Injured Russian soldiers are being sent back into the line of fire in “meat wave” assaults.
The Ukrainian army has reported capturing Russians already suffering from their wounds sustained in previous attacks.
They had been given minimal medical attention before being sent back to fight.
The tactics show an apparent disregard for foot soldiers as commanders throw thousands of men into the front lines in a slow and grinding summer offensive.
Some Russians have been captured re-entering the battlefield on crutches.
This particular war is not exactly free of the propagandistic arts. So, pinch of salt and all that.
On the other hand the basic Russian attitude toward recruits and troops is pretty vile, so could be. Which doesn;t get us very far, just tells us that if it’s propaganda then they’re using something that’s easy enough to believe.
I’m not sure whether the propaganda means that the Russians are fiendish inhuman types who we must defeat at all costs; or that the Russians are plainly losing, so one last push will see the job done.
Good news! NATO is being defeated by one-eyed paraplegics on bicycles.
British military intelligence believes
in unicorns, fairies, and the desirability of African penis.
Ignore everything the Ukrainians or the MOD say and just look at what the Russian regulars are saying about themselves. It looks pretty similarly unpretty.
A characteristic of the war – reported by even Western Commentariat – is Russia has conducted a defensive, holding campaign allowing Ukrainians to send in ‘meat waves’ to be ground up in the Russian meat-grinder, territory covered with thousands of mines, and a rain of artillery fire and drone attacks.
Russia advances have been relatively small scale, localised where Ukrainian defence is weak.
Russia still has a huge reserve of men and unlike Ukraine, no conscription. Ukraine ‘recruiting involves kidnapping men and women off the street.
It is more likely wounded Ukrainian soldiers are quickly being return to the front line, since the Ukrainian army is heavily depleted and cannot replace dead and wounded like Russia can.
It is predicted by some Russia will start moving forward, now that Ukrainian resources are so stretched – hence the panic to get more NATO equipment and ‘hopefully’ NATO forces into Ukraine.
. . . Russia has conducted a defensive, holding campaign allowing Ukrainians to send in ‘meat waves’ to be ground up in the Russian meat-grinder . . .
This was the shortlived “big counteroffensive” in Zaporizhzhia last year. Other than that, and some spectacular gains against overextended Russian forces in 2022, the Ukrainians have fought the defensive, holding campaign you speak of. Though it has been an active defense.
To use Steveish terms, “pressganged geriatrics hold back second powerfullest army in the world”.
– Russia still has a huge reserve of men and unlike Ukraine, no conscription.
You’re absolutely fucking deluded, mate, if you think Russia doesn’t have conscription.
– It is predicted by some Russia will start moving forward . . .
Russia is already moving forward. Slowly and at enormous cost in men and materiel. If they can sustain it, and the damage to their economy, they win. If they can’t, they lose.
John – It is more likely wounded Ukrainian soldiers are quickly being return to the front line, since the Ukrainian army is heavily depleted and cannot replace dead and wounded like Russia can.
They are. There’s been a steady stream of videos coming out of Ukraine of locals physically fighting Ukrainian army recruiters, who behave like Navy press gangs from the 1600’s.
Amputees (i.e. guys who have already given an arm or leg for Ukraine and been demobbed) are starting to show up in those videos now. They’re also regularly fighting with ambulance crews and firemen, because the recruiters are desperate and don’t care who they grab, as long as you’re fit to man a trench for a few hours.
Situation is beyond fucked, which is why UK MoD propaganda is so shrill and stupid.
. . . like Navy press gangs . . .
Yay, called it by five minutes. These stories have been running since near the beginning. No doubt some of them are true. But they won’t be typical because that’s not how you operate a long term active defence against a massive invasion.
Curious fact – Ukrainian conscription begins at age 25 (until February this year it was 27). It’s a policy (hope) to help retain a viable population. That’s the main reason the army has a high proportion of older men. Ukraine has to man a very long front, most of which isn’t “hot”. Anyone who thinks the new Russian offensive into Kharkiv is being turned back by sixty year olds doesn’t understand biology.
PJF – yay, called it by five minutes. These stories have been running since near the beginning. No doubt some of them are true. But they won’t be typical because that’s not how you operate a long term active defence against a massive invasion.
It’s unfortunate the UAF is unaware of how to operate a long term active defence against a massive invasion, then. Because it’s not “stories”, it’s SOP for which we have plenty of video footage.
Curious fact – Ukrainian conscription begins at age 25 (until February this year it was 27). It’s a policy (hope) to help retain a viable population. That’s the main reason the army has a high proportion of older men. Ukraine has to man a very long front, most of which isn’t “hot”. Anyone who thinks the new Russian offensive into Kharkiv is being turned back by sixty year olds doesn’t understand biology.>
It’s the Ukraine situation in general you don’t understand. The average age of a Ukrainian soldier on the front line is about 46. Nobody doubts this, except people who refuse to listen to what Ukrainians are saying.
