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Posted (edited)
2 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Something definitely burning.

If the reporting and geolocating is correct, they hit the large-scale/long-range SAM battery that protects the harbor first (flashy explosion, but not much fire) and then hit the export dock/terminal (lots of fire, still burning hard, mushroom-looking cloud).  That's some pretty solid coordination.

Edited by atomheartbevo
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Posted
41 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

If the reporting and geolocating is correct, they hit the large-scale/long-range SAM battery that protects the harbor first (flashy explosion, but not much fire) and then hit the export dock/terminal (lots of fire, still burning hard, mushroom-looking cloud).  That's some pretty solid coordination.

Lot of good footage of this thing.

 

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Posted

 

There is some slight confusion - some are saying the area above the cargo terminal was some kind of military facility/base/barracks. Not sure if naval related or some kind of facility for export/import of military cargo or not.

Just hitting the large SAM installation and the oil terminal are huge though.  Cargo...can be offloaded at one of the other piers (even if it's a pain in the ass).

This was a well-coordinated strike.  Still can't believe how easily they wrecked the SAM battery.

G5ssFW0X0AAbB0g.thumb.jpg.20803a6879f26e71f7c860ddbc55328f.jpg

Both oil terminals in the Black Sea that Russia was using have been hit hard.

 

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Posted

Ukraine's General Staff reports Defense Forces struck the Novorossiysk naval base in Russia's Krasnodar region overnight using Neptune missiles and attack drones, hitting port infrastructure, the Sheskharis oil terminal, and an S-400 launcher with its missile storage, triggering detonations and fires. Strikes also hit the Saratov oil refinery in Saratov region, causing explosions and fires on site. The Kristal fuel storage facility near Engels in Saratov region was also struck, with explosions and fires reported.

 

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Posted

Even high school students in Europe know what's up

A group of Slovak high-schoolers walked out on Prime Minister Robert Fico after he ranted against helping Ukraine, local media report. When Fico claimed the EU was spending “140 billion euros to prolong the war” and told students to “go fight if you’re such heroes,” they drowned him out with jingling keys and left the hall.

------

The jingling keys thing refers to this:

The Key-Jingling Protest of the Velvet Revolution — THE END OF HARM

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Posted
On 9/3/2025 at 4:49 PM, Laxtonto said:

 

 

12 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Ukraine's General Staff reports Defense Forces struck the Novorossiysk naval base in Russia's Krasnodar region overnight using Neptune missiles and attack drones, hitting port infrastructure, the Sheskharis oil terminal, and an S-400 launcher with its missile storage, triggering detonations and fires. Strikes also hit the Saratov oil refinery in Saratov region, causing explosions and fires on site. The Kristal fuel storage facility near Engels in Saratov region was also struck, with explosions and fires reported.

 

 

2 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

 

Saratov still on fire

 

 

2 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Reuters reporting that oil/cargo transfers halted.

Russia's Black Sea port of Novorossiysk suspends oil exports after Ukrainian drone attack, sources say | Reuters

This is probably what went boom in that one epic explosion that left a mushroom cloud.

MXNFZOZABVICDAOGCYVF3CCKJI.jpg?auth=dac0

 

Here's the launch of the Neptunes used

 

 

2 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

 

There is some slight confusion - some are saying the area above the cargo terminal was some kind of military facility/base/barracks. Not sure if naval related or some kind of facility for export/import of military cargo or not.

Just hitting the large SAM installation and the oil terminal are huge though.  Cargo...can be offloaded at one of the other piers (even if it's a pain in the ass).

This was a well-coordinated strike.  Still can't believe how easily they wrecked the SAM battery.

G5ssFW0X0AAbB0g.thumb.jpg.20803a6879f26e71f7c860ddbc55328f.jpg

Both oil terminals in the Black Sea that Russia was using have been hit hard.

 

Fuck yeah, Man.  FUCK YEAH

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Posted

I’m not really a fossil fuel technocrat, so I’m not sure how Russia exporting   < checks notes > zero….amounts of fuel from the damaged harbor is a good thing.   

