NATO - The Ukraine

Make your posts about Naval, together with Joint and Inter Service Execises on this thread. NATO, SEATO, etc.
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Re: NATO - The Ukraine

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Satellite Images of Crimea Air Base Indicate Explosions Destroyed Russian Jets

Kremlin has said no planes were lost in the blasts, which it attributed to detonating ammunition

Satellite images of the Russian air base in Crimea hit by explosions appear to show several destroyed war planes, contradicting Russia’s official account that no planes were lost in the blasts.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address late Wednesday that Russia lost nine combat aircraft in Crimea. Officials in Kyiv have mocked Russia but not taken responsibility for the blasts.

Continues at - https://www.wsj.com/articles/satellite- ... 1660216115



Russia Loses 24 of Its Best Fighter Jets, Turns to Obsolete Planes: Ukraine

Russia is reportedly turning to "outdated" fighter jets after it lost about two dozen Su-35 aircraft in its ongoing assault on Ukraine, according to a social media post on Thursday.

In a Facebook post, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said that Russia was going to start using "old" Su-24M bombers after Moscow's forces lost "two squadrons" in the war.

"The SU-35 aircrafts also showed a low level of durability. During the full-scale aggression, the occupants lost two squadrons of such aircraft—it's about 24 units," Ukrainian Brigadier General Alexei Gromov said, the post reported.

Moscow's forces, at the order of Russian President Vladimir Putin, launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, drawing swift and widespread international condemnation. Although Putin and his advisers reportedly believed they could quickly take control and topple the government in Kyiv, the initial assault was repelled by the Ukrainian army and ordinary citizens resisting the aggression.

Continues at - https://www.newsweek.com/russia-loses-2 ... 1660239287
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Re: NATO - The Ukraine

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Ministry of Defence

The UK & 25 other partner nations have agreed to provide long-term military funding for Ukraine.
This funding will ensure financial support for vital military kit & training, helping Ukraine defend against Putin’s invasion.

See - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-a ... ne-support
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Six months on – lessons and impacts from the war in Ukraine

With Russia’s war in Ukraine entering its sixth month, in this opinion piece we assess the impacts of conflict from a UK perspective, try to draw out a few key lessons and look at the situation in the Black Sea.

All wars are not the same and one must be careful not to extrapolate too far and too quickly from the specific events of one campaign. They are plenty of dubious ‘hot takes’ written by commentators who have been quick to decide the main battle tank is obsolete, missiles render all ships indefensible and drones are the solution to every problem. However, as the biggest conflict on European soil since the Second World War that also includes a significant naval dimension, there are important actions to evaluate and new factors to consider in the development of future strategy.

Shock mitigation
The invasion of Ukraine can be seen as another big step in the growing division between democratic western values and the authoritarian values of Russia and China. The polarisation of the world back into two competing value systems has been happening since the post-Cold War thaw ended but recent trends have seen a hardening of attitudes on both sides. This division has now become so pronounced that the process of economic globalisation, which has brought a period of unparalleled prosperity for billions of people, is now being reversed. For the foreseeable future, this will result in shortages of energy, food and materials as well as rising costs for both the consumer and the defence supply chain. A significant downward change in fortunes for the majority of people is also likely to result in social unrest and political instability.

Some of this is the unintended consequences specific to the war such grain shortages and sanctions on Russia but there is a deeper trend. Even before the pandemic, there were the beginnings of efforts to decouple from unreliable potential adversaries. This is particularly true for Chinese manufacturing as the trend in the US towards on-shoring manufacturing either domestically or in more reliable nations had already begun. Chinese labour is no longer as cheap as it once was but political, logistical and environmental factors are now carrying as much weight as the bottom line.

Taking the long view on the great power competition game is something authoritarian powers have been doing effectively for some time, while the UK and much of Europe have been drifting. This is partly a product of the short electoral cycle but also a vague belief that the free market will always win out, that long-term strategic planning is an expensive luxury or some kind of hangover from an imperial past.

