One year ago, the Kerch Strait Bridge was hit for the second time, following the October 2022 attack. Russians tried to repair that damage, but the results seem to be…subpar.
šš„ Kerch Bridge: As a result of the damage received, the structural elements of the bridge are degrading, which leads to the crumbling of its individual parts, – ATESH pic.twitter.com/99WgC1HaYX
— MAKS 24 šŗš¦š (@Maks_NAFO_FELLA) September 8, 2024
I’m not an expert in bridge structural integrity, but that warping/sagging/bending doesn’t look good. In a video game, that looks like a structure you’d get once chance to jump off of before it collapses into the sea.
Pro-Ukrainian resistance groups are saying that it’s not long for this world.
The Kerch Bridge, a strategically vital structure used by Russia to connect with occupied Crimea, is in need of urgent repairs and cannot survive structural damage, according to a Crimean-based pro-Ukrainian group.
“The Kerch Bridge is living its final days,” Atesh, a pro-Kyiv military partisan group of Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars, said in a post on Telegram on Sunday.
A partisan source, so take it with a grain of salt.
Denys Davydov covers the bridge damage in the first minute of this video:
From the limited information we have to go on, this analysis seems correct.
It can be hard to determine the truth of things coming out of a warzone, even with Russia’s notoriously poor operational security. But absent photo manipulation (which we can’t rule out without more firsthand evidence), it does appear that that the Kerch Strait Bridge is clearly slumping and may even be unusable, which will severely complicate Russian logistics in southern Ukraine.
Tags: bridges, Crimea, Denys Davydov, Foreign Policy, Kerch Strait Bridge, logistics, Military, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, Ukraine, video
The Kerch Strait bridge is one of three rail lines servicing Crimea. Donetsk and Luhansk have an abundance of rail lines connecting to Russia due to the predominance of the metallurgical and agricultural industries. None of them have been destroyed.
Besides, we have been reliably informed that the Russian logistics system is truck-based, not rail-based.
The focus on the Kerch Strait bridge seems to be an attempt to goad Putin, rather than a real strategic effort.
This is sarcasm, right…? Right…?
“Besides, we have been reliably informed that the Russian logistics system is truck-based, not rail-based.”
Because if it isn’t, then this is probably the most erroneous statement ever made. Russian military logistics is rail-based to a degree that boggles the mind of outsiders, particularly given the rest of the shambolic mess that is “Russian logistics”.
There are reasons that you see them using Chinese golf carts and the stereotypical “bread loaf” vans for hauling ammunition that last mile: It’s because they don’t have the trucks, and never have. Even during the Cold War, Russians didn’t have enough trucks and couldn’t keep their fleets going for most of it. They had to strip a lot of the logistics enablers out of Eastern Europe in order to do Afghanistan, and that was a reason our intel guys heaved a sigh of relief.
Saying that Russian logistics are “truck-based” is delusional as all hell, if you’re serious. Which I can’t even tell, any more…
Reviewing all the “new” material out there this morning, I gotta say that the supposed “collapse” of the Kerch bridge is pretty questionable. The images you see there of the damage catwalks and railings could date back to the original attack on the bridge by the truck bomb, or they could simply be unrepaired damage from that. Looking at the image metadata I can access tells us nothing about provenance, so until I see something else that confirms this is new/current…?
I don’t think it really means a damn thing, sadly.
As to the status of the bridge? You can tell a lot from the way they’re using it, and as far as I can tell, they’re still under weight restrictions on the rail component due to the return they made towards the railcar ferrys that the Ukrainians have been blowing up. That is a telling fact, and elimination of those ferrys is a significant logistic degradation for the Russians.
The other thing to look at here is that those rail lines going across the land corridor have to be fed with electricity for the Russian electric traction engines to even work. That’s not a trivial issue; diesel locomotives in the Russian system are few and far between, and the electrical infrastructure to keep things running between reliably Russian territory and where they need the goods is something that the Ukrainians can easily attack and damage.
