As of 1612 May 14, CST, I updated this story with a significant Russian media report.
Here’s some updates from World War III. In my previous post I talked about scale error. In the context of propaganda, the scale “error” is deliberately separating the viewer from any sense of proportion or context. Here are two examples.
The first example is the “Spartans” of Snake Island, those brave Ukrainian soldiers who were declared dead, even when they were most obviously not dead. Even without Russian media reports that the garrison had peacefully surrendered, even a layman should have been able to tell this story was fake.
Reason #1: 13 soldiers is not nearly enough for a garrison. A group of people on an island need a full staff, including administrative and supply clerks, cooks, 24-hour security… at least a company-sized element. So right away, everyone should have known that “13” number was false, and the Russian statement of capturing roughly 80 people was a more believable number. It’s also relevant to know that the ownership of Snake Island is contested by Romania, and part of retaining possession of it obligated Ukraine to keep the “population” above a certain level. In other words, more than 13.
Reason #2: It’s really hard to kill people who don’t want to be killed. A ship could completely plaster the island with shells and still not kill anyone. It’s very weird to have 100% killed and 0 wounded or captured – which in of itself shows that Zelensky was declaring those soldiers all dead when it was literally impossible for him to know that for sure.
Furthermore, the “Missing in Action” category exists for a reason. When an army loses contact with one of their soldiers, he’s not immediately written off as dead. This distinction is of particular importance to the family, because there is at least some hope that he is still alive, and of equal importance, they continue to receive his pay and benefits. This is how the system is supposed to work and anyone who argues otherwise is an idiot, a liar, or both.
The divorce between media reports and a sense of scale only got more outrageous over time. Consider this Daily Mail story dated May 12.
Russia has suffered yet another battlefield humiliation after Ukraine successfully thwarted its attempt to cross a river in Donbas, destroying dozens of vehicles and inflicting heavy casualties.
Satellite images lay bare the scale of the failure with the remains of two pontoon bridges drifting in the Donets River at Bilohorivka, west of the city of Lysychansk, surrounded by the ruins of tanks and armoured vehicles.
It appears Russian commanders were attempting to surround Lysychansk – and its sister city of Severodonetsk – with the crossing, but saw their sneak-attack turn into a massacre when Ukraine correctly guessed their plans.
‘Maxim’, a Twitter user claiming to be a Ukrainian military engineer, says he identified the spot where Russia was most-likely to try crossing the river on May 7 and told his commanders to listen out for the sound of tugboat engines pushing a pontoon bridge into place as a sure sign that a crossing was imminent.
On the morning of May 8 Russia blanketed the river with smoke by burning nearby fields and throwing smoke grenades, he said, but commanders detected the sound of boat engines and called in artillery strikes which caused devastating losses…
‘After one day of combat, 9th May morning the bridge was down. Some Russian forces – roughly 30 to 50 vehicles and infantry – were stuck on the Ukrainian side of the river with no way back. They tried to run away using the broken bridge. Then they tried to arrange a new bridge.
‘Aviation started heavy bombing of the area and it destroyed all the remains of Russians there, and the other bridge they tried to make. Rumors say it’s 1,500 Russian dead. Their strategic objective was to cross the river and then encircle Lysychansk. They miserably failed.’
It is just the latest defeat for Putin’s forces, after a successful Ukrainian counter-attack pushed Russian troops away from the city of Kharkiv and back across the border. It means Ukrainian artillery can now threaten the town of Vovchansk, which contains a key highway and rail line supplying Russian forces in Donbas.
My initial kneejerk reaction was that this story was fake, and the main reason why is the time lapse between the alleged event and the news reporting, which is consistent with the Ukrainians’ track record of taking a false flag, unrelated accident, or actual defeat and running it through several cycles of lies and copium until it looks like a victory. Aside from the time-lapse, this story reads like a product that changed hands multiple times with each person adding a new layer of embellishment, with details that he thinks make it sound more authentic, but don’t actually make sense.
As I was writing this post, I did decide to waste some time and dug deeper. My first stop was the personal blog of my favorite nazi propagandist Tom Cooper (see my post about his “analysis” here). Unlike Cooper, I do not spend inordinate amounts of time trying to discern fine tactical details from this war. I don’t find it useful to overanalyze specific battles and anyway it’s way too hard to figure out what is true and what a total lie. However, when I checked out Tommy’s page, I found something interesting, which made me think something significant may have actually happened. There was apparently some sort of large river crossing in Donets, and Cooper spent three days agonizing over it, and wrote at least three different posts about this specific thing.
Then, out of the blue, Cooper referenced a Twitter thread by a self-proclaimed Ukrainian combat engineer, and this appears to be the same source the Daily Mail used. So, here it is.