Investing in defence to project power across the world and look after UK interests is vital but needs to be considered as part of a much broader and holistic cross-governmental effort to protect the nation and sustain its long-term security, health and prosperity. The massively ambitious 2021 Integrated Review does acknowledge this but only recently started the ball rolling on the development of a ‘Comprehensive National Resilience strategy’. Such work should have always been core to government planning going back decades, as the UK has recently discovered, national resilience measures cannot be whistled up in a couple of weeks but may need years of preparation. For example, the last two defence reviews listed a pandemic a “Tier-1 threat” but when one came, little planning had been done or resources prepared, resulting in a botched response and policy-making on the hoof (to be fair this was the case in the majority of nations).

Governments cannot control global commodity prices but better planning could have lessened much of the looming cost of living crisis caused by rocketing gas prices. The 1990s ‘dash for gas’ saw plentiful domestic coal supplies used for electricity generation replaced by cleaner and ‘cheaper’ LNG alternatives. Unfortunately, this decision did not consider the inherent strategic risks of putting the UK at the mercy of foreign suppliers and increased exposure to global price fluctuations. More than half of the UK gas comes from the North Sea and Norway which are reasonably dependable but a proportion is imported from the Middle East and the US by sea. Giant LNG tankers would be easy targets in a conflict and even the undersea gas pipeline infrastructure is potentially vulnerable to interference.

The long-term answer is likely nuclear and a mix of renewable energy sources but retaining a few coal-fired power stations that could be brought on line to cover a gas shortage or ballooning gas prices would have been one of several options for better energy resilience.

Germany, the powerhouse economy of Europe was repeatedly warned against the policy but was especially foolish in becoming almost wholly reliant on Putin for its gas supply (having also rashly divested itself of nuclear energy generation). Should German industry suffer shutdowns from lack of gas, this will have a big impact on parts of the UK economy which rely on German imports. British politicians cannot take the moral high ground on the issue, given their failure after the first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and the Skripal poisonings to take tougher action against dirty Russian money in London.

Russian Northern Fleet frigate RFS Admiral Gorshkov test-fires a Zircon Hypersonic Missile in the Barents Sea at a sea, successfully hitting a target 1,000 km away, May 2022. Despite its losses and poor performance in Ukraine, and the limitations of Western sanctions, the threat from the Russian military to Europe will not fade. (Photo: Russian Ministry of Defence)

Stocking up
There are many lessons from the battlefields of Ukraine which are beyond the scope of this article but it could be surmised that the Russian Army has demonstrated how not to fight a war on every level from the strategic to the tactical. If there is one lesson that needs to be re-learned by the UK it is the volume of munitions that are consumed in a live conflict. If public figures are roughly in the right ballpark, the British Army’s ammunition stocks would last for about two weeks at Ukraine’s current rate of consumption and just two days at Russian rates.

A similar paucity afflicts naval weapons stocks. Precise figures are hard to come by but it is well known that there is a shortage of complex weapons. It is not hard to imagine that in a peer conflict a typical RN combatant could fire off its full outfit of missiles in a busy afternoon. Putting aside the issues around VLS cells’ inability to replenish at sea, just how many reloads would be available in the naval munitions stores to re-arm ships returning from the fight? There is a very difficult balance to be struck between buying deep stocks of expensive missiles or greater spending on the number and quality of the more obviously visible launch platforms.

The success of the NLAW (Next generation Light Anti-tank Weapon) has seen a sudden spike in demand, highlighting the lack of industrial capacity to adapt to a sudden conflict. NLAWs are wanted for further use in Ukraine, to replace more than 5,000 from UK stocks already donated as well as meet a rise in export interest. It will take some time to ramp up production again and the components and sub-systems that rely on stuttering global supply chains may also be harder to come by than in the past. Although not as economical, consideration needs to be given to keeping the production lines of key weapons open, making small numbers during peacetime but able to quickly scale up again to meet a spike in demand.

