phil nos trae un resumen semanal
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-28
The Russian Winter Offensive of 2022-23 seemed finally to end and the initiative moved inexorably into Ukrainian hands.
Well, this week we might have witnessed the Putin-2023 version of a culmination. That would be the point where you have weakened your own forces to such a degree that they simply cant go forward any more. We saw that around Bakhmut. Having painfully taken about 90% of the city, Russian forces have been struggling to take the last bits. As Russian impetus became faltering, however, the Ukrainians started some local counterattacks to the North and South of the city—and Russian resistance seemed in small pockets to crumble. The map changes show clear but small Ukrainian advances.
With the Ukrainians re-taking some land from the Russians, the head of Wagner, Evgenii Prigozhin to go into hyper-rant mode against the Russian army (and remarkably against Putin himself).
Overall we can therefore draw two probable conclusions from the fighting around Bakhmut this week.
1. The momentum is now shifting inevitably into Ukraine’s hands and it will stay there through the launching of the Ukrainian counter offensive. Its maybe not a rational culmination of Russian operations, but culmination is being forced on them by their losses and ways of fighting.
2. What we saw around Bakhmut was not the Ukrainian counteroffensive. This seems to have been smaller, local Ukrainian operations that ran into exhausted and demoralized Russian forces. If these Russian forces are indicative of general Russian morale, it holds out the prospect for a far more successful Ukrainian counteroffensive than some are saying is possible—but this is not part of the counteroffensive itself. That will start almost certainly with much larger, coordinated, operations.
The evidence now looks stronger and stronger that the Ukrainians have pursued the proper strategy around Bakhmut. The exhaustion of Russian forces reveals that they were exactly right to string the battle on as long as possible, and not to withdraw and allow Russian forces to rest. Its fascinating to see how the reporting and analysis are changing as people try to cover their tracks.
This war and before Feb 24 has revealed massive problems with how the analytical community and press assesses military power and judges the effect of military operations. These problems are deep and have layers, and one of the greatest is the reliance on what might be called the deceptive granular.
Russian Aircraft Fall From the Skies
Around 24 hours ago reports starting coming in of Russian helicopters and advanced fixed wing-aircraft being shot down while flying over Russia itself. At this point, and we still dont exactly know, it seems like two of Russia’s MI8 helicopters and one SU-35 and one SU-35 were shot down in relatively rapid succession.
https://twitter.com/UAWeapons/status/1657368124788809728?s=20
There were even reports (unconfirmed) that the two helicopters were actually some of the most advanced in the Russian armed forces, specially modified Mi8’s for Electronic Warfare.
When the first reports coming in, there were some guesses that this might have been friendly fire—twitchy fingered Russian anti-air units somehow bringing down their own forces. However that might have been possible were it one or even two, but the more aircraft reportedly brought down, the more this points towards some kind of Ukrainian operation. The targets were so high value and the destruction so limited to a specific day, that a mistake becomes less plausible.
Ive seen different hypotheses on what the Ukrainians might have done—infiltrating SF with Manpads is one, or maneuvering their own ground-based systems very close to the Russian border is another. I have no idea—but the balance of probability is that this was a Ukrainian operation, and an extremely successful one.
y sigue... pero paso de daros más la turra
