Ukraine Blog 62 – Russian Maskirovka and it works (unfortunately)
Dear friends, family and colleagues,
The
tweet that I predicted would come in my September 4th blog has unfortunately
finally arrived
Translation:
Ukraine: go negotiate with Russia, for “as long as it takes” has a limit. This
is the cumulation of a continuous stream of self-inflicted bad news for Ukraine
and the West over the past three months. The West brought itself in a very
difficult position by appeasing dictators like Putin and Khamenei and showing
it’s not willing to mobilize its industrial potential to counter Russia.
So
let’s break down where we are right now
First: What’s the state of Putin? Putin is at this moment more rational and more convinced he can win the war than EVER before. I’m sure the champagne corks popped in the Kremlin when the U.S. mission to NATO posted their disastrous tweet. For Putin it is the confirmation that when he persists, he can prevail. And to me it proves that he’s right on more than a couple of points in his assessment of the West, namely:
a.
The
West is weak
b.
The
West has no moral spine
c. The West can be divided
One of the most important features of Vladimir Putin that I admire is his patience. Where we in the West want to rush everything and run ourselves to stress in order to reach our supposed goals, Putin has shown that he is willing to wait many years in order to capitalize when the right moment appears. It’s also a personal lesson for me in life: just be patient and wait for the right moment to capitalize. You almost start to think I start to like the guy right? Well, it’s Putin’s other characteristics, his total lack of respect for human life and the prospect that the current Russian state has nothing to offer besides a lot of destruction makes me more convinced we need to fight this man.
Military
the Russians also significantly adapted on three fronts
1. As I predicted earlier this year,
Russian artillery ammunition stockpiles were running low. Against all odds,
Russia managed to make a deal with North-Korea to supply one million 122mm and
152mm artillery rounds (and I suspect also a couple of hundred D20 and D30
artillery pieces). Where Russia had 15 million artillery rounds before Feb 24th
2022, North-Korea has an estimated whopping 21 million artillery rounds. For
North-Korea it’s not a problem to send another 5 million rounds to Russia.
There’re limits. Only around one-third of North-Korea’s artillery is of the
Russian standard 122mm/152mm caliber. The North-Korean standard is mostly 130mm
which the Russians don’t use anymore since the eighties. I don’t think that Kim
Jong Un is bound to fight Ukraine or the West. I just think he managed to get
quite a good deal from Putin. There are a couple of Western milbloggers who
note the supposedly 25 to 40 percent dud rate of the North-Korean shells (rate
of shells that fail to explode). I would like to note that this means that even
with a 50 percent dud rate, Russia managed to get 200.000 more working!
artillery shells than the 300.000 the West delivered during all of 2023. If the
West doesn’t start to get serious about ramping up artillery production
(something I already spoke about in my blogs during the summer of 2022), it
will not only result in a shortage for the Ukrainian army, but it will also
further embolden Putin that he can win this.
2. Russian military production versus
deep storage activation: there’s some good and some bad news here.
a. The Russians are bragging about that
they are currently producing 1500 tanks per year. I know that this is pure
nonsense when it comes to building new tanks from scratch. Russia has not been
building new T-72, and T-80 tanks since the early 1990’s, but there were doubts
about the T-90M’s (supposing Russia’s most modern tank). I suspected for the
past year that these T-90M’s rolling of the conveyor belts were in fact
upgraded T-90A’s, but I couldn’t find a single piece of information about it.
Finally of all sources, Forbes posted an article and it confirmed that Russia’s
T-90M’s simply have to be rebuilt T-90A’s since T-90A losses disappeared from
the battlefield and no T-90A’s are visible on satellite pictures.
Russia's
Modern Tanks Are AWOL In Ukraine War (forbes.com)
So, this
is the good news. The bad news has everything to do with the earlier mentioned
deep storage facilities of the Russians
b. Russia has an estimated 100
so-called deep storage facilities where they store tens of thousands of tanks,
AIFV’s, APC, artillery and MLRS systems that had to be decommissioned because
of the Conventional Forces Europe (CFE) treaty that was made between NATO and
the former Warsaw Pact countries. Per country it puts limits to the amount of
conventional weapons a country can possess per a couple of categories. The
loophole is that the treaty applies to Europe. Russia simply moved huge amounts
of equipment east of the Urals. This did not guarantee a solid backup of
military hardware. Most of the equipment has been stored in the open in rain
and the Siberian winter and a lot of it can’t be instantly re-activated as
such. For many years the deep storage facilities looked like pig sheds, with
derelict equipment scattered around, stripped of parts by corrupt officers and
chaotic scrapyards. Thanks to
Twitter account (3) high_marsed
(@HighMarsed) / X (twitter.com) and
Youtuber Covert Cabal - YouTube
we know that the Russians are
actively emptying their deep storage facilities right now. I’m not going to
replicate their work, but by looking at some recent satellite images and
comparing current and historical imagery on Google Earth I noticed something
else: the Russians are organizing, structuring and cleaning up their deep
storage facilities. And after showing continuous incompetence over the past two
years, they are finally doing something according to the book. I will use an
example that you can replicate yourself on Google Earth.
The example I use is the 1295th tank
storage facility that you can find on Google Earth via the following
coordinates: 44.127297,133.280762. If you look at the historical image from one
year ago (you need Google Earth desktop for this) you can see the chaotic setup
of the site. However, in the most recent image of 2023, you see that the site
is much more empty, organized and there’s even structure visible in the
scrapyard. To me it’s clear the Russians are doing the following:
i.
They
perform assessments on equipment. Equipment in good condition will go straight
to the front or limited service (replacing oils, cables, paint job etc.).
ii.
