Cont: The Russian invasion of Ukraine part 7

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The Don said:
Maybe he has done a better job of managing whose sons are being killed There aren't thousands of mothers protesting in major cities this time around.
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He did have to cancel the immortal brigade during victory day this year. I suspect that bit of pageantry will not come back for a good few years.
 
Doubt said:
Back in the stone age....well, the 80's, when I was in basic training, we saw some films on the Soviet army. One of the things they pointed out was that the conscripted infantry often did not speak Russian and the officers leading them often did not speak anything else but Russian.

The collapse of the Soviet union likely made things a little better but the tradition you pointed out seems to still be there.
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Svetlana Alexievich's "Zinky Boys" (named after the zinc-lined coffins that the Soviet military used at the time) is a fantastic book about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Being a soldier during wartime is usually not a very fun experience, but the Soviet soldier's lot seems to have been especially awful.

https://wwnorton.com/books/zinky-boys/
 
a_unique_person said:
Is the Krech Bridge suffering concrete cancer?


Crimean bridge is falling down – cracks appear on its pillars, photos (yahoo.com)
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If their military is suffering the results of years of kleptocracy, why not their civillian infrastructure. It was built in a fraction of the time a similar civil engineering project would be done in the West.

Maybe it's just the West having corrupt moral values that makes them take too long, though. Corrupt moral values also force the West to use proper materials, conduct design reviews, etc. Disgusting! :rolleyes:
 
Looking at the underside of the bridge after the Ukrainian attack showed there was almost no redundancy in the structure. When any support fails the rest of the structure ends up supporting the weight from the opposite side of the bridge. Effectively they end up putting the weight of one side at the end of a lever from the other side. The strength just is not there.

Given the age of the bridge, and what that concrete looks like, I would not be surprised if there was some salt water in the concreate mix.
 
a_unique_person said:
Is the Krech Bridge suffering concrete cancer?


Crimean bridge is falling down – cracks appear on its pillars, photos (yahoo.com)
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I saw this elsewhere a few days ago and wasn't sure if the story was true enough to post it here or not. But now a few sources are running it, albeit with the same pictures, so I'd say there's some serious validity to it. I have zero engineering or any other skills to back up what I see, but I did grow up with a father that was an architect whose specialty was structural concrete, so I have seen some stuff in my time.
Those pillars are done for, it's only a matter of time before the concrete says, 'so long, we're out of here!', and several large hunks go their separate ways, quickly and catastrophically. Rusted rebar is an unfixable and relentless bitch.
What that also means is, it won't take a whole lot of effort to speed that result up, significantly.
 
Jimbo07 said:
If their military is suffering the results of years of kleptocracy, why not their civillian infrastructure. It was built in a fraction of the time a similar civil engineering project would be done in the West.

Maybe it's just the West having corrupt moral values that makes them take too long, though. Corrupt moral values also force the West to use proper materials, conduct design reviews, etc. Disgusting! :rolleyes:
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You're not wrong, but it does occur to me that Putin may well have had people working on plans for years before the occupation of Crimea.
 
Jimbo07 said:
If their military is suffering the results of years of kleptocracy, why not their civillian infrastructure. It was built in a fraction of the time a similar civil engineering project would be done in the West.

Maybe it's just the West having corrupt moral values that makes them take too long, though. Corrupt moral values also force the West to use proper materials, conduct design reviews, etc. Disgusting! :rolleyes:
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An article about that from 2018

https://www.engineering.com/story/europes-longest-bridge-spans-troubled-waters

But not everyone thinks these measures will be enough to keep the bridge steady on its perilous ground. Civil engineer Georgy Rosnovsky, who previously designed two other possible versions of the Kerch Bridge, is troubled by the current design. He believes that the bridge is necessary, but has stated that he thinks it's being built "in the wrong place and the wrong way." He believes the pilings need to be at least 100 meters (328 feet) long, and worries that they are not sunk deep enough into the bedrock to be stable.
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And that is just talking about the bridge as designed. It would be very surprising if it had been built to specifications, given how few of other Russian engineering projects are.
 
SpitfireIX said:
You're not wrong, but it does occur to me that Putin may well have had people working on plans for years before the occupation of Crimea.
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Plans for the Kerch Bridge? My headcanon is that Russian Ted Mosby drew up an aspirational sketch for an Architecture School assignment, and then got tapped to make it real once the head of the university realized he had something he could sell to Putin on the back of the successful annexation of Crimea.
 
TurkeysGhost said:
Russia, and Putin in particular, are no strangers to the notion of having to suppress disgruntled ethnic minorities. Hell, the current war could be seen as one in a long series of overt acts to discipline the non-Russian parts (or former parts) of the country.
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Indeed. Most of the boarders within the former Soviet Union were deliberately made to cross ethnic boundaries so that if they ever achieved independence the disgruntled ethnic minorities would be too busy fighting each other for control to resist Russia re-annexing them.
 
theprestige said:
Plans for the Kerch Bridge? My headcanon is that Russian Ted Mosby drew up an aspirational sketch for an Architecture School assignment, and then got tapped to make it real once the head of the university realized he had something he could sell to Putin on the back of the successful annexation of Crimea.
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If only Bryan Cranston had designed it :rolleyes:

 
SpitfireIX said:
You're not wrong, but it does occur to me that Putin may well have had people working on plans for years before the occupation of Crimea.
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The other day I read a Twitter thread about the medals that Shoigu, who never was a soldier, wears on his uniform. One is to commemorate the 2014 annexation of Crimea. The design of that medal, allegedly, had been ordered in 2013 already, iirc, or at any rate at a date when president Yanukovich was still holding the reigns of power in Kyev. So this would indeed indicte that the annexation was already planned by Russia well before things got wild in 2014.
 
lobosrul5 said:
Not really conditions were far far worse than any movie from the 1960's could possibly portray accurately. (I'm a bigtime David Lean fan fyi).

We'll see soon, but I expect many Russians to abandon their positions the moment they see Ukrainian armored approaching.
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Agreed conditions were worse then shown...but I think it is right in showing how the Russian armies just collapsed in 1917, and set off the revollution.
 
Almost tempted to poll everybody here to see what day they think the offensive will really start. Not having a good definition for what that will be makes it a bit silly. But we can still pick dates.

They are not going to wait for all the tanks and planes to show up. We are into June so the "spring" part of a spring offensive is about over with. Weather reports I looked at show rain starting around June 10th in a couple of key locations. I think they are going to go this month and, without much of anything to really back this up, I am guessing June 8th. Odds of being wrong are quite high. Take your best guess.
 
Doubt said:
Almost tempted to poll everybody here to see what day they think the offensive will really start. Not having a good definition for what that will be makes it a bit silly. But we can still pick dates.

They are not going to wait for all the tanks and planes to show up. We are into June so the "spring" part of a spring offensive is about over with. Weather reports I looked at show rain starting around June 10th in a couple of key locations. I think they are going to go this month and, without much of anything to really back this up, I am guessing June 8th. Odds of being wrong are quite high. Take your best guess.
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I am 110% confident in having no idea.

Anytime between now and as late as late August. It just depends on the goals.

I figure they need about two weeks to maybe a month or month and a half of good dry weather for a hard push that could recapture about 1/4 of what Russia currently controls. If Ukr casualties were low in such an operation, it would signal that Ukraine can keep going on a longer timeframe. I don't think they need to recapture everything this year, just show that they have the ability to recapture everything in a time frame of a few years.

They have lots of time.
 
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