You have to look at Russian logistics and wonder “What the hell were they thinking…?”, because while it is fairly robust in some senses, it’s also incredibly brittle. Friend of mine used to do targeting during the Cold War, and one of the things that he thought few had really “gotten” about the Soviet system was just how heavily they relied on electric traction in the rail system. If you took out something like six regional distribution centers for the electrical network, you could shut down 80-90% of the Soviet system west of the Urals, according to him… And, that meant “No supplies” after the war kicked off.
Which was one reason the analysts thought that the intent was for a full-bore “Come as you are…” war, one that would use only what was on hand in Central Europe.
I’ve no idea why the hell they’d design rail-reliant logistics, and then go for full electrification instead of the distributed diesel-electric situation the US freight network uses. Given how much the Soviet Union had in the way of petrochemical resources, the electrification thing just seems really poorly thought-out, from a war-making standpoint.
Hell, if I were setting out to design a really robust and “anti-fragile” logistics system, I’d specify diesel-electric, and make damn sure that I could use those massive electrical generators on rails as replacement/backups for electrical generation that I could almost certainly plan on losing. The Soviets didn’t do that, which just goes to show you that they weren’t all that foresightful…
I’m actually surprised that the Ukrainians haven’t gone after more of the railway electrical infrastructure, because it’s sure as hell a major vulnerability: Most of the big electrical switching yards are out in the open, just like all the newly-constructed oil storage facilities. Putin’s Russian Federation stopped putting things underground the way some of the Soviet facilities were… Which turns out to have been a bit of a mistake.
There are before photos that show the railings strait after the earlier attacks, indicating that the rippling/warping shown is more recent.
Either way, Lawrence, the damage to the catwalks and railings is immaterial to the functionality of the bridge components that actually matter logistically.
Taking out a bridge like this is something you just don’t do with casual ease. Unless you’ve got the thing honeycombed with prechambers the way the West Germans had most of their equivalent infrastructure, a conventional demolition on a bridge like this could take weeks to prepare and a literal trainload of explosives, depending on how much “disable” you wanted. There are reasons why many of the really big bridges in West Germany were slated for the attentions of an ADM team, and that was down to the length of time and materials required for demo. Even going after these targets with things like bombers and artillery ain’t all that easy, which is why I laugh every time I hear people talking about taking down a span or two with an ATACMs.
Really large bridge demo ain’t easy. Even with all the time in the world and everything done to prepare it, the Germans failed to blow the bridge at Remagen. The story of just how the Ukrainians managed their attack on the Kerch bridge is one of either incredible luck, or really amazing planning, in order for them to get that truck to blow up at just the right point to set that train of fuel on fire and do all the fire damage to the rail component of the bridge.
As someone who used to do these sorts of things for a living, I’m here to say that this “new stuff” simply doesn’t have enough information or provenance to tell us much. You want to know what is really going on with that bridge, then we need to know whatever the engineers who surveyed it after the fire and blast found, in terms of damage to spans from heat and all the rest of it. The fact that they put the rail ferrys back into operation again is a telling one; I think that the damage done to the rail half of this thing was more extensive than they’ve admitted, and the freight-carrying capacity is seriously degraded.
Of course, it’s Russia; there’s no telling what the real deal is, until it happens. These are the same people who managed to turn a hydraulic system into a freakin’ massive bomb that took out an entire dam’s powerhouse in an incredible display of what I can only describe as an “anti-safety” culture. If a Russian engineer has determined that the bridge can’t carry a full load, well… Odds are, things are even worse than anyone rational would think.
āTaking out a bridge like this is something you just donāt do with casual ease. Unless youāve got the thing honeycombed with prechambers the way the West Germans had most of their equivalent infrastructure, a conventional demolition on a bridge like this could take weeks to prepare and a literal trainload of explosives, depending on how much ādisableā you wanted.ā
āEven with all the time in the world and everything done to prepare it, the Germans failed to blow the bridge at Remagen.ā
This WWI era bridge was located in close proximity to the Ruhr Valley armament factories. It would be reasonable to assume that the engineers had ready access to high-grade Bofors steel when the project was being done. After the war, France occupied this very area, which gave them control of the bridge. French engineers subsequently filled in the bridgeās demolition chambers with cement, which increased its resistance to explosive damages.
