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Source: Simplicius the Thinker
Today is the first day we can probably say the offensive has truly begun in the sense that Ukraine has launched large maneuver attacks in exactly the primary directions long-predicted as being at the heart of the offensive. Yesterday’s push much farther east near Velyka Novosilka had long been forecasted as the ‘diversionary’ direction, and today they struck the true direction right under Orekhov where for a long time their main force buildup was observed by Russian recon/intel units. With the large NATO Air Defender exercises—called ‘the largest ever’—set to begin on June 12, we can only assume that today was the opening act of what’s meant to be a ramp up that will crescendo during the exercises in less than a week. Presumably, Kiev is timing it to make initial breakthroughs from now til then, and then inject their much larger reserve force into the breakthrough zone right at the time of the exercises to achieve a truly triumphal propaganda syzygy. But, judging by today’s results, that syzygy is more a zugzwang. Russian forces dealt a crushing blow to AFU’s meat-vanguard. Let’s break down how it happened in detail; however, before that, first let’s update a few things about the last advance over the past couple days on Zaporozhye’s eastern flank. I reported last time how Russia managed to retake Novodonetsk under Velyka Novosilka. But I just wanted to add some of the official numbers to contextualize things. In a somewhat uncommon gesture, Shoigu himself actually gave the exact figures of Russian losses during this assault. They were: 71 Russian servicemen killed, 210 wounded. So as one can see, Russian forces do take losses in these meat assaults by Ukraine. However, Shoigu’s listed losses for Ukraine for the period were:
Many have scoffed at his figure of 3700 casualties, some saying that you can divide this by 10 and it’s still a lot. We must remember this includes wounded, so the KIA is likely much lower. The above figure is for major assaults over the course of three days. If you break down the 3,700 as probably 1000+ killed and 2700 wounded (give or take), how is that an unrealistic number for three days’ time of June 4, 5, and 6? That would mean 300 killed per day. That’s a light day for AFU even in Bakhmut when they were on defense. Now imagine them on offense, exposed and easy to hit. Another thing, you see those figures like 52 tanks, 200+ armored vehicles—which too sounds like a lot. Once again that’s over three days. But interestingly, just in today’s new assault in west Zaporozhye, we have visual confirmation of 42 pieces of armor destroyed. That’s just from a couple videos from one unit out of dozens/hundreds of units on these lines. And this is just the videos of mass armor knockouts, there are dozens of videos showing individual pieces being knocked out like Lancets taking out artillery, of which there were at least 5-7 new videos today alone. So imagine what the total destroyed figures are when you extrapolate this out?
So, to get back to today’s offensive and the videos which the above graphics are sourced from, here is one of the, showing by some counts 11 armor/vehicles destroyed at once in one of the directions. It was said some of them hit mines while others were finished off by a combination of artillery and Russian attack choppers:  And another of Ukrainian BMP-2s and other pieces of disabled armor being finished off by Russian drones:  Even Jihad Julian threw one of his famous hissy fits:
Russian Spetsnaz group near Lobkov right on one of the directions:
Another Russian unit on the front says you can’t imagine how many enemies died today, “the number is measured in thousands”, confirming Shoigu’s reports:
Meanwhile, this was an AFU units post regarding the new French AMX-10 tanks they used for the first time in combat yesterday. First, note that we also have video confirmation for the first time of the tanks heading to the frontline:  It was initially once again misgendered as a Leopard, but sharp-eyed experts properly aligned it with an AMX-10 profile:
Of course, I already posted 3 of them destroyed/disabled/abandoned last time. But now here’s what the AFU unit operating them says about the mighty French wunderwaffe’s performance:
Not quite a rousing selling point for French engineering, eh? Here’s a detailed description of the exact assaults that took place:
The above map shows roughly the settlements they attacked on the western flank. But as can be seen from the description above, they made several other axes further east, close to Velyka Novosilka (on its western side). Bar none the best military analyst on Twitter @MNormanDavies drew up this map of the AFU’s potential plans. The “A” line is the feint around Velyka Novosilka:
Several of the above mentioned brigades are part of the special 9 developed by the West and armed with Western armor. However, they have not been committed yet but appear to be getting ready to be used as the breakthrough force after the meat assaults punch a hole in the Russian defenses first. I said last time that the AFU strategy will be as follows: They will increase the pressure on all these fronts in order to try to find a weak point. In a sense, it’s a larger scale continued recon-by-fire, but it seems a final preparatory one rather than the initial, much smaller speculative ‘feeler’ ones we’ve had for weeks. But here’s the kicker. If they don’t find a weak spot and continue to be brutally rebuffed as they have been so far, the AFU plans to simply never announce this as the offensive. They will just pretend they are ‘testing’ Russia and the mythical offensive is still yet to come at some arbitrary and obscure future time. But if they do find a weak spot, they will throw everything to punch through it and then ex post facto claim this was the major offensive all along. In short, they’re playing the dual psychological game I had already described long ago, the sort of phantom Schrodinger’s Offensive, where the plan is to characterize the actions afterwards depending on their success. Another analysis from today:
The common theme is that they’re probing in force, but the main breakthrough force is being positioned at the rear and ready to swing in as soon as the vanguard units find an opening. But the danger is that this breakthrough force is gigantic, and it is likely comprised of the main elite Western-trained brigades.
