cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/72208315

Russia spent 18 months building its salient toward Sloviansk; Ukraine took much of it back in three. By 30 September, three of four planned phases in, the operation had returned 176 sq km to Ukrainian control, taken 250 Russian prisoners, and cost Russia more than 5,000 killed and wounded, Ukraine's presidential office said. It also foiled a Russian plan to break into the rear of the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk urban area, the office said.

Defying critics who insisted vehicles couldn't possibly survive in the drone-patrolled gray zone, the 3rd Army Corps repeatedly deployed mechanized forces as it counterattacked across a roughly 100 sq km salient the Russian 20th and 25th Combined Arms Armies had extended toward Sloviansk, one of the last two big free cities in Donetsk Oblast.

Maneuvering for months under a veil of secrecy, the 3rd Army Corps found and exploited gaps along the flanks of the 20th and 25th CAAs, ultimately breaking into the Russian armies' rears and forcing them to pull back across the Zherebets River in order to avoid encirclement.

Human Beings in armored vehicles NOT Robots, do you "AI and drones beat everything" techbro armchair generals in the back hear that? Do we need to keep repeating it? Yes? It is called Combined Arms for a reason.

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[–] -1 points 4 weeks ago*

I see no evidence of war crimes, in fact the entire point of mechanized armored maneuver is to enclose large swaths of enemy fighters who refuse to stop trying to kill you and invade your country in order to force their surrender with minimal fighting. Yes you can use it to conquer territory filled with people who don't want you there but it is an illusion since you will be simply resisted by guerilla forces rather than an organized military and you will lose all the same.

There is no other reason to be proficient at it, which is why russia isn't, they already treat their own soldiers like worthless prisoners, at an institutional level the russian military is incapable of understanding the value of alive human beings and it is why they have lost this war.

Sorry but where are you getting any of this from?

First, the previous poster is absolutely correct to say that - if this were true - it would be making their case for them. They're arguing that the number of prisoners, relative to the number of wounded and dead, is too low and this is evidence of war crimes.

As I've stated elsewhere, the people with actual experience in modern mechanized warfare that I spoke with completely disagreed with their assessment and found there to be absolutely nothing remarkable about the reported ratio of prisoners to casualties.

But what you're apparently arguing is that Ukraine is somehow employing a method of warfare designed exclusively to capture rather than kill the enemy. If true, this would completely validate their otherwise baseless claim that the casualty numbers reported are suspiciously low.

It's not, of course. Everything you wrote here is, forgive me for being blunt, abject nonsense. Again, this is not my expertise speaking here, but that of the actual mechanized infantry soldiers I spoke with. The people who do this exact thing professionally.

Yes, mechanized warfare is intended to exploit gaps in an enemy's defense, and yes, where possible the ideal outcome is an encirclement. But true encirclements are rare, and more often the threat of one is what forces an enemy to retreat. And mechanized assaults themselves are just one small component of the broader structure of combined arms warfare. The normal approach to an attack like this would be to heavily damage the enemy positions with drones, artillery and other long range fires before even approaching. And once closely engaged the fighting can often become brutal and intense as you make your way into the enemy trenchlines. Russians are known to pre-range their own positions for artillery fires and then immediately call in strikes the moment coms go down, which can often lead to their wounded becoming their dead instead of ending up as captives.

As for the notion that Russia does not employ mechanized warfare... I can hardly think of a more absurd statement. Russia largely invented the modern form of mechanized warfare. While it has its roots in German blitzkrieg, which was really just a propaganda term for "Prussian Maneuver Warfare But With Truck", the idea of the infantry fighting vehicle as an integrated component of the section in combat is a specifically Soviet evolution, one that NATO quickly adopted, though not nearly as fully as the Russians did. To this day the vast majority of the US Military still does not have organic transport, while the entire Russian military does. In terms of overall level of mechanization they are probably the most mechanized military in the world.

I think you're also confusing division level and company level operations here. Mechanization allows the division to move quickly, exploit gaps, and ideally create encirclements, but at the company or even batallion level an attack still typically involves sending your forces against their forces in an attempt to push back or break through their lines. Those battles are, by necessity, bloody and violent, and casualty counts can be extremely high with the nature of modern weaponry as we've seen in so many of the reports coming out of Ukraine.

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