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Vadym Ivchenko, Member of Committee on National Security, Defence and Intelligence of Ukrainian parliament has said, in public and over the internet, that Ukrainian armed forces have likely sustained at least half a million dead.. He is from Tymoshenko's party, with a pro-Western record.
So, at least around 2.5x more than is the Mediazona estimate of Russian casualties, and assuming identical age distributions, the per capita losses are 10x higher.
Seems like Russians are employing a simple if sound strategy to win a war of attrition as manoeuvre is sort of dead because nobody has enough counter-surveillance technology. The only remotely safe way of moving forces up to the front is sending infantrymen in small groups into prepared positions.
According to this report on Ukrainians training in Poland, nobody told NATO, at least the lower ranks, that the nature of war has changed.. Even though it's been 3 years of heavy recon drone use in Ukraine, NATO units still mostly trains and operate as if the drones weren't there, which is surprising to observe in a force that prides itself on being reliant on technology and good training.
The main problem isn’t the drones, it’s the massive imbalance in tube artillery. HIMARS systems are neat but they are vulnerable to counter-battery fire and can’t substitute for Russia having ten times as many standard howitzers. NATO’s main advantage is air power, which is politically untenable to deploy and logistically untenable to give to Ukraine.
What makes them more vulnerable? Aren’t they supposed to be “highly mobile”?
This is a genuine question. I don’t fully understand how they’re utilized compared to traditional artillery. I know the U.S. is converting some howitzer battalions to HIMARS; they cite improved long-range lethality, which makes sense for the intel-heavy approach to fire support. But that’s not really a privilege enjoyed by Ukraine, is it?
Drones. Russia has finally been able to amass enough recon drones that HIMARSes have to keep well away from the line of contact. This subtracts a couple tens of kilometers from the GMLRS range, allowing Russian logistics to edge closer to the line of contact.
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The fact that most of your artillery strike capacity is reliant on the survival of four vehicles. You lose one of those, now your strike capacity is down 25 percent (not a perfect figure since the Ukrainians do have some tube artillery of their own too, but you get the idea).They used to be pretty resistant to counter-battery fire due to their mobility, but the Russians developed better ways of tracking and eliminating them after a year or two. That’s why you don’t hear a lot about them anymore. There are only about 400-700 HIMARS systems in existence and the rumor is Ukraine has gone through about 75-100.
HIMARS ammunition capacity is a problem too. Plus the Russians got better at distributing logistics so there aren’t as many huge ammunition depos within strike range. HIMARS only carry about 4-6 rockets, and are best suited for strikes against a few large key targets, not doing 40 artillery strikes a day against small infantry positions for weeks at a time. French Caesar systems and other similar systems have the same issues. Intel isn’t much of a problem since they get live satellite coverage from US systems.
The few sources I saw showed closer to a 1:1 ratio on replacement. I’m not sure what effect that has on volume of fire. Sure, the HIMARS are only tossing 6 rockets each, but they’re much larger warheads than even the 155mm shells.
I agree that they’ve got to lose out on sustained fire, especially given the cost per round…but that’s a separate issue from vulnerability to counter-battery fire. Shoot and scoot should be much safer than setting up one of those monster cannons, right?
They aren't that much larger.
The warhead is a mere 200 lb, twice as heavy as a howitzer round. While missiles can be thin-skinned and with fragmentation cover a larger area, it's not massively better than a common modern howitzer shell.
Very good against targets in the open, yes. If you wanted to target people in the basement of a reinforced concrete building, you could spend millions of $. Needless to say, the fragmentation warheads is probably useless even against sturdier dugouts, which must be hit with the unitary warhead.
It's a decent weapon especially with the ISR Ukraine is given, but they're getting too little ammo for some reason. Daily rate of fire was allegedly <10. Military artisanal complex strikes again!
The systems countering HIMARS is Tornado (250 kg warhead, 200km range) and Iskander (~500 kg, 500km range) are both similarly mobile and capable of leaving the launch site quickly. They're also vulnerable to stuff such as Lancet drones, but these are less common now, perhaps bc they can be intercepted with electric drone interceptors that are more common now.
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Sure, for each individual unit. But Russia has 4-5 thousand individual artillery pieces in the field, including around a thousand to fifteen hundred that are also self propelled (though not as accurate). Ukraine has 1500 tube artillery plus a handful of western MRLS systems. So individual Russian artillery pieces and systems get destroyed too, but it’s not going to change the overall disparity in volume of fire.
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