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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Artillery confrontation |
| 2023-08-07 |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. [LB] Artillery of the Defense Forces of Ukraine conducts intense work and destroys the enemy's control system, knocks out headquarters, destroys warehouses, destroys logistics. And breaks the enemy's long arms - artillery. The quality of which the enemy is constantly deteriorating. We explain why. by Viktor Kevlyuk A few words about the situation. In the Vasylivskyi direction, Transcarpathian mountain attack aircraft pushed forward enemy units to the northern outskirts of the village of Zherebyanki. The enemy command is aware of the threat of a breakthrough of the 128th Brigade to Vasylivka, the loss of which opens the way for the Defense Forces to Energodar (the end of the "nuclear threat" games) and to Kherson along the Dnieper. And this is a castle on the way out of the Azov mousetrap to the Crimea, which is also a motivation for the enemy to fight to the last. Therefore, the occupiers will fiercely defend their positions along the T0812 highway and the key points for maintaining the stability of the defense in Zherebyanka, Lugovoi and Verkhnia Krynytsia. Unfortunately, only the foundations will remain from the villages. On the outskirts of Vasylivka, the enemy command is gathering a tactical group for a counterattack on the right flank of the Transcarpathians, for which it has concentrated part of the forces of the 810th Naval Infantry Brigade of the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Federation there (the brigade’s famous name has remained, ours have beaten it three times already, a handful of fighters remained from the former elite, all the others are well-trained, but chumps), combined tactical group of the 4th military base (South Ossetia, two battalions formed from the Russian occupation contingent in Georgia), 429th Motorized Rifle Regiment of the 19th Motorized Rifle Division (PPD - city Mozdok, the penultimate combat experience - aggression against Georgia. An interesting fact - out of 30 wounded in that march, only two were wounded in battle. Such infantry, it turns out). In the direction of Tokmakin the Robotyny area, the enemy is making great efforts to hold the village and prevent our troops from reaching the main line of defense between the villages of Novoprokopivka and Verbove. It's restless in Robotyn Vorozhenka: units of the 1430th Motorized Rifle Regiment of the territorial troops have been introduced into the village (this is when there are small arms, and the vehicles are katma. Call it "territorial troops" or "mob reserve" and play on as if you have a full-fledged army), the regiment's defense line was sealed by the 11th BARS detachment (that's how reservists are in the swamps), which was transferred from the village of Kopani, where it is still relatively calm. The 42nd Motorized Rifle Division, which is leading the defense here, has the task of preventing the Defense Forces from reaching the main defensive line of the 58th Army for as long as possible, and if that doesn't work, to narrow the areas of our breakthrough as much as possible. There is a nuance: when there are not enough forces to complete the task, the headquarters takes part of the forces from the areas that are not attacked and throws them into those that are attacked. There are two conclusions: there are not enough or no reserves, the troops are holding their positions with difficulty. The most active actions are ongoing in the Berdyansk direction . In the area of the villages Priyutne – Zavitne Bazhanna (what names, what Ukrainian toponymy!) the situation for the enemy was not too favorable: a little further north, the 247th Assault Regiment of the 7th Division captured the enemy, which was taken to the west to recover Zavitnoy Bazhanjo, where the regiment is setting up a defense area. The enemy deployed two battalions of the 114th Motorized Rifle Regiment of the 127th Motorized Rifle Division from Sakhalin to the northwest of the village of Volodyne. The enemy command sensed the danger and increased the density of their battle formations between the Shelter and the Covenant Desire. The scale of the scare prompted him to form a defense in two echelons: the first line - the 60th Motorized Rifle Brigade, the remains (I would say - the remains) of the 394th Motorized Rifle Regiment of the 127th Division, the 71st Motorized Rifle Regiment of the 42nd Division and the remains of the aforementioned 247th Regiment; the second line is the 336th Naval Infantry Brigade of the Baltic Fleet, the 114th Motorized Rifle Regiment of the 127th Division and the 136th Motorized Rifle Brigade. The latter is an interesting object for research. PPD - the city of Buynaksk in Dagestan. At the beginning of the invasion, 300 servicemen refused to fight against Ukraine, were returned to the PPD and released. There are several other interesting traditions in the brigade - selling MON-90 mines to Islamist militants, who used them to blow up the military camp of the 177th Naval Infantry Regiment in Caspiansk. Another tradition is to sell their servicemen into slavery to the Chechens. Sold 46 fighters. Firm first place in the 58th Army of the Russian Armed Forces on human trafficking. The brigade will form the basis of the Staromlynivka garrison. ACCOUNT OF MORALITY, OR WHO ARE WE FIGHTING AGAINST? The enemy also