Russian volunteer Murz on why Russia is not ready to defend Ukrainian winter offensive
Posted on 19 December 2022
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in
Russian Accounts
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by
WarTranslated
Below is a translation of a long blog post by the Russian volunteer Murz whom we’ve covered extensively during the past several months.
In this post, Murz, who has been previously critical of the way the Russian Army is conducting the “special operation”, goes over the potential of a Ukrainian offensive in winter and shows that Russia is completely unprepared for it in terms of armoured vehicles, communication, defensive lines, artillery, and manpower.
This is perhaps the most critical of his texts and was shared by Igor Girkin as “recommended for reading”. The author has a certain way of constructing sentences so we apologise for any misunderstanding while reading.
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In pursuit of “positives”
Sorry, there will be a lot of swearing. It was actually supposed to be a large and rather strict text, but firstly, I doubt that in this format it will even reach anyone, usually when you yell obscenely at someone, it reaches them faster, and secondly, I simply don’t have time for a big, strict, practically academic analysis of all the garbage. So sorry, it will be short and with swearing.
Those who read my TG channel could already notice that a terrible thing happened to me recently – I watched Russian TV. The story of the morons from “Russia-24” who said that, as it turns out, it is possible to “dismantle Ukrainian fortifications” from a 57-mm anti-aircraft gun, left an indelible impression on me. Well, that is, for any person who understands at least a little about military affairs and who has generally seen these fortifications at least in a photo, such a phrase cannot cause anything but hysterical laughter.
The finale of the news release generally made me doubt that I was watching Russian TV. The weather forecast included a story, typically Ukrainian in essence and presentation, that in Ukraine, the weather is kind of terrible – solid ice, in Dnepropetrovsk so many buses have crashed due to ice. Most of the rest of the time was devoted to rituals about the fact that not only Ukraine, but finally the whole of Europe will freeze this winter.
“The burghers are alarmed,” the announcer said, completing the “forecast”, “by the fact that black smoke poured out of the pipes of German thermal power plants!”
Apparently, it was such a special test moment to see how everything in the viewer’s head has calibrated, because along these words they showed ordinary white steam coming from these same pipes. “If you see white smoke, watch the news again in an hour and repeat until the smoke turns black” or something like that.
After leaving Kherson, the public, instead of soberly assessing the situation, began, with the active help of the media, military correspondents, and all other available means, to suck out the “positivity” from any bullshit, often demonstrating just the opposite – complete fuck ups. A typical example of this, again, was in my TG – a video with grandiose music from the 127th division, in which Ukrainian grenade launchers are allowed to approach tanks at 50 meters. At the 10th month of the war. Unteachable. Moreover, no one is embarrassed by the fact that in the frame it is clear that the tank missed with a return shot – the shell passed over the trench and exploded off-screen. Loud and prolonged applause. Pew Pew! We attack!
Separate fierce fuck-up are the constantly popping up videos from the 1st Army Corps of the DPR showing firing from tanks from closed positions, practiced on a regular basis. The horror here, of course, is not that tanks shoot from closed positions, they can do it, a good tankman should be able to do it, moreover, tankmen were trained for this in 2016-2017 and the KCPN carried manuals for this on the topic. The horror is that with the silent catastrophic lack of shells in artillery (you can’t talk about it, because then someone will have to answer for it, but no one wants to), it was decided to replace artillery with tanks on a regular basis. For tanks, shells seem to still exist. I am not at all surprised, by the way, that the well-deserved media prostitute Vladlen Tatarsky supported this “good undertaking”. More like not surprised. Then he will, with a completely innocent look, expose the consequences of this garbage and, wringing his hands, ask – “What kind of bitch ordered this to be done?” And everyone is like, “Yes, yes! Who could it be?”