They’ve so far resisted the urge to conscript laddies for the reason you mentioned, but also because Ukraine doesn’t have a lot of fit young men aged 18-25. Their demographics were among the worst in Europe before the war, it has only gotten worse since.
Russia still has a huge reserve of men
And they’re chewing through them at a very high rate, as claimed by their own soldiers*.
No doubt we’ll be told the accompanying video is a Ukraine deep fake. Judging by their output half the population of Ukraine must be in the deep fake business.
*Referring to these men as soldiers is both unfair on them and a disservice to trained soldiers. They’re hardly trained cannon fodder who are left to their own devices to try to survive the meat grinder:.
– It’s unfortunate the UAF is unaware of how to operate a long term active defence against a massive invasion, then.
Ah, it’s been an accident since Feb 2022.
– The average age of a Ukrainian soldier on the front line is about 46. Nobody doubts this, except people who refuse to listen to what Ukrainians are saying.
Define “front line”. Like I said, Ukraine has to man the frontiers of Transnistrian Moldova and Belarus, as well the relatively inactive stretch of border with Russia, the Black Sea coastline and the west bank of the Dnipro river up to Zaporizhzhia city. These, as well as all the incountry stuff like supply and logistics can be carried out by “Dad’s Army” types. The hot zones will be manned mostly by the younger contingent. Because physics.
PJF – Ah, it’s been an accident since Feb 2022.
Yes, Ukraine has been suffering horrendous casualties since Feb 22 and every new wave of conscription is pulling in the decreasingly fit and willing.
Define “front line”. Like I said, Ukraine has to man the frontiers of Transnistrian Moldova and Belarus, as well the relatively inactive stretch of border with Russia, the Black Sea coastline and the west bank of the Dnipro river up to Zaporizhzhia city. These, as well as all the incountry stuff like supply and logistics can be carried out by “Dad’s Army” types. The hot zones will be manned mostly by the younger contingent. Because physics.
The front line, as in where the fighting is.
Looking at photos of recently mobilised or POW Ukrainians, the “younger contingent” you fondly imagine must be doing the fighting doesn’t exist. Ukraine isn’t the Commando Comic you want it to be.
@PJF
Russia is already moving forward. Slowly and at enormous cost in men and materiel. If they can sustain it, and the damage to their economy, they win. If they can’t, they lose.
That enormous cost in men and material applies to Ukraine too. Their material gets supplied by the west, but they are running out of men.
It’s an old cold war generals wet dream: two of the founding republics of the old USSR fighting each other in a post dated civil war.
Western media doesn’t understand that Russia has a very different mentality about war and losses, Starmer and most NATO leaders don’t want headlines about losses of troops, Biden definitely doesn’t want it before the election
BniC – I dunno. The Russian gov has been quite careful (by Slavic standards) about casualties overall, though inevitably they’ve taken horrible losses in capturing the “fortress cities”* of Bakhmut and Avdiivka. But… most of the butcher’s bill to date has been paid by convicts/Wagner (people nobody will miss, let’s be honest), the LDR (people who live there and have no other options since they hope to keep living there), and Chechens (people who love war and are fully prepared to meet Allah at any given time).
It’s a bit of a cheat, Putin trying to do a major war on the cheap, as it were. Not sure how sustainable that is for Russia (which has horrifyingly bad demographics of its own and rapidly being Diversified and Islamised as a consequence), but they don’t need to do this forever, they only need to outlast Ukraine’s ability and willingness to mount effective armed resistance.
Ukraine has proven much more resilient than anybody could have a right to expect. They’ve gone to their deaths in the hundreds of thousands fighting Russia. They have proven themselves to be men of great courage and determination.
Unfortunately, heroism doesn’t, by itself, win wars. You need more men and materiel than the other guys to win a war. Spreadsheet Phil defeats King Leonidas every time a war turns attritional.
Ukraine’s manpower problems go way beyond the army, btw. They’re short of manpower in general, due to all the deaths, maimings and the millions of Ukrainian blokes who thought “fuck this” and left the country. It’s a huge, shitty problem for a country that desperately needs men to do all the jobs men do, not just the military ones, in order to sustain the war effort and prevent a breakdown of society. Whose economy is now entirely dependent on Western loans (nota Benny the “loans” part, they’re gifts no longer), and who faces an enormously expensive rebuilding effort after the war. (Over 50% of Ukraine’s electricity generation has now been destroyed…)
I expect postwar Ukraine will be rapidly enriched by many millions of Diverse men, courtesy of their best pals in the EU and Western lenders demanding they bring in cheap(er) labour. But that’s a problem for Future Ukraine.
