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Ukraine Invasion Day 250: Russia's conventional military operations will continue into 2023 [1]
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Date: 2022-10-30
The Ukrainian Air Force has chosen a group of pilots that can move to the US & start training on U.S. planes (F-16 & F-15). Meanwhile, some analysts write on the increased importance of winter weather in the Russian strategy against reports on the limits of training conscripts.
..A Moscow resident who was called up under Putin’s draft last month said Colonel General Alexander Lapin had personally pulled out a pistol and held it to the head of a commander overseeing drafted troops who’d retreated in Luhansk, threatening to shoot if the unit did not return to the frontline, Sota reported Wednesday.
And amid a humiliating retreat from northern Kharkiv last month, a volunteer fighting for Ukraine in the region who spoke to The Daily Beast on the condition of anonymity said his fellow volunteers and Ukrainian troops had found several dead Russian commanders with gunshot wounds to the back of their heads after top Russian military brass gave an order to gun down any fleeing troops.
While Russia has bolstered forces with thousands of newly drafted soldiers and prison inmates recruited by the Wagner Group, it would seem those reinforcements have only added to the dysfunction among the ranks.
The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reported earlier this month that Russian inmates freed from prison to fight regularly “leave their units and try to return to Russian territory” after receiving their weapons. While the inmates are enticed by promises of a pardon, Putin crony Yevgeny Prighozin, the man behind the Wagner Group's prisoner-recruitment scheme, is said to have privately told the Russian president that “for the majority of inmates joining Wagner, it’s not a reprieve but a death sentence,” according to Yellow Folder, a Telegram channel ostensibly run by former members of Russia’s Federal Protective Services.
www.thedailybeast.com/...
x Source: General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine operational information at 18:00 on 30 October 2022 pic.twitter.com/YpN5nMx7JQ — Michael MacKay (@mhmck) October 30, 2022
x In the second clip we can see a USV being targeted by a Russian fire from ships, motor boats and even helicopters. The damage dealt to the ships is yet to be assessed since no aftermath photos are available. pic.twitter.com/TTSzEncg92 — 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) October 29, 2022
Weather offers another likely periodization of Russian efforts that coincides well with the force-generation timelines discussed above. Fall in Ukraine is generally wet and muddy but not usually so bad as to make mechanized offensives impossible. Winter, on the other hand, is usually the best season for mechanized warfare in Ukraine. Ukrainian land is among the most fertile on earth in part because of the dense network of rivers and streams that irrigate it. That network also breaks up the land and can inhibit mechanized advances by canalizing them along roads (although both Russian and Ukrainian troops are, in principle, trained and equipped to operate on this terrain in any season, Ukrainian troops have been far more successful, in general, in doing so.) When the ground freezes hard, however, most of the streams and some of the rivers also freeze, greatly facilitating cross-country mechanized advances. Spring is the nightmare season for fighting in Ukraine. The thaw swells rivers and streams and turns fields into seas of mud. Mechanized warfare in the spring muddy season is extremely difficult (although, again, not impossible for forces like Ukraine’s and, theoretically, Russia’s, that are properly equipped and trained for it).
www.understandingwar.org/...
x This is Liubov Plaksiuk. She is 29, a history teacher, and a mother. In 2016, she joined the Ukrainian Army and became the first woman to head an artillery unit.
Here she stands on the ruins of Russian military equipment that her unit destroyed.
📷 Kostiantyn & Vlada Liberov pic.twitter.com/oFstYbQ0b4 — Euromaidan Press (@EuromaidanPress) October 30, 2022
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia resumed its blockade of Ukrainian ports on Sunday, cutting off urgently needed grain exports to hungry parts of the world in what U.S. President Joe Biden called a “really outrageous” act.
Biden warned that global hunger could increase because of Russia’s suspension of a U.N.-brokered deal to allow safe passage of ships carrying grain from Ukraine, one of the world’s breadbaskets.
“It’s really outrageous,” Biden said Saturday in Wilmington, Delaware. “There’s no merit to what they’re doing. The U.N. negotiated that deal and that should be the end of it.”
Biden spoke hours after Russia announced it would immediately halt participation in the grain deal, alleging that Ukraine staged a drone attack Saturday against Russia’s Black Sea Fleet off the coast of occupied Crimea. Ukraine has denied the attack, saying that Russia mishandled its own weapons.
Ukraine’s Infrastructure Ministry reported Sunday that 218 ships involved in grain exports have been blocked — 22 loaded and stuck at ports, 95 loaded and departed from ports, and 101 awaiting inspections.
One of the blocked ships, carrying 40,000 tons of wheat for Ethiopia under a U.N. aid program, could not leave Ukraine on Sunday as a result of Russia’s “blockage of the grain corridor,” Oleksandr Kubrakov, Ukraine’s minister of infrastructure, said on Twitter. The ship, Ikaria Angel, was stuck in the Black Sea port of Chornomorsk.
apnews.com/...
x Wheat futures surged after Russia pulled out of an agreement to allow grain exports from Ukraine through the Black Sea, a deal seen critical for easing tight world supplies and controlling global food costs
https://t.co/pwiTn034Ve — Bloomberg (@business) October 31, 2022
x Putin is not weaponizing food. He’s weaponizing starvation. — Frida Ghitis (@FridaGhitis) October 31, 2022
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