Parade of captured tanks organized by the Armed Forces of Ukraine on May 9/Photo from Facebook by Ivan Kirichevsky All these scares in the style of “now the Russian Federation will announce total mobilization and still crush us with its mass.”
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“Power” and “strength” quickly ended
Everything that the Russians really could, they already collapsed on us in February-April 2022. Many simply became ungrateful, not everyone wants to remember those truly terrible days.
During the preparations for the invasion, the Russian Federation did not just move troops back and forth along our borders. the Russians obviously pursued the goal of hiding the real place of concentration of one or another of their strike groups.
Therefore, for example, it happened that in February 2022, the elite 1st tank army of the Russian armed forces attacked Sumy in general, where there were quite a few fighters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and terrorist defense, and spontaneous popular resistance decided everything.
Unknown to history, the Hero was literally a few tens of minutes ahead of the occupiers, found a way to distribute machine guns to all willing people of good will in Sumy, and only this accident kept Russian tank units from further advance into the Poltava region and Kyiv .
Or – the offensive of the Rashists from Belarus on the same Kyiv. I remember that even in February 2022, Polish analysts estimated that a maximum of 15-17 thousand “bayonets” of the Russian army had gathered on Belarusian territory. And it all looked more like a military-political demonstration, the logical end of which should be, for example, the final “Anschluss” of Belarus.
But it turned out that twice as many Russian military arrived at the Belarusian training grounds, and their goal was precisely attack on Kyiv.
Why “Kyiv in three days” didn't work
Now let's talk about the very idea of the rashists to attack Kyiv. It seems that the planners of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces quite specifically read the book by the British military historian Liddell Garth on “asymmetric military strategies”, which begins with such a postulate – it is better to immediately attack the capital of the enemy in order to achieve the effect of surprise and a collapse in the state.
The fact that several dozen helicopters were able to fly relatively unhindered to Gostomel may, let's say, testify to the level of fire impact that the enemy had against our air defense systems.
And here, too, only a miracle saved us – that the artillerymen of the National Guard brigade in Gostomel were more dexterous than the Russian paratroopers, and immediately opened artillery fire to kill. Which thwarted the enemy's original plan to capture the Antonov airport. Because further, as it turned out, Russian paratroopers were supposed to land at the airport “Kyiv” in Zhuliany, just there the “Medvedchuk's plane” was needed as a means of barrier.
The enemy turned out to be persistent, literally in a short time in the Bucha-Gostomel-Irpen triangle, a Russian group of at least six brigades passed through Chernobyl.
And, among other things, the very fact of the appearance of such a herd of orcs on one of the strategically important routes from Kyiv to the west, probably could complicate the delivery of additional shipments of Western weapons to us, at least the same “Jevelins” and NLAW. For approximately the same purpose, by the way, orcs regularly attacked the important Korosten railway junction in March 2022.
There are other things to remember as well. For example, according to data from open sources, as of 12:00 on February 24, 2022, 40 dead Ukrainian soldiers were already known. On the same day, the rashists tried to blow up a helicopter landing even in Vyshgorod. It's just that our air defense turned out to be clever, shot down at least two Russian helicopters of the Mi-35 type, and this forced the Russians to refuse to land.
On the night of February 26, the Russians fired a rocket at the gateway at the Vyshgorod hydroelectric power station. If they hit, it would be better not to imagine what would happen to Vyshgorod itself, and, say, Obolon. But, fortunately, our missile was shot down.
On the morning of February 27, Zaluzhny reported that our air defense shot down “a missile fired from a Tu-22M3 bomber” on approach to Kyiv. Such a bomber can only carry X-22 or X-32 missiles, which fell on Kremenchug and Sergeevka. And imagine if such a missile with a warhead of 1 ton and a speed of approach to the target in just a few minutes fell, say, on the same Obolon.