The new paradigms of ‘information age’ warfare have been demonstrated in Ukraine. UAVs allow targets to be hit more quickly and at a longer range, than before. Cheap but smart weapons can defeat expensive platforms if they are not adequately protected or deployed without paying very close attention to the tactical situation. In some cases, off-the-shelf commercial systems can quickly be repurposed and be used for decisive effect. These examples from the land battle may not always translate directly to the naval environment but the principles are similar.

Intellectual heavyweights will again be needed to make the right calls in trade-offs between a few exquisite capabilities or cheaper, more numerous and attritable alternatives. For example, the ambitious Future Maritime Aviation Force vision may come down to choices between more carrier-launched UAVs, both high-end and simpler swarming type drones, or further investment in F-35 such as long-range stand-off weapons.

BSF fails
The naval dimension of the Ukraine War is a strange kind of conflict, fought in littoral waters where neither side can expect reinforcements due to the closure of the Dardanelles. Remarkably the Russian Black Sea Fleet has failed to significantly influence the land war despite fighting an adversary that has no effective navy. In the early stages of the war, the BSF established sea control, quickly cutting off Ukraine from resupply by sea and strangling its trade. It was also able to poise offshore, tying down defenders to repel a possible amphibious assault.

Subsequently came the shock of the sinking of the cruiser Moskva, the largest combatant in the Black Sea, and the Russian’s failure to hold strategically important Snake Island. The threat from land-based missile systems appears to have pushed the Russian Navy away from the west coast of Crimea, and their main units are now observed operating further south and east where they have limited influence. The only substantive gain seems to be total control over the Sea of Azov. The slim chance of an amphibious operation has receded but the BSF does remain at least a ‘fleet in being’ and retains the ability to launch its dwindling stocks of cruise missiles from sea-based platforms.

On 31st July a drone was used in a minor strike on Black Sea Fleet headquarters buildings in Sevastopol. The increasing reach of Ukrainian weaponry or their special forces may even threaten the naval base at Sevastopol. The major attack on Novofedorivka air base (9th August), whether by long-range missile strike or a special forces/partisan operation threatens Russia’s hold on Crimea. It would appear a number of SU-24 (Fencer) and SU-30 (Flanker) jets were destroyed, inflicting Russia’s biggest loss of aircraft in a single day since WWII. (Probably some of these aircraft were involved in aggressive passes over HMS Defender during her Black Sea Transit in June 2021).

In a deal brokered by Turkey, the Russians have agreed to allow some trapped merchant vessels to sail from Ukraine with cargoes of grain. The Russians may have recognised that being blamed for global food shortages is not in their wider interests and they need also Turkish support to enable their own Black Sea exports

Unfortunately, as we predicted, shipowners are reluctant to send more vessels into the Black Sea to collect further cargoes. There is still a threat from stray sea mines and being caught in the crossfire of an unpredictable war. Russian ‘safety guarantees’ are virtually worthless, demonstrated by their cynical cruise missile strike on the port of Odesa shortly after the deal was signed. Insurance for vessels entering the Black Sea is still prohibitively expensive, even if willing crews can be found.

The RN has formally acknowledged it is training Ukrainian sailors in Scotland and at sea to operate the two minehunters, ex-HMS-Blyth and HMS Ramsey purchased by Ukraine before the war began. Under current conditions, there appears to be no way to get these ships into theatre. There is a waterway between Europe and the Black Sea via the river Danube but it is not quite wide enough in places to accommodate even these small vessels and water levels have been further reduced by the summer drought. If Turkey agreed to allow the minehunters to pass through the Dardanelles categorised as ‘warships of a Black Sea power returning to their base’, then there would be no way to prevent the Russians from sinking them unless they agreed to their presence.

Source - https://www.navylookout.com/six-months- ... n-ukraine/
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Re: NATO - The Ukraine

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Ukrαine boost: British volunteers arrive to help build lethal drones to annihilate Russiα

BRITISH volunteers of Ukrαiniαn heritage have returned to their country to help build hundreds of Valkyrie drones designed to provide vital intelligence on Russiαn military advances.

