Russia-Ukraine war and related tensions Megathread

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

Russian outlet Kommersant reports another Crimean airbase is on fire and authorities are investigating the possibility of a drone strike: www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/ausland/explosionen-auf-krim-offenbar-wieder-militaerflugplatz-in-brand-18247490.html?GEPC=s3

Prior to this incident, Russian allegedly had 20-30 attack jets there.

[NOVA Green]

Meanwhile in Russian occupied Melitopol the Russian TV propaganda station goes off the air...

Two explosions in the Russia-occupied city of Melitopol, Ukraine, knocked out pro-Kremlin television broadcasts on Tuesday, according to the city’s former Ukrainian mayor. The broadcasts had taken the place of local Ukrainian media sources as Russia seeks to spread propaganda and control the news narrative about the war.

The attack damaged a transit cable after it struck near an electric power plant, according to Ivan Federov, the city’s former mayor, who is in exile after being abducted by Russian forces in March and later freed in a prisoner exchange.

Details about the blasts could not be independently confirmed, and it was not immediately clear who was responsible. But Mr. Federov said the episode emphasized the opposition that the Russian-backed authorities would continue to meet in the city.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/08/16/world/ukraine-russia-news-war

[DINGO Joe]

https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1559584173731586050

Busy Day

[DINGO Joe]

https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1559519126258962437

If I had the time I might try to repurpose the Dead Kennedys "Holiday in Cambodia" for Crimea

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

https://twitter.com/officejjsmart/status/1559491609108119552?t=yR3eF4fQV_JTDzF_2...

[NOVA Green]

A few snippets from today's NYT updates from Ukrainian activities within the Crimean Peninsula...

Although likely none of this is unfamiliar to most of the "regular posters on this thread", it still helps "frame" the story as part of larger narrative.

I will attempt to avoid requoting items previously posted, since the NYT will sometimes delete previous content, while also including "legacy content" into "new stories".

Russian warships patrol Crimea’s coasts and Russian warplanes fly from its territory, transformed by eight years of occupation into a fortress. President Vladimir V. Putin has called Crimea a “sacred place,” Russia’s “holy land,” and one of his top advisers has warned that if the peninsula were attacked, Ukraine would face “Judgment Day.”

But lately, Ukraine has been calling the Kremlin’s bluff. Huge explosions rocked a temporary Russian ammunition depot in Crimea on Tuesday, in the latest in a series of clandestine Ukrainian assaults against the Black Sea peninsula that Mr. Putin illegally annexed in 2014, and that is now being used as a vital staging ground for Russia’s invasion.

The attacks in Crimea underscore Ukraine’s increasingly aggressive military tactics, as the government in Kyiv leans on long-range Western weapons and special forces to strike deep behind the front, disrupt Russian supply lines and counter Russia’s advantages in matériel. They also represent a growing challenge to Mr. Putin, with Crimea’s security key to Russia’s military effort — and to Mr. Putin’s political standing at home.

No single action that Mr. Putin has taken in his 22-year rule provoked as much pro-Kremlin euphoria among Russians as his largely bloodless annexation of Crimea, an action that cemented his image as a leader resurrecting Russia as a great power.

And in the run-up to the full-scale invasion last winter, it was Crimea that Mr. Putin repeatedly cited as the locus of what he called an existential security threat posed by Ukraine, warning that a Western-backed Ukrainian effort to retake the peninsula by force could trigger a direct war between Russia and NATO.

An analysis by The New York Times of several photos and videos shows a large fire burning west of Mayske, on Tuesday, and a satellite image shows smoke rising from the same site. Videos taken by passers-by before the explosions and verified by The Times show military vehicles parked in the nearby village, including what appear to be mobile multiple rocket launchers emblazoned with the ‘Z’ Russia uses to identify its forces.

About 11 miles from the location of the explosions, a transformer substation in the town of Dzhankoi was also on fire. The cause was not evident, but it is near another site where hundreds of Russian military vehicles were filmed in the weeks before.

After Mr. Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, Russian forces lunged north from Crimea and quickly captured a large swath of territory in southern Ukraine, including the Kherson region, which Russian forces almost fully control. Russia is now using Crimea to funnel troops and supplies, and provide air and logistics support to its forces in Kherson and the neighboring Zaporizka region, where Ukraine has been attacking Russian supply lines and threatening a major counteroffensive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/16/world/europe/crimea-russia-ukraine-explosions.html

[NOVA Green]

Haven't read the article yet, but apparently WaPo conducted a one-hour exclusive interview with Mr. Zelensky earlier today.

