So, a few days worth of news and bits.
Germany:
Has quietly started delivering patriot systems. The first is up and running. This has dissuaded the Russians from running so may fighter/bomber raids with glide bombs. It may be that they are also running low on those.
German "advisor" presence on the ground has also swelled significantly.... 500 or so.
Their General on the ground also divulged that they have been keeping a tally of destroyed Russian equipment and arty .... just as my mate runs his spreadsheet.
Where my mate has the russians having burned through 63% of their arty systems, the Germans think it is above 75%. ... quite significant if true. This seems to be being reflected on the ground with tanks and arty being moved to the rear, the Ukrainians presume to save them for a summer offensive.
Zyrski had a go back on frontline duty at Terny and, noticing some shortcomings in the Russian offiensive/gear ... he went and took back 3km of territory and created a 2km grey zone.
Peaceniks
"
Peaceniks
Yesterday *** asked me where Uncle Luka had gone.
Apparently to Moscow it seems to meet a Putin or two for a face to face.
He returned talking about that the time for peace having arrived.
I find the timing curious for this latest Peacenik initiative from the Blyatniks.
Half of Russia is drowning, the other half is having a fuel shortage.
They are starting to face "Lackings" at an increasing rate.
They are still invaded in Bilhorod.
Their offensive push have stalled out almost completely.
And Ukraine is receiving weapons and consumables left and right.
Europe is contemplating getting involved.
And in a couple of weeks F-16s are arriving.
And to make things even worse, China just downgraded their Friendship without Limits, to Russia Friendly.
That happened as Russia came to China to beg for direct deliveries of dual-usage components and arms.
It was at that point that they got served that "China is Russia friendly" and that it was out of the question to deliver dual-usage componets and arms.
It even got worse when China officially declared that they are neutral in the conflict and do not deliver components to either Russia, nor Ukraine.
This was just purely ******* Russia in the face, since Russia just had tried to use the argument that China is delivering tens of millions of drone components and shells to Ukraine.
This annoyed China no end, and they very testily informed Russia that they do no such thing.
Here's the thing, China is sort of neutral, but leaning a tad towards the Ukrainian side to not annoy EU.
They have not sold anything to Ukraine, they sold it to EU, and what we do with it is not their problem.
Same goes for Russia, they do sell components to countries that sell them onwards at Scalper-prices to Russia, but here they do not sell any arms, just components.
And, it is making an incredible difference, we buy at discount and give stuff to Ukraine.
Russia has to buy the same parts at prices well above ten-times the list price.
And then China informed Russia that they sadly have a fuel shortage, but that if Russia gave them crude oil for free, they might be able to scrounge up a little.
Sad Russia Noises happened at that point, and China with a beaming smile sent them packing empty handed.
I iterate it once again.
In China words are cheap, but sales contracts are gold.
And China know better than to **** up the golden contracts they get from EU.
And Russia is not really able to pay enough to even make a dent in that resolve.
Anyway... sidetrack aside...
I am almost certain that this round of Peaceniking is Russia starting to face the music.
The war is slowly going to **** for them from now on.
And they are now desperately trying to keep something through diplomatic means.
Neither Ukraine, nor EU is having none of it.
A peace deal with Putin is not going to happen, not even when Ukraine has rolled Russia back to their old borders.
The muppet would just try to rebuild his army and come back again.
No, peace will come after the borders are back where they are supposed to be, plus restitution, and a massive demilitarized zone towards all of Europe and Ukraine.
And not even that might be enough for EU and Ukraine, Russia will probably have to shed parts to us just to increase our safety."
A bit more on "lackings and China"
Things are continuing to go fairly abysmally on the frontline for Russia now, it is clear to everyone that the offensive power of Russia is now mostly gone, and that they now only manage to take a lightly defended field or two at unexpected directions.
All along the frontline we see more and more ad hoc usage of non-military vehicles.
It also seems like Russia is moving units along the Eastern front in a manner that only can be described as "confusedly".
One day they send troops from Kupyansk to either Avdivka or Chasiv Yar, and then a few days later they move troops from Chasiv Yar and Terny to Kupyansk, and Units from Avdivka to Chasiv Yar.
This obviously is confusing the heck out of the Russian units who never get the time to get used to their new surrounding, nor reach the front, prior to them being packed up and sent somewhere new.