See - https://pgckhabar.com/ukneboost-british ... lgJLpPYDd4


Oleksii Reznikov Ukraine government official
UK promised, UK delivered!
More M270 MLRS arrived in Ukraine. Thanks to B Wallace MP and all the GB people! Your support is amazing and so important for Ukraine. Our army will skillfully use this "replenishment" at the battlefield.
P.S. More “gifts” will arrive soon.
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USAF’s ‘Super Scanner’ Aircraft Providing Target Coordinates To Ukraine As Russian Military Comes Under Frequent Attacks – Report

The US or British Royal Air Force (RAF) RC-135V/W Rivet Joint aircraft are reportedly collecting signals intelligence (SIGINT) to provide target coordinates of Russian air defense radars to the Ukrainian Air Force.

There has been an uptick in precision attacks on Russian troops and positions, with the latest speculations that Ukraine could have stuck a Russian military base in Crimea.

The US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Colin Kahl, said in a press conference on August 8 that the US has sent “several anti-radiation missiles that can be fired off of Ukrainian aircraft that can have effects on Russia radars and other things.”

Kahl’s remarks came shortly after Russian Telegram channels released the allegedly destroyed AGM-88 HARM images.

See - https://eurasiantimes.com/usafs-super-s ... ng-target/
Note the content of the above link contains more info about the Russian-Ukraine war and the China-Taiwan situation amongst others.
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Intel. update
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Re: NATO - The Ukraine

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THE FUTURE - ONE MAN'S OPINION - FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES 7.8.22
By General Sir Richard Barrons a former commander of Joint Forces Command

The West must know this — if Putin faces defeat, he may go nuclear

We are right to back Ukraine’s counterattack in the south, but overwhelming success could bring a devastating response.
Vladimir Putin had hoped for a swift and overwhelming victory, the capture of Kyiv and the crippling of Ukraine as a functioning state. But six months after his tanks rolled over the border, the war has been neither quick nor decisive and he and his enemies are settling in for the long haul, with costs and risks not seen in Europe for a generation.
The red mist has descended on both sides: neither is likely to give up.
What comes next? Can a Ukrainian counterattack in the south succeed? A broader Ukrainian offensive and mobilisation expected as soon as next spring could lead to battlefield successes and the liberation of land seized by Russia. This might create other risks. If Putin senses defeat, will he be tempted to use tactical nuclear weapons to change reality on the battlefield?

The long road ahead
Next month, Russia is expected to formally annex occupied territory in Donbas. This will signal the determination of its forces to stay put. It will also redouble the determination of Ukraine and its supporters to eject them, ensuring this war will probably continue for years.

The offensive stumbled badly in the early phases, but Russia may try again to take Kyiv next year or the year after. This ought to be one of the fundamental lessons drawn from the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Wanting the fighting to stop for humanitarian or economic reasons will not be enough.

Ukraine’s counterattack around Kherson is causing Russia to reduce resources in Donbas, probably slowing its advance there. Ukraine’s objective is to throw the Russians back onto the eastern side of the Dnieper river.

This would reduce the military risk to Odesa and create a harder Ukrainian defensive line for the coming winter. It jeopardises control of the freshwater supply to Crimea and threatens the security of Russian supply lines. Above all, though, the Ukrainian offensive is intended to buttress hope among the people and send a vital message to Ukraine’s international supporters that this war will one day be won and not go on forever.

A wider offensive
A successful counterattack, though, is not same as the strategic nationwide offensive across the 1,000 miles of front line needed to eject Russia from Ukraine.

To do that, Ukraine talks of creating an army of up to one million. Russia is likely to have about 100,000 personnel committed in Ukraine, with many more supporting in Russia. A successful Ukrainian offensive will require force ratios of about five to one at the key points of attack, and the ability to sustain operations.