Here's a direct quote from the first question posed in this "abbreviated interview", although WaPo will release the full transcript likely before too long.

Q: When CIA Director William J. Burns met with you here in Kyiv in January, one of the things he told you was that the Russians would attempt a landing at the airport in Hostomel. What was your reaction when that actually happened on Feb. 24? Should there have been more Ukrainian forces already there?

A: Regarding the airport, some six months prior to all of this, and perhaps even earlier, if you remember, there was a gathering of troops on the territory of Belarus and so on. We appealed to all our partners, telling them that we believed this is how they would act. They were training there — and it was well known — to capture or bomb key infrastructure points. They had been training, they had plans to capture Boryspil airport and so on. I don’t know how old these plans are.

They used maps, and the way they were capturing things, some of their paths were the same as those of the Nazis during World War II. So to say they had something unique planned here, it is impossible. Everything we had, it was there.

I’m not ready to talk about everything Burns talked about, but his main signals were about threats to my life. And those were not the first signals — they came from everywhere, from our intelligence services, from foreign colleagues and so on.

Here's a brief excerpt from the 2nd interview question released thus far by the WaPo:

Q: So did you personally believe full-scale war was coming?

A: Look, how can you believe this? That they will torture people and that this is their goal? No one believed it would be like this. And no one knew it. And now everyone says we warned you, but you warned through general phrases. When we said give us specifics — where will they come from, how many people and so on — they all had as much information as we did. And when I said, “Okay, if they’re coming from here and it’s going to be heavy fighting here, can we get weapons to stop them?” We didn’t get it. Why do I need all these warnings? Why do I need to make our society go crazy? Since February, even from January as there was a lot going on in the media, Ukrainians transferred out more money than Ukrainians abroad received in assistance. Tens of billions of dollars in deposits have been withdrawn, so Ukrainians spent much more money in Europe compared with the amount Ukrainians had been given there, with all due respect.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/16/zelensky-interview-transcript/

Don't want to exceed my limit, plus only got so many hours to sleep before the alarm rings and I gotta go back to the factory again, despite the fact that I know most of the Sr. Client MGRs, while we are dealing with massive rolling "furloughs" to hit FY22 Q4 final reporting goals, and this isn't the only thing I'm following right now.

Still, overall interview seems a bit newsworthy, and def worthy for Atlas Members to take out the extremely discounted trial subscription....

[NOVA Green]

Yet another "MSM" print media, namely the Wall Street Journal has posted an update on the "Crimean Story".

Been a fan of the WSJ for their political and international coverage over the decades, but not a huge fan about their editorial pages and op-eds.

Explosions rocked an ammunition depot in Crimea, damaging rail tracks and power lines and marking a fresh blow to Moscow’s war effort.

The blasts were set off by Ukrainian saboteurs, according to a senior Ukrainian government official. Russian officials also blamed sabotage, their first official acknowledgment of a major strike on the peninsula.

The explosions hit the ammunition dump early Tuesday at an abandoned farm near the village of Maiske, leaving two people with minor injuries. Authorities on the peninsula, which Russia’s military seized in 2014, evacuated more than 3,000 people from a three-mile zone around the depot and stopped trains on the nearby train line, which sweeps up from the eastern edge of the peninsula to the Ukrainian mainland.

The damage to Russian facilities in Crimea has provided a morale boost for Ukrainian forces, which surrendered the peninsula in 2014 with little resistance and have been losing ground in the country’s east. The incidents also demonstrate a new threat to Russian supply lines from territory that Moscow considers its own in a war that it has sought to portray as a limited operation.

Russian officials said the exploding ammunition caused damage to a railway line that leads from eastern Crimea, where a bridge connects the peninsula with the Russian mainland. The Russian Ministry of Defense said power lines and infrastructure, as well as civilian homes, were damaged.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/explosions-hit-russian-ammunition-depot-in-crimea-11660635257

Regardless of whatever the cause of these mysterious explosions, pretty clear that Russian Ammo supply chains are starting to get hit all over the places with tons of secondary explosions practically every day...