Equipment
that is not serviceable will be taken apart for parts. Good parts will be sent
to the factories. In such a way, Russia is able to make one “good” new tank
from two or three “bad” tanks.
iii.
Parts
that can’t be used will end up on the scrapyard for processing in metal
factories.
This is
actually a very good way to keep your war supplies going, get rid of old
military legacy without the need to mobilize your industry in a total war
scenario. In October we saw the Russians losing sometimes hundreds of tanks,
AIFV’s and APC’s per day. During two weeks around Avdiivka, the Russians lost
more equipment than they lost during two years in the First Chechen war (where
we saw column after column of destroyed Russian equipment in Grozny). The sad
truth is, Russia will be able to continue to throw all this metal at Avdiivka
for at least the coming 1,5 years. I’m fully convinced that by early spring the
Russians will capture Avdiivka, which will provide Putin with a tangible
“victory” on the home front and by then the U.S. election will be much closer. So
in short, we’re seeing Russian maskirovka (the use, by Russia or the former
Soviet Union, of military deception intended to confuse Western intelligence)
here. No new Russian weapons, but refurbished old ones. But hey, it’s working.
3.
Hybrid warfare: Russia’s hybrid warfare (as
formulated in the Gerasimov doctrine is more active than ever). Russia is
throwing everything it has at Europe short of direct military confrontation.
a. Sending
refugees over the Finnish border. You might have missed it, but at the Finish
border we see a repeat of what we saw in the autumn of 2021 at the Polish and
Baltic borders.
b. Russian
dis-information bots are more active than ever on social media and I highly
suspect are able to influence Western public opinion (I think a lot of people
will be surprised by the amount of votes the Dutch PVV party will get during
tomorrow’s elections)
c. I
already mentioned it in my previous blog, but I’m more convinced than ever that
Putin is going to test NATO’s article 5. Primary target will be the Baltic
states. Trump will be the Republican candidate and most likely the next
president of the United States and as soon as that happens, it’s very likely
Putin will go on the attack against the Baltics. Whereas one year ago I
expected the chance of success in such a case at one percent, right now I would
say it’s 30 percent and rising.
d. Draining
Western airpower: yes, Russia is successful at this without even firing a shot.
Let me explain how this works. I was always ok with sending Ukraine every
artillery shell we have in our stocks, till the last one. For the simple reason
that if Russia would ever touch NATO, NATO would unleash its massive airpower
to which Russia has no answer. The news that got me very concerned is that
Israel in the first week of the Gaza war dropped 6000 aircraft bombs on Gaza.
God knows how many they have dropped by now, but just 6000 raises all alarm
bells with me. The thing is that the stocks of aircraft bombs of non-U.S.
countries are very low. For example the Netherlands barely has more than a
thousand aircraft bombs available. The bombs Israel uses are backfilled with
U.S. bombs from so-called Prepositioned Organizational Material Storage (POMS)
sites. While I fully support Israel’s effort to eradicate Hamas, it’s
irresponsible of Israel to use so many high value aircraft bombs against an
insurgent army. Besides that Western stockpile runs low on bombs, Israel should
also keep up its stocks to defend against Hezbollah and Syria (most notably
other Iranian proxies in Syria). You might think I’m exaggerating a bit, but
both during the 1999 bombing campaign against Serbia and the bombing campaign
against Libya in 2011, NATO was seriously running out of aircraft bombs.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/may/07/richardnortontaylor
So,
pretty depressive right? Yeah, thanks to Western politicians we got ourselves
in deep sh*t. Is it all doom? Well, fortunately not
1. Fact
is that during the early months of their invasion in Ukraine, the Russians
completely self-destructed their capable military units. Currently around
20.000 Russians are killed each month and around 20.000 are recruited each
month. This makes sure that Russian lines don’t collapse and they are able to
make slow incremental gains (Avdiivka). However, Russian force generation (the
foundation of new combat capable units) will be impossible for many years to
come and it ensures that Russians forces won’t be able to capitalize on any
breakthrough of enemy lines they achieve (be it in Ukraine or the Baltics). To
Putin and many Russians this won’t matter. It’s perfectly in line with “the
Russian soul” that believes that only by suffering while enduring hardship in
the end something better will arise. I still owe you guys a special on Russian
political theory, but in case you want to make an effort to grasp the Russian
soul, please read the following works (all of them are in my top 20
literature):
a.
“Dead
Souls” by Nikolai Gogol
b.
“Crime
and Punishment” and “The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoevsky
c.
“War
and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy
2. Despite all the problems with the new
U.S. speaker of the house Mike Johnson upholding a vote on aid to Ukraine, Ukraine
has proven to be very skilled in weaponizing the First Person View (FPV)
drones. Ukrainian drone operators are already able to operate them sometimes
more than 40 kilometers behind Russian lines. According to reports and
footages, Ukrainian FPV drones are already responsible for more than 50 percent
of Russian losses and have proven to be extremely effective against the feared
Russian TOS-1 Burantino flamethrower MLRS
Whereas long range artillery and more than 20 ATACMS (that’s all what the US delivered) will definitely help, this kind of innovation will make sure Ukraine at least stays in the fight and in the long run can shift the balance.
Major
problem remains that besides the Russian soul and lots of casualties, Russia
has a plan with strategic dots on the horizon, with a 30 percent chance of
succeeding. Russia definitely stepped away from a piecemeal approach and finally
seems to get its war supply from deep storage facilities in order. What the
West wants is unclear and it is in a weird state of disarray and
hibernation.
It is sad though that the West had the option to end the war by mid-2023 if they had provided the right equipment with sufficient political will. Last year I was optimistic the war would end in 2023, but now I can tell you for sure: the war will not end in 2024, possibly not even in 2025...
ะกะปะฐะฒะฐ
ะฃะบัะฐัะฝั!
Niels
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