The Russians fired their maximum missile salvo – 30 cruise missiles in one launch – on March 9 at the Yavoriv range and the outskirts of Lvov. According to some reports, during the first strike on Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Russia fired only 75 cruise and ballistic missiles, and so the orcs themselves missed the moment when they could launch a truly “massive missile strike”.
Not it would be happiness, but misfortune helped
Perhaps a separate epic after the Victory will deserve how Western weapons were delivered to the defenders of the capital. I think you will be very surprised that small and proud Luxembourg has its own army. And be even more surprised that this small and proud country gave us NLAW in March and fifty million euros for emergency defense measures.
Or the same Macron, who in March 2022 had regular telephone conversations with one hand with Putin, and another sent us Milan anti-tank missile systems. As they say, a word and ATGMs are better than just a word.
And when verbalism ceased to have at least some weight for Putin, then Macron began to give us CAESEAR self-propelled guns – gun mounts are good, but also expensive, and in the conditions of the development of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in peacetime format, we are unlikely to ever be able to buy such self-propelled howitzers.
Iron tends to run out
The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, to be more precise, on March 4, 2022, was the first to announce the “end of missiles among the Russians” back in March. True, the wording in the original was as follows: “To carry out missile attacks on targets on our territory, the Russian invaders used almost the entire ammunition of the Caliber missiles intended for the offensive operation in Ukraine.”
But literally two weeks, March 18, the same General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine announced that the Russian Federation had transferred the production of the same “calibers” to three shifts.
It was in March-April that the Russians actually began to reopen their Soviet-made armored vehicles. To be more precise, at the end of March, for the first time, information appeared about the beginning of the reactivation of rare T-62s, and in April-May, BMP-1 and BMP-2 of rare modifications, which obviously had previously been in storage depots, already flashed.
But the T-62 has one significant drawback that few people think about – how the crews select orcs for them in the age category of 55 – 60 years, so as not to bother with retraining. And at the same time, it seems that the rashists do not expect that their “rare” crews of archaic T-62s can literally “glue their flippers together” during the battle, because the age and health are not the same.
Exhale and believe in Victory
It seems that it was at the end of March that the same “total mobilization” of Russia took place in military and ideological terms. After the invaders were forced to get out from under Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy under constant attacks by the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
It's just that our society did not notice this, because it was too carried away by discussing the parameters of possible peace agreements reached at the meeting in Istanbul, which was held in the format “the parties agreed to negotiate.” Therefore, now it turns out that “passionate” citizens are “winding” their gullible compatriots, scaring them with the fact that this has already happened.
So, Putin has Lukashenka, who regularly supplies 152-mm shells and other ammunition for the invaders in the east of Ukraine. So, in Russia there is still a certain stock of MT-LB tractors, with which it can equip its motorized rifle units (although, it seems, the rashists have exhausted the stock of their BMP-1 and BMP-2 on conservation and blew it).
The same A-50 aircraft, which now seem to be trying to “copy” our air defense during flights over Belarus – sorry, but it was precisely such aircraft that the Russians used to control the night bombing of Kyiv. And, as you can see, they did not achieve much success.
Our enemy is still strong. Therefore, Defense Minister Reznikov set such a time frame that victory is possible either at the end of 2022 or at the beginning of 2023. But the peak of Russia's military capabilities was precisely in late February – early April 2022, and this peak for the Russians has already passed.
According to calculations based on open sources, “forced mobilization” in the temporarily occupied Donbas (about 14 thousand people a month) is much more successful among Russians than on the territory of Russia itself (almost 10 thousand people a month).
wishes well. But it seems that with the category of good in the current conditions, everyone will have to decide individually. And at the same time enter from such a trajectory.
There is such a technique – to perceive the war not only as an existential threat, but also as a personal challenge. If, against the backdrop of a protracted war, some acute personal problems began to appear, which, among other things, makes them less resistant to news of a “military” nature, then it is time to significantly adjust their behavior. And the best therapeutic effect will be when you decide on the answer to the question – how to celebrate our Victory.