Not quite sure what is happening with Russian Fuel Depots, but then again in Kherson Province Russia is effectively running on Football "Defense Mode", while meanwhile their offensive campaign in Donbass has effectively become a crawl, part of the reason they have relo'd roughly 20k allied soldiers towards the Kherson Front.

"Running out of Gas", might sound a bit bizarre for yet another "Petro Dictatorship", that has effectively become a bit more of a "Neo-Fascist" society, especially over the past decade, but yet Russian military still uses train lines as main methods of resupply logistics,

Part of the problem I suspect is that Russian Generals fighting against Ukrainian Generals, most of whom were all educated at the same military academies, mean that the defending country has very keen insights into the military strategies and technologies of the invading force.

Still Ukrainian military, especially after the '14 Russian Invasion and Occupation, has adopted a much more decentralized Command and Control structure, which empowers NCOs to make flexible decisions on the field.

Now that Ukrainians have very very good artillery systems, and pretty sure that American and NATO SIGINT, Sats, are likely giving Ukrainian detailed info on a daily basis to provide geo-location info regarding Russian movements all along the massive 500+ Miles front line.

It is very interesting regarding of these recent mentions of "partisans", especially within the context of Crimea, which one would likely imagine to be perhaps the most dangerous place to be a "partisan", outside of "Mother Russia" herself.

[jaichind]

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinese-military-will-send-troops-russia-joint-exercise-2022-08-17/

"China to send troops to Russia for 'Vostok' exercise"

It seems both PRC and  India will send troops to Russia's Vostok military exercise

[Storr]

https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1559519126258962437

If I had the time I might try to repurpose the Dead Kennedys "Holiday in Cambodia" for Crimea

38,000 comes from Russian state media, so the real number is probably higher:

https://twitter.com/mjluxmoore/status/1559589176177221634?s=20&t=zDcTOOZrtDB...

[Storr]

https://twitter.com/JominiW/status/1559710646337413126?s=20&t=iAcQSnFvAx-5ML...

https://twitter.com/JominiW/status/1559710649747488773?s=20&t=iAcQSnFvAx-5ML...

https://twitter.com/JominiW/status/1559710651865497602?s=20&t=iAcQSnFvAx-5ML...

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinese-military-will-send-troops-russia-joint-exercise-2022-08-17/

"China to send troops to Russia for 'Vostok' exercise"

It seems both PRC and  India will send troops to Russia's Vostok military exercise

A bit surprising that both of them stayed in, given that India is trying to block China from sending aid (via ship) to Bangladesh. Russia is fond of live fire exercises, but might want to avoid those this year.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

In contrast to Saki, satellite imagery shows no apparent damage at Gvardeyskoye air base. It's not clear what happened there: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/no-major-damage-seen-at-russian-airbase-in-crimea-after-reported-attack

The smoke/explosions were initially reported by a Russian outlet. If an attack was intercepted or its damage was minor and subsequently cleared, perhaps it wouldn't have shown up on satellite imagery.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Love how they tried to camouflage the walls as if that was most important in hiding the location.

https://twitter.com/Militarylandnet/status/1559817046413742080?t=FE_SvJA_YKiSd75...

[NOVA Green]

NYT wrote a story published today based upon interviews with Ukrainian partisans operating behind Russian lines... well worth a read.

Here are a few selected excerpts:

In recent days the Ukrainian military made Svarog and several other of the operatives available for interviews in person or online, hoping to highlight the partisans’ widening threat to Russian forces and signal to Western donors that Ukraine is successfully rallying local resources in the war, now nearly six months old. A senior Ukrainian military official familiar with the program also described the workings of the resistance.

With little movement of the front lines, insurgent activity is now intensifying, as the fighters strike stealthily in environs they know intimately, using car bombs, booby traps and targeted killings with pistols — and then blending into the local population.

Svarog said he was among the trainees in these public programs. Behind the scenes, Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces were forming a more structured, and secret, program that included instruction on sabotage, explosives and stashing weapon caches in anticipation of Russia’s attack.

After the invasion, Svarog said, he was directed to a storage shed outside Melitopol, where he found slabs of high explosives, detonators, Kalashnikov rifles, a grenade launcher and two pistols equipped with silencers.

