Ukraine Blog 46 – Mopeds and Mobiks
Dear friends, family and colleagues,
After
Ukraine’s stunning battlefield victories in September and early October, we are
now in the phase where Ukraine is consolidating in the newly liberated areas.
Services are restored and the Ukrainian army is looking for small Russian
leftover pockets of resistance. In addition, the second batch of 10.000 Ukrainian
soldiers who received NATO style combined arms training is now returning to
Ukraine. That means that Ukraine now has more than 20.000 NATO trained maneuvering
forces available. During the Kharkiv offensive we saw what the first 10.000
were capable of. And the Russians, well they are struggling to keep their
mobilized forces (Mobiks) under control.
The most
important area to have a look at right now, is the Kherson region. The
Ukrainian military imposed a strict regime of operational silence here. This is
respected by most of the Ukrainian loving community on the internet. Some
important Twitter and Telegram channels seem to know more about what’s going
on, but they respect the rules of the Ukrainian command to not disclose
important information. However, when looking at the Russian Telegram channels,
it’s clear the Russians are in very serious trouble there. They are now openly giving
the details of an ongoing evacuation of the West bank of the Dnipro river.
What I expect
is going on there, is that Russia is now evacuating their remaining VDV
airborne forces. These are the last capable forces in the Russian military and
they have been fighting like lions to keep the Ukrainians from advancing.
Russia understands it can’t afford to lose all these forces. Russia will likely
be able to exfil these troops, but the VDV forces will likely have to leave
behind large amounts of equipment since the Ukrainians destroyed all bridges
and other logistics. It’s so clear that the Russians are evacuating right now,
that I expect that Kherson will be abandoned within two weeks. While the VDV forces
are getting out, the Russians bring in large amounts of Mobiks to the west bank
to cover the withdrawal. They will likely be left there. Their only choice will
be surrendering or become minced meat in the Ukrainian meatgrinder.
The other
area to have a look at, is the area around the pre-February 24th
frontline in Northern Luhansk. I also expect the Russians to give up Svatove
and Starobilsk and fall back to roughly the February 24 frontline. The most
important indication, is that the Wagner PMC mercenaries are constructing a
line of defense that in appearance resembles the Siegfried line, that Germany
constructed prior to World War II to defend against an attack from France.
While the “Wagner line” has the same looks, it has only 10 percent of the potential
of the Siegfried line. So many things are wrong with it. Let’s have a look:
1. The first problem is with the “Dragon
teeth.” The Russians just drop the teeth in a field without fixing them deep in
the soil.
The dragon’s teeth of the Siegfried line were
fixed to a heavy concrete foundation up to two meters below the soil. This was
done in such a way that it’s not economically achievable to demolish the Siegfried
line. Almost 100 years later, most of the line is still mostly intact.
Westwall03.jpg (992×679) (wikimedia.org)
This means that in case the Ukrainians attack the
Wagner line, they can simply removed the teeth with an armored bulldozer or
other engineering equipment.
2. The other problem is with the set of defenses that have been set up in conjunction with the Dragon’s teeth.
So, besides the teeth, the Russians created two lines of trenches using ancient BTM-3 trench diggers. This vehicle digs out a trench and disperses the earth next to it so that it creates a defensive earth berm at the same time. The problem is that when you build this type of defense, you need to combine it with other defensive components, like pillboxes, barbed wire, fall back trenches and most important of all: on purpose create weak spots in the line where you want the enemy to attack.
One of the most important misconceptions in the public about defensive lines, is that the whole line needs to be used to defend attackers who attack like the Orcs in Lord of the Rings. You simply don’t want that as a defender. You need to create strongpoints and weak points. You need to guide the enemy to the weak points, so you drive them in a kill box, where artillery and machine gun nests finish them off.
The Russians are building none of
that here and considering that they need to be manned by Mobiks, Russia should
prepare itself for a disaster. Without a defense strategy, a defensive line is
useless
Then let’s
talk about the Mobiks: my prediction that they become more of a liability than
an asset to the Russian military has absolutely become reality.
1. Commanders in the Russian military
complain that most of the Mobiks who arrive in Ukraine simply desert or go back
to Russia as soon as they have been issued with weapons. What we’re seeing here,
are the groundworks being laid for Russia’s upcoming civil war. To all the Balkan
people reading this: I don’t need to tell you what happens when you distribute
weapons to poorly educated, working class people with criminal/substance abuse
issues. It’s a recipe for disaster and it’s already playing out faster than I
expected.
2. Russian commanders also complain
about infighting between the Mobiks leading to serious operational issues. Some
of these issues spilled even spilled out in open conflict
a. Last week a conflict erupted between
a group of mobilized Tajiks and other Russian soldiers. The Tajiks killed between
11 and 30 Russian Mobiks. The conflict was apparently related to religion.
b. There was an incident where a Russian
soldier made fun of Kazakhs.