Having no money to prosecute the war will probably free up an army of unemployed bank tellers to hit the front line. 

Advantage Putin.

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Posted
1 hour ago, Gatorubet said:

I’m not really a fossil fuel technocrat, so I’m not sure how Russia exporting   < checks notes > zero….amounts of fuel from the damaged harbor is a good thing.   

Having no money to prosecute the war will probably free up an army of unemployed bank tellers to hit the front line. 

Advantage Putin.

Not to be pedantic, but..

If I understand it correctly, with the damage to the refiners, Russia needs to export oil to anyone who will still take it, and then import fuel.  Hitting the ports seriously fucks that up.  People halfway joke about the vodka production, but honestly they may end up having to use higher proof alcohol (ethanol) for their cars and generators eventually.  Of course that isn't a replacement for diesel. 

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Posted
8 minutes ago, Tuco said:

People halfway joke about the vodka production, but honestly they may end up having to use higher proof alcohol (ethanol) for their cars and generators eventually.  Of course that isn't a replacement for diesel. 

IMG_5460.jpeg.021df580fd85417f6f78fcb00d68183e.jpeg

Russia now stealing secret American submarine tactics

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Posted

Eight Nordic-Baltic countries announced a joint $500 million weapons package for Ukraine on 13 November as Russia intensifies strikes on civilian and energy infrastructure before winter. 

The package uses NATO's Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List to coordinate purchases of US-supplied equipment, including HIMARS rockets, air defense systems, precision weapons, long-range artillery shells, and guided aerial bombs. 

Norway is contributing $200 million of the total. "Ukraine's security is directly connected to ours," the defense ministers from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, and Sweden stated.

The PURL mechanism allows allies to pool funds for faster delivery rather than making separate individual purchases.

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Posted

Mossad levels of sabotage

https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/11/14/ukrainian-intelligence-derails-trans-siberian-railway/

Ukrainian military intelligence (HUR) released video showing a sabotage operation that derailed a freight train on the Trans-Siberian Railway near Sosnovka in Khabarovsk Krai - 6,600 kilometers from Ukraine. 

The 13 November operation targeted a critical corridor used to transport weapons and ammunition from North Korea to Russian forces. 

The blast reportedly damaged the track and halted cargo movement along the route. HUR described the action as part of ongoing efforts to disrupt Russian logistics infrastructure far from the frontlines, demonstrating Ukraine's capability to strike deep inside Russian territory at supply routes critical to sustaining military operations.

 

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Posted (edited)

More for @PTINS

The Novorossiysk strike disabled critical oil infrastructure, Exilenova reports. One hit appears to have struck pipelines feeding crude from shore tanks to pier loading terminals, with fire covering a large area. Damage to pipes or pumps halts tanker loading even if storage tanks remain intact.

----

I've seen comments saying that they were ignoring the storage tanks and deliberately targeting pumps and other critical hardware. Would be wild if they are that accurate.

Edit: And since this ends their abilities to load oil to tankers in the Black Sea, that probably means there's a shitload of oil sitting in pipelines stretching down to the Black Sea, plus tanks that are just sitting there full to the brim.  Feels like it could jam up a lot of stuff.

Edited by atomheartbevo
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Posted

I wonder what would happen if Ukraine hit Russia's physical gold reserves in the vaults within the Bank of Russia headquarters in Moscow and its facility in Saint Petersburg. 

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Posted
1 hour ago, atomheartbevo said:

That thing is out of control  @PTINS can probably explain why, but I can’t believe they haven’t starved it of fuel somehow.

 

You all have seen many pics of O&G facilities, and their maze of pipes in the pipe racks.  With any fire, you shut the valves on either end, and make a decision to put the fire out, or let it burn itself out. Fire water systems are designed for smaller, localized fires; not a catastrophic explosion.

There are fail safe procedures in place, starting with fire detectors and an  Emergency Shut Down (ESD) system, a big red button that sends pre-programmed instructions to open and close whatever needs to be opened and closed in an emergency.  They are located in the control room, around critical pieces of equipment, and around the perimeter of the process areas of the plant.

