Large frontline summary 22-28 October 2024
The Russian badaboom has arrived; Selidovo - a hint to the most ignorant. By Marat Khairullin with illustrations by Mikhail Popov.
Today we can talk about the capture of Selidovo as a fait accompli. This is another important milestone in the current collapse of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. It is not even that the city was captured very quickly by the standards of this war, but that Selidovo should really be considered a symbol of the Ukrops' impotence to stop the Russian military machine, although they tried to do this. To understand what a difficult situation our enemy found himself in, let's look a little deeper.
On the Novogrodovka-Gornyak section, about 20 km wide, the Russian troops were confronted by a powerful group of the Ukrainian Armed Forces - about 11 mechanized brigades, not counting the territorial ones. In one mechanized brigade, they usually have two or three artillery divisions, each with 4 batteries (one battery, as a rule, 6 guns). And one tank battalion - nominally 50 tanks. That is, only by the most modest estimates, in this area we were confronted by 500 to 800 artillery pieces and about 500 tanks. However, this is the so-called "on-paper" data.
If the Ukies really had so much artillery working in this area (under conditions where the entire battlefield is visible through and through by drones), our losses would have been horrific. Remember how many videos there were of our losses at the beginning of the war. Today, the density of troops is higher than then.
What does this mean? That's right - that the enemy's artillery, if not completely suppressed, certainly can not affect our maneuvering. Look how we are bypassing Selidovo from both sides.
On the nex next point: Just recently, there was a squeal in the war bloggers' networks about the total superiority of the Ukies in drones. Let's see what this advantage looks like in the specific example of Selidovo. Now, all the main brigades of the Ukrainian Armed Forces have officially created a drone battalion. For example, the super-duper elite 93rd Brigade "Kholodny Yar" has as many as two.
Our intelligence estimates each battalion of Ukrops at about 200 active UAV operators. Among them, by the way, there are many females. In other words, there should have been more than two thousand Ukrops with remote controls on a 20 km section. That is, quite a lot, however, we do not see footage of our losses that the enemy would regularly publish. If there was something to publish, do not doubt that they would do it...
Thus, drones are not capable of replacing artillery and stopping the advance of a well-trained army. In addition, the current nature of the battles clearly shows that either the Ukies have begun to run out of steam, or our army has found an antidote to the Ukies' buzzers. As far as I know, both have happened. A system for identifying and destroying UAV launch sites has been actively implemented at the front for several months now. It is an analogue of the counter-battery system. The fruits can already be seen - the pressure of enemy drones on our infantry has begun to decrease significantly. This is a direct result of an invisible technological battle, and we are clearly winning here, too.
Now let's sum it up: after we started knocking out the enemy's artillery en masse, the Ukies bet on drones, and the Ukrainian Armed Forces quickly acquired the corresponding units. Each brigade, I emphasize, each of the nominal 160 brigades, had two hundred or even more UAV operators. And now the battle for Selidovo has clearly shown that this bet has been lost for the AFU.
The Selidovo section of the front was defended from the enemy side, not by just mechanized brigades, but by the best units that remained, for example, the same "Kholodny Yar" brigade. These are not just "cyborgs" from the ruins of the Donetsk airport. This was, until recently, the most powerful brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, comparable in numbers to two Soviet divisions. It has seven infantry battalions alone, and an entire artillery regiment, which includes four divisions and two specialized battalions, plus two tank battalions and two battalions of UAV operators. In the best of times, this brigade alone held a twenty-kilometer section of the front. It was directly responsible for the defense of Selidovo.
In addition to the 93rd, the remnants of the best mechanized brigades were spotted here - the 47th (Magura) and the 59th. These are almost complete analogues - seven infantry battalions and full-fledged artillery regiments. This also includes three paratrooper brigades, which the Ukies now call Jaeger, and, of course, the 12th Nazi brigade "Azov" as well as another Nazi brigade, the 15th (Zelensky's presidential guard "Kara-Dag").
The 12th and 15th are purely punative and barrier detachments (these detatchments are there to shoot stragglers and those that refuse to follow orders). Let me remind you that, after the mutiny of one of the brigades on the Pokrovsk-Selidovsky front, three brigades of punitive forces were concentrated at once. The Ukrops who were dying in commercial quantities had to be supported with something so that they did not run away. And these are only the so-called elite brigades. No one even considers the regular infantry (terro-defense) here.
So, the Ukrainians concentrated their best brigades (or rather, what was left of them) to give us a second Bakhmut near Selidovo. The battle for the city, which is the center of the main front line Pokrovsk-Kurakhovo, began on October 9 and ended on the 28th, and in 20 days, we did not see any epic battles, total shelling and carpet bombing, as, for example, in Bakhmut. Ours simply systematically surrounded another "hornet's nest" and also systematically forced the Nazis to flee.
By the standards of this war, the city was left to us almost intact. That is, Selidovo is truly a kind of illustrative example. If the Ukrainians, having concentrated their best forces, so quickly gave up the key city on which two flanks hang - Pokrovsk and Kurakhovo, what will happen next? Kurakhovo, to be brief, is already in semi-encirclement, and the movement towards Pokrovsk does not stop for a minute. It should be understood that the situation was complicated by the fact that Selidovo was covered by two full-fledged cities on the flanks - Novogrodovka and Gornyak, which are strong fortresses in themselves. So our troops calmly blocked them and continued moving towards Selidovo.
If we take the entire section of the front from Toretsk, Pokrovsk, and to Ugledar, it turns out that our troops are advancing in more than a dozen operational directions at once. That is, as they said in the famous film (The Fifth Element), the Ukrainians are getting a "big badaboom." Selidovo is a clear hint for the especially stupid - it's time to run, we're giving you one last chance...
The indicators are good.