But recall what I said: if they do not achieve a breakthrough, they will scuttle this and pretend there was never anything serious, it was all just Russian propaganda and they were merely conducting testing strikes. This is my caveat to future people who may accuse me of having announced the final offensive. The truth is, this is it, but they are still dipping one toe in with the other foot on shore so they can pretend they never intended to launch should things go sour. And of course, I still predict that they will not get a breakthrough so that is to say don’t actually expect the “big one” to come. However, the forces are positioned to launch this ‘big one’ the moment a breakthrough comes, so there is a chance—I simply give it a higher probability that they won’t breach. Recall that, as large as those numbers above sound—a 30,000 man breakthrough force followed by a 50,000 man reserve to expand the breakthrough once it’s unleashed—I’ve noted previously that some sources estimate Russia has close to 200k men on this front waiting for these advances. Most of them would likely be way in the rear, or not even injected into the actual theater yet (i.e. could be in Crimea, etc.) but that is the totality of what they can bring to bear there in a short amount of time to plug holes on any ‘breakthroughs’. With that said, the intel remains very dangerous for UA’s capabilities here. For instance, top Russian analyst channel Two Majors has the following analysis of today. Note the sophisticated use of EW warfare, accurately reconnoitered fires to Russia’s rear, professional de-mining operations, and advanced equipment like nightvision for incoming nighttime operations:
And Rybar has further intel which appears to indicate much larger coming pushes soon:
Thus far, Russian forces are holding admirably and giving almost no ground at all as far as I can tell. There was one complaint from an analyst about an alleged small breakthrough just west of Lobkove in the Kamyanske direction (far west of Orokhov/Orikhiv). However, I haven’t seen any actual confirmation this actually happened, so his complaints may be premature. The fighting happened just like in the Novodonetsk direction. The AFU would push with a lot of light armor and MRAPS which would hit minefields then be picked apart by Russian Ka-52s and artillery. And there are several new videos showing the Ka-52s in action:   What’s funny is that Russian troops state that the airmen tell them they love the American Maxxpros in particular as their very tall outlines presents such a juicy fat target to destroy:
But now, let’s get back to the Novodonetsk battles of the past three days near Velyka Novosilka, as there are a few other important updates to make on that. We’ve already covered how absolutely shredded the AFU got in that advance attempt. But now we also have further confirmations from their own side streaming en masse. There have been two separate videos released of their own 37th brigade pleading with leadership, saying they were told it was an ‘empty village’ and they got slaughtered:
 One was a lone drunk soldier, the other was an entire unit:
Some claimed the ‘drunk’ one was a fake, yet the same soldier actually released multiple videos lambasting the AFU command; unfortunately it’s not subtitled. Ukrainian accounts quickly sprang into action to claim it’s “fake”, but here’s the kicker, Russian forces recovered massive amounts of documents from the hundreds of casualties that this group incurred:
They published all of them in full, you can easily find the zoomed in, detailed scans.
