Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch
Here's the possible problem with an early analysis of this war, and it is a war.
Pretty much right now because the Russians are actually really good at the combined arms approach to war. You'll see heavy casualties at the start, this is usually because the Russians move so fast that they're really outstripping any recon effort, so they'll run into ambushes. But the bottom line is that this thing is going to be all about weight. The Russians will attack everywhere hard. Their weight will crush the Ukraine enemies in the field and when the Russians achieve a break through they'll pour through it, encircle the enemy, slam the door shut on the fire sack and kill everything inside of it with air, artillery, armor and mounted infantry.
The Russians have a huge numerical advantage. The Ukrainian's don't have much to give.
Probably the best thing that the Ukrainian military can do is fight an extremely mobile war. Be willing to give up ground, don't get caught up in static defenses which means similar to the Russians in WW2, be willing to give up ground, while bleeding the lead elements of the Russian attacks, and try to find the weak spots with the Russian logistical tail.
But if the Ukrainians are fighting to defend land and territory, yeah the Russians will take casualties but eventually the weight of their numbers and far more advanced weapons will crush the Ukrainians where they stand.
I think the only hope would be for the Ukraine military to trade space for time in the hopes that help will arrive before its too late, though as I stated above, I doubt that help is coming any time soon.
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I think the equipment (particularly the naval and air power) is more of an advantage to the number of troops, Ukraine does have ~215k soldiers + ~250k reservists (which they activated earlier in the week). Whereas reports were only that Russia had 200k soldiers at the border (from news articles that I read).
Now, how many of Belarus's military is engaged (their army is much smaller) ~62k active, ~340k reservists. And how much of the separatists are left from the 40-50k fighters reported from the war.
In theory, numbers might be on Ukraine's side for manpower but definitely not equipment.
Also depends if the population fights, Russia fighting both the army and an insurgency could really tie them down in too many conflicts at once.
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I also heard reports (though I think they are dubious at best) that Ukraine stood up a 1m strong militia. Do they even have the equipment to arm a militia that size? How would no one know about it? This I suspect is BS.
Edit: maybe after your last post, the reports I was hearing were confusing Reservist with Militia, and the 1m number wasn't as BS as I thought it was. The numbers I was getting was from wiki (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Forces_of_Ukraine)