Comments by "LRRPFco52" (@LRRPFco52) on "In Kherson, a Turning Point?" video.

A lot of these kinds of campaign developments evolve due to the home team advantage of knowing their own terrain. Combined with Russian incompetence in their officer and junior combat leader corps, as well as Battle Group Military Intelligence staffs, and these types of boxing-in, channelizing, and cauldrons become more likely.
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I’ve been studying the Russian and Soviet sphere since the 1970s, and I’m struggling to recall which exact army worked well enough against inferior economies. In all the things I have seen, they were hurt and humiliated by surrounding nations, including the small ones.
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Am I the only one thinking the 300,000 mobilized soldiers (mostly recently-trained conscripts and contract guys who did their time, then went back to civilian life in the past 5 years) are going to be used for a new Russian Winter Offensive? What orders does anyone think Putin will issue to them? Stand around and tickle each other waiting for something to happen? There is a high likelihood these men will be thrown into the meat grinder to pre-occupy and attrit Ukrainian combat power in some way or another, even if it means soaking up artillery, anti-tank weapons, and aerial-delivered munitions down to a level where the follow-on campaign can then press the attack again.
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@bernardvc5820 This is my take on it too, having been a student of Russian military history for quite some time, and having lived there to gain an understanding of how they think, what their culture is like, what makes them function. Like anyone else, I would love for there to be a total ceasefire and Russian forces completely return to Russia, leave Ukraine. I also would love for Marilyn Monroe to come back to life and be my girlfriend, minus the drama and being used as a rag doll by the Kennedy Brothers and mafia bosses. I really think there’s going to be a Russian offensive this winter with the recent mobilization effort, and I think those soldiers are going to perform well enough to at least soak up as much Ukrainian combat power as possible as basically human bullet, artillery shell, ATGM, and drone-delivered munitions dummies so the next campaign can push through next year. I think we’re looking at a 3-year overall initial series of campaigns going back-and-forth. Russia will work hard to deter foreign military sales/transfers into Ukraine with their network of moles and compromised politicians within NATO and the US, but that will still be hard to pull-off. They almost had it with Biden offering a ride for Zelensky and his family from the outset of the war, remember?
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@NomadJoe0323 1st Chechen War was a brutal humiliation of Russia. One of the reasons Putin was assigned to be one of 3 Deputy Prime Ministers under Yeltsin was to spearhead a 2nd Chechen War to make Russia look strong again. In the middle of that 2nd Chechen War, Yeltsin retired and handed over the Presidency to Putin without an election, on Dec 31, 1999. Putin went scorched-earth on Chechnya, with apartment buildings bombed and leveled, mass civilian graves, as well as Spetsnaz and VVS hunting down Chechen rebel cells with a vengeance. It’s really not over though when you look at the continuing Chechen terrorist attacks inside of Russia before and since, as well as Russian occupation forces in Dagestan-some of whom were called-up and redeployed to Ukraine this year.
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@michaelmaroney1660 Things got so bad in World War II that they had to start drafting women and elderly people for support roles, and even formed female sniper sections. With a population of 143 million people, an annual conscript service in the 263,000 - 267,000 region, they’re going to get their army I think.
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@michaelmaroney1660 It's interesting because during the Czarist times, they had 25yr-life military service commitments, professional soldiers who learned their jobs and were selected for the type of unit they would serve in based on experience with horses, their physique, literacy, and local village elders input. They have incrementally reduced the conscription years of service from then into the Soviet times, then even more cuts in the Russian Federation to where these guys are institutionally incompetent from Generals down to conscripts. Even their low density, high skill set career fields are filled with incompetents. Their SAM battery operators shot down a civilian airliner, then discussed it frantically on an open cellular network while driving out of Ukraine as fast as they could. Their fighter pilots are being shot down for sport while talking on open, non-secure, single channel freqs, no use of brevity codes, rambling on without any sense of urgency, even as their flaming wreckage powers down and they should have ejected already. They're a shell of what they used to be, bumbling around like a sick drunk, but dangerous enough to still destroy, maim, and murder.