Either this a clumsy Maskirovka with Russia trying to make it look like they have more troops than they have.
Obviously we know what goes where, and fairly well how many Russian soldiers and units there are.
The next option is that there is some sort of power struggle going on between different sector commander due to lack of overall leadership.
I favour this line of thinking, after all Ukraine have taken out several high ranking officers, and others have been fired or arrested.
It reeks of desperation.
Beside the mounting Lacking of artillery, we are now seeing the beginning of Lacking of APCs in a more broad perspective along the entire frontline.
We also see very low reserve numbers of both of these groups in the reserve and the deep rear, indicating that this is now a permeating and permanent issue for Russia.
It also seems like Russia is now husbanding their tanks hard.
The number on the front has decreased and no new ones are being brought forward from the rear reserves or the deep rear.
We do think that this is done of purpose intentionally to preserve them across the Rasputitsa for a last ditch offencive attempt during the summer.
But, with deficient artillery support and lack of APCs tanks are vulnerable, and Ukraine has a massive artillery and drone advantage now.
I can point towards Robotyne sector in this regard about Lackings,
Russian soldiers are complaining to high heavens about Ukraine lobbing up to ten shells for each Russian, and that they are now forced to use old motorcycles and trucks when going on their meatwaves.
This ended up as a weird propaganda video warfare today as Russia published a very upbeat video about their motorcycle special force getting ready to storm the Ukrainians (5 guys on motorcycles...).
2 hours later Ukraine published the result with a burning motorcycle and a blown up Russian, clearly the same motorcycle as two hours earlier, but not necessarily the same Russian, well at least he was a bit hard to recognise.
The spreading Lackings is starting to truly be a pain in the **** for Russia.
And this leads me over to...
China
The important Minister of European Affairs, together with the resigning Ambassador Fu Cong, together with Military Attaché Si Jinping (niece to Xi), met with European counterparts during the day, it had been informed that it would be military oriented, so I snuck in as a digital whisp of smoke.
Among the flowery speach there was quite a few nuggets.
-According to China the war is a lost cause for Russia.
-Russia can't compete with the industrial power of Europe.
-Russian arms industry is struggling.
-Russia will run out of key weapons capabilities within 12 months.
-Ukraine will militarily regain all territory within 24 months.
-China warned about Russia being inclined to perform a naval attack on unspecified nautical territories of Europe and NATO.
-China expect turmoil to break out in Russia within 24 months "of a significant scale".
-If needed China is willing to cooperate in securing Russian nuclear assets.
In light of this China is now pushing Russia to accept the Zelenzkyy peace plan, but does not think that Russia is quite ready to accept that yet.
But, they expect Russia to be more willing with time.
They also wish that Russias borders should be adjusted so that any remaining "unclear borders" return to their "natural state".
I interpret this as China meaning that if we look away from Manchuria, they will look away if we find even spurious reasons to nibble chunks out of Russia.
They directly mentioned Karelia and pieces that Russia cut away from the Baltic states.
They then went on to congratulate EU for the progress of Kazakhstan in regards of new laws harmonising Kazakhstan to EU, and how they looked forward to the future border.
Obviously they did not state anything that we did not already know, but it was nice to have confirmed that they know what we know.
The Realpolitik effect of this is that China is about to ditch Russia even further in the near future, and that China is fairly happy about peace being on the horizon.
I would also point out that China seems to have downgraded US as a player influencing their affairs.
The part of them "getting" Manchuria will whip up fury in the US, but they seem very fine with this.
It was also notable that they did not even mention the US with a single word.
I think they have more or less prepared for a new Bipolar world where China and EU calls the shots over their respective spheres of influence, with the US being seen as a wildcard at best.
Thoughts
Is China to be trusted?
Absolutely not, but for the time being our interests align."
Africa and stuff
"Yesterday Russia lost the following
920 KIA
9 Tanks
13 APCs
19 Artillery systems
53 Vehicles such as trucks, golf carts, Scooby Doo Vans, etcetera.
For this price they gained exactly 820 square meters.
There's a lot to debone in this one.
The KIA and Vehicle ratios are their usual high selves, so Russia is definitely still attempting to push forward.
But, the low numbers in tanks, APCs and artillery systems is telling a different story, a story writ large in the miniscule average gains made.
We already know that Russia is husbanding their tanks in their deep rear for presumable future usage.
