Ukraine - Thursday, April 14
All about Moskva, no apparent plan in Eastern Ukraine, and Russian soldiers sold their tank fuel for alcohol
Moskva (Russian for “Moscow”):
🇺🇦 The the crew of the Russian flag ship in the Black Sea, Moskva, has abandoned ship due to an incident. By “incident” I mean Ukraine hit it with two Neptune anti-ship cruise missiles.
🇺🇦 Ugggg the above is going to be old news by the time I post it on Thursday when you read this
🇺🇦 Uggggg it’s 9pm on Wednesday, and there are already memes coming out about the Moskva being “promoted to a submarine” and this update has to wait till tomorrow because I already published on Wednesday!
🇺🇦 Ugggg my friends are all messaging me asking if I heard about the Moskva submarine!
🇺🇦 How the Moskva plan was executed: Ukraine set up the Neptune missiles during a storm so neither the ship nor satellites could spot them. Ukraine used a Bayraktar drone to distract the crew. This ship has robust anti-missile defenses. But the ship’s primary radar only has a 180 degree field of view, and was pointed at the Bayraktar drone, so it was pointed away from the missiles.
🇺🇦 Also, Neptune missiles aren’t just point and shoot. There are rumors that a western government entity was targeting for them. It’s a big and sophisticated system
🇺🇦 Update: this is the “Russian warship for f yourself” warship
🇺🇦 This is the largest warship lost since WWII
🇺🇦 This ship was used to defend other ships against air attacks and it would have been used to bombard Odessa (assuming Russia would attempt a land assault)
🇺🇦 This ship is irreplaceable because the Turks control access to the sea
🇺🇦 This is a big deal because it was the pride of the Russian military, and the king of the Black Sea. Not only is it devastating for moral in Russia, but it is a huge victory for Ukraine
🇺🇦 Update: The ship officially sank
Other stuff:
🇺🇦 Belarusian troops described Russian troops deployed to Belarus while waiting to fight: ‘They drank a lot, and sold their diesel fuel to buy more alcohol.’ As we know, they ended up running out of fuel and getting trapped in Ukraine
🇺🇦 Ongoing US effort to equip Ukraine: 11x MI17 helicopters (originally earmarked for Afghanistan before the gov fell), 18x 155mm howitzers, 40,000 artillery rounds, counter artillery radar, 200 armor personnel carriers, 300 switchblade drones, coastal defense drone boats, dedicating additional intelligence units
🇺🇦 Columbia is sending coal to Germany to offset problems for when they shut off energy from Russia
🇺🇦 Russia is dropping mines everywhere. They’re launching missiles that only drop mines
🇺🇦 Russian soldiers mined everything as they left: refrigerators, washers/dryers, trunks of cars, etc
🇺🇦 Ukraine has deployed 550 mine personnel who have so far defused 54,000 devices
🇺🇦 Russia said they would put nuclear weapons in the Baltic Sea if Sweden and Finland joined NATO…but Russia already has nuclear weapons there so its not like this threat makes sense. But nukes is all Russia has so I guess they’ll play that card
🇺🇦 French presidential candidate Marine La Pen is campaigning on an anti-US platform where she opposed US ‘aggressiveness’ against China
Operational:
🇺🇦 Russian forces continued to take ground in Mariupol
🇺🇦 Russian forces continued unsuccessful local attacks in eastern Ukraine amid continuing preparations for a likely wider offensive.
🇺🇦 Russian forces continued to regroup in Kharkiv Oblast for offensive operations and conducted only minor attacks south of Izyum.
🇺🇦 Russian forces continued to conduct small-scale limited offensive operations on both the Izyum and Severodonetsk and have not yet begun a broader offensive campaign. But that might be because…
🇺🇦 Update: It appears that Russia isn’t actually preparing for a larger offensive. It appears that Russia is redeploying units piecemeal into the fight in eastern Ukraine instead of coordinating a larger attack (Institute for the Study of War)
🇺🇦 Russia is not gathering combat power to conduct a massive attack to break through. It’s unknown why they are doing this. Maybe they just don’