Deciding on what terrain Ukraine should try to reconquer will be complicated: there are occupied areas vital to its future, others inhabited mainly by people who support Russia. Some parts are only winnable at a cost that may outweigh any objective value. Ukraine will decide, and expect its supporters to agree, but the debate will be a tough one.

Building an army
Creating a million-strong army means more than mobilising Ukrainian civil society: there is only failure and sorrow in feeding willing but insufficiently trained and equipped volunteers to Russian artillery.

Every new soldier will need the basics: uniform, body armour, a weapon and ammunition. They will also need other equipment to be an effective part of an attacking force: aircraft, missiles, tanks, armoured personnel carriers, machineguns, mortars, artillery, radios, night-vision equipment and so much else — especially thousands of tons of ammunition.

Then there is the logistic and maintenance support they will need to sustain fighting over months, as well as a medical system to manage fatalities averaging at least 100 a day, and seriously injured numbering three times that. Casualties of 10 per cent in a million-strong army equates to the size of the British Army.

The onset of winter will significantly slow military operations. It is likely to take until next spring at the earliest to be ready, though the war will continue along the front line as both sides try to create advantage. A long, bitter winter looms.

For Ukraine’s supporters in the West, the big demand now is the transition from providing support from the inventory of our armed forces and industry to the industrial mobilisation (including in Ukraine) needed to produce the volume of equipment and ammunition that offensive operations will require. This will be a significant bill for taxpayers.

Ukraine requires about £5 billion a month to sustain itself now, and the rearmament it needs will be on top of that. Time will be a big factor: some of the industrial lead-times to produce new weapons and ammunition from scratch will take deliveries well into 2024.

Logistics will drive strategy. The vital point here is that the West is facing a crucial choice: either provide the money and material to match Ukraine’s manpower to create the offensive military power that throws Russia back, or falter and so end the war with Russian annexation and the prospect of further rounds of aggression against Ukraine and elsewhere.

Against a dire economic backdrop, this is not a position anybody wanted to be in, but it is where we are. Enabling Ukraine to fight Russia is still a much better smaller, more sensible ask than mobilising Nato in a general war with Russia.

A threat of catastrophe
Wars need to be thought through to the end. When the fighting stops, there are always enormous consequences to deal with. Geography does not change. The West needs to think about the shape the fighting may now take and to include in that the prospect of catastrophic success for Ukraine: if Russia is thrown back to the extent that Putin senses strategic defeat, he is likely to employ tactical nuclear weapons.

Russian nuclear thinking accepts the use of small nuclear weapons to impose unacceptable damage on an opponent as a means of coercion, particularly in circumstances where the existence of the state is in question. Before the end of this year, Russia will have declared areas of occupied Ukraine part of the Russian state. So should a Ukrainian offensive roll over this new self-declared border, the use of nuclear weapons to break up the attack will be on the table. This is not unthinkable — it is only unpalatable.

We need to be clear what sort of nuclear weapon is in mind here. It’s not the 1,000 kiloton bomb that could be targeted at Washington or London, resulting in total devastation. Hiroshima saw up to 146,000 fatalities from a weapon of 15 kilotons. The Russian Iskander missile used in Ukraine has a range of 300 miles and can deliver a conventional or nuclear warhead with a selectable yield.

A nuclear warhead can be made to detonate on the ground (which results in greater nuclear radiation hazard) or — more likely — in the air. To give an example, using online tools such as Nukemap, a 10 kiloton warhead detonated 2,200ft over a town the size of Kramatorsk in the Donbas would produce a fireball with a radius of around 500ft, a fatal radiation dose out to about 0.6 miles, blast damage enough to collapse buildings and cause third-degree burns a mile away. It would break windows 2.6 miles away.

Detonated over a Ukrainian brigade advancing on a key town, it would certainly break up the attack and create a great sense of peril there and around the world. But it would not physically touch areas beyond the borders of Ukraine. It would be the first use of nuclear weapons for 77 years, breaking an enormous taboo, but this is not inconceivable to Russians if the ends justify it in their eyes.

