I know you didn't ask me but the answer is no.Do you think the counteroffensive has begum in earnest in and around Bakhmut?
Ukraine are definitely taking ground in the area,and all along the Donetsk frontline.Do you think the counteroffensive has begum in earnest in and around Bakhmut?
shamima?Do you think the counteroffensive has begum in earnest in and around Bakhmut?
Perhaps he still feels sharing certain info with NATO is not secure?NATO military committee meeting is currently ongoing in Brussels.
Zaluzhny should be in attendance.....sent his apologies for not attending.
Reason was "the situation at the front".
Slava Ukraini.
Interesting that there have been quite a few high level briefings by the defence minister and other top Ukrainian officials (latest Newsnight last night) that have tried to steer Western expectations away from a Kharkiv style counter offensive as the russians have spent a considerable amount of time laying deep defence lines and naturally the element of surprise will not be there.Ukraine are definitely taking ground in the area,and all along the Donetsk frontline.
I know soldiers that have been trained on Western equipment have been moving to their positions for about a week now.
They have been targeting,ammo depots,command posts bases,artillery,supply routes etc.
Got to be softening it up for an easier offensive,if there is such a thing.
We will all know when it starts proper,believe me,it's going to be huge.
Posted the other day,I was told "we have seriously advanced weaponry that has not been made public,and never will be".....no idea what it is.
I then posted a vid of HIMARS firing in slow motion(Noelreports).
I have no idea if it was deffo in Ukraine,but it was 100% ATACMS.
Slava Ukraini.
I think the above post is pretty much spot on.
And rightly so with Hungary and Turkey involved. Orban is Putin's finger puppet and Erdoğan would sell out his own mother if he saw an advantage in it for himself.Perhaps he still feels sharing certain info with NATO is not secure?
I don't think either have "air superiority" as such.On the question of air superiority, it is still doubtful whether the Russians have the will to take advantage. They have seemed very reluctant so far. Then there is the drone factor; Ukraine has trained thousands(?) of drone pilots and maybe that mitigates Ukraine’s relative weakness in the air.
Perhaps someone with greater knowledge than I (not difficult!) might like to comment.
I think this war will force military experts to redefine what the definition of air superiority actually means with the integral part that drones of a reconnaissance and attack nature that @KS55 mentions have brought to the dynamics of this war since they first crossed the border. I have read that there is a furious race to build unmanned attack aircraft (the more conventional ones rather than the Iranian drones) and noticeable that Iran are looking at shifting production of kamikaze drones to Belarus to avoid sanctions.I don't think either have "air superiority" as such.
Just from the reports I've seen, Ukraine are probably better served, in that their air force is based in Ukraine, and they have transportable air defence assets, which they can put anywhere. The russians meanwhile are largely based in their own territory, so it's a longer trip to use them, and over Ukraine territory they are quite vulnerable to hand launched missiles, and that has been borne out by how many they've had shot down. Their air defence can also only be in occupied areas, so has limited value unless Ukraine are flying over that territory which I'm sure they do sometimes.
It surprised me at the very start, that the russians didn't take out of action more airfields/aircraft, this is normally what you do in an invasion, but that might be because their initial intention was "Kyiv in 3 days", and they wanted to use them after they had fully taken over, seemed a big mistake to me. This (imho) allowed Ukraine to position their air force in more distant airfields, making it more difficult for russia to attack them, as they don't have high accuracy missiles to take out aircraft, and a runway can be repaired quickly.
So russian aircraft have had limited success over the occupied areas only (apart from the aircraft launching missiles from hundreds of miles away, but they never go anywhere near occupied territory).
All just an opinion obviously, but wars are rarely won without air superiority in this age.