Ukrainian titanium mines are open-pit operations. They are, in fact, very vulnerable to shelling - draglines and bucket excavators make excellent targets, I’m sure. And high value - who wouldn’t want to do $100 million in damages with one shot?
And the biggest operations are in Kirovohrad, Zhytomyr and Dnipropetrovsk Oblasts, none of which are Russan-held.
Good to know. How complicated is it to replace the mining equipment?
Depends on the damages, and which kind of machine, but mine equipment is basically designed for a rough life. Expensive to replace, but not too complicated.
Well, if they could blame Gorby then at some point they can blame Putin. Perhaps the next Russian leader will have a more level head see how disastrous this war has been for the Motherland, and throw Putin under the bus. I guess it all depends on how Putin is removed from power, by whom, and when.
Cut the power and they flood, though.
And railways and highways that take the product to the refinery are subject to bombing as well.
Too bad @Oredigger77 has been MIA for a year. 
Quantity has a quality all its own. With due respect, clearly numbers have made SOME difference in this war. Russia has gained ground and killed a lot of Ukrainian troops. They still occupy Ukrainian territory. They haven’t been defeated yet, and it’s been a year.
The key here is what constitutes “Good supplies.” Logistics is a matter of both time and space; if a substantial force is sufficiently supplied for a month, that can overwhelm a smaller enemy. But if the supplies run out in a week, there is just no way I can see Russia being able to mount a coordinated and effective offensive that quickly. And if the do have one or two months of supplies but it doesn’t win the war, Ukrainian troops will just start scratching the Russian gains back later in the year and they’ll all be back where they started.
I suspect this war will last years. It’s going to devolve into static artillery warfare, just as the limited Donbas war did.
I feel Putin doesn’t want a general nuclear war. And we certainly don’t.
What Putin wants is a free hand to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine. Ukraine doesn’t have nuclear weapons so that would be a one-sided attack.
What Putin is worried about is if he uses nuclear weapons against Ukraine, the United States might respond by using nuclear weapons against Russia (probably in the battlefield but that could quickly escalate to a strategic exchange).
So each side is posturing to try to make the other side back down. Russia is talking about a general nuclear war to convince the United States not to respond to a Russian nuclear attack against Ukraine. And the United States is talking about a general nuclear war to deter Russia from making that nuclear attack against Ukraine.
After the chaos of the very beginning of the war, Ukraine’s movements (including retreats) were all very considered and smart. They traded territory for space, time, and Russian lives. On the flip side, Russia has thrown lives and more lives away in pointless attacks for meaningless pieces of territory. Sometimes they got territory, and surely some Ukrainians were killed, but Ukraine’s dictated the terms of this war since the end of the chaotic first phase.
Maybe it will take years to totally expel Russia, but you can mark my prediction here – Ukraine’s offensive in the spring will be very successful and expel a very big portion of Russia’s forces from a big portion of Ukrainian territory. IIRC you thought Russia would win in a walk-over at the beginning, while I thought Russia would have a very tough time of it.
This interpretation is based on the reporting by Ukraine-favoring sources and might not be an accurate way to view the course of the war.
Most reporting is giving fairly equal numbers of losses between the two sides, both in terms of soldiers taken out of the battlefield and equipment losses. For example:
If they lost 145,000 soldiers and we lost 145,000 soldiers and the battle lines have largely stayed still then it’s pretty hard to argue that one side is using its people more effectively than the other side. The defender should have the advantage so achieving geographical deadlock and wearing the invader down should - if converted to casualty counts - mean lower numbers for the defender.
And if both sides have lost the same number of men but Russia has more troops overall then the one who has been conserving its energy and picking its battles is not Ukraine.
That said, the Oryx group is (purportedly) tracking equipment losses.
I started going through the various tanks, infantry movers, artillery devices, etc. and checking the size of the crews/passengers per vehicle and - at least for land vehicles - came to the conclusion that you could probably just guesstimate that there’s a crew of six for every land vehicle. And, realistically, we’re looking at a land war that’s largely not being fought in the sky.
If you figure that troops are likely to be taken out at the same rate as equipment then you can basically use equipment losses as a proxy for total troop losses.