These weapons exist for just the sort of circumstances the war in Ukraine may lead to, so nobody should claim total surprise if they are used. Events since 2014 have established that neither hope nor denial are sound approaches to dealing with Russia today.

How should the West respond to a tactical nuclear weapon being used? Would such use mean that the removal of Putin and his inner circle became a matter of vital western security — and if so how would that be accomplished?

A Nato offensive? At the very least it should mean Russia being isolated by the West, no matter what the cost in energy supplies — but what would China and India do? The answer could be not very much. Would it mean Ukraine joining Nato immediately to fall under article 5 and the alliance’s nuclear umbrella? More broadly, it would seem unlikely to lead necessarily to strategic nuclear war. But it would change how nuclear weapons are viewed in other confrontations such as that between India and Pakistan.

Few of these questions should be left to be answered in the heat of the moment. They require careful judgment and communication to eliminate the potential for catastrophic miscalculation — perhaps as soon as next spring.

Attached The Russian military’s Iskander-K missile launcher RUSSIAN DEFENCE MINISTRY/AP
And a S.T. Graphic.
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How Ukraine Could’ve Quickly Put AGM-88 Anti-Radiation Missiles To Use

With wreckage of the radar-killing AGM-88 HARM missile appearing in Ukraine, here’s how the weapon would likely be used.

While the United States has so far only confirmed that unspecified air-launched “anti-radiation missiles” have been transferred to Ukraine for its war with Russia, the apparent remains of an AGM-88 High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile, or HARM, said to have been fired recently at a Russian position, suggest strongly that this is the weapon — or one of the weapons — involved. With that in mind, it’s worth looking in more detail at how this trademark Western radar-killer works and how it might be put to use by the Ukrainian Air Force, in particular.

Anti-radiation missiles, or ARMs, like the AGM-88, home in on enemy radio frequency emissions, primarily from radar arrays belonging to enemy air defense systems, and destroy or disable them. They are a critical tool for not only ‘breaking down the door’ through an enemy’s air defenses but also for providing self-protection to the aircraft that carry them and the aircraft they may be escorting.

See - https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/h ... Jbe3riS_dQ
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Navy Lookout

Finland and Estonia have agreed to integrate their coastal (Blue Spear / MTO-85M) anti-ship missile systems.
Could close the Gulf of Finland, threatening to deny 🇷🇺Russian naval forces based in St Petersburg access to the Baltic.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/ ... k-russian/
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Moscow blames saboteurs for explosions that rock ammo dump in Russian-annexed Crimea

LONDON, Aug 16 (Reuters) - Russia on Tuesday blamed saboteurs for orchestrating a series of explosions at an ammunition depot in Russian-annexed Crimea, a rare admission that armed groups loyal to Ukraine are damaging military logistics and supply lines on territory it controls.

The incident follows a series of explosions last week at a Russian-operated air base in Crimea which Ukrainian officials hinted were part of some kind of special operation but which Moscow said at the time was an accident.

Russia's defence ministry said in a statement published by state news agencies on Tuesday that nobody had been seriously injured in the latest explosions, which it said had also damaged power lines, an electricity substation, railway infrastructure and some residential housing in northern Crimea.

Footage on Russian state TV showed an electricity substation on fire near the town of Dzhankoi in Crimea and a series of large explosions on the horizon which authorities said were caused by ammunition detonating at a military base.

It was not immediately clear how saboteurs had triggered the blasts, though Russian state media speculated they may have used small drones to bomb the ammo depot and other facilities.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility from Ukraine, which is battling to push back Russian forces nearly six months into the war that began with Moscow's Feb. 24 invasion.

Two senior Ukrainian officials took to Twitter to exult in the explosions, however, with one, presidential advisor Mykhailo Podolyak, hinting at possible Ukrainian involvement while stopping short of confirming such a role.

"(The) morning near Dzhankoi began with explosions," wrote Podolyak.

Continues at - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/am ... 022-08-16/

[Plenty more reports in the media but note lastest Intel. update attached.]
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