Armchair Warlord
@ArmchairW • 153,412 subscribers
Weaboo, author and battle theorist. Interactions are not endorsements.
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Today was probably the worst day for the Armed Forces of Ukraine since February 2022. Let's walk through it. The Russians started the day off by destroying two HIMARS launchers at their hide site in Sumy. This has likely ended GMLRS support for the Kursk operation temporarily.
Armchair Warlord3,553,061 views • 2 years ago
A dark theory for the evening. Let's talk about Russian strategy in Ukraine.⬇️ Looking at developments lately, specifically: (1) the Ukrainian casualty leak showing an astronomical 1.7M KIA/MIA; and (2) the Ukrainian collapse north of Pokrovsk - I thought should revisit a dark thought I had a while ago, namely that, "maybe the killing itself is the point of all of this." I've said before that the Russians have fought an extraordinarily clean war in Ukraine, but it should be understood that there is a very legalistic shade on that assessment. They've killed very few civilians, and Ukrainian propagandists are perpetually beclowning themselves trying to pretend that the usual single-digit handful of injured civilians that accompany the latest attack using hundreds of standoff weapons fired into city centers (producing secondary explosions visible from outer space as military targets hidden among civilian infrastructure are destroyed with surgical precision) somehow constitute gEnOCiDe rather than some of the most well-controlled warfighting in the history of the business. There is another and far darker side to Russia's "clean" war, however. Let us consider the fate of the Armed Forces of Ukraine - legal combatants all, whom the Russians can and do target and kill without limit. I mentioned the casualty leak earlier, but I feel this needs to have a line drawn under it - one point seven million personnel killed or missing in action in the AFU, over the course of the war. 1.7 MILLION. Seven or eight percent of Ukraine's prewar population, probably something like a quarter of the entire national cohort of military-aged males, dead or missing. Casualties on the scale of a genocide, sufficient to permanently cripple any postwar Ukrainian nation. Casualties multiple times that which I assessed two years ago as sufficient to shatter the AFU based on the experience of Nazi Germany. This brings me to the Ukrainian collapse north of Pokrovsk two weeks ago, in which a run-of-the-mill Russian attack walked through twenty kilometers of Ukrainian defensive belts and into open country. The Ukrainian propagandists coped by whining about how the single most important front sector for the AFU had somehow "run out of infantry." But did the Russians throw in a mobile reserve to collapse the front and chase the AFU back to the Dniper, despite doubtless knowing full well what was going on? No, they did not - they consolidated in the breach and awaited the inevitable, panicked Ukrainian counterattack, in which they would have the opportunity to destroy Ukraine's remaining elite troops. Which brings me to my conclusion. The Russians have had countless opportunities to make large advances in this war, especially recently - the Ukrainian front line is an absolute shambles and their "drone wall" tactic will falter against any serious attack. So ineffectual is the AFU that very few Russian moves at the front even face serious opposition these days, with most geolocations of Russian advances showing them already established in place and dealing with harassment by kill drones after having seized positions bloodlessly. The Russians have in fact consistently foregone breaking the front and taking swathes of ground in favor of killing the largest possible number of Ukrainian soldiers on the existing front line under the existing attritional combat dynamic. This "tactical directive" held true even during the Battle of Sudzha-Korenevo, fought in prewar Russia. Rather than counterattacking aggressively to evict the AFU, the Russians saw the opportunity to kill gigantic numbers of Ukrainians in a trap the enemy wouldn't be able to extract themselves from for ideological reasons, and they took it. That battle ended up being nine months of hideously lopsided butchery that broke the back of the AFU. All of this makes observing the war more than a little maddening, but it's a consistent pattern of behavior that begs for explanation. So here's my theory. The Russian government has consistently sought to end the war via peace treaty with the existing Ukrainian government, not via regime change, outright conquest, or even killing enough of that government to find a more flexible interlocutor among the Maidanites. Putin apparently wants a treaty with Zelensky. The Russians have also consistently made demands of the Ukrainian government - and its NATO sponsors - that are absolute political nonstarters for the Maidan-era regime and which that regime, by its very nature, simply cannot accept. Russian language rights, Orthodox religious rights, demilitarization, large territorial concessions which would see the AFU surrender vast urban areas without a shot fired. And yet the Russians insist, and they're going to continue killing Ukrainian soldiers at ever-more lopsided ratios until they get their way. Which leads me to the brutal conclusion: Putin doesn't want to see Ukraine conquered. He's never publicly expressed any desire for that. The consistent Russian policy is instead to see Ukraine - a "free" and "independent" Ukraine, having come to this impasse of its own sovereign will - utterly humiliated. Putin wants to make Zelensky put on a suit, come groveling to the Kremlin, and sign a treaty that will see the Maidanite government surrender its arms, disgorge huge amounts of territory, and reverse every single anti-Russian policy position it ever had. Ukrainian nationalism will be discredited overnight by the hands of those very nationalists, and the economically irrelevant, demographically shattered rump state will be sucked back into Russia's political orbit in a matter of days. So of course the Russians are only advancing in the most leisurely way possible. Their goal is to place the Ukrainian government into a militarily untenable situation so as to force a flamboyantly humiliating peace treaty upon them that includes large territorial concessions beyond the line of control - the ultimate Ukrainian taboo - so as to discredit Ukrainian nationalism by the hands of the very ultranationalists who took their nation to war in the first place.
