'The Biden administration has said it wants to deliver more weapons to Ukraine as quickly as possible..'
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U.S. expects to begin delivering Abrams tanks to Ukraine in September, July 27, 2023
'The Hollywood-tailored excitement of the Battles of Kyiv and Kharkiv may have unduly raised the bar for what Ukraine can accomplish in short order. Yet the Battle of Kherson, begun in August 2022, was a long, hard slog, the bulk of which garnered comparatively little contemporaneous front-page coverage — until all of a sudden it did. That operation culminated four months later with an announced Russian withdrawal.
This was before the Ukrainians had U.S. or European main battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, cruise missiles and cluster bombs. This was also before Putin’s regime began to cannibalize itself by downing its own helicopters, seizing military districts and exiling the vanguard of its expeditionary force to tent encampments in Belarus.''..Kyiv has resorted to using long-range fires to degrade Russian logistics and artillery, a tried-and-true method of what retired Australian Gen. Mick Ryan calls “corrosion of the Russian physical, moral and intellectual capacity to fight,” principally by annihilating all the concomitants of warfare. Kyiv has spent the past several weeks directly targeting individual artillery pieces with accurate counter-battery fire and blowing up Russian ammunition depots with long-range cruise missiles and drones, including a major series of drone strikes in Oktyabrskoye in central Crimea on July 22 and a series of cruise missile and drone strikes hitting targets across the peninsula on July 24.
According to “Karl,” a pseudonymous Estonian military analyst
New Lines previously interviewed, Ukraine continues to “demolish on average about 25 artillery pieces a day. This is beginning to have some effect.” The Russian military has always been heavily dependent on massed artillery to conduct both offensive and defensive operations, meaning that destroying these crucial assets has an outsize effect on all aspects of Russian battlefield performance. Don’t take Karl’s word for it.
Senior Russian military officials on the front line are experiencing the impact of Ukrainian corrosion with a ferocity understandably inaccessible to pessimistic Western pundits. Consider the high-profile sacking of Gen. Ivan Popov, who until recently was the commanding officer of the 58th Combined Arms Army. The 58th has been engaged in heavy fighting in Zaporizhzhia. Popov recorded a voice memo for private dissemination among his soldiers, but Russian parliamentarian Andrey Gurulev posted it on Telegram. The general criticized “the lack of counter-battery combat, the absence of artillery reconnaissance stations” and what he described as “the mass deaths and injuries of our brothers from enemy artillery.” Popov also claimed that the 58th desperately needed rotating, as most of the rank and file have been at the front for months on end and have suffered disastrous losses.
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Popov, it bears mentioning, may be the highest-ranking member of the Russian army to grouse about the efficacy of Ukrainian artillery, but he is not the only one. A host of pro-Russian sources on social media have attested to the damage Ukraine is doing with its Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (GMLRS) as instruments for counter-battery fire. These precision rockets are fired from Western-supplied High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) and M270 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems, which made a crucial difference in the Kharkiv and Kherson counteroffensives..
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Another disorienting weapon for the Russians is the U.K.-supplied Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missile. Ukraine has been using the Storm Shadow to hit Russian logistics bases it would have previously hit with GMLRS but for the fact that Russia adapted to that tactic by relocating its materiel outside the 56-mile range of the artillery rockets. These cruise missiles, however, can reach any Russian target in any part of occupied Ukraine, depending upon where they are fired from the Su-24 bombers that carry them.
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British cruise missiles have also felicitously freed up more GMLRS for counter-battery purposes .. The recent U.S. decision to supply Dual-Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions (DPICM), or cluster munitions, will only increase the lethality of Ukrainian artillery..
Ukrainian forces are “advancing every day,” according to British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace in remarks made after the recent NATO summit in Vilnius. Wallace also confirmed Ukraine had not yet committed reserves from their 12 offensive brigades, the majority of which were trained by NATO and thus recipients of the lion’s share of Western-supplied equipment. Sir Richard Moore, head of MI6, told an audience in Prague days ago that “in the last month, Ukraine has liberated more territory than Russia captured in the last year,” an easily verifiable bit of perspective absent from much of the depressive commentary on the war. Even Gen. Mark Milley, the chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff — someone who would never be accused of an overabundance of optimism about Ukraine’s military prospects — has stated that “the Ukrainian counteroffensive is far from a failure, despite the fact that it is happening more slowly than expected.” The Ukrainians were “preserving their combat power and they are slowly and deliberately and steadily working their way through all these minefields,” Milley later claimed, adding that they still retain a “significant amount” of forces to deploy.
The Hollywood-tailored excitement of the Battles of Kyiv and Kharkiv may have unduly raised the bar for what Ukraine can accomplish in short order. Yet the Battle of Kherson, begun in August 2022, was a long, hard slog, the bulk of which garnered comparatively little contemporaneous front-page coverage — until all of a sudden it did. That operation culminated four months later with an announced Russian withdrawal.
This was before the Ukrainians had U.S. or European main battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, cruise missiles and cluster bombs. This was also before Putin’s regime began to cannibalize itself by downing its own helicopters, seizing military districts and exiling the vanguard of its expeditionary force to tent encampments in Belarus.
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Russians See Ukrainian Progress Where Others Don’t, July 26, 2023
Context(Ukraine needs ATACMs) - '..if they had ATACMS and Gray Eagle Drones..'There’s No Such Thing as a Great Power, How a Dated Concept Distorts Geopolitics