We are one
month into mobilization now and already there are multiple major incidents,
almost all of them involving ethnic minorities versus ethnic Russians or intra
ethnic minority infighting. Expect this type of problems to rise over the coming
weeks and months. For me this is the clearest indication Russia is heading for
a catastrophic Somalia style civil war.
So, is
Russia failing everywhere? Well, not really. After the Ukrainian attack on the
Crimea bridge, Russia started major cruise missile and Iranian drone strikes on
Ukrainian cities and critical energy infrastructure. The Western press dubbed
these “terror attacks.” While I do believe terror is a secondary objective for
the Russians, the Russians are in my opinion performing a very primitive form
of Suppression of Enemy Air Defense (SEAD) operation, that’s surprisingly effective.
The key here, are the Iranian drones. They are slow with a small engine. The
humming sound of the engine made the Ukrainians made them call “Mopeds.” They
are also very cheap. Around 20.000 EUR per unit and there’re plenty of them.
While Ukraine manages to shoot down 85 percent of them, that’s also exactly
where the problem is.
Ukraine
finally has received really modern air defenses, including the German made IRIS-T,
which is the most advanced air defense system in the world. Technologically
advanced, also means that the missiles are very expensive. One IRIS-T missile
costs over one million EUR and it takes time to produce them.
Russia
initially purchased around 300 of the drones, but they are so effective in
draining the Ukrainian air defense, that Russia ordered 2400 more of them. The
Russians (actually I think the operators are Iranian) are operating how you’re
supposed to operate them. Send them in large waves. Most of them get shot down
(by expensive missiles) and some of them get through.
I don’t
understand why the Ukrainian military is using IRIS-T and Buk missiles for this
purpose. In my opinion they should take old ZSU-23 mobile quadruple anti-aircraft
guns from storage and ask the West to upgrade the radar (which is not hard to
do). In addition, for the real high value targets like powerplants, they need
the Americans to supply the Counter Rocket and Mortar (C-RAM) system. This is
system operated around the U.S. embassy in Baghdad has a hit record of almost 100
percent in downing Iranian rockets and drones. The rounds in both the ZSU-23
and C-RAM are very cheap and that will enable the Ukrainians to deal with the
Iranian drone threat operationally and economically. The Ukainians already
started to adapt. This morning a Mig-29 shot down a drone with a relatively
cheap R-73 missile.
Then
Belarus: It took me a while to figure out what the Russians are up to there. I
can’t imagine that they would go for another push to Kyiv with Mobiks and the
Belarussian army. As opposed to February, the Ukrainian military has now blown
the bridges to Belarus and the remaining routes have been heavily fortified and
mined.
The key
piece of information are the logistics that are going in and out of Belarus. It
seems Belarus is emptying its stocks of old weapons and this equipment is being
send to Russia (most likely Donbass). Inbound are railway wagons with Mobiks
and light equipment like trucks. That’s not the setting you need when you’re
preparing for a big offensive push. I think the Russians are using the
Belarussian officer corps as trainers. In blog 33, I referenced a brilliant article
by Forbes that the Russians were deploying their training brigades to combat at
the time. This has a serious impact on force regeneration.
The impact
seems to have become visible right now. The Russians don’t have the resources
anymore to train the Mobiks. Lukashenko can use this situation to show to Putin
that he can still be of use without having actually to send in his army. It
still can’t be ruled out the Belarussian front will be reopened. However, I don’t
expect that to happen within the next two months.
The final
development where I expect things to heat up in the next couple of weeks and
months, are attacks on critical infrastructure here in the West. We already had
the blasts on the Nord Stream pipelines and I’m afraid this is just the
beginning. Over the past couple of days multiple underwater critical
communication cables were cut.
We never
had such incidents and now we have three confirmed cases within a week. In
addition, there’s a lot of activity in Norway. Norwegian police arrested
multiple Russians who were operating drones near critical energy infrastructure.
I think it’s
highly likely that we will start to see aggressive maneuvering of Russian
submarines in NATO areas surrounding critical infrastructure. I do expect kinetic
engagements here. An attack on NATO critical infrastructure will be interpreted
as an article 5 situation and any Russian submarine caught here will be subject
to defensive action. So why are the Russians aiming for critical infrastructure?
The reason is quite silly. I have been observing Russian propaganda channels
for weeks now specially focused on this topic. The majority of Russians believe
that the winters in Europe are exactly the same as in Siberia and that without “their”
precious gas, everyone in Europe freezes to death. To make things clear here:
winters in Russia are extreme, where for over months temperatures like -30 to
-40 degrees Celsius are not an exception. In addition, houses in especially rural
Russia are not as well isolated as in the West. The majority of Russians simply
don’t understand that in large parts of Europe it only freezes for a couple of days
in the winter and due to good construction and isolation of houses, people won’t
freeze to death. Even with some of the critical infrastructure hit in the West,
people won’t freeze to death in large numbers.
And that’s
the problem with Russia right now. It’s country out of touch, isolated, delusional and beyond broke right now. It’s a spiral that goes evermore downwards until everything
collapses.
Слава Україні!
Niels
Comments
Post a Comment