Going by the data at Oryx, we should expect that the Russians have lost roughly three times as many troops as Ukraine. Since they’ve stalemated and the Russian army has roughly three times as many soldiers, that tracks. We’re also not reliant on the public statements of anyone involved in the war to come to these numbers. But their counts could be way off because they’re reliant on Facebook and Instagram posts - which might be incomplete and skewed by the ability and willingness for locals to post pictures that are negative to their side.
But, likewise, the Western governments might be using a counting system that’s very strict, when it comes to accepting an enemy casualty. They know their own counts accurately by underestimate the enemy losses, to be safe. Or, likewise, they might prefer publishing lower bounds rather than more likely counts in the hope of lulling the enemy into complacency and bad decisions.
In general, I’d take any interpretation with a grain of salt.
We can be pretty sure about the physical location of the battle lines. Everything else is - at our level, as consumers of public facing info - liable to be grossly inaccurate.
From my reading, the “Ukraine-favoring” sources have been correct the vast majority of the time. Just about every other source consistently overestimates Russian capabilities. By now it should be obvious – Russian morale is shit, Russian logistics is shit, and Russia has very little ability to take and hold territory beyond a few dozen miles from their own supply depots.
That would be counter to the narrative that the war is likely to stretch on for decades to come.
You can’t keep fighting for years and years with no equipment and no men willing to do the work. Maybe, with the latter, you can force it through draconian measures but the former is a pretty hard limit. But, soldiers fighting with poor morale are also a lot more likely to die. If both sides are dying at equal rates then the morale doesn’t seem to be so bad.
If Russia keeps showing up with bullets and missiles then their logistics is in place and working. We might choose to believe that they’re exceeding their capacities and are on an unsustainable path. Maybe, all of a sudden, all of their supply lines will self-implode and Ukraine is able to move forward and stomp a bunch of unequipped guys, left stranded in the field. But, until that day comes, we should assume that if Russia got bullets to the front line yesterday and today, then they’re going to be able to do it again tomorrow.
Saying that their logistics are crap and saying that their morale is low doesn’t mean that those things are true. If equal people are dying and the front is static then both sides are equal. If one side was truly lower, it would manifest as physical movement and excess gravestones.
Ukraine’s offensives have actually worked – there just haven’t been that many of them. When Ukraine pushes, they retake territory. When Russia pushes (and they’re always pushing somewhere), they usually don’t.
Ukraine is preparing for a big offensive in the spring. I think this will be a big, big push that will retake big chunks of territory over the course of weeks. We’ll see in the next handful of months if I’m correct.
I don’t disagree with that. As said, I think that Oryx confirms the popular narrative.
I’m simply pointing out that the official version of the popular narrative conflicts with itself, and that should give us some pause on accepting it, without something to explain the discrepancy.
Maybe Oryx provides that explanation for some readers. Maybe it doesn’t for others.
This is a website for skepticism. It’s fair to advise skepticism.
I’ve seen nothing to refute the assertion that Russia is losing vehicles of all sorts, including armor, at irreplaceable rates. Russia today simply doesn’t have the kind of command economy that allowed the Soviet Union to crank out t-34s seemingly without limit, no matter how crappy they were and how quickly they were lost in battle.
T-34s were terrific tanks. State of the art.
The tanks they have NOW, I’m not super confident in, and I have zero confidence they can do well against the (admittedly limited) Abrams and Leopard IIs they’ll soon be facing.
The greatest threat Ukraine faces is Western resolve falling away, because Ukraine doesn’t have any real defense industry. They rely on our stuff.
That’s an an exaggeration. I completely agree with your assessment that as Western support goes, so does Ukraine. It is not remotely capable of supplying themselves in a major war on their own and even more so their economy needs propping up. But factually Ukraine’s arms industry isn’t tiny and prior to 2014 at least was a real source of export income. It’s just not scaled to the task at hand.
Nitpick: The design was good; the tanks that actually rolled off the assembly line, maybe not so much.
Supposedly, the Russian minister of production was recently bouncing around the Middle East, trying to sell Russian arms. “Proven in combat!”
To be fair, that’s not super indicative of anything, but it could be argued to show some sense of excess supply.
(It could more easily be argued to show a need for outside funding, to help build supply.)