Some times, it becomes a bit more complicated. Like a drone, or a big bomb exploding in the middle of a pipe rack, like the one in the picture below.  

image.png.b9c3e2bed9d99c5d0f1f45dcd1ee30ae.png

Usually the ESD will isolate everything within the plant. Okay, the valves at the plant fence are closed, now what?

It depends, on a lot of things. A lot of the larger pipes and block valves have motor controlled actuators that are controlled remotely, or at the valve.  Once all the automatic control valves are closed, or opened, now the rest have to be done manually. Most equipment is always in service, so they only have manual isolation valves that are needed for routine maintenance. Why are the big oil companies so cheap? Why don't they automate everything? Sometimes that stuff breaks, or fails, or goes off by itself, and automatically goes to fail safe, either opened or closed. Each decision to automate is made case by case.

After that, the remaining valves are closed manually.

The first priority is protect personnel. Muster is preselected places, and count heads.

Then, make decisions on what do do. Is the fire under control? 

There are drawings on every pipe in the plant. Lots of them. It is hard enough tracing a specific pipe, looking at the drawings, then the pipe, as you walk through the pipe rack.

Obviously, you can't do that during a fire, and when everything is a pile of twisted steel, good luck with that.

Even when everything is done right and operating okay, O&G plants are dangerous, and intimidating places. The sounds of high pressure steam and high speed turbines is not a natural sound, and they have a blend of strange smells. By design, you are putting extremely hazardous and volatile fluids at high pressure in a large steel vessel, and adding heat to it. I don't think those would be the preferred places to be in a war.

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Posted
11 hours ago, Bevo said:

I wonder what would happen if Ukraine hit Russia's physical gold reserves in the vaults within the Bank of Russia headquarters in Moscow and its facility in Saint Petersburg. 

Or maybe make it all radioactive. Saw a movie about that once, but they tried it on Fort Knox. 
 

CHIEF

Posted

This is the road that Russian troops were seen using to enter the area under the cover of fog - it's mud all over the place if you get off the road, and this maybe the same strike from a different angle earlier, that cut a bridge/elevated section over a marsh/wet area.  Russia going to have to move stuff in by foot.

 

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Posted

Supposedly we flew bombers over Estonia (but that term could cover several aircraft depending on configuration) close to the border as a show of force.

Also, NATO has AWACS aircraft over the Black Sea - claims are they are looking at Crimea and most likely feeding intel to Ukraine.

Hungary claims their national security interests lie in the Middle East, not their own backyard.  surejan.gif

 

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Posted
13 hours ago, PTINS said:

There are drawings on every pipe in the plant.

 

Lol, that's cute. We don't even have P&ID's for our steam. We have so much stuff that exists in the field, but not on paper that it's real fun when you are in charge of coming up with a plan to lock it out. We even have ancient AIPed equipment in the field that has no tags or anything, and nobody even remembered what it was named until I stumbled across an old hand drawn drawing from the fifties in which had it on there. 

Posted

Russia is Collapsing - Diane Francis

What follows is a 28-minute podcast I did on November 12 with The Times in Britain about Russia's economic meltdown, its war, and Ukraine’s strategy and political situation.

The salient developments:

Russia’s oil revenues are down 27% due to the effectiveness of sanctions and intense bombing by Ukraine of its refineries and other oil facilities. Petroleum exports finance the war. Ukraine has also embarked on an intense and successful aerial war targeting Russia’s electrical grid.

Russia has had to dip into its National Welfare Fund to finance the conflict. In 2022, this “national piggy bank” totalled $100 billion and is down to $34 billion. Russia has also lost access to its $300 billion in foreign-exchange earnings, which were frozen after its 2022 invasion. Allies are close to agreeing to transfer these funds to Ukraine to help rebuild the country.

 

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Posted

Russia has lost around 1,158,260 troops in Ukraine since the beginning of its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces reported on Nov. 16.

The number includes 860 casualties that Russian forces suffered over the past day.

According to the report, Russia has also lost 11,353 tanks (+3), 23,591 armored fighting vehicles (+3), 67,464 vehicles and fuel tanks (+68), 34,469 artillery systems (+26), 1,543 multiple launch rocket systems (+2), 1,244 air defense systems, 428 airplanes, 347 helicopters, 81,286 drones (+409), 28 ships and boats, and one submarine.

