Oh, I was a 19D, an Armored Reconnaissance Specialist. Colloquially known as a cav scout. Luckily, the track we threw was in Hohenfels or Grafenwoehr, where we weren’t under fire when breaking track and fixing it.
That was back when the M3 Bradley was still new, and same for the Abrams. The 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment had just recently gotten them when I arrived in West Germany.
Scouts Out! We used to call 19D “19-Detail” because they usually got pulled to perform any crappy tasks. That mud in Graf-n-hohenfels is no joke though!
Ukraine has penetrated Russian lines in some areas, says UK
The latest intelligence update from the UK’s Ministry of Defence said over the past 48 hours “significant” Ukrainian operations have taken place in several sectors of eastern and southern Ukraine.
Ukrainian forces have “likely made good progress” and “penetrated the first line of Russian defences”, the MoD added. However, in other areas “Ukrainian progress has been slower”.
Meanwhile, Russian performance has been “mixed”, with some units “likely conducting credible manoeuvre defence operations while others have pulled back in some disorder, amid increased reports of Russian casualties as they withdraw through their own minefields”.
The update added: “The Russian Airforce has been unusually active over southern Ukraine, where the airspace is more permissive for Russia than in other parts of the country. However, it remains unclear whether tactical airstrikes have been effective.”
For the third day the russians are releasing footage of them striking the SAME failed Ukrainian attack.
So… they don’t want to show us any footage of the other 40+ Ukrainian attacks that have happened since?
I wonder why…
Most likely:
Someone wants to make sure that Ukraine will never get its ships back, no matter what happens to Crimea.
An audio message purportedly from a Ukrainian soldier fighting in that area says that Russian soldiers ran away when they saw the Ukrainians storming their positions.
increased reports of Russian casualties as they withdraw through their own minefields”.
I mean, I’ve never been involved in mine laying, but don’t they do in front of your defensive lines?
You can have multiple lines of defense. Minefields, triple-strand concertina wire, emplaced troops in defilade positions, ditches etc. With minefields you can leave a clear path to allow for withdrawal, then you use a system like MOPMS to fling mines into the gap after you withdraw. The russians have a rocket-launched mine scattering system which I don’t remember the name of. If they are withdrawing in a haphazard fashion with untrained, undisciplined troops using bad maps, they could easily stray into their own defenses.
Thank you. This makes sense.
It’s quite the incentive not to retreat.
Russia’s most powerful mercenary said on Sunday that his Wagner fighters would not sign any contract with Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu just hours after the defence ministry sought to bring volunteer detachments under its sway.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner group, has repeatedly attacked president Vladimir Putin’s top military brass for what he casts as treachery for failing to fight the war in Ukraine properly.
Neither Shoigu nor chief of the general staff Valery Gerasimov have commented in public on Prigozhin’s insults and criticism, Reuters reported.
But the defence ministry on Saturday said Shoigu had ordered all “volunteer detachments” to sign contracts with his ministry by the end of the month, a step the ministry said would increase the effectiveness of the Russian army.
Though the defence ministry did not mention Wagner in its public statement, the Russian media reported that it was an attempt by Shoigu to bring the mercenaries to heel.
“Wagner will not sign any contracts with Shoigu,” Prigozhin said in response to a request for comment on the Shoigu order.
Prigozhin said Wagner was integrated into the overall system and completely subordinate to the interests of Russia but that its highly efficient command structure would be damaged by reporting to Shoigu.
“Shoigu cannot properly manage military formations,” Prigozhin said, adding that Wagner coordinated its actions in Ukraine with general Sergei Surovikin, nicknamed “General Armageddon” by the Russian media.
Six civilians were wounded on Sunday when Russian forces opened fire and attacked a boat the civilians were using to evacuate, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s chief of staff has said.
The civilians were fleeing from flooded, occupied territory to the Ukrainian-controlled city of Kherson, Reuters reported.
The area they were in experienced catastrophic flooding after the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam, which both Kyiv and Moscow have accused other of deliberately blowing up.
“The Russian army attacked a boat with civilians evacuating from the left bank of Kherson region,” Andriy Yermak wrote on the Telegram messenger.
“They opened fire at the backs of civilians. Six people were wounded. They arrived in Kherson and were taken to hospital… Doctors are fighting for the lives of the wounded,” he wrote, providing no further details.
What a macabre and ironic twist to the story.
My thoughts on the current state of the counteroffensive is that it seems Russian commanders are only putting up token resistance, figuring it easier to claim to their chain of command that the Ukrainians took heavy losses than to actually try to fight. I think many are rattled, homesick and just fuckin’ want to get it over with, man.
Perhaps Russian occupation officials in cities like Melitopol and Tokmak will start packing their bags, now that the enemy is getting a bit closer.
Macabre, yes. Ironic, no. This is cynical. Everything about it is.
Kakhovka is the seventh reservoir there. Finished in the 1950s. And everything about the destruction now feels like they are trying hard to do a WWII reenactment.
On September 18th, 1941, the Soviets blew up the fifth, after the Germans had invaded. An unknown number of people died, estimated numbers vary between 20.000 and 100.000.
In October 1943, the German troops again blew up the dam, which had since been reconstructed.
Both incidents were attempts of scorched earth warfare.
That’s not entirely correct. The Nova Kakhovka dam was built in the 1950s, creating the Kakhovka Reservoir.
The dam that was blown up twice during the Second World War is in the city of Zaporizhzhia.
I saw the irony that one war washed free relics of a previous war. I hesitate to call it evidence, since the only thing truly revealed was the remains of dead soldiers. So I call them relics. Modern archaeological finds, I guess you could say.
That’s what I meant by the seventh/fifth. But I get confused now with the numbers, maybe Kakhovka dam is the sixth? Anyway, the one breached in the war twice is upstream from the Kakhovka reservoir. Kakhovka dam didn’t exist yet when first the Russian and then the Germans blew it.