In reality, such shooting is an emergency temporary measure in a situation where it is necessary to cover a large concentration of the enemy, and there is no free artillery at hand or it is impossible to use it because of the operational counter-battery fire, to which the tank, due to thick armor, is much less susceptible than self-propelled artillery guns and, especially, the towed guns in which the crew and ammunition load are not covered at all. Smooth-bore tank guns are not designed for what they are now doing all day long: continuously bombarding enemy positions with high-explosive fragmentation shells. Modern tank guns are made smooth-bore so that they can be used to accelerate an armor-piercing projectile, in the jargon – a “crowbar”, to an initial speed of 1700-1800 meters per second (For comparison, the rifled 152-mm howitzer D-20, aka – 2S3 “Akatsiya”, if we are talking about self-propelled guns, the combat missions of which the tankmen are trying to perform, has an three times smaller speed of a high-explosive fragmentation projectile output). The task of the tank is to destroy enemy tanks with direct fire in a tank battle with such “crowbars”. If – you lose the barrel, you won’t hit anything, the enemy will destroy you first. And the survivability of the barrel of a tank gun, it is much less than that of a rifled howitzer. And the tanks that are doing all this are no longer new, the barrels have already been used, so to destroy targets from closed positions, a large consumption of shells is required, which wears out the barrels even more. In the LPR, still very much before the SMO, there was already a situation at one time when in one of the division’s tank barrels were shot to the point where further training firing at the range would deprive the tanks of combat value in the future, so the unit at the range began to shoot from 14.5 -mm inserts with cartridges from the KPVT machine gun. Usually, by the way, they start just with shooting from the “inserts”, and then they already train with combat ammo, but this is our army, after all.
But in combat, you can’t shoot like that. And the guns on the old T-64/72/80 tanks, the old models of the 2A46 gun, they can’t be changed without dismantling the turret. That is, we are now methodically putting out of action the last surviving tanks of the People’s Militia Corps, trophied tanks captured in a tolerable condition, and those removed from storage, are all urgently taken to the front.
It is understandable when the obsolete 100-mm Rapira smoothbore guns were assigned to support the infantry. They are not very relevant against modern tanks, so can be used to “finish off” the resource of barrels with high-explosive fragmentation shells before decommissioning. But to ruin our tanks … For what? In order, of course, to succumb to Ukropov’s wiring.
This duping is straightforward. Since the Armed Forces of Ukraine don’t give a shit about the fate of civilians in Doncek, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are hitting the city with multiple rocket launchers. All the preparations for firing can be done in advance, the BM-21 installation eventually rolls out to the point literally for a couple of minutes, the actual package of 40 missiles leaves the rails in less than a minute, after which a minute later the installation can be turned into a cargo Ural with the simplest means of camouflage, which from the air is not particularly distinguishable from the real cargo “Ural”. Moreover, with minimal extra work, the 40-barrel package of BM-21 launch tubes can be disassembled into blocks of 20 or even 10 guides and mounted on more compact machines that are easier to mask. In the end, a “counter-battery fire” against such missile terror by searching for and destroying systems with our current resources will give almost nothing. And that’s exactly what the enemy is counting on. He is counting on the fact that politicians, having seen enough of burning city blocks, will put pressure on the military – “Drive the ukrops away from the city!” And the 1st Armed Corps will continue to kill the remnants of their infantry at the Ukrainian fortified areas around Donetsk.
In other sectors of the front, the Russian command does not need such a goading, as it voluntarily drives to slaughter the last remnants of the infantry, no longer very combat-ready due to previous losses. The Russian military has an incredible talent for turning any village with a couple of landings and a pig farm into Verdun, on which their own, not enemy, units are ground. Why? Yes, because “BUSV”, the Combat Charter of the Ground Forces, these people do not open and read almost ever. And more than any “Javelins” and “HIMARS”, more than any “NATO satellite groups” fighting against us is the Combat Charter of our own Ground Forces, on which our valiant command wanted to shit. And ukrops [Ukrainians] – they read it and creatively processed it, taking into account the available new technologies.
In the text about radio communications, I described the main problem of command and control in the Russian army, due to which the army cannot really advance, cannot maneuver, and cannot even fully repel enemy attacks. Nothing larger than the “remnants of a motorized rifle battalion” in the RF Armed Forces can be controlled as a single organism. And, of course, in this situation, the battalion commanders and company commanders of these “remnants” become well-deserved heroes, who, if possible, drag all the shit on their own backs. Although more often, alas, they don’t. And they are buried with their subordinates when, after half a dozen assaults, each organized worse than the previous one, we still capture another piece of land and collect their rotten remains.
From the fact that the Russian army can do nothing except for, bleeding, capture another village while surrendering a district center or an entire region on the other flank, the Russian army made an amazing conclusion – let’s take more villages! And arranged the maximum possible Verduns along the entire front line, including the very infamous Pavlovka in the DPR. And, of course, Bakhmut. How could it be without it? Why not kill the last remnants of combat-ready infantry at it? It’s not possible at all. These fucking bastards need to get positive motives for the news somewhere! Here, we freed another 100 meters of such and such village. And whoever is the first to report on the complete liberation of the village gets an order.