Posted

Ukrainian intelligence is warning that a Russian Lancet drone is prowling the sky, loitering above Kramatorsk, like a heron poised over a fish pond, ready to strike.

A laptop shows multiscreen images of medics racing through shredded forest, Russian soldiers in Ukrainian sights, bunkers being blown up – everyday terror.

This is the future of war – and the West isn’t ready for what may be coming in an open conflict with Russia: mass casualties and a transformation of the battle beyond anything that Nato’s armies are training for.

 

The laptop feed is for Rebekah Maciorowski, an American volunteer paramedic who runs the medical operations, evacuation and training for an entire battalion of men and women on Ukraine’s eastern front, under its 3rd Brigade. In a conventional war, she would be a major. In this conflict? She has no idea what her rank is and cares even less.

But the revelations from this frontline soldier, one who has the rare claim to have shot down an incoming Russian drone attacking her patients, are chilling.

“You have had encounters with Nato training teams. You’ve talked to Nato when you’ve been back in Europe. Do you think that they’re ready for the next war with Russia?” The Independent asks her.

 

“No. No, I’m honestly a little bit terrified,” she replies – after more than 40 months at war here.

She goes on to explain: “If you were to talk to Nato military officials, they would reassure you that everything is under control, they’re well equipped, they’re well prepared. But I don’t think anyone can be prepared for a conflict like this. I don’t think anyone can.

“And what’s concerning to me is, while they’re offering training [in Europe for Ukrainians], I think it would do them well to also take some information and training from the Ukrainians.”

Maciorowski has undergone training with Nato forces in the last year and says what they taught was relevant to Afghanistan and Iraq – not Ukraine.

“When I went to train with Nato, the factor of drones was not really filtered in. It was very much the tactics that were learnt in the previous war. And these tactics now do not apply because you’re not making a linear assault.

“Everything has changed with drones. And I don’t think it was factored in, at least not in this training,” she says in her secret medical evacuation headquarters.

US medic Maciorowski and her team tend to injured Ukrainian soldiers in the Donetsk region
 
 
US medic Maciorowski and her team tend to injured Ukrainian soldiers in the Donetsk region (The Independent)

Her teams evacuate wounded soldiers using quad bikes because armoured ambulances are now death traps, while quads can race between forests and dugouts trying to avoid drones.

But her team takes heavy losses. Over the last week, a top medic, callsign Viking, was killed on a rescue mission east of Slaviansk. A few weeks before that, another driver was blown up by a drone.

“I don’t see other Europeans coping with this,” she says.

Nato’s leaders and intelligence agencies agree that Europe, especially, is already involved in a hybrid war with Russia. This includes propaganda to undermine democracy, cyber attacks, sabotage and assassinations.

Lately, it has included probing attacks inside Poland and Estonia by Russian aircraft and continuous challenges at sea.

An outright war may never happen. It may also be inevitable.

Vladimir Putin has made it clear he wants to force the Baltic states back under Russian rule and has designs on all of eastern Europe in countries once dominated by Moscow.

Ukrainians and Georgians know that when he says such things, he invades.

If it came to a war, Russia has experience in modern combat that only Ukraine shares.

An officer operating in Pokrovsk, where Ukraine says Russia is concentrating 150,000 men on trying to break through

“We are changing the structure of the war on the go,” says Oleksandr Yabchanka, commander of a drone unit in the Da Vinci Wolves, part of the 59th Brigade.

“There is bad news for Ukraine and Europe. Russia is adapting just like us. It is a colossal threat and very underestimated in Europe.”

A spokesperson for the British-led programme Operation Interflex said that 61,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been trained for “putting them in the strongest possible position as they resist ongoing Russian attacks”.

He said that Ukrainian military experts and drone operators had served as consultants to train soldiers going to war and that 91 per cent of Ukrainian soldiers who completed Nato’s basic training “feel more confident of their survivability at the end of the training”.