Even assuming the use of high-grade steel in constructing the Kersch bridge, the well-known culture of corruption surrounding Russian military projects, as exemplified by the recent arrest of Russian Generals, gives rise to suspicions that the concrete pylons were fabricated with tofu dreg.
Its collapse would come as no surprise.
The overall point, Malthus, is that we can’t tell much from this remove without somewhat more information than some candid photos of the catwalks and railings.
Hell, I’ll be brutally honest: I don’t think I would want to be the guy doing the bridge classification on this thing unless I had the time and access to do all the necessary lab work. I too rather doubt that it was built to the highest standards in the first place, but I don’t see anywhere near enough info in anything to say anything conclusively.
You can, however, infer a hell of a lot from how much traffic they’re putting over it. Or, how little… Given the usual Russian insouciance towards safety, I’d say it has to be pretty bad for them to have cut back as much as they have on the rail traffic.
You may see some spectacular things happen when and if they decide to withdraw forces from Crimea.
ā[W]e have been reliably informed that the Russian logistics system is truck-based, not rail-based.ā
You frequently make observations about the war on Ukraine which are reasonable enough, even though your interpretation of these events differs significantly from my own.
You most recent observation however is strikingly obtuse. It reeks of desperation. The Great Railroad Carriage Cassette Bearings debate is sufficient evidence that you know beyond doubt that railway rolling stock is critical to Russian war efforts. You have vigorously pushed the narrative that Russian industrial competence and capacity is equal to the challenge posed by SKFās bearing boycott.
Your ātruck-based logisticsā is a pathetic straw man argument that a child could refute. The damage done to your ethos today will not be readily repaired.
Trent Telenko did a thread after Ukrainian missiles struck the Kerch Bridge. Based on video of the attack and the results on the bridge, he determined that some of the missiles only partially detonated, and their fuel splashed onto the concrete of the bridge without igniting. The fuel has a component that soaks into concrete like a sponge and slowly degrades it, causing it to lose structural strength. There is no chemical counter for this effect, so the concrete would have to be replaced. It was not. Telenko’s position was that the concrete members of the bridge would degrade and eventually collapse. Not quickly but within a few years.
āBesides, we have been reliably informed that the Russian logistics system is truck-based, not rail-based.ā
This was just a paraphrase of your half assed comment in a recent post comparing superior Ukrainian containerized logistics with primitive Russian truck-based logistics.
Jeff, can you provide a cite for that? I’ve been unable to find anything from Telenko detailing what you are saying, and I can’t remember ever seeing it, either.
There are rocket fuels that can damage concrete, like Chlorine trifluoride (ClF3). I cannot find any examples of Ukrainian tactical rockets using this stuff, however… Nearly everyone has transitioned to solid fuels, and there are hardly any liquid-fuel rockets still in use, anywhere.
In short, I’m just not tracking with you, here.
Kirk,
I was going from memory, so I probably got a few details wrong, but the gist of what I said was accurate. This is the thread from Trent Telenko in which he describes the impact of the missile itself as well as the effects of the propellant:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1693054675870716028.html
[…] (ALMOST) A BRIDGE TO NOWHERE: Kerch Crumples. […]
Undershot imagess of the Kerch Strait railroad bridge show the adjacent walkway detours outboard over every pier so descent ladders for inspection can bypass the cap sills on top of the piers.
The idiot Telenko has misinterpreted his photos by missing this three dimensional effect, which falsely appear to be a dip in the two dimensional views he presents. You are alternately looking at the walkway close to the rails (between piers) and outboard, beyond the edges of the cap sills.
By the way, the TEA he is so giddy about is actually used in cement production. The only 5V28 rocket fuel constituent deleterious to concrete is the trace amounts of hydrogen fluoride used to passivated the nitric acid tanks.