Each operative has a different a role to play, the official said: scouting a target, gathering intelligence on a target’s movements, and carrying out an attack. Individual cells are kept separate and do not know one another, lest a detained partisan reveal identities under interrogation.

Two entities within the military are responsible for overseeing operations behind enemy lines, the official said: the military intelligence service, known as HUR, and Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces. An interagency task force oversees operations of both the intelligence agency and Special Operations Forces branches of the underground, what is known as the Resistance Movement, or Rukh Oporu in Ukrainian.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/17/world/europe/ukraine-partisans-insurgency-russia.html

[NOVA Green]

Looks like Ukrainian sources are making the rounds on the "partisan stories", especially after recent series of "spectaculars".

Here are a few excerpts from a WaPo story posted today:

Ukraine is hoping that a new strategy of attacking key military targets deep inside Russian-occupied territory will undermine Moscow’s ability to hold the front lines ahead of an eventual Ukrainian counteroffensive to reclaim territory, Ukraine’s defense minister said Wednesday.

Ukraine’s conventional forces lack the weapons and ammunition needed to launch a full-scale ground offensive to retake territory from the Russians, Oleksii Reznikov said in an interview. He said he expects that sufficient quantities will eventually be delivered in line with commitments already made by Ukraine’s Western partners.

To that end, Ukraine is activating a “resistance force” under the command of Ukrainian special forces to carry out attacks far behind Russian lines, Reznikov said. The force was formed in January in accordance with a law passed last year, and in recent weeks has been activated in Ukrainian territory held by the Russians.

Some spectacular explosions in the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula over the past week have drawn attention to the emerging strategy, and to the role of Ukrainian special forces in implementing it. Ukrainian officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, have told The Washington Post that those forces were responsible for the Crimea blasts, at a Russian air base last week and at an ammunition depot and an air base on Tuesday.

However, Ukraine’s Western allies have been involved in training the special forces that are responsible for the attacks, said Mikhail Podolyak, an adviser to the defense ministry. NATO partners have provided trainers to show the Ukrainians how to operate behind Russian lines, he said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/17/ukraine-defense-minister-special-forces-new-strategy/

[NOVA Green]

Wall Street Journal runs with something similar today...

A Ukrainian official said saboteurs were behind Tuesday’s blasts, which prompted authorities to evacuate more than 3,000 people and suspend trains on a rail line. Russia also said it was sabotage in its first official acknowledgment of a strike on the peninsula.

In a show of action, Russia’s FSB intelligence agency on Wednesday said it had detained six Russian citizens in Crimea who belonged to a cell that spread what it called terrorist ideology with the support of Ukrainian “emissaries,” according to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti. It didn’t say the detained suspects were involved in either of the recent blasts.

The apparent deterioration in security across Crimea is likely to be of concern to Russian commanders, who rely on the peninsula as a rear base for their occupation of a swath of territory along Ukraine’s southern coast, the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense said Wednesday.

Supporters of Ukraine have been active in other areas of the country more recently occupied by Russia, with both Russians and their Ukrainian collaborators a target. On Wednesday, Russian forces blocked the exit from the city of Melitopol following an explosion near the office of the city’s occupation administration, according to Melitopol’s exiled mayor, Ivan Fedorov. He provided no further details of the blast but told Ukrainian TV that Russian forces were undressing men who wanted to leave the city and checking their identity, a sign a hunt for suspects was under way.

Ukrainian military intelligence said Wednesday that Russia had relocated some planes and helicopters following the blasts in Crimea, moving aircraft to airports deeper in the peninsula and the Russian mainland.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Mr. Zelensky, on Wednesday suggested the Kerch bridge connecting Crimea to mainland Russia would be a legitimate target: “As recorded in international law: Crimea [is Ukraine]. So this bridge is an illegal object, permission for the construction of which was not given by Ukraine,” he said on Twitter. “It harms the peninsula’s ecology and therefore must be dismantled.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-strikes-ukrainian-ports-after-crimea-blasts-11660734371?mod=hp_lead_pos7

[NOVA Green]

Newsweek article based upon Ukrainian sources regarding relocation of Russian air assets within and from Crimea posted a couple hours ago:

Explosions have forced the Russian military to withdraw airplanes and helicopters from airbases in Crimea, according to Ukraine's Ministry of Defense.