However, a recent study by Jack Watling at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) warns that Nato needs to catch up with understanding that war has changed.

The advent of small, deadly drones, often flown with first-person vision (FPV), frequently guided by fibre-optic cables, and capable of pinpoint accuracy far beyond what were considered front lines, has transformed conflict.

Nato doctrine focuses on what it calls “combined arms manoeuvre”. This means an emphasis on the concentration of aircraft, armour, infantry and artillery with the aim to surprise and overwhelm an enemy.

That doesn’t work any more.

Dr Watling explains that “pervasive networks and sensors have made the ability to achieve surprise difficult”. Known as battlefield transparency, the modern surveillance of battlefields means that an unexpected attack is almost impossible.

On top of that, “the ubiquity of precision weapons” makes concentrated forces vulnerable to “rapid attrition”.

Armoured vehicles, engineering equipment, electronics warfare kit – it can all be spotted and picked off with ease, and over long distances.

This means that the front lines are wide, deep, shattered and almost empty of infantry.

Nato’s method is to take on mass attacks by the “near peer” forces of Russia. But Russia’s tactics no longer concentrate on mass – the weight of numbers in men and arms used against Ukraine three years ago.

Now, Ukrainian forces are being attacked with long-range glide bombs. Russian drones hunt out Kyiv’s UAV teams in their bunkers and force them away from their forward lines. And above all, the lines of logistics are pounded with terrifying accuracy.

Russian soldiers hide in dugouts, trying to avoid drones, near Zaporizhzhia, southern Ukraine
 
 
Russian soldiers hide in dugouts, trying to avoid drones, near Zaporizhzhia, southern Ukraine (The Independent)

As a result, small groups of two or four Russians covertly sneak into locations on the front lines to try to hold bunkers and dugouts while Ukrainian drones patrol overhead.

The soldiers use blankets designed to muffle their thermal images, sometimes held above them on poles, to get into locations where they may be embedded for weeks or months.

Ukrainian troops do the same. And now that their lines of communication have been cut, they rely entirely on supplies of food and ammunition, as well as medical supplies from drones in the air or on the ground.

In Afghanistan, 99.2 per cent of British army casualties who were evacuated to the main Helmand hospital at Camp Bastion survived – mostly because they were taken there from the front lines within the first “golden hour” after injury.

In any war with Russia, it could be days or weeks before a severely wounded Nato soldier could be evacuated. And the numbers injured in a single incident or a drone blast are likely to be high.

“The wounds, the injuries, are catastrophic,” explains Maciorowski. “And they’re multiplying because the radius of impact for a drone that drops a grenade or explosive device is massive.

“So you can have an entire group that’s taken out, all of them injured in one drop. We’re not seeing that hand-to-hand combat so much now.

“Now we’re looking at prolonged field care; guys who are unable to evacuate and giving medical advice over a radio, making sure that when guys come to the unit, every soldier is trained like a medic because we don’t have enough medics, and there’s no guarantee that they can get to the wounded soldier in time.

“So every soldier needs to be a highly trained medic… to treat himself and others around him.”

Medics of Da Vinci Wolves Battalion treat Ukrainian soldiers injured during fighting near Pokrovsk in August
 
 
Medics of Da Vinci Wolves Battalion treat Ukrainian soldiers injured during fighting near Pokrovsk in August (AP)

Nato’s regular armed forces are rarely, if ever, trained how to treat themselves for long periods with antibiotics and intravenous drips.

And, above all, they are unprepared for the potential mass casualties that Nato forces would face in a conflict with Russia.

“We almost can’t comprehend the scale of those losses,” says Ed Arnold, a former British Army officer who is now with Rusi.

Gangrene among Ukrainian soldiers is commonplace because they are stuck on the front lines for so long. Britain’s biggest mobile field hospital has a capacity of only 80 general beds and 10 for intensive care.

In a Ukraine-type war where the UK, and Nato, can expect hundreds of casualties every day, the capacity to cope is just not there.

“We should have Ukrainians training [British officers] at Sandhurst (Royal Military Academy) at the moment,” adds Arnold.