advanced the 228th tank regiment of the 127th Division near Staromlynivka. The 34th Motorized Rifle Brigade and the 143rd Motorized Rifle Regiment of the 127th Division cover the flank of this group in the Remivka - Novozlatopil area. Note that the most powerful army of the Eastern Military District of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, the 5th Army, was deployed here. Only the 57thMotorized Rifle Brigade was finished near Bakhmut. Now, actually, about artillery. If you look at the map, two divisions of the enemy's 58th Army, the 19th and 42nd, are defending on the left, and the 5th Army has deployed to the right. It follows purely from this that the enemy can have two artillery brigades of the armies, the 291st and 305th, three artillery regiments of the divisions, the 292nd, 50th and 872nd, and the artillery of brigades and regiments. Using the example of the 305th brigade, I will show what a zoo it is - an artillery brigade of the combined army of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation: - 240mm self-propelled mortar division 2c4 "Tulip"; – division of 152mm self-propelled guns 2c5 "Hyacinth-S" (my favorite artillery system, at the end of the 90s I was the commander of the only division in Ukraine, now these machines are fighting in our country in the 26th Artillery Brigade named after Colonel-General Roman Dashkevich); – division of 203mm self-propelled guns 2c7 "Pion"; - the division of the 220mm BM-27 9k57 Uragan anti-aircraft missile system. Now imagine yourself in the city of the officer of the operational department, who has to plan the combat use of this flower garden in battle. Then imagine the chief of the missile and artillery brigade service, who has to supply this flower bed with ammunition: 240mm mines, 152mm shells, 203mm shells and 220mm rockets. It is not certain that this person has been seen sober since the beginning of the war. How can such logistics be organized?! POLYGON AND AMAZON. THE WEST KNOWS WHY IT SUPPLIES THE LATEST WEAPONS HERE Let's have fun: the purpose of the army artillery brigade is to fight against tactical nuclear weapons, command posts, enemy artillery , air defense equipment, rear objects and reserves. The counter-battery fight is highlighted in bold. This is the meaning of the combat activity of the army artillery brigade. What could it look like in real life? Division 152mm 2c5 is sharpened precisely for this. But he is the only one in the brigade. Rate of fire 203mm 2s7 – 2 shots per minute. The duration of a healthy self-propelled gun battery is one fire task, i.e. 3-5 minutes. We subtract from there the cycle of reconnaissance, decision-making and guidance. Where will the first volley of 2c7 hit? And in the white world, as in a penny, said my brigadier general. 2c4 was generally created to break through fortified areas with nuclear strikes or, in extreme cases, with 240mm high-explosive mines. Rate of fire - 1 shot in 62 seconds. The last on the list is the "Uragan" anti-aircraft missile system. It looks formidable - the warhead of each projectile weighs 100 kg (when construction began, a colonel from the USSR Ministry of Defense recalled how during the war he was hit by a German air raid with 100 kg bombs, so the Uragana warhead weighs exactly that much. The story is real). A battery volley is similar in power to a tactical nuclear strike. But, as always, there is a but: how will the MLRS start to hunt for batteries, who will fire at the reserves, KP, lay minefields, pound the infantry with cluster bombs? The jet fighters are clearly not into counter-battery fighting. Another purpose. To understand the depth of the depths: the German self-propelled gun Pzh-2000 launches 8 shells per minute, but if it is really necessary, then for a certain time it can be 12, the Caesar self-propelled gun - 6. The question is who shoots whom? CLUSTER SHELLS. OFFENSIVE WEAPONS If we tentatively accept June 15 as the beginning of the offensive in the Azov region, then it turns out that the Defense Forces of Ukraine sent 1,150 guns and 100 BM RSV of the enemy to scrap metal from 15.06 to 05.08 (the figures are for the entire front line, for the Azov region I would give 60 %). The enemy lost 16 artillery brigades (a normal brigade has 72 guns) and two jet regiments (54 BM). Russian self-propelled artillery regiment - two divisions of self-propelled artillery 152mm 2c19 "Msta-S" and a division of RSZV "Tornado-G" or 122mm BM-21 "Grad". 2с19 is a tough nut, capable of competing with modern Western self-propelled guns. In brigades, as a rule, there are also 1-2 divisions of self-propelled guns 2c19 and a battery of anti-aircraft guns (there are many brigades, so they all have different types, in particular, howitzers with anti-aircraft guns are of different types). There are also "buts" in this segment: the artillery of the regiment/brigade does not conduct counter-battery combat, it does not have such a task, and, therefore, training. There is one more big BUT: counterbattery combat requires intelligence (radar for detecting fire positions, sound-metric complexes, UAVs) and a nimble fire control system. The enemy here has presentations about the ACS "Kapusnyk", "Sozvezdie" and all sorts of trendy and youth-related things, about the "Zoopark" and "Aystenok" radars. Our greatest meningitis in artillery opposition is the enemy trio "Orlan"+"Zala"+"Lancet". However, we have a tangible advantage in the "intelligence-management-impact" segment. The