World War III

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Russian draftees in open rebellion because of no food, water, rusty AKM rifles from the 70's, etc. They begin changing "cocksucker" at the senior officer threateni9ng them with "riot police"...

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When you don't pay your army...

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Ukrainian forces are moving in on Kherson as the Russian openly talk of retreat, liberating the city would be another remarkable milestone. It will also allow Ukraine to again cut off fresh water supplies to Crimea. Maybe the Russians can use their oil and gas to build desalination plants no?

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Blow Up Russian Trains, Liberate The Coast: Ukraine Has A Plan To Win The War
David Axe, Forbes Staff - Yesterday 4:43 PM

© Provided by Forbes
According to AFP, the Kremlin ordered repairs to the $4-billion, 11-mile span to wrap up in July 2023. Until then, Russian forces in southern Ukraine will depend on just one overland supply route—a rail line through eastern Ukraine that’s well within range of Ukrainian artillery.

All that is to say, the Russian field armies in and around the port of Kherson on Ukraine’s temporarily-occupied Black Sea coast are in trouble. They were struggling with resupply before the Ukrainians blew up the Kerch Bridge, twisting its twin rail lines and dropping one of its two road lanes. Now the struggle will get worse.

The partial destruction of the Kerch Bridge “presents the Russians with a significant problem,” tweeted Mick Ryan, a retired Australian army general.

And that sets conditions for what some analysts say is Ukraine’s plan to end the eight-month-old war. As Russian forces fray in the south, gaps could form in their defensive lines stretching from just north of Kherson 250 miles west to the terrain between occupied Mariupol and free Zaporizhzhia.

If Ukrainian brigades can exploit those gaps and liberate the ruins of Mariupol, they will “sever the Russian armed forces in Ukraine into two pieces that cannot mutually reinforce,” according to Mike Martin, a fellow at the Department of War Studies at King's College in London—and almost entirely isolate the Russians in the south.

After that, “you’re going to see a general collapse of the [Russian armed forces], a change of power in Moscow and a deal that involves Crimea being handed over,” Martin added. “Or, the Ukrainians will just take it.”

The Russian army traditionally relies on trains to move the bulk of its supplies. That explains why the army never had the big, robust truck units that, say, the U.S. Army takes for granted. The Russians’ truck shortage got a lot worse this spring when the Ukrainians blew up hundreds of trucks trying to resupply Russian battalions rolling toward Kyiv on a doomed mission to capture the Ukrainian government.

The Kremlin’s problem, now that Ukraine has cut the main rail line into Kherson Oblast, is that the only other rail line connecting Russia to a railhead anywhere near Kherson, terminating in occupied Melitopol, lies just a few miles south of the front line near Volnovakha, north of Mariupol. Ukrainian troops could hit the line, and any trains rolling along it, with 120-millimeter mortars, 155-millimeter howitzers and High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems.

Realistically, Russian commanders have few options short of surrender. They can feed small quantities of supplies into Kherson by truck, by boat and by plane—and hope that the garrison in the south can hold out until July, when the Kerch Bridge might fully reopen.

The problem is that Ukrainian commanders know they’ve got nine months to take advantage of Russia’s logistical problem. Nine months to add a third counteroffensive to the counteroffensives they launched in the east and south six weeks ago. That third attack almost certainly will target Mariupol in order to cut in two the Russian army and starve half of it.

With the Russians on the defensive and the Kremlin’s desperate nationwide mobilization mostly feeding hapless old men into a war they’re not equipped to fight, the momentum clearly lies with the Ukrainians. They get to choose when to launch a third counteroffensive. Russian sources already are anticipating the possible attack.

It’s likely only the coming winter can dictate terms. The first few months of Ukraine’s winter are wet and muddy. The last few are cold and icy. The former are hostile to ground combat. The latter, somewhat less so. If Kyiv aims to end the war on its terms before, say, January, it might need to make its move soon.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/blow-up-russian-trains-liberate-the-coast-ukraine-has-a-plan-to-win-the-war/ar-AA12YrX4?ocid=mailsignout&pc=U591&cvid=fd653a7570a643dca9bea4b60c188f55

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[Kristy]

Is Germany being a little bad ass here or what?

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Looks to me like a bomb went off under the road bridge and that set off the train loaded with fuel on the rail bridge. A coincidence that the train was there? I think not. Good planning on this bombing.

Upon further review, that may be the case but FFS how? Like The Guns of Navarone shit!

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Naw, it was the tractor trailer, maybe mounted by operators. Very sophisticated blend of white phosphorous, fuel, and maybe Semtex...

While the Russians claim they partially reopened things to traffic (guessing passenger cars), the rail slicing is a big problem for the Russian military...

[Kristy]

Looks to me like a bomb went off under the road bridge and that set off the train loaded with fuel on the rail bridge. A coincidence that the train was there? I think not. Good planning on this bombing.

[silverfish]

Sorry for the foreign language video, but it's the only thing that's not in the useless, non-embeddable "youtube shorts" format.

CNN has a clip:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/08/europe/crimea-bridge-explosion-intl-hnk/index.html

"The exact cause of the blast at Europe’s longest bridge is yet to be confirmed. Russian
officials said a truck exploded, causing Crimea-bound sections of the bridge’s road portion
to collapse. A subsequent fire engulfed a train of fuel tanks on a separate, adjacent rail
portion of the bridge."

[FORD]

So Long And Thanks For All The Vodka??

I obviously don't read Russian, so I can't verify the exact purpose of this illustration, but it would appear to be the Russians bragging about all of the ways this bridge was supposedly protected, and could never be destroyed.....



They even had trained dolphins defending it, apparently? If the dolphins abandoned their post, should we be looking for a Vogon Construction Fleet in the sky??

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https://twitter.com/OleksiyDanilov/status/1578636142055870464?s=20&t=7QKa59_z7vdMsWdZQoGkcw

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ooof!

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https://www.defenseone.com/technolog...ecrets/185264/

We left a lot of electronic equipment that gave us an advantage. It’s the electronics stupid. Not the trucks and shit.

Dude you really are a weirdo with something to prove. Didn't you live there for a while? Another year old article where everything we are talking about is already obsolete. Whatever the Taliban has left is rotting away and they are imploding with a very active insurgency. Most of the Afghan army had shit with mainly the special operations forces having the best most worthwhile stuff. Even the previous Afghan Air Force was falling apart without US contractors to prop them up.

Please tell us how this treasure trove to tech and knowledge has helped, say, the Russians? The Talib march around looking tough in all their captured Western gear but are pretty much neutered by their ineptitude, economic chaos, and famines...

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What mineral wealth? Ha! Ha! Just proved you know nothing about Afghanistan or geopolitics.

Lithium? Make sure you take yours! Who gives a fuck? Thanks for the year old article though. Afghanistan isn't cornering the market on that or anything else and the Chinese may end up spending as much securing it in transport than they make. It's fucking Afghanistan where everything goes to shit but they can have fun projecting their forces there....