“There should be a resident Ukrainian platoon, which regularly rotates, giving us the actual download on what’s going on.”

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Posted

Some interesting TLDR articles related to the article above:

https://re-russia.net/en/analytics/0340/

https://ecfr.eu/article/the-long-game-how-europe-can-outlast-russias-war-of-attrition/

https://www.armyupress.army.mil/journals/military-review/online-exclusive/2025-ole/russia-ukraine-war/

https://geopoliticalfutures.com/russias-new-war-of-attrition/

https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/attritional-art-war-lessons-russian-war-ukraine

 

Personally, I think the last article is the most on point on the future of war. The US focuses on expensive equipment and technologies where it probably needs to focus on larger quantities of inexpensive equipment. 

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Posted
1 hour ago, Bevo said:

Ukrainian intelligence is warning that a Russian Lancet drone is prowling the sky, loitering above Kramatorsk, like a heron poised over a fish pond, ready to strike.

A laptop shows multiscreen images of medics racing through shredded forest, Russian soldiers in Ukrainian sights, bunkers being blown up – everyday terror.

This is the future of war – and the West isn’t ready for what may be coming in an open conflict with Russia: mass casualties and a transformation of the battle beyond anything that Nato’s armies are training for.

 

The laptop feed is for Rebekah Maciorowski, an American volunteer paramedic who runs the medical operations, evacuation and training for an entire battalion of men and women on Ukraine’s eastern front, under its 3rd Brigade. In a conventional war, she would be a major. In this conflict? She has no idea what her rank is and cares even less.

But the revelations from this frontline soldier, one who has the rare claim to have shot down an incoming Russian drone attacking her patients, are chilling.

“You have had encounters with Nato training teams. You’ve talked to Nato when you’ve been back in Europe. Do you think that they’re ready for the next war with Russia?” The Independent asks her.

 

“No. No, I’m honestly a little bit terrified,” she replies – after more than 40 months at war here.

She goes on to explain: “If you were to talk to Nato military officials, they would reassure you that everything is under control, they’re well equipped, they’re well prepared. But I don’t think anyone can be prepared for a conflict like this. I don’t think anyone can.

“And what’s concerning to me is, while they’re offering training [in Europe for Ukrainians], I think it would do them well to also take some information and training from the Ukrainians.”

Maciorowski has undergone training with Nato forces in the last year and says what they taught was relevant to Afghanistan and Iraq – not Ukraine.

“When I went to train with Nato, the factor of drones was not really filtered in. It was very much the tactics that were learnt in the previous war. And these tactics now do not apply because you’re not making a linear assault.

“Everything has changed with drones. And I don’t think it was factored in, at least not in this training,” she says in her secret medical evacuation headquarters.

US medic Maciorowski and her team tend to injured Ukrainian soldiers in the Donetsk region
 
 
US medic Maciorowski and her team tend to injured Ukrainian soldiers in the Donetsk region (The Independent)

Her teams evacuate wounded soldiers using quad bikes because armoured ambulances are now death traps, while quads can race between forests and dugouts trying to avoid drones.

But her team takes heavy losses. Over the last week, a top medic, callsign Viking, was killed on a rescue mission east of Slaviansk. A few weeks before that, another driver was blown up by a drone.

“I don’t see other Europeans coping with this,” she says.

Nato’s leaders and intelligence agencies agree that Europe, especially, is already involved in a hybrid war with Russia. This includes propaganda to undermine democracy, cyber attacks, sabotage and assassinations.

Lately, it has included probing attacks inside Poland and Estonia by Russian aircraft and continuous challenges at sea.

An outright war may never happen. It may also be inevitable.

Vladimir Putin has made it clear he wants to force the Baltic states back under Russian rule and has designs on all of eastern Europe in countries once dominated by Moscow.

Ukrainians and Georgians know that when he says such things, he invades.

If it came to a war, Russia has experience in modern combat that only Ukraine shares.

An officer operating in Pokrovsk, where Ukraine says Russia is concentrating 150,000 men on trying to break through

“We are changing the structure of the war on the go,” says Oleksandr Yabchanka, commander of a drone unit in the Da Vinci Wolves, part of the 59th Brigade.