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@michaelmaroney1660 I've listened to their radio comms when they have violated Finnish airspace. Finns published it openly years ago. Same exact thing, Su-27SM pilots ranting on and on over the radio, sounding inebriated, "da da da...", non-secure, open text, no brevity codes. I saw better radios and comms discipline in line Infantry units in the early 1990s in the US. US and NATO fighter pilots have excellent equipment, freq-hopping, encrypted radios, brevity, and data links with graphics overlays on JTIDS displays. They have lost a lot of Su-30s (11), Su-25s (22), and Su-34s (16-17). Su-30s and Su-34s are some of their most advanced, modern fighters. They also had 1 Su-35 shot down, as well as some Su-24s shot down/destroyed on the ground, and now lost a MiG-31.
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@peterblood50 Zelensky likely set Putin’s plans back 3-6 years by not playing along with the Biden evacuation offer. Kiev would have been seized quickly, and the military situation devolve into a partisan resistance against occupation. It still would have resulted in many Russian and Ukrainian deaths, refugees, and mayhem, but with no identifiable Ukrainian leadership, nobody to coordinate European weapons supplies with, and Russia would have staged for the next domino on the board.
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Everybody thought Ukraine would fold. The real factors that people aren’t talking about are: 1. Zelensky didn’t play along with the Putin-Biden plan to pull him out of the country so Putin could fill in the leadership vacuum quickly. 2. Western governments were reaching a tipping point with mass protests over insane Wuhan virus lock-downs, masks, and forced injections. Ukraine gave them a pressure-relief valve to diffuse that internal unrest and redirect people’s attention towards what Putin was doing. 3. Since Europe doesn’t want to see this pour into their borders anymore, a mass reaction of military, diplomatic, and economic measures were taken to support Ukraine.
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@landontesar3070 I saw it daily there. Police pull people over (wave them over with batons) hoping for corruptsia pay-outs, no probable cause necessary for waving you over. People with mortgages need to pay an arbitrary and undefined corruptsia fee to the local police in order to have the privilege to have a mortgage. Ministers of Parliament plow through traffic expecting everyone to get out of their way, even in full traffic jam in Moscow. 9 journalists were killed the year I was living there. Military officers steal or re-allocate state-owned equipment and sell it back on the market. We’re seeing that now with uniforms and equipment. Soldiers being mobilized have to go to local stores to find the equipment they should have been issued in a Central Issuing Facility. Anti-terrorist soldiers got Glock pistols when I was there. Upon opening the new cases, they discovered someone had stolen the spare magazines. Military commanders might end up fighting their own units during the week, then drill with them periodically on assigned days if they were also the local police chief. Putin was put into power by the 1st Generation of Oligarchs (senior KGB officers who could see the overall economy and structure). As soon as he took the Presidency, he ousted them and awarded their businesses to the 2nd generation of oligarchs, who owe total allegiance to Putin. It’s more corrupt than Mexico or Ukraine, very close to the top on the WCI.
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@josephtorres3229 Actually Russia violated Minsk, since Ukraine gave up her nukes as part of that deal where her territorial integrity was off-limits. Putin’s red line was crossed when Ukraine threw out his puppet in Kiev, Yanukovych, who signed onto the Russia-Eurasian Economic Pact, against the will of 79% of the Ukrainian people. They actually wanted to trade their goods and services for Euros, not Rubles. Step outside of the Russian Pravda and into a more holistic assessment of the history and real events. Turn of Russia One TV, and build a timeline of events on your own, asking who, what, where, when, why.
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@michaelmaroney1660 Russia has never had a real intact logistics train by Western standards. When things were running “well” by their lot in life, they had terrible rail lines, pothole-filled roads, weak strings between vast distances, cursed by extreme cold temps. It has always been that way in Russia, even worse before they had paved roads. And yet still, they managed to throw millions of bodies at invaders until they out-lasted some of the largest, most tactically and logistically-competent armies in history-especially the Wermacht. The distances required to deploy mass amounts of soldiers over their current borders with Ukraine are on the same terrain. One of the main campaigns of The Great Patriotic War was in Ukraine, and their ability to move men, weapons, and equipment really sucked back then.
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@robertkirchner7981 Attrit is a commonly-used verb that I became accustomed to over the last 5 decades in the defense community. We use it in aerospace, armor, artillery, and infantry terminology.
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@roberttaylor3594 Yes, any logistics hubs that flow into Ukraine will be fair game for HIMARS. Russian strategy might be to just keep feeding bodies into it until Ukraine runs out of HIMARS within certain windows of time. That’s for the Boyars to figure out and take blame for, not Putin.
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