The report above states there are tons of useful military documents recovered from their bodies, highly secret OPORD docs, etc. What’s shocking is that the 37th is one of the 9 big elite Western-trained brigades. This is the one in the Pentagon leaks that was allocated the French AMX-10s as well as the Mastiffs. What’s interesting is that we now have confirmation of several mastiffs destroyed as well as yesterday’s AMX-10s, which proves this 37th is operating here: 
Here you can clearly see the knocked out Mastiffs as well as many other vehicles. This settlement you see in the pictures is actually Novodonetsk:  And here are the geolocations of where the Mastiffs were destroyed:
So, basically: the 37th is already being shredded and this was one of the big bad NATO-trained formations that was supposed to slice through Russian forces like a hot knife through butter. The Pentagon OPORD leaks had the brigade as: 37th BDE: 30 x Mastiff / Husky (UK) So out of the above we already have confirmation of a bunch of Mastiffs taken out, at least 3 AMX-10 visually confirmed and 1 Senator, as well as numerous tanks and countless infantry. And if that wasn’t enough proof of the hiding they’re taking, check this weepy post about a unit from Ukraine’s 57th brigade. Not a single person returned from the offensive:
But worry not, one of AFU’s commanders said that the true purpose of the grand counter-offensive is to not allow Russian troops to advance:
So all this time, the counter-offensive was actually a reverse counter-offensive whose purpose was to simply keep Russia from conquering more territory. This is akin to Budanov’s statement that Crimea has already been conquered by Ukraine…psychologically. Now, that things are heating up, and UA is starting to get aggressive with their usage of prime equipment, we’ve had a slew of confirmations of prestige system kills from today alone. Firstly, what appears to be the first ever Swedish CV-90 IFV destroyed:
This is widely considered by many to be the world’s best infantry fighting vehicle, and was one of the most elite and advanced pieces of kit sent to Ukraine. Now, the Russian Lancet has gotten the first ever confirmation kill on the German IRIS-T air defense. Ukraine has very few units of this and this is one of NATO’s most expensive and powerful AD systems:  
But even with these victories, I don’t want to get overcocky as Ukraine still has a lot of offensive potential left, and only one of the big 9 brigades has been fully committed thus far. Even as of this writing there is news that the AFU has regrouped and is spotted coming towards Russian positions again, this time at night. Some believe they perhaps will attempt night attacks under the hope that their putatively ‘better’ Western nightvision/thermal optics in the new Western-supplied vehicles can outperform the equipment of Russian defenders. This is particularly in regard to if they are to finally use the American Bradleys, German Leopards, British Challengers, etc. (fat chance of that). Like I said, the next few days may only continue ramping up in intensity to hit a peak crescendo by the time of the NATO exercises at which point they may have some “surprise” in store. In the meantime, former Ukrainian presidential advisor believes that Zelensky could be overthrown if he fails in this counter-offensive:
And one of the best most even-headed war bloggers/correspondents/
Now let’s move onto some sundry updates about various other ongoing situations. First, let’s start with a small update on the Kakhovka dam. Earlier today, Twitter “community notes” attempted to debunk the narrative that Ukraine was playing with the water levels of the Kakhovka reservoir. But soon after, their own ‘fact check’ was destroyed when new footage was released from residents upriver showing that Ukraine’s hydro-electric plants had in fact massively opened up their sluice gates. Here are both of the videos compiled:  The man recording even says, “I’ve never seen this in my life.”
Vladimir Rogov appears to believe that the lowering of the Kakhovka Basin water levels will actually increase the risk of Ukraine landing to try to seize the ZNPP nuclear plant at Energodar:
And on the note of the Dnipropetrovsk hydro-electric plant being opened up by Kiev prior to the Kakhovka event to raise water levels, we have the first truly high level Russian confirmation of this. Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev stated the following:
One very ominous development is that the Kakhovka dam situation has markedly shifted the rhetoric from topic Russian leadership. The above-mentioned Patrushev, who is said to be in the innermost circle of Putin, and who not only used to be the director of the FSB but once considered as the leading candidate for the future presidency of Russia, stated in a new interview that the Kiev regime needs to be “replaced” and Ukraine itself must become a neutral state:
However, Russian state Duma deputy Elena Panina went even further stating that the only way to ensure Russia’s security is for the entirety of Ukraine to be incorporated into Russia as a federal district, i.e. total absorption of the state of Ukraine:
Several days ago I already posted how Dmitry Medvedev called for the total “extermination” of the Kiev Nazi Regime. Today, he issued another statement calling not only for the total overthrow of the ‘Nazi Regime’, but he interestingly gave us a clue by stating that as soon as Russia defeats the Ukrainian ‘counter-offensive’, Russia must launch a massive offensive of its own:
Yes, he actually called Ukraine ‘Country 404’. For some reason I thought that was only Saker’s trademark, but I guess Medvedev is now using it too. The important thing to note about all this is that, for everyone who’s been worried on whether Putin will end up selling out and going soft on Ukraine, more and more recently his top siloviki have been giving us big clues as to the interior mood inside the Kremlin an their inner circle. It’s very difficult to imagine Putin would back down from maximalist objectives in light of how strongly his inner circle is now signaling their intentions. Now, a few notes on the Belgorod region situations. Ukraine’s phantom offensive into the region continues generating nothing but fake psyop vapor while they continue to slowly be liquidated. Here is a large cache of high end mercenary gear recovered from a batch of liquidated agents in the Novaya Tavolzhanka region:  The biggest thing to note is the very expensive, $200k+, Black Hornet Nano used by U.S. special forces. Russian Archangel Spetsnaz group was said to have swept Novaya Tavolzhanka and even made a video challenging the cowardly RDK group to come and fight them and not hide in the forests as they have been doing.