“There is bad news for Ukraine and Europe. Russia is adapting just like us. It is a colossal threat and very underestimated in Europe.”

A spokesperson for the British-led programme Operation Interflex said that 61,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been trained for “putting them in the strongest possible position as they resist ongoing Russian attacks”.

He said that Ukrainian military experts and drone operators had served as consultants to train soldiers going to war and that 91 per cent of Ukrainian soldiers who completed Nato’s basic training “feel more confident of their survivability at the end of the training”.

However, a recent study by Jack Watling at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) warns that Nato needs to catch up with understanding that war has changed.

The advent of small, deadly drones, often flown with first-person vision (FPV), frequently guided by fibre-optic cables, and capable of pinpoint accuracy far beyond what were considered front lines, has transformed conflict.

Nato doctrine focuses on what it calls “combined arms manoeuvre”. This means an emphasis on the concentration of aircraft, armour, infantry and artillery with the aim to surprise and overwhelm an enemy.

That doesn’t work any more.

Dr Watling explains that “pervasive networks and sensors have made the ability to achieve surprise difficult”. Known as battlefield transparency, the modern surveillance of battlefields means that an unexpected attack is almost impossible.

On top of that, “the ubiquity of precision weapons” makes concentrated forces vulnerable to “rapid attrition”.

Armoured vehicles, engineering equipment, electronics warfare kit – it can all be spotted and picked off with ease, and over long distances.

This means that the front lines are wide, deep, shattered and almost empty of infantry.

Nato’s method is to take on mass attacks by the “near peer” forces of Russia. But Russia’s tactics no longer concentrate on mass – the weight of numbers in men and arms used against Ukraine three years ago.

Now, Ukrainian forces are being attacked with long-range glide bombs. Russian drones hunt out Kyiv’s UAV teams in their bunkers and force them away from their forward lines. And above all, the lines of logistics are pounded with terrifying accuracy.

Russian soldiers hide in dugouts, trying to avoid drones, near Zaporizhzhia, southern Ukraine
 
 
Russian soldiers hide in dugouts, trying to avoid drones, near Zaporizhzhia, southern Ukraine (The Independent)

As a result, small groups of two or four Russians covertly sneak into locations on the front lines to try to hold bunkers and dugouts while Ukrainian drones patrol overhead.

The soldiers use blankets designed to muffle their thermal images, sometimes held above them on poles, to get into locations where they may be embedded for weeks or months.

Ukrainian troops do the same. And now that their lines of communication have been cut, they rely entirely on supplies of food and ammunition, as well as medical supplies from drones in the air or on the ground.

In Afghanistan, 99.2 per cent of British army casualties who were evacuated to the main Helmand hospital at Camp Bastion survived – mostly because they were taken there from the front lines within the first “golden hour” after injury.

In any war with Russia, it could be days or weeks before a severely wounded Nato soldier could be evacuated. And the numbers injured in a single incident or a drone blast are likely to be high.

“The wounds, the injuries, are catastrophic,” explains Maciorowski. “And they’re multiplying because the radius of impact for a drone that drops a grenade or explosive device is massive.

“So you can have an entire group that’s taken out, all of them injured in one drop. We’re not seeing that hand-to-hand combat so much now.

“Now we’re looking at prolonged field care; guys who are unable to evacuate and giving medical advice over a radio, making sure that when guys come to the unit, every soldier is trained like a medic because we don’t have enough medics, and there’s no guarantee that they can get to the wounded soldier in time.

“So every soldier needs to be a highly trained medic… to treat himself and others around him.”

Medics of Da Vinci Wolves Battalion treat Ukrainian soldiers injured during fighting near Pokrovsk in August
 
 
Medics of Da Vinci Wolves Battalion treat Ukrainian soldiers injured during fighting near Pokrovsk in August (AP)

Nato’s regular armed forces are rarely, if ever, trained how to treat themselves for long periods with antibiotics and intravenous drips.

And, above all, they are unprepared for the potential mass casualties that Nato forces would face in a conflict with Russia.