I am UA military engineering + EOD officer. I have served one turn in Donbas prior to the recent invasion.
Recently, I have accomplished a mission which made huge impact on Russian losses and completely screwed up their plans to encircle Lysychansk.
Initially, there was intelligence from frontline units that there are Russians on the other side of the river and they gather various vehicles. So, my commander asked on 6th May me as one of the best military engineers to do engineering reconnaissance on Siverskyi Donets river
Together with recon units for backup, I went to explore the area of Hryhorivka and Bilohorivka on 7th May.
Frontline units in Bilohorivka reported multiple RU vehicles gathering on the other side of the river.
I explored the area and suggested a location where Russians might attempt to mount a pontone bridge to get to the other side. And, used rangefinders to figure out river is 80m wide, thus Russians would need 8 parts (10m each) of the bridge connected to get to the other side.
With that flow of the river, I knew they would need motorized boats to arrange such a bridge, and it would take them at least two hours of work.
Took me a day to check everything. And I had to do it on 8th of May as well.
So, reported this information I had to my commanders.
Also, I told the unit who observed that part of the river that they need to be on the look out for sound of motor boats.
Visibility was shit in the area because Russians put fields & forests on fire, and were throwing a lot of smoke grenades. On top of that, it was foggy.
They had to hear the sound. And they did on May 8th early morning. Right at the place I said. I was there to check it as well – and I have seen with my drone as Russians do the pontonne bridge. Reported immediately to commanders.
Looking back, I think my recon + hints to the river unit made the biggest impact. I outplayed RU mil engineers.
Russians attempted to place a bridge RIGHT in the place where I guessed.
River unit didn’t see RU units, but was able to hear motor boats and report it immediately
Artillery was ready.
We have been able to confirm Russians mounted 7 parts of the bridge out of 8. Russians have even succeeded to move some troops and vehicles over the river. Combats started.
In ~20 minutes after recon unit confirmed Russian bridge being mounted, HEAVY ARTILLERY engaged against Russian forces, and then aviation chipped in as well.
I was still in the area, and I have never seen / heard such heavy combat in my life.
After one day of combats, 9th May morning the bridge was down. Some Russian forces (~30-50 vehicles + infantry) were stuck on Ukrainian side of the river with no way back. They tried to run away using broken bridge. Then they tried to arrange a new bridge.
Then, Aviation started heavy bombing of the area and it destroyed all the remains of Russians there, and other bridge they tried to make.
Rumors say it’s ~1500 RU dead.
Their strategic objective was to cross the river and then encircle Lysychansk. They miserably failed.
10th May pontonne bridge was completely down. That’s about time when you started to get all the pictures from the area.
I was on the ground, doing the work there, alongside with other Ukrainian heroes.
I did my part and it had significant impact.
Proud to serve Ukraine!
After finding this guy’s blog, earlier suspicions I had about the Daily Mail account seemed justified, and couldn’t be attributed to misquoting or a translation error.
Alright, my first complaint about the veracity of this story is that it’s being told in such detail. Really, it’s not a story that should be told at all. If you’ve figured out the enemy’s tactics to the point you can accurately predict and destroy entire units, obviously you shouldn’t tell them.
My second complaint is the ridiculous KIA count which doesn’t even match up with the number of vehicles allegedly destroyed. 30-50 vehicles is obviously nowhere close to enough for 1,500 soldiers. The 1,500 figure is ridiculous in of itself. Again, I cannot stress this enough, both the Ukrainian and Russian armies directly involved in this fight are small by historical standards. Ukrainians repeatedly claim World War II level damage against the enemy, which is basically impossible to accomplish because Ukraine couldn’t have anywhere close to that much firepower in one place, and even if they did, the Russians couldn’t have enough forces in one place for them to target.
Now, for a historical example for context. Here is a depiction of an early firefight in the Battle of Arnhem during Operation Market Garden. Taken from A Bridge Too Far, the 1977 film adaption of the book by the same name. In this scene, an SS reconnaissance group crossed a bridge without proper, uh, reconnaissance, and ran into British paratroopers. Out of 22 German vehicles that participated in the movement, 12 were lost.
The main difference between the movie and the real battle is time. The actual shoot-out was two hours, and that’s mainly because people in real life tend to have more interest in self-preservation than they do in movies. But watching people take potshots at each other for two hours wouldn’t be an interesting movie so things are sped up for dramatic effect. But aside from time, the movie should give viewers a reasonable understanding of what such a bridge battle would look like. Most importantly, it should give a viewer an understanding of how big a bridge battle could be. Now imagine how long it would take to move thousands of soldiers and vehicles across a couple of pontoon bridges, which are much smaller and can handle less weight than the bridge at Arnhem.