You guys all know more about logistics and armaments than me but I have been going to Ukraine since 2007 and lived there in 2018-19. Just by observation, have you ever seen the concrete mixes they use? Poor powder/water ratio. I would not trust the concrete supports. In a salt water environment? Everything made of concrete is degraded. Just sayin…
You should have left it at,”You’re no expert.”
Those images are not recent, they are from just after the attack 2 years ago…. but Russia is two weeks from collapsing for the third year in a row!
I so old I can remember NATO (aka US) blowing up all the Serbian bridges over the Danube. I think they were all rebuilt rather quickly.
I think that the projections made by Telenko about how much rocket fuel would be left to damage the concrete after an impact/warhead detonation from that re-purposed air defense missile are somewhat… Optimistic.
I’d also point out that it’s not certain that those specific missiles were even used.
The destruction of a large bridge target like the Kerch bridge isn’t a trivial undertaking. I’m not even sure that the assessment of what its current condition is can be made from what limited information is publicly available. And, again… About all you can really infer anything from is what the Russians are actually putting over the bridge in terms of load and use, and then work backwards from the fact that their conception of what constitutes “risk” ain’t what you’d find taught in most Western engineering training. If they’ve drastically reduced traffic on any of the spans, then you can reliably infer that something is severely damaged…
Honestly don’t know what is going to transpire in the next few years vis-a-vis Russia and its half-ass Federation. The more resources they pour into trying to conquer Ukraine, the more damage they’re doing to themselves on multiple levels, and it will eventually catch up with them. They still haven’t really recovered from WWII, in a lot of very significant ways. The leadership is still delusional in thinking that they command endless manpower, and I’d wager that the majority of the people running Russia from their perches in Moscow really have no idea at all what “reality” is out in the villages and towns that are the underpinning reality of “modern” Russian Federation life. It ain’t what’s going on in Moscow and St. Petersburg that matters in terms of demography and actually keeping Russia going as a nation-state proposition: It’s all those little villages and towns out in the hinterlands that still don’t have indoor plumbing, and whose healthcare systems are a damn joke. It’s all those vast ruins of factory towns that produce nothing but contaminated runoff, these days, poisoning the people around them.
As someone once said, “…there’s a lot of ruin in a country…” The problem for today’s Russian Federation is that there are hard stops to all that “ruin”, and they’re going to be rapidly running up against them.
Whatever happens in Ukraine in the immediate future, historians will be making the precise same assessment here in a few years that they make about Afghanistan: That Ukraine was a bit of epic and totally unnecessary stupidity that led to the usual “…and, then… Things got worse.” for Russia. Whatever comes out of it, it ain’t going to be anything that accrues to the general benefit of Russian Federation citizens.
Then again, that’s not the point of the Russian Federation, is it? The apparent point of the Russian Federation is for oligarchs to get rich, go West, and for former regime officials from Soviet times to get their jollies playing totalitarian dictator. Anything else simply isn’t on the table.
A couple of points about the state of russian rail systems.
The Russians do have about 14-15% available diesel electric locomotives. They’re only usable in the southern part of the country year ’round due to the problems with diesel anything in polar climates, ie the fuel has to be kept warm or it gels and thickens. The same issue
Then there’s the point that the diesel locos are heavier than straight electrics and marginal bridges may not be usable for that reason.
āThis was just a paraphrase of your half assed comment in a recent post comparing superior Ukrainian containerized logistics with primitive Russian truck-based logistics.ā
No, this was just a lame straw man argument. I never posited the efficacy of Russian road transport. Outside Moscow and St Petersburg, their roads are largely impassable.
If you want to see āhalf-assedā look at Putlerās strategy that relies on labor intensive methods of loading/offloading freight cars while sacrificing this same untrained labor pool on the front lines. Manpower is not inexhaustible. Something has to give somewhere.
Whoās going to operate the armament (and railway cassette bearings!) factories when your brute muscle is engaged in stockpiling ammo dumps for the Ukrainians to precisely target?