“We almost can’t comprehend the scale of those losses,” says Ed Arnold, a former British Army officer who is now with Rusi.

Gangrene among Ukrainian soldiers is commonplace because they are stuck on the front lines for so long. Britain’s biggest mobile field hospital has a capacity of only 80 general beds and 10 for intensive care.

In a Ukraine-type war where the UK, and Nato, can expect hundreds of casualties every day, the capacity to cope is just not there.

“We should have Ukrainians training [British officers] at Sandhurst (Royal Military Academy) at the moment,” adds Arnold.

“There should be a resident Ukrainian platoon, which regularly rotates, giving us the actual download on what’s going on.”

Well that's terrifying.

So how would NATO win a hypothetical war?  Do what we did in GW1 and start with an extended air war?  Take out all the infrastructure we can reach and let them die on the vine before any kinda ground attack?

Seems Ukrainian air attacks are getting through and the only impediment is munition supplies. One presumes a full NATO arsenal has a order of magnitude more?

Or are we all screwed?

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Posted
24 minutes ago, Parliament said:

Well that's terrifying.

So how would NATO win a hypothetical war?  Do what we did in GW1 and start with an extended air war?  Take out all the infrastructure we can reach and let them die on the vine before any kinda ground attack?

Seems Ukrainian air attacks are getting through and the only impediment is munition supplies. One presumes a full NATO arsenal has a order of magnitude more?

Or are we all screwed?

 

The next set of articles pretty much state that long range aerial attacks can only have limited success and that ground wars are inevitable. And the US always plans for short-term conflicts and fails when it comes to long-term affairs, pointing out our loss of Afghanistan and Iraq, and our one month war game scenarios for Taiwan. 

So yeah, pretty terrifying. And our industrialized societies in the US and Europe don't have the will nor the control of its citizens to sustain the losses that Russia has been willing and able to sustain.

One positive with regard to Russia's conflict with the West is the decline of the Russian economy and the impact of Ukraine strikes on not just the Russian economy but also on Russian civilian support for the war. The article below seems to state that Ukraine should hit civilian targets in Russia because it would eventually cause Russian civilian support for the war to erode. I personally have my doubts though because it would lead the West to conclude that Ukraine isn't worthy of support. 

https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-war-ukraine-next-chapter

Unfortunately, all the articles that I have posted today (while extremely informative) are exceedingly long. So, most of us probably aren't going to go through them all. 

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Posted

Has anyone found a credible estimate of the percentage of refining capacity at which Russia is currently operating?

At one point, I recall that an estimated 20% of refining capacity was impacted, but that was a week or two ago.

Lots of great information about Shadow Fleet tankers full of oil not being able to dock anywhere, and multiple nations scrutinizing the shadow fleet movements after the sanctions were imposed.   With the additional sweet goodness of all those ports transferring oil being hit, do we have any idea about the percentage of normal Kremlin sold oil being reduced?    

They have to be hemorrhaging money and deeply in need of that revenue.  Add to that the fact that they need to actually buy gasoline from other countries now to meet their domestic needs.  Somebody has to be keeping score.

Posted

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/russia-using-spare-oil-refining-capacity-offset-ukrainian-drone-damage-sources-2025-11-13/

Answering my own question, partly, this article suggest that it’s still not as bad as we had hoped it would be because apparently Russia has other refining capacity that was not being used, and which went online to mitigate the production losses from the September-October attacks.

I have to note that saying “industry sources” is not the depth of information that we should rely on if those industry sources are the Russians. But Reuters…

If true, this does show Russian resilience - for a timeframe anyway.  Albert Spear was a genius and kept Nazi war production going despite night and day bombing at a rate that was truly impressive.   But that was a matter of when, and not if, the war economy would collapse.

But it also occurs to me if they have to start up previously non-producing smaller refineries, they can’t set up decent air defenses everywhere for them. If they can’t stop their largest refineries from getting hit multiple times, the smaller ones in Dogpatch Russia are going to be easy targets over time because they are running out of Pantsirs and S-400s.    And I would bet they are not moving any out of Moscow or St. Petersburg in any event.    

Political priorities versus strategic priorities.

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