advantage result is three paragraphs higher. With those who read me regularly, we have already discussed the logistics problems of the enemy group and the fact that the enemy arta in the South of Ukraine are put on starvation rations. And then generals Budanov and Malyuk blow up everything they find in the Black Sea - tankers, naval vessels , airfield bridges , the Novorossiysk port, some patrol ships. That is, the diet of enemy artillery will continue - the enemy has more and more problems with bridges, airfields, ports, the railway is being watched by partisans from "Atesh", SSO, watchful patriots, that is, when it is necessary and where it is necessary, it will happen, as in the song: "мы they took away the water pump, but gave away the locomotive." There is also an interesting dual trend in the degradation of Russian artillery - the Defense Forces have destroyed almost 5,000 artillery systems and 700 self-propelled guns since the beginning of the war. Before the war, the Russian Armed Forces began the process of rearming the troops, replacing all existing self-propelled guns with a relatively new single 152mm self-propelled gun 2s19M2 (about 700 of them were produced). A strange picture emerged - the regiment, brigade, corps, army received the same system with the same firing range of 25 km. But the depth of the tasks at different instances is different! And you also need a different nomenclature of ammunition: a commander does not need smoke and lighting ones, and a brigade commander - what else! ABOUT HARES AND TURTLES. IS THE OFFENSIVE IN AZOV DEVELOPING SLOWLY? Later, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation began to prepare for the invasion of Ukraine and deploy divisions instead of brigades. That is, two divisions of the brigade were to be cloned into 4-6, which the division requires. 152mm 2с19М2 suddenly ceased to be enough, non-modernized 152mm 2с19s went to the troops from the bases (I had to deal with them, in addition to the bad electronics traditional for the USSR, Russian designers managed to make an equally bad transmitter, which disassembled itself under intense fire. My classmate in the LAU in the second Chechen war was the head of the commandant's office, said that the representatives of the manufacturing plant were just sitting in 2c19 and endlessly solving technical problems). For those who did not have enough 152mm 2c19, 152mm 2c3 "Acacia" and 152mm 2a65 "Msta-B" trailers. That is, on February 24, 2023, everything that was new and not new invaded us without invitation. And the fact that the tractor crew of Svyrid Opanasovich has not yet dragged to Vtorchermet is rusting in the forests and fields. The enemy is forced to get an even older one from the storerooms, bring it to his senses and give it to the troops (they are able to restore 100-200 per month, but lose 500-550!). That is, the quality of the enemy's artillery is constantly and steadily deteriorating, its TTX is decreasing, the gap between the artillery of the Defense Forces and the artillery of the aggressor is deepening. WAR FOR INITIATIVE The flip side of this trend is staff. If we assume that at least half of the destroyed artillery was destroyed along with the attendants, then the enemy lost at least 2,500 trained attendants . All of them need to be replaced, trained, organized into batteries-divisions, which is not so easy. A separate line - the lost artillery officers, first of all - combatants and commanders who control the fire. This category is taught for months. Sometimes an officer is a combatant for two years, but he is a seal, it's just not his and you can't do anything about it. How many times have I met such people. Let's summarize: the enemy's artillery will weaken due to the decrease in the TTX of the systems and the level of training, first of all, of the officers and sergeants. I would add to this the lack of rotations, intense combat operations, general exhaustion, lack of quality drinking water, interruptions in the supply of fuel, food, and medical supplies. The introduction into operation of several fresh brigades of the Defense Forces will destroy the Russian defense. Absolutely unambiguous. When it will happen - only Zaluzhny knows, we will not guess. VALERY ZALUZHNYI: "EVERY DAY, EVERY METER IS GIVEN WITH BLOOD" I would advise you to look carefully at the direction Staromayorske - Staromlynivka - Nadiyne. Now the enemy there is restraining us with frantic counterattacks, throwing everything at them. But somewhere deep in the soul, the enemy operators are already aware of the inevitability of a retreat in the southern direction. And if the Defense Forces advance to Vasylivka, Tokmak and Pology, the situation will take on the appearance of a defeat. In order for the play not to look boring, ours added a bit of momentum in the direction of Vugledar - Volnovakha. It is worth mentioning the slow pace of our advance, but it should be remembered that the army is working hard day and night and destroying the enemy's management system, knocking out its headquarters, destroying warehouses, destroying logistics, and breaking the enemy's long arms - artillery. The result should be. No doubts. The only thing that does not give rest is the question - where did the two missile brigades of the enemy - the 12th and 20th - split up. They must be somewhere here, in the south, I can hear in my spinal cord... |
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