We also know that they are critical low on APCs.
So, these lower numbers are something that we can expect for some time now until the presumed summer offensive.
Artillery is though somewhat of a mystery.
It is not like Ukraine has gotten worse at hitting them all of a sudden, nor have Ukraine run out of shells and drones to take them out with.
Instead we see a thinning of artillery systems along the frontline, and they are on average placed further back from the frontline, making them less useful for offensive operations, but still effective for defence.
We also see that they have pulled artillery systems back into the deep rear, presumably to husband those for the presumed summer offensive.
New Lacking
We are starting to see low troop numbers on the Russian side.
This is unexpected, and might be a temporary thing.
What is more perplexing is that we are not seeing signs of a large scale mobifikation.
So far they have announced that they will do one of approximately 300K soldiers + the yearly conscripting of about 150K.
The conscripting is ongoing, but those soldiers will be for training purposes, and for usage inside Russia.
In the end many of the conscripts will be pushed into signing contracts, but the impetus to sign was unusually low last time around, and will probably be suitably low this time too.
What we are seeing is that they recruit around 20K contract soldiers per month, but no sign of a massive mobifikation.
We expected it to be in full swing now to be able to pull off a summer offensive.
Perplexing to say the least.
Normally it takes roughly 3 months to process 300K soldiers for the frontline through mobifikation, so if Russia would start today they would have arrived in force in mid-July earliest.
This means that until mid-July earliest Russia will suffer from staff shortage and declining troop numbers along the frontline.
Nobody in Ukraine believed that Russia would be lacking soldiers, so we are somewhat perplexed to put it mildly, it is after all their one huge advantage over pretty much anyone except China.
Afrika Corps
So, how bad are things for Russia?
Their offensive has stalled along the entire frontline, with only minor gains.
And if we would count in the Free Russia Forces and their gains in Bilhorod, Ukraine would have a pretty significant net gain over Russia.
And oh yeah, Bilhorod is still very much a thing.
It is a bleeding wound in Russia that they have utterly failed to cauterize.
The troops they sent was totally inexperienced and had minimal equipment, so they suffered heavy losses, mostly in the range above 50 percent KIA.
Those troops came out of the 20K montly that are contracted, so mostly old untrained blokes, and those blokes didn't end up on the regular frontline, thusly increasing the shortage of soldiers there.
And, without the mobifikation things are now looking very dire in Bilhorod, and later on elsewhere along the frontline.
So, something had to be done.
Something painful that is setting Russia's ambitions back months, if not even years or decades.
They are pulling out their Afrika Corps and sending them directly to Bilhorod to turn the tide in the war there.
Afrika Corps are already packing up to the utter shock and dismay of the African Russia Simps and tinpot dictators that they are propping up.
With them they bring their heavy gear, the last realistic stock of that in Russian hands that are of somewhat good quality.
The Afrika Corps are brimming with the best and most battlehardened ex-Wagnerites.
These are definitely not slouchy Ivans, as such it is the last "eliteish" force that Russia posseses.
They should be able to dunk the Free Russia Forces one would assume.
But, there is a problem...
I think Russia made an error in judgement here.
Half of the Free Russia Forces are also ex-Wagnerites.
And the Afrika Corps Wagnerites was mostly sent to Africa as punishment for the Freedom March under Prigozhin, and the half of the Free Russia Forces that are fighting in Bilhorod are also ex-Wagnerites that opted out of being sent to Russia.
What I am trying to say is that Russia are sending the one force that is most likely to turn coat to fight their own brethren.
I suspect that they will arrive, and then do an about turn and start attacking Bilhorod together with their former compatriots.
Russia, not using brain since time immemorial.
EU is obviously making a celebratory dance today on the back of the news that the Afrika Corps is going home.
Regardless if they turn coat or not, this is a huuuuuuuge win for our side, we can now pry back Africa from the Russian grasp, and on top of that Russia is losing Cudos in Africa by the Bushel, Hog, Hog's Head, Barrel, and Supertanker, please pick you favourite phrase and tap out the bung from it.
What will flow out are salty and delicious Blyatnik tears from losing Africa.
From the EU perspective it is though important that we move in prior to China doing it.
At least China will not send forces to Africa, of that we can be sure.
They will use contracts to take over if they go ahead, and we will probably do something similar.
Regardless, I will take this win and worry about tomorrow later."