Bad strategy coupled to rapidly deteriorating logistics signals defeat for your boy Putler.
Kirk,
I report. You deride.
It may not be that Russia still has not recovered from WW2 so much that Russia still has not learned from WW2. The Red Army was completely mechanized by 1945 thanks to us sending them 6- and 8-axle trucks. The Wehrmachtās Heer was at most 50 percent mechanized. Russia did not keep its mechanized logistics but went back to being almost completely dependent on rail. Moreover, what mechanization the Russians did have at the beginning of the Ukraine war was very basic. The US has systematized the packaging and handling of things like ammunition, fuel, and other supplies. Russia relies on human labor, which is much more slow and takes away from the time troops could be training or deploying.
One of the things a lot of people fail to recognize about Russia and Russian endeavors is the massive competence deficit they operate under.
The forced-draft industrialization that Stalin started and which the Holodomor paid for was something that should have, in the view of the people doing it, leapfrogged the Soviet Union to first-line industrial capacity. In reality? They still haven’t overcome their dependence on foreign technical expertise. When they went to revive their industry after the fall of the Soviet Union, did the Russian Federation go to internal sources for building new factories and buying new machine tools in order to modernize? Nope; they went to outsiders, yet again. This isn’t new: The basis for the Russian Imperial small arms industry was purchased lock, stock, and barrel from American and British industrial sources, and they never achieved anything like the ability to produce their own industrial plant for things like automotive or trucking products. All of that was bought in from overseas.
This is important because it is a leading indicator of how shallow an economy the Russian Federation actually possesses. Just about everything is imported; they have no capacity to produce their own machinery or factories.
@Jeff Cox,
There’s a basic philosophic difference between the West and Russia. In the West, the most expensive thing in a military is the personnel; for Russia, that’s the cheapest. They don’t buy Materials Handling Equipment (MHE) the way we do because that gear would wind up stolen/sold off. The conscripts they rely on instead are what they erroneously think of as an endless cornucopia of manpower. It’s not just the trucks; it’s the full range of logistics items like the telehandlers and everything else.
Case in point: I ran a support platoon in a wheeled combat engineer battalion of the US Army. I had ten HEMTT trucks and a telehandler. Each of those trucks had a crane; I could roll up on a logistics point, load the trucks with just the operators, and be on my merry way. My Class IV yard was where the telehandler lived, and it was a key enabler for loading and organizing all the tons of material we had coming in for distribution. I had like ten-twelve guys working for me to run all of that, including drivers.
The equivalent Soviet/Russian operation would have required a platoon/company’s worth of troops to run, and they’d have been doing everything by hand. That’s an entire company of soldiers removed from combat to support routine logistics operations. Multiply that out across the entire force, and you soon see that the “efficiencies” of the Soviet system are illusory; penny-wise, and personnel foolish.
The Russian Federation has nickel-and-dimed itself to death before the troops ever even get to the front lines; the inefficiencies are there, and sadly, I suspect they’re there mostly because they can’t do anything else due to corruption; the MHE would be stolen almost immediately. And, without the opportunities for graft that those massive numbers of troops dedicated to logistics imply, what’s the point in it all for the Russian officer class…?
The really amazing thing is to go back and look at things like Pushkin and Tolstoy, and recognizing that all of the current problems on display are a part of a historical continuity going back beyond the Tsars…
[…] considers revoking visas of foreign officials who sponsor Cuban slave doctor program BattleSwarm: Kerch Crumples, also, Venezuelan Gang Takes Over El Paso Hotel Behind The Black: Polaris Dawn successfully reaches […]
Kirk,
Except for, say, the Civil War, the US has always placed a high priority on protecting its soldiers, sailors, aviators, and Marines. Democracies (including democratic republics such as the US) in general do a much better job of protecting their service people than non-democracies, and few democracies can match the US in that regard. Remember in the Pacific War when we lamented early on how our Warhawks and Wildcats could not match the Japanese Zero. Then we figured out the reason why as that our planes were heavier, tougher, more armored, self-sealing fuel tanks, etc. And we put those advantages to work. Japan has the best combat pilots in the world at the start of the war, but its refusal to protect those pilots cost them those pilots. And the replacements were not as good. Call Lanchester.