Armchair Warlord515,777 views • 1 year ago
Nothing to see here, just the Ukrainians rocketing a random intersection in Belgorod to kill and terrorize civilians. If the Russians did this we'd have a week of international condemnation, sob-story news articles and deranged posts on this website. Ukraine? Yawn.
Armchair Warlord315,085 views • 2 years ago
Still boggles my mind that the Ukrainians made an actual movie trailer for their 2023 counteroffensive. The arrogance was unbelievable. These people thought they could not lose, and their main concern was selling tickets to what was to be the geopolitical event of the year.
Armchair Warlord216,142 views • 1 year ago
ATACMS is such a fearsome weapon system that the Ukrainians have to (checks notes) fire so many of them at single targets that they literally overwhelm the simultaneous engagement capability of Russian air defense systems. Hair-raising but not remotely sustainable.
Armchair Warlord299,870 views • 2 years ago
8. There are no Nazis in Ukraine! Oh come on. Ukraine's "founding fathers," Bandera, the OUN/UPA, the Galician SS? Nazis and Nazi collaborators, many implicated in the worst crimes of the Holocaust. Ukraine's most prestigious military units? Packed to the rafters with Nazis.
Armchair Warlord215,412 views • 1 year ago
Cool argument bro. I raise you five exploding Patriot batteries on video.
Armchair Warlord154,287 views • 1 year ago
General Gerasimov recently announced the village of Borovaya had been taken by the Russian Army. This set off a storm of accusations that he was lying, because no mapper had Russian troops anywhere near the town in force. Today the MoD posted proof they seized it weeks ago.⬇️ You can watch the video for yourself, it's attached. Notice that the leaves are off the trees, indicating that the assault went in and the Russians cleared the town during the March-April timeframe. Thus as far as the Russian Army was concerned, their holding Borovaya was old news and they were presumably quite surprised to see frenzied Telegram blowback on the announcement. No "serious" mapper as of yesterday had Russian troops anywhere near the town - most had their front line approximately five kilometers to the north. And as I pointed out earlier, this seizure was actually old news to the point the Russians felt comfortable announcing it officially. By now the true Russian front line is likely some ways south of the town and the area is secure. There's an old saying in America, "The people who know aren't talking, and the people who talk don't know." The Russians have always had good operational security in general, and earlier this year one of the only side-channels that voenkor commentators used to communicate with their few actual front-line sources - pirated Starlink terminals - were bricked.* Cut off from the front line, Russian civilian commentators fell back on analyzing Ukrainian propaganda (something they've always heavily relied upon) at the exact moment the Ukrainians also seem to have tightened their own OPSEC and become institutionally aware of the role their own propaganda was playing in mapping Russian advances for the public and refuting their narrative of constant success. * This is why broenkors have been screaming and rending their garments about Starlink access. It's their leak vector. The Russian Army never officially used pirated terminals to any significant extent and may have in fact intentionally triggered the crackdown to choke off an OPSEC risk by putting a couple pirated terminals on cruise drones. I specifically believe that the Ukrainians have imposed media and even propaganda blackouts in two sectors - Kupyansk and Zaporozhie - in which they attempted to launch counteroffensives in the last six months. Both of those attacks failed, but the blackouts seemingly remain to avoid embarrassment - and given the Russians only post front updates sporadically and in accordance with their own OPSEC requirements, this means that the front lines in both sectors probably bear little resemblance to the war mappers' current traces. Given that all of this also happened in the February-April timeframe this further suggests that the Russian "pause" in March of this year was simply a reporting artifact and that they're sitting on significant unrecognized gains. Which the Russian MoD has in fact reported on two occasions now during high-level updates, but the mappers refused to believe them!
Armchair Warlord37,588 views • 4 months ago
The Ukrainians launched a major attack on Crimea last night, probably trying to disrupt the "vibe" for Victory Day next week. It was a fiasco. 170 attack drones shot down, a dozen heavy missiles, 16+ sea drones. No noteworthy damage - the Russians maybe lost one fighter jet.⬇️ This was their first attempt to break out of where they've been bottled up in the northwest Black Sea in several months - judging by the annihilation of the attack force I expect we won't be seeing much of them for a while. They've clearly managed to regenerate some sea drone capability since the death of much of the Black Sea Attack Network's personnel early last year, but as you can see in the attached video the Russians have also been working on their game and had little trouble destroying these craft with AT drones among other weapons. I say "maybe" on the fighter jet because although the loss of an Su-30SM to a drone-launched antiaircraft missile was widely reported, the video provided by the Ukrainians shows nothing definitive and does not match the broenkor narrative that the crew ejected and was subsequently rescued. As such the footage is possibly old - there was an aircraft of the same type shot down by MANPAD while attacking Ukrainian commando boats last year, with the crew lost. The broenkors may be "rushing to be wrong" yet again.
Armchair Warlord85,759 views • 1 year ago
