by very definition, 150-200.000 russians cannot completely control europe’s 2nd largest country … (600.000 km2)
My guess is 50-60% of those will be sent to the 10 largest cities and other high value targets… which leaves 1 russian soldier for each 6-10 km2 on the countryside → hence the part in my OP where you start out in the smaller villages where the density of russians will be very low - and build momentum there! (social media, share success-stories etc…)
of course you dont disclose you have killed them, they will be MIA for retaliation reasons
The most valuable asset Ukraine has right now is their supply lines from their western border. Only a standing army can hold that corridor; an insurgency can not. Every day that corridor remains open means more and more supplies can be prepositioned for the time when an insurgency becomes necessary.
the russians are so overextended already, do you really think they will have the time, plan and and coordination to search random houses? … again my preliminary guess is 1 russian soldier per 6-10 km2 outside the cities.
just so you can get a feeling for the numbers, wikipedia tells me that there are 1.500 cities and 28.552 villages in ukraine - say a village consists of 100 houses - that is nearly 3.000.000 houses you’d have to search. - impossible … and then of course - you just bury your Glock17 somewhere in the yard and they will never find it.
Do you really think the russians will go full “Jehova’s witnesses” and visit every single house (and keep register, so they can tick houses off their list?
THIS is the central point of my reasoning: … the numbers are the ukraine’s best friends …use this number game that skews 220:1 in your favor , instead of engaging the russians where they are (relatively) best and you are the 50:1 underdog like in conventional warfare
…plus you might have a city to come back to after all is over and not a Grozny/Hiroshima crossbreed.
How about this? Do a quick review of what happened in Warsaw during World War 2, and come back with suggestions on why your idea would be so much more successful than the Poles’.
Your plan says Ukrainians will be killing Russian soldiers with those rifles. So the number one priority for Russian soldiers will be searching for rifles.
You also have to take human nature into account. The Russians don’t have to search every house and find every rifle. They just have to find a few and make examples. (And your plan will make finding rifles easy even if you search at random.)
Find one rifle and kill one family; the next day the Russians can go to the closest lake and they’ll find hundreds of rifles have been thrown into it. Very few people are going to want to take the risk of keeping a rifle in their house after seeing what happens if you get caught.
And if you’re one of the hard core rebels who keeps his rifle and plans on using it, you better watch your neighbours. Because remember, they’ll all be killed when you shoot a soldier. Which means your neighbours will turn you in before you shoot a soldier to protect themselves and their families.
there are some logical fallancies that imho invalidate your comparison:
size (a city like warsaw vs. a vast 600.000 km2 country like Ukraine)
warsaw (and surroundings) was completely under tight nazi control - Ukr. is by no means under russian control
density of occupation force in warsaw vs. Ukr. → there are probably 3-4 orders of magnitude in difference
advance of guerrilla warefare in the past 50 or so years (molotov then was a .ru politician, not a insurgence weapon)
visibility (and tolerance) concerning atrocities for the public opinion now and then - rounding up civilians and shooting them will not fly in europe in 2022 anymore
Find one rifle and kill one family; the next day the Russians can go to the closest lake and they’ll find hundreds of rifles have been thrown into it.
I think you underestimate the Ukrainians — they haven’t brought their army to the closest lake when being invaded by the russians, either, have they? They are fighting back on a high aggregate level, and I see no indication that they will roll over to die … and I think there is still momentum building and we will see more martyres, like the bridge guy
also it is more about “widespread grass-roots killing of an occupation force”, which can be archieved in many different ways. You want to bring the TERROR on the russians … see those 5 russian soldiers that “control” a village of 800 people ? … they cant go to sleep, b/c they might not wake up any more … that kind of thing
their command recons they havent heard from them, but has no idea if they are drink, killed or run away …
rinse-repeat … you do not create focuses of conflict, but 100s of instances of “10 little monkeys jumping on the bed”
This is probably just about you not understanding what “orders of magnitude means”, but it’s still hilarious. If we start with your back-of-the-envelope numbers for Ukraine you are here claiming the Nazi occupiers in Poland outnumbered the Poles 5-50 times.
Sure, I’ll give you this:
If you could get a gun to every Ukrainian, if every Ukrainian was willing to risk their own and all their neighbors’ lives directly by killing Russian soldiers, and had no other mental barriers to committing such an act, if the Russians sent five guys to each village to “occupy” all the land, and if the Russians made no changes to this unrealistic way of doing occupation in the face of the tactic, then you would have a quick Ukrainian victory.
Unfortunately not a single point on that list is anywhere near realistic. Some of them resemble interesting philosophical hypotheticals in the “what if everyone just rush the lone gunman”-vein, but your idea of how an occupation works makes the whole so, so ridiculous.