Fires and explosions have recently rocked multiple areas of the Crimean peninsula, which was annexed from Ukraine by Russia in 2014. On Wednesday, the Ukrainian government said that the damage had forced at least 24 planes and 14 helicopters to abandon their bases and retreat to sites deeper into Russian territory.

One of the planes believed to be a MiG-31 was observed catching fire when being flown out of Crimea, according to Ukraine. The aircraft were purportedly flown from the bases on Wednesday and on August 11.

At least 14 Russian helicopters were also allegedly flown out of Crimea on Wednesday, including six Kamov Ka-27s. Eight helicopters of an unspecified make were purportedly flown east to a Russian base in Krasnodar.

https://www.newsweek.com/explosions-force-russia-pull-planes-crimean-airbases-ukraine-1734649

[NOVA Green]

Love how they tried to camouflage the walls as if that was most important in hiding the location.

https://twitter.com/Militarylandnet/status/1559817046413742080?t=FE_SvJA_YKiSd75...

I would imagine that regardless of the posting the exact geo-location coordinates it might have worked out badly considering this...

From Newsweek today:

A Ukrainian regional governor in the country's war-torn east says that up to 100 Russian soldiers could have died in an explosion in the recently occupied city of Lysychansk.

Serhiy Gaidai, head of Ukraine's Luhansk administrative district, provided few details about the blast in an interview with Radio Liberty on Tuesday. His remarks come amid reports of ongoing morale problems among Russian forces despite recent victories in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region.

Gaidai told the news outlet that Russian troops were conducting a large offensive from the side of an oil refinery and suggested that "some careless smoking" may have caused the deadly explosion in Lysychansk, which Russia claimed last month to have "liberated" as the last major holdout in the Luhansk administrative district.

The slain soldiers were no longer part of Wagner PMC, a Kremlin-aligned private military company, but were in Russia's regular army, he said.

https://www.newsweek.com/blast-may-have-killed-100-russian-soldiers-occupied-luhansk-governor-1734275

[Torie]

Is there any concern that behind the lines partisan sabotage might incentivize Russia to just forceably expel all the Ukrainians in the territory that they have occupied? Some of that has gone on already I think I have read.

[CumbrianLefty]

Well that is always a possibility. But their propaganda has fairly consistently been that "real" people in Ukraine support them and not the minority of "Nazis" they are combating?

[jaichind]

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/88015/ukraine-may-be-forced-onto-an-ammo-diet-says-us-military-analyst/index.html

"Ukraine may be forced onto an 'ammo diet' says US military analyst"

It seems there are signs that military aid to Ukraine might start to decline making it harder for Ukraine to maintain current ammo burn.

[jaichind]

European natural gas prices.   I just read a news story that today this price just surge 6.7% to 241 reaching a record high.  Gas prices tend to spike in the winter (see 2021 winter spike).  If it is spiking now I wonder what it will look like this winter.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/88015/ukraine-may-be-forced-onto-an-ammo-diet-says-us-military-analyst/index.html

"Ukraine may be forced onto an 'ammo diet' says US military analyst"

It seems there are signs that military aid to Ukraine might start to decline making it harder for Ukraine to maintain current ammo burn.

The Spiegel interview that article lifts from is paywalled, but Kofman (the interviewee) reports something slightly different. He says that Ukraine is likely to go onto some kind of ammunition diet (i.e. ration) because it probably suspects Europe (no mention of the US) has given most of what it is willing to give. In essence, he argues Ukraine will conserve some resources in case they don't receive more, not that they won't receive more.

This would make a lot of sense in the cases of e.g. ammunition for Soviet artillery systems, which the US does not produce and which Europe does not have huge surpluses of (it has probably sent most or all it's willing to part with w.r.t. howitzer shells). Europe can still manufacture these shells, but presumably manufacturing rates are lower than pre-existing surplus stock.

Where his outlook darkens in the interview is w.r.t. a Ukrainian counteroffensive. He speculates that if Ukraine gains no more significant ground before the start of the next year, they may come under pressure to accept a stalemate. Therefore, he argues, there is pressure on the military to attempt some kind of operation before then even if it is unlikely to succeed.

[Storr]

https://twitter.com/DefMon3/status/1560225371089522689?s=20&t=KXJkCyRWd7Xdq_...