For Present Ukraine, even the Wall Street Journal sees little point in sugar coating the news these days:
Ukrainian Men Desperate to Escape War Are Drowning as They Flee
Delays in mustering fresh troops have increased strain on soldiers who have served on the front line against Russia for more than two years
By Isabel Coles and Ievgeniia Sivorka | Photographs by Justyna Mielnikiewicz for WSJ
Updated July 13, 2024 12:01 am ET
VELYKIY BYCHKIV, Ukraine—It was seven weeks after Pvt. Ivan Pidmalivskiy had been due back on the front line with Russia when rescuers pulled his lifeless body from a river on Ukraine’s western edge.
His death added to a toll of more than two dozen other men who have drowned in the River Tysa since Russia invaded, many of them fugitives from a military draft aimed at sustaining Ukraine’s war effort. Pidmalivskiy was different: He had fought for two years after returning to Ukraine from abroad to defend his country.
His family had seen the war take a growing toll on the burly 32-year-old, but he never revealed the depths of his exhaustion to them. “What was happening inside his soul, I don’t know,” said his mother, Liubov Pidmalivska.
PJF, please pay attention to what Bezos Blog is telling us:
Many of the men who initially mobilized to repel Russia’s invasion are dead, missing or wounded—and the rest are worn out from more than two years of brutal combat.
Ukraine’s government has struggled to replace them after dragging its feet over a politically unpopular decision to expand the draft. A wartime law bans men aged between 18 and 60 from leaving Ukraine. Still, tens of thousands have fled the country illegally and many are lying low to avoid conscription.
Remember how we used to think, if people are willing to risk their lives to escape East Germany or North Korea or whatever, how awful their prospects must be?
But the conscription campaign has also driven more men into the shadows and inflamed tensions in society. Across the country, men are hiding from draft officers, who have been filmed snatching potential conscripts off the street. Data from three neighboring countries indicates the number of men fleeing Ukraine illegally has increased in recent months. Border guards catch dozens of men daily, with some of the more desperate attempts ridiculed on social media.
Doesn’t sound like England during the Blitz, does it?
Smugglers now cater to booming demand from men trying to flee the country, charging from $4,000 to $15,000 for their services. It is more lucrative than their traditional trade in counterfeit and contraband cigarettes, of which Ukraine is a top source for Europe.
It occurs to me that some may call these men cowards and whatnot. There are always people like those white feather bitches during WW1. But rather than pass moral judgement, we should see them as a leading indicator.
*Fortress cities didn’t work for the Third Reich either.
American troops in WW2 would go AWOL from medical tents when injured to rejoin their units before being cleared to do so.
Could be the Russians are doing the same here.
Of course, when our guys do it, it’s brave and admirable.
When their guys do it, it’s evidence of an exploitative and evil dictatorship.
Shrug.
As far as meat wave assaults go, I can’t see any evidence of them from either side at the moment.
With all the drones and hyper surveillance of the front, they’d get caned by a swarm of drones as soon as they tried to stage.
Seems that assaults are by small detachments with one or two armoured vehicles in support.
If anyone has any links to videos proving otherwise, share here.
History Legends on YouTube has pretty good and reasonably impartial rundowns of the situation if anyone is interested and doesn’t mind having their opinions challenged.
PS – the article blames “delays in mustering fresh troops” for Ukraine’s terrible morale and undermanning problems.
And then, later in the article, describes how men are going to extreme lengths to evade Ukrainian army snatch squads.
The truth is, Ukraine has been constantly mobilising fresh troops since the start of the war. That’s their problem, the barrel has been thoroughly scraped and now they’re being asked to put kiddos on the front lines. Male Gen Xers are an endangered species in Ukraine these days, but it’s another thing entirely to sacrifice the literal future of the Ukrainian nation…
– PJF, please pay attention to what Bezos Blog is telling us:
Like I said, these stories aren’t new (nor are they new to me). Here’s the BBC in June last year:
Ukraine war: Deserters risk death fleeing to Romania
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-65792384
It has obviously not been enough of a problem to collapse the Ukrainian war effort.
And yes, it all terrible and shitty.
It occurs to me that some may call these men cowards and whatnot. There are always people like those white feather bitches during WW1.
People like this should be shipped to the frontline themselves.
If they’re so critical of people’s unwillingness to be killed for Raytheon’s (other MIC companies are available) bottom line, why don’t they show us how it’s done?
Ditto “queers for palestine” and all the other terrorism supporters infesting our streets.