This is where the cowardly group appears to be hiding from Russian Spetsnaz:
They get chased out then crawl through the forests playing peekaboo and popping out for five minutes to take some photos inside the village, then run away again. Also, their equipment is being systematically found by Russian recon in the forests and destroyed. As for Belgorod, the AFU is spreading as much psyops and propaganda as possible about mass chaos and panic in Belgorod, Shebekino, etc., but that’s not the case. Not only have I personally seen a bunch of interviews with Belgorod residents who are either upbeat or not concerned at all, but this journalist confirms it:
A few other things, firstly I had promised to mention the Russian MOD blooper, when they misidentified the Ukrainian combine harvester or farming tractor for a Leopard:  But the interesting angle others haven’t covered is that the so-called ‘tractor’ appears as pitch black on the reverse-contrast thermal view. Typically very ‘hot’ objects would appear that dark, while cold objects appear lighter in color.
This would seem to indicate the farming equipment was active. So the big question is, why were there active farming tractors with engines running in the middle of a mass Ukrainian offensive? Either the ‘farmers’ were really oblivious and reckless or the AFU deliberately staged their tank advance through active farm fields in the midst of sowing/harvesting in order to disguise themselves behind civilian shields. Or perhaps it wasn’t a tractor after all, though it admittedly does look like one. Either way, it appears the MOD made an embarrassing mistake here but my tu quoque argument will be: why do people pretend that a single mistake by the Russian MOD is so critical when the U.S. Pentagon is literally known worldwide as the kings of misattribution, misidentification, etc. How many Afghan weddings did they mistake for army groups? How many civilian cars did they mistake for various types of military gear? There are so many cases of the U.S. wrongfully identifying targets that it’s not even a competition—Russian MOD stands no chance at the U.S. crown here. I won’t even get into the needless deep-dive of U.S. failures but if we’re going to judge optics by critical ‘mistakes’ made then U.S. craft have the worst optics in the world, as the number of wrongfully struck targets and killed civilians they’re responsible for is nearly uncountable. And some have laughably and disingenuously made fun of ‘Russian optics’, claiming the Ka-52’s EO/optics are so bad they can’t tell a farm tractor apart. Yet they fail to note that most of these kills are at ranges exceeding 10-15km. For that distance, those optics are excellent; anyone who doesn’t think so simply doesn’t know anything about military optics. You can’t compare a 15km missile kill to a video of an AH64 Apache guns kill which are at most like 500m to 1km since 30mm chainguns can’t fire that far. I think I’ve recounted this before but all you must do is use a stopwatch to time how long the Ka-52’s missile takes to reach the target. In some of the video kills I posted it was upwards of 18-20 seconds. The 9K121 Vikhr missile they use has a speed of 600m/s which means 18s x 600m = 10.8km. In other news:
A new WashPost article is calling Ukraine’s new offensive an all-or-nothing D-Day. What’s interesting is how all Western press now frames the offensive exclusively as revolving around the objective of freezing the conflict. They clearly no longer see victory as possible whatsoever:
By the way, the article repeats a completely fabricated narrative invented by ISW and co. that Ukraine gained a massive 10km in their push. No such gains were made and in fact after suffering horrific losses, the AFU was pushed back pretty much to the starting line. But it shows the level of propaganda being pumped to a completely delusional Western audience that slurps up this slop and asks for seconds. The hilarious article tries to stir up mythic images of improbable victory by invoking not only the American Revolutionary War and the Civil War but even the Battle of the Bulge of WW2. It ends on an utterly cretinous passage that can only be characterized as gaslighting the poor Ukrainians into a further slaughter by propping them up on false hopes built on shaky foundations of fake propaganda:
Well, at least one positive from this drastic tone change is that even the twisted Western propagandists now clearly acknowledge that this is the final hail mary hurrah on which everything rests. A last couple of items. I had mentioned some Taiwanese mercenaries last time, but now one of them has returned home and offers up some candid insights into the AFU’s losses. He states in an interview that his unit suffered 50% losses, the platoon was completely annihilated twice. And he said, they did not even fight in ‘the deadliest zone’ of the conflict:
Another tidbit was that Rybar appeared to have gotten confirmed intel that 20 seamen infact died on the Ukrainian ship Yuri Olefirenko which was destroyed by Russia last week, with another 23 badly wounded.
Another thing: many Ukrainian channels are claiming that the Kakhovka dam breach destroyed [enter ridiculous number here] amounts of Russian troops, gear, etc. But in fact no such thing happened. Not only have videos appeared showing orderly Russian military evacuations in the zone, but even perennial-pessimist Strelkov admitted that Russia evacuated from the at-risk zone with minimal losses of any kind:
Russia in the meantime used huge Mi-8 helicopters to bring troops and equipment in the danger zone to safety:  But not everything was perfect. Rybar reports the following:
As of this writing, AFU is renewing an assault in the middle of the night, there are already reports of casualties and a lot of destruction of AFU armor in the same direction from Orekhov in Zaporozhye region. We’ll see what happens and update again next time. |
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