Warmonitor has tweet about attacks in Crimea.
Severe fighting in Bhakmut. Go to the twitter for details.
I"m pretty confident that the US/NATO are giving Ukraine some detailed coordinates for where to make the strikes that will hurt Russia the most.
And Russia will retaliate with lots of “dumb” bombs that just take out civilian targets/military targets/whatever.
Probably, but I’m not sure it would even matter if we weren’t. For everything except satellites, Ukraine probably already has better intelligence than we do: Remember, they used to be part of the same nation as their targets.
And a barracks mysteriously catching fire sounds to me more like a local arsonist (you know, from one of those native Crimeans, who of course voted perfectly fairly and freely to join Russia) than like a long-range munitions strike.
Very true. I imagine that Ukraine has more than a few folks on the ground in Crimea and inside Russia who are only too happy to provide exact GPS coordinates for Russian barracks, ammunition depots, and the like.
If the attack on Melitopol was HIMARS, then it surprises me that they are already within safe launch distance. Just a few more miles and they are in a position to attack anywhere in the corridor supplying the Kherson Oblast and Crimea.
The centre of Melitopol is about 75km from the front lines. The MLRS ammunition Ukraine has for HIMARS/M270 has a range of 80km. Ordinarily Ukraine hasn’t been hitting more than about 70km behind the front, because they don’t want to expose the HIMARS launchers to any counterbattery attacks. But a few juicy targets might be worth sneaking right up to the lines in the dead of night, letting off a volley, and high-tailing it to the rear.
Every nuclear power by definition has EMP weapons.
Softening them up for a counterattack?
It would be ironic if the Russians fought from the
Azovstal steel plant. It’s a formidable bunker.
Or just a smoker. Russians are heavy smokers, and it is too cold to go outside to smoke now.
That is a very scary thought.
And a very likely one. II hope that hokey Orson Welles movie on Nostradamus doesn’t come true. It predicted a Russian backed Iranian strike on NY City.
I dunno… If Russian barracks are burning down due to smokers, that displays an even greater level of incompetence than I’ve come to expect from Russia. Sure, smoking does cause house fires, but that’s usually from someone falling asleep while smoking in bed. In a barracks, you’ve got dozens of people all sleeping in the same room, any one of whom should notice a fire before it gets out of control, and you darned well ought to have at least a few awake to stand watch all night.
I mean, any fire destroying a barracks represents a clear failure of military readiness, but it’s at least a little bit easier to buy with a very rapid fire, like you’d get with accelerants, deliberate ignition, and an effort to hide the point where it starts (i.e., what you’d get in an arson).
What is the normal rate of fires in a country the size of Russia? Sometimes it feels like Shark week.
One word: vodka.
Not necessarily. I’m going by US military experience, but the large group sleeping in a big room was only at basic training. After that, barracks were subdivided into smaller rooms with two people per room, much like a college dorm. Russia may be different, or course.
Presumably you’d have one or more smoke alarms as well, possibly even a fire suppression system.
That was a very important barracks. I can see the Wagner group using a former hotel. *Elite troops get better facilities.
*Elite in comparison to Russian conscripts.
Anyone in that building is gone. That looks like a direct missile strike.
I don’t see soot or black marking from fires?
Scores of Russian mercenaries die when a barracks is blown up? It’s hard to work up much sympathy here.
What was the rate of barracks fires before the Special Military Operation? If it was as high as now, then there’s plenty of reason to believe that it was something normal like smoking accidents. But if the barracks fires are a new thing, then it’s unlikely to be accidental at all. Some might say that an increase in accidents could be from the increase in troops. But I find that unconvincing. These Mobliks are new to combat, not new to smoking.
It might also be that they’re getting sloppy, because of weeks of fighting and bad sleeping conditions. If they can’t rotate troops out for R&R, their utility will only decrease over time. This has been know for a long, long time. With the problems the Russians have been having, it wouldn’t surprise me that they’re just ignoring this, and so we’d expect stupid accidents to be increasing over time.