I think that the Ukrainian command later, already in captivity, will give these people the appropriate awards. Because on the eve of the winter offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, it is almost impossible to provide the Armed Forces of Ukraine with some more significant service than killing the remnants of our infantry and the remnants of our tanks. Although no, I’m sorry. We can! It was provided to the hohols by the organizers of mobilization in the Russian Federation, who drove the lion’s share of those mobilized into “rifle regiments” without heavy weapons and artillery, the same state as the regiments of the Donbass “mobiks”. These absolutely uncontrollable due to the lack of proper command personnel and, of course, the lack of communications, units are simply created in order to devour the human resource and do not represent any combat value. They are simply created for the Armed Forces of Ukraine to locate them by the clusters of constantly turned-on cell phones, listen to their analog “Baofengs” radios and strike precisely at them, inflicting strikes in the flanks and rears of their neighbors – the battered during 10 months of the war formations of the regular troops of the Russian Federation and the Republics.
Could these people replenish the staffed personnel units, in which motivated officers and sergeants, military equipment remained? They could. It was possible to eliminate that monstrous patchwork that is the RF Armed Forces, when soldiers of various military units, the National Guard, PMCs, BARS volunteers”, “Akhmads” crowd on the square of one or two kilometers? It could be. But no one did it. The enemy has been rendered a large-scale service, worthy of a military tribunal, which, of course, will not happen.
Is it worth discussing the construction of the “Faberge Line” [Surovikin’s Line]? With shameful videos of how the T-64, at a very low speed, “God forbid the tank is scratched” is trying to “overcome the concrete gouges” and it is almost like a tetrahedron stops it. I can tell a lot of sad things about this “construction of the century” including 250-kg aerial bombs abandoned in forests, without any means for their remote detonation, marked on the maps as “land mines”, including concrete caps placed at the indicated points without any foundation and left after a couple of rains with embrasures below ground level, but this will be another huge text explaining why it is impossible to build fortification lines for people who, in principle, do not understand what, how and why they are doing it. I will reveal a terrible secret – the quality of this “Faberge Line” is purely secondary, because without all the other components of a properly built defense, even correctly, according to science, the built fortified areas can be assaulted without any problems.
It’s a shame to learn from the enemy of our army, yet in the meantime this spring and summer the enemy demonstrated in the Donbas all the necessary components of a successful long-term defense, which sipped a lot of blood of our troops. It suddenly turns out that the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation have problems with these issues, and all potential rudiments of improvements are destroyed at the root. I repeat once again – this level of military incompetence simply does not exist. This is deliberate sabotage, sabotage and betrayal.
The first and main condition for any successful defense is the presence of stable command and control. The Armed Forces of Ukraine ensured this to the maximum, transferring the entire army to closed digital communications and spreading a huge number of repeaters along the front line. The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation do not want to solve their problems with communication. They don’t even want to voice them, because voicing leads to broken careers, confiscation of stolen goods, and prison sentences. All they can offer the troops, who now need to dig into the ground, is wired communication, for which the troops themselves must find both cable and field telephones (there is no discussion of field switches). And, of course, these field lines are being laid… in full accordance with the guidelines for laying temporary field lines. Somewhere just across the field, elsewhere along the trees, elsewhere along the poles. TEMPORARY FUCKING LINES! In the projects of the cyclopean “Faberge Line,” there is no place for normal underground cable communications protected from shelling! Having all the equipment, the materials, the time, all the infantry in positions will still remain without wire communication after five minutes of shelling. Exactly as it was with the Red Army in the summer of 1942 in the breakthrough sector during Operation Blau. But that is only, of course, if the infantry at all manages to find a field cable on its own in order to lay this connection at least somehow, And spare parts for field telephones are sent to the army by volunteers, bought up at flea markets.
In general, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation do not and will not have normal control. In the best case, units of the RF Armed Forces will be able, once in the LPR, to find the owner of this Planet Earth Control Panel and come to him with the words “Help us, Obi-Wan Kenobi!” and a bottle of cognac. And he will help, because a crowd of volunteers works for him, dragging him the necessary consumables at the expense of KCPN and OPSB [volunteer organisations].
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