With the Red Army, we hear about how great the T-34 was, but Iāve read in a few places that the wartime version was actually a POS. We sent Shermans to the USSR as part of Lend Lease and Russian tank crews actually preferred the Sherman because of its greater survivability. We did human wave assaults in the Civil War (like at Fredericksburg) but we really havenāt donāt them since. Russia still does human wave assaults.
“āBesides, we have been reliably informed that the Russian logistics system is truck-based, not rail-based.ā
Because if it isnāt, then this is probably the most erroneous statement ever made. Russian military logistics is rail-based to a degree that boggles the mind of outsiders, particularly given the rest of the shambolic mess that is āRussian logisticsā.”
Comment from “Followup: Timelapse Of Kursk Incursion”
“Oh, and making them [the Russians] expend even more of their truck-based logistics to support that? Gravy. Pure gravy….”
@Jeff Cox,
I suspect that the abiding lesson to be taken by the survivors of these next few decades will be that the regime/elite that fails to take care of its people will go down to destruction.
Every single failure is going to cost them their positions in their societies, whether it’s the profligate manpower destruction of the Russians or the insouciant treatment of women in China and India. Our own elites seeming determination to replace their own kind as the primary ethnic group in their own nation with Third-World pliant types will backfire, and I suspect that the end state of that will look like Pol Pot on steroids. Possession of an Ivy League diploma may wind up being a death sentence in coming years, as the masses figure out and recognize what is going on.
The elites truly are clueless. They’ve no idea at all how things really work, and none of them care to learn for themselves. Klaus Schwab thinks he’s the lord of creation, but the fact is, he’s the tip of a pyramid that he’s been steadily hollowing out all the years of his life. When the only thing left is the shell of that pyramid, life is going to get really rough for these types, really quickly. It’ll be about like the nobility realizing, there at the end of the Black Death, that those “cheap and cheerful” expendable peasants don’t have to hang around the manor and kowtow to the nobility. They can, in fact, walk off and leave the nobility to starve…
@10X25mm,
You are, as usual, an idiot. The very limited “truck-based logistics” I was talking about was that “last mile” element that bridges the distance between the railheads and the front line trace, where the munitions and supplies actually have to get to do any good.
The lack of actual Kamaz trucks and their replacement by Chinese golf carts/motorcycles/vans is a fact; the number of those littering the ground all across the combat zone tells us this.
For those with better reading comprehension skills than our sharpshooting illiterate here, I offer this example:
https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1832713300519317596
Note the progression, there: The mortar element the author of that translated Russian piece describes exactly what I’m talking about, the destruction of that “last mile” transportation system. No trucks, no golf carts, no motorcycles… Until they’re reduced to man-packing the mortar rounds they need to survive, with the expected outcome. This is what I was talking about, when I said that their truck-based logistics were being destroyed; it’s not that they’re shipping things from the factory to the front on those trucks, it’s that they can’t get them from railheads to the troops at the pointy end of things.
https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1834124131396206746
That’s another indicator, right there: The fact that these rear-area admin vehicles are being pressed into front-line service to transport manpower and supplies shows how desperate the Russian Federation has gotten. They don’t have the actual military trucks, any more, to risk at the front line where the drones can get at them. The bukhanka littering the front-line trace are not signs of success or victory; they’re signs of a breakdown in logistics and the destruction of actual purpose-built logistics assets. You don’t cram mortar rounds and artillery projectiles into something like those things to run to your batteries unless you’re in screaming need of that ammo, and don’t have anything else to do it with.
I ain’t going to be surprised when they start showing up with horses and panje carts the way they did in WWII.
There appears to be a straightforward historic reason for Soviet/Russian electrically powered trains. In the Russian Civil War both sides made use of coal powered armored trains to project power across their huge roadless landmass. By going largely electric, it became simple to prevent anyone from repeating this tactic against the central government, as it is fairly easy to cut off electricity to paralyze rail lines. Never underestimate the paranoia of tyrants who shot their way into power.
