are they still getting most of their armor destroyed in the “screening zone” or whatever it’s called? I remember a few days ago The New Atlas was pointing out how they hadn’t even reached Russia’s first defensive line yet
It looks like in the past few days they cooled off with using armor, recently they’ve been just sending a lot of troops in to storm villages and they managed to capture a few that way. However, now they have to start making their way across open fields again and the whole thing stalled once again. They’re still kilometres away from the actual defensive lines.
Basically what’s happening is that they’re making their way through heavily mined open fields. As they discovered over the past two weeks, this makes it effectively impossible for a large armored assault to happen. Ukraine would send a mine clearing tank and the rest would have to follow in a line since moving to the side means hitting a mine. Russians would disable the first vehicle and then pick off the rest since they have nowhere to go. On top of that, KA-52s can hit these columns from up to 10 km away, and Ukraine doesn’t have anything that can hit back. So, all the vehicles are basically sitting ducks.
The new tactic of throwing infantry in first to clear the way saves vehicles, but obviously result in much higher manpower losses. It’ll be interesting to see what Ukrainians do in the next few weeks. The pressure from the west to show some results before the NATO meeting in July must be incredible, so they could be forced to use zerg rush tactics.
are they still getting most of their armor destroyed in the “screening zone” or whatever it’s called? I remember a few days ago The New Atlas was pointing out how they hadn’t even reached Russia’s first defensive line yet
It looks like in the past few days they cooled off with using armor, recently they’ve been just sending a lot of troops in to storm villages and they managed to capture a few that way. However, now they have to start making their way across open fields again and the whole thing stalled once again. They’re still kilometres away from the actual defensive lines.
Basically what’s happening is that they’re making their way through heavily mined open fields. As they discovered over the past two weeks, this makes it effectively impossible for a large armored assault to happen. Ukraine would send a mine clearing tank and the rest would have to follow in a line since moving to the side means hitting a mine. Russians would disable the first vehicle and then pick off the rest since they have nowhere to go. On top of that, KA-52s can hit these columns from up to 10 km away, and Ukraine doesn’t have anything that can hit back. So, all the vehicles are basically sitting ducks.
The new tactic of throwing infantry in first to clear the way saves vehicles, but obviously result in much higher manpower losses. It’ll be interesting to see what Ukrainians do in the next few weeks. The pressure from the west to show some results before the NATO meeting in July must be incredible, so they could be forced to use zerg rush tactics.