Now, here are the casualties of the entire battle at Arnhem, according to Wikipedia.
So… I’m supposed to believe the Ukrainians inflicted as many losses in 24 hours as a whole week of fighting in World War II? Here’s why “mis” and “dis” have different meanings, and why disinformation is not the same as misinformation. Misinformation is fake news that is plausible and has some semblance to reality, which is what makes it believable and fools people, and is often started by an honest mistake. Disinformation is deliberate, and is crafted to divorce the audience from any sense of reality, so they do not even understand what truth looks like anymore.
Here are more details that I found laughably wrong. This idea of burning fields and throwing smoke grenades to screen the bridgehead, that doesn’t even make sense. Grenades couldn’t produce enough smoke to mask a pontoon bridge, and couldn’t even be thrown far enough anyway. Burning fields doesn’t make any sense either. The smoke would have to blow in a zigzag, first across the river and then parallel to it. What kind of wind does that? Anyway it’s all very silly because you don’t conceal your movements by dropping smoke on yourself. You can’t breathe smoke, and dropping smoke on your own position does the opposite of concealing you, the enemy can just fire into the cloud and know they’ll probably hit something.
What a real army would actually use is smoke munitions from a howitzer, like the 155mm M825 round. An initial volley of rounds fired in a linear sheaf or pattern would provide an initial smokescreen, with new volleys fired every 2-8 minutes (depending on the potency of the chemical used, as well as environmental factors like wind and humidity). Obviously you wouldn’t fire them at the same place you’re planning on walking. You would fire them in front of enemy positions. The point is to blind them, not yourself. Do I really have to explain this? If you still don’t believe me, read the relevant chapter from the US Army’s Field Manual 3-6.
Possibly the weirdest part of this fairy tale is why the Ukrainians would use aircraft and artillery at all. If there is an enemy unit grouped up at a bridgehead, a Tochka missile would be the best weapon to use, bunched up enemies in the open is literally what it was intended for. Maybe Ukrainians are so used to blowing up nursery schools and hospitals they forgot it is possible to aim at military targets sometimes.
If you are honestly still skeptical, check out this news report from the Donetsk News Agency, who don’t have a plausible motive to downplay the damage Ukrainian forces are inflicting to separatist settlements. According to them, on May 13:
One civilian has been killed, five injured over the past day as Ukrainian forces shelled the DPR 37 times, the Republic’s Mission to the JCCC said.
The enemy used heavy artillery, MLRS [Multiple Launch Rocket System] systems, mortars, and grenade launchers.
“One civilian has been killed, five injured,” the report reads.
Fourty-five households and infrastructure facilities have been damaged as a total of seven cities and towns came under fire. A total of 285 rounds were fired.
Behold, the unlimited power of the Ukrainian army. 285 rounds over 24 hours, counting everything from the largest rocket down to the smallest handheld tube.
But at the end of this guy’s post, suddenly, everything makes sense.
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Ah, so there it is. Make up sensational stories then beg for money, and presumably there are enough gullible morons in the audience to make this blog post quite profitable. Interesting thing about his Twitter profile, he tweeted exclusively in Ukrainian until Feb. 28, then abruptly switched to English. I wonder why he did that.
Speaking of grift, here’s some other gems from recent history.
Earlier, I wrote about Slovakia sending their S-300 to Ukraine, where it was promptly destroyed. In return, Slovakia got a Patriot system. Another win for the military-industrial complex without the bother of, you know, actual battlefield wins. It’s actually better to lose because broken and destroyed weapons have to be replaced. (see my post here)
Yesterday I was tipped off to a similar story in Slovenia. Prime Minister Janez Janša’s government was voted out and left office on March 13, but not before ramming through one last crucial deal, from a Slovenian news outlet (machine translated):
New negotiations have started and Tonin recently revealed the final price of the deal: 343 million euros for 45 armored vehicles, ie “only” 7.6 million euros per vehicle (including VAT). But in doing so, he withheld an important detail. Combat vehicles will come to our country without a significant part of the equipment required by the Slovenian Army before the purchase. Leaders at the ministry headed by Tonin were clearly in a hurry. They preferred to save another round of negotiations with the Germans by agreeing to their price and the poorer performance of the purchased vehicles.
We’re witnessing a staggering amount of grift and possibly the most worrying part of it, besides the possibility of sudden nuclear war, is that this grift has a life of its own. The military-industrial complex is running amok and is not in any way subordinate to the state. If anything, the state is subordinate to the MIC.