“You are, as usual, an idiot. The very limited ātruck-based logisticsā I was talking about was that ālast mileā element that bridges the distance between the railheads and the front line trace, where the munitions and supplies actually have to get to do any good.”
This was only your most recent comment decrying Russia’s “truck-based logistics”. You have made this allegation at least twice before. None of these comments mentioned or alluded to “last mile” logistics. All of them are simply wrong. This most recent comment of yours even goes on to suggest that the Russians are using “Chinese golf carts/motorcycles/vans”, an inherent contradiction with your newly conjured last mile truck statement.
The Ukrainians themselves claim that the Russians are outfiring their artillery by 5-to-1. Other observers claim the Russian artillery is outfiring the Ukrainians 10-to-1. Regardless of the actual superiority, the decrepit Russian logistical system has to be outdelivering the wonderful Ukrainian logistical system by at least 5-to-1.
In relatively static warfare, artillery shells and propellant is the overwhelming majority of supplies needed by front line troops – both by weight and volume. The Russian logistical system has demonstrated that it can deliver, even across black soil. Moving heavy loads across black soil – directly or on unimproved roads across black soil – is extremely challenging. Why all of the NATO super tanks have been destroyed by the Russians after they became immobilized.
If you want to defeat the Russians, you need to start with accurate assessments of relative strengths and weaknesses of the combatants. You have made no such effort.
“If you want to see āhalf-assedā look at Putlerās strategy that relies on labor intensive methods of loading/offloading freight cars while sacrificing this same untrained labor pool on the front lines. Manpower is not inexhaustible. Something has to give somewhere.”
See my previous comment. The Russian logistical system is outdelivering the Ukrainian logistical system by at least 5-to-1.
On another note: The Russians and the Ukrainians just traded prisoners in two swaps. The Russians got back all of the 152 prisoners the Ukrainians captured when they attacked Kursk Oblast, almost all of whom were FSB border guards (not actual combat troops). The Russians still hold over 6,000 Ukrainian prisoners, most of whom refuse to be repatriated.
152 is not the 3,000 Russian prisoners you claimed that the Ukrainians bagged during their Kursk offensive in your comment to a previous post.
10X25mm again goes above and beyond, in his work to demonstrate his own obtuseness and generalized stupidity.
Point the first: The Russians have both rail and truck logistics: The vast majority of their stuff is rail; the trucks are last mile affairs, meant to get things from the railheads to where they need to be.
As such, the apparent assumption that our dearly beloved dolt here makes that speaking of “truck-based logistics” means, somehow, that the Russians have trucks driving back to the factories in the Urals and then driving back to the front with munitions. Which ain’t happening, and never has.
You run into this idiocy with people that have never worked in that world, and who have zero understanding of how it all works. The US Army has enough trucks that they could probably re-enact the Red Ball Express and get all the pre-positioned stocks from the Netherlands into central Germany simply moving trucks. They don’t necessarily need the Bundesbahn, though it is nice to be able to do that and save wear-and-tear. That kind of mobility and adaptability simply isn’t on for the Russians, something we’re going to be seeing here in the next few weeks. Given the way their counterattack in Kursk is going, it’s my guess that the next rasputitsiya season is going to be murder on their forces throughout all theaters, and from there? No idea. It’s going to be difficult to extract them, that’s for damn sure.
For those needing it spelled out: Rail is the arteries and veins of logistics for the Russian military. Their trucking is basically the capillaries, and without their tactical trucks, they’ve had to resort to all sorts of expedients like golf carts and bukhanka “bread-loaf” vans. The use of these things across the front-line trace is an indicator of a general collapse and the destruction of their actual tactical truck fleet, most of which is now so much scrap iron. Don’t look for victory by Russia any time soon… If ever.
Maybe a simple equation can help you understand:
Russian logistics > 5x Ukrainian logistics.