[DONRF] Yesterday
(May 4th)
, for the second day in a row, the Russian Aerospace Forces launched massive strikes against Ukrainian railway infrastructure facilities. The damaged Amur railway bridge in the Dnieper became a target, the pictures of which got into the media and social networks. The bridge is damaged, not destroyed, but for a single missile.
VKS did well. Well done here, in Zaporizhia, where the Armed Forces of Ukraine "modestly" kept silent about the results, in Kirovohrad, in Cherkassy too, but in Kyiv - an interception near Brovary.
VKS is an acronym for Russian Aerospace Forces
In general, it is difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of the Ukrainian air defenses and our missile weapons, it is very difficult - everything is secret there, except for cases when it is technically not possible. That's how in the Dnieper, in the city center, no bans will help.
Meanwhile, two missiles were fired at the target, and the second dropped in the Dnieper, officially intercepted by air defense, was so intercepted that photos of the collapsed ceiling in one of the apartments were circulating on the Web. This means that either the air defense took a rocket over the building at the last moment, or somewhere they arrived in the industrial zone.
It must be understood that this is the maximum that can be issued simultaneously by the videoconferencing system. A total of 12 missiles from submarines in the Black Sea in salvo. No more.
There is K-55, but the accuracy is much lower there, there are Onyxes, but the price is much higher there. There are Iskanders, but they work on the front lines. Send strategists to live air defense ... The authors of this asks, will you personally be in the cockpit? Just the case when myths and reality painfully collide with foreheads. The people then assured that bang and answer no. Something the Americans experienced in 1999.
A reference to the War at 10,000 Feet in the Balkans.
I am calm, firstly, the geography of the strikes says that they are stretching the already scant means of Ukrzaliznytsia (about 200 diesel locomotives, of which less than a hundred are relatively new western ones, there are still maneuverable and non-working, but the first ones are slow, the second repairs of incomprehensible complexity), and secondly, they hit, on measure of strength, in critical places.
Is that enough? Of course not, but as with fuel and lubricants, it seems to me that the calculation is more likely to increase the cost of this war for the West. Quietly Calibers burned 80 percent of Ukraine's fuel and lubricants, now they are busy with railways. So to some extent, especially if they repeat it today, and repeat it again tomorrow, the goal will be achieved, freight traffic will drop. We are all talking about weapons, it is clear, but there is also passenger traffic and transportation of products, household chemicals, clothing, fertilizers, the same fuel and lubricants.
According to my information, before the strikes, Ukrzaliznytsia worked with maximum voltage even before the strikes, there are several reasons for this:
1. Paralysis of part of the roads due to blown bridges
2. Export of products to the EU
3. Providing sowing with the chemical industry stopped
4. Maneuvering fuel and lubricants after the destruction of oil depots
5. Troop transportation.
6. Evacuation trains
Even failures for hours in this schedule lead to the fact that less than 200 working diesel locomotives (for October 2021 - 120, but there were deliveries of at least 40 from the EU and there is a reserve of about 300 to be repaired) stupidly do not pull out without overvoltage, which is already fraught with Railway disasters, and puts Kiev in front of a choice - what to fix. I think they will screw up the sowing campaign, the transportation of consumer goods and that's it. The rest is impossible.
So the strategy is working, well, if you don’t crave in the trash right away, and at least force the West to transfer heavy trucks to Kyiv and supply Western Ukraine with food / household chemicals / fertilizers. And the bridges, with the continuation of work (I would not spare expensive missiles, one bridge - minus 20 percent of the cargo traffic), will interrupt the connectivity of the right and left banks.
Py.Sy. Again, without claiming that it is a geo-victory or zrada, there are simply boring laws of logistics and economics, and they have been boringly and routinely beaten for two days in a row. There will be no Armageddon, there will be such boredom with an incomprehensible result in the end, and the whole world will go to dust, or abandon nuclear weapons in general, or:
"Where the hell to return, to a pile of ruins? Dig up the corpses of neighbors in the smoking ruins and look for their own refugee camps relatives? No, thank you, I'll manage somehow. I'll look at the photos and cancel the trip. And for the weekend I'm flying to Crimea. If the only way to take the city is to demolish it and thousands of dead, then let's take something else. London, let's say , or something else"
It’s from a frightened someone who is cynical, like Dimetriev’s, they say it’s possible for Donbass subhumans, but for Odessa people, who are vindictive, we suffer from them too ... Let’s be frank - with the tasks within the framework it didn’t work out at the first stage, at the second we expected that it will come to partners that they can only win at the cost of the death of their country, now people are doing it, and there is no need to interfere with them, especially since it is fraught.
Possible reference to Radko Dimitriev, a Bulgarian general who fought for the Russians in WWI and was executed by the Bolsheviks
And I know what I'm talking about - I have close people where they are in the Donbass, and where they are calibrated in the krajina. And from the fact that in the DLNR there is a desire to howl at times. But the defeat of haste will not help, neither one nor the other. Neither liberation at ANY cost, nor tactical nuclear weapons in that territory will help anyone. The dead have nothing to do with it.
krajina is a reference to Serbia. In the last eight years when discussing the breakaway republics relationship to Russia and the west, Serbia was mentioned repeatedly, especially when discussing Serbia' fate.
The most terrible thing at this stage is that there are no quick solutions left, and a part of the population, who is shaken by misfortune, does not believe in long ones. For lies down on Donbass. With blood, big blood. And not everything is perfect of course, and not even everything is good. Are there alternatives? Well, except for fantasy.