Anyway, if Ukraine is winning, why is the US Senate trying so desperately to ram through the $40 billion aid package so quickly? Why Did Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ask his Russian counterpart Lloyd Shoigu to consider a ceasefire (see this great article from Moon of Alabama)? What exactly is going on? I don’t know, but I don’t think “Ukraine is destroying thousands of Russian troops a day” is the true answer.
Update: The answer is, apparently, the pictured destroyed vehicles were actually Ukrainian. So Ukrainian propagandists are posting pictures of their own dead and claiming it’s Russian dead. Honestly, that’s pretty typical of them. See this news report from Vedomosti.
I’ll close with some utterly insane comments from our Senate Majority Leader.
Featured Image Source: Donetsk News Agency
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I updated this post, scroll up and see if you haven’t already.
I recently mailed you about one shady Israeli analyst, who me I *feel* to be a real one. He had some notes on it, and on Russia’s tactics, as he see it, in general. There also was another article, arguing with him.
Actually that river crossing is a big puzzle for everyone, Russian public too. Fog of war is thick there.
It does not help that this event became so hyped that other crossings photos became attributed to it, by emotional mistake or deliberately.
There is a video seemingly showing the crossing under Russia’s fire.
https://youtu.be/i5TeWvU9dw4
People were arguing about identifying vehicles, frankly I sometimes can not even see the details they were arguing about, but they are sure most vehicles can be reliably identified.
They said majority of them were old light armored agile cars of BMP-1 or early MT-LB families. One vehicle they say was Ukraine-only med-evac modification of MT-LB (personally, again, I only could see too rectangles, one for the main haul, and another might be superstructure or photo defect or anything). They said three vehicles held “O” mark and had to be Russia’s (I only could certainly see one mark and uncertainly what could be another).
Russia has very few BMP-1 and early MT-LB models, and those in Far East armies. In European part they either were converted in specialized vehicles or written off. LDPR militias probably had many ex-Ukraine vehicles, but no point for them to be in so hot a place west of Lysychansk. So it was assumed that about two dozen of vehicles were Ukrainian light armored ones. There also were two T-72 tanks standing together. Some thought those were Ukrainians, other thought those were Russian and they ambushed those BMPs successfully until were disabled or run out of ammo.
There were news Russia managed to make a bridgehead in Belogorovka about week ago. That place probably does not make immediate threat to Lysychansk but would be used later, when Ukrainian formation east of Popasnaya South of Lysychansk flees or gets destroyed.
So for Russia this crossing was mandatory to supply the bridgehead.
For Ukraine controlling that crossing was also required both to reclaim Belogorovka and to threaten Russia’s “tongue” west from it and south from Izyum.
It was alleged heavy fighting was held 8-11 May. Initially there were Ukrainian forces on “our”, north-western shore, either trying a sudden run at Izyum, or trying to retreat to “Ukrainian” shore.
There was long no certain news about Belogorovka, so if we held the bridgehead or lost it is not clear. If we lost, then Ukrainian light vehicles could be coming home. If held, they could try to mount a sudden attack over the river and into the backs.
Weird thing here is that both BMP and MT-LB are amphibious families, they do not need pontoons at all. Their initial role was to transport infantry to/from/through battlefields, secondary – recon and support of bridgheads before pontoons set.
Basically, the news of large fleet of Ukrainian light armored transporters destroyed and pontoons attempts destroyed are plausible each alone, but fit badly together.
So, allegedly that was the first chapter, Ukrainians lost their crossing attempt and their vehicles.
Then Russia tried to do their crossing, in the same place (because that river does not have lot of places where both shores provide for crossing, and because of Belogorovka). Not sure about Tochka-U accuracy and range, probably VSU had none close enough. Reportedly VSU moved artillery out of stronghold position to decimate the crossing. And they did. But the uncovered artillery was decimated in turn. War of attrition, exchanges of deaths. Allegedly later Russia did a second crossing and this time VSU had nothing left to counter it, so it was finally successful.
But again, all those are rumours and in reality both armies keep cards close to chest. If not for public outcry RuMod would probably kept stern silence further on.
Latvia (one of tri-baltic statelets) seems to de facto denounce the treaty about Russian army withdrawal from Latvians SSR.
https://aftershock.news/?q=node/1107368
De facto creating casus belli patterned on 2018 BBC movie.
It can be just Western rusophobia going amok. But it also can be a desperate attempt to distract Russian Army from Ukraine by any means.
“Maybe Ukrainians are so used to blowing up nursery schools and hospitals they forgot it is possible to aim at military targets sometimes.”
LMAO, That was a 100% accurate comment. Nice article!
ps: They are still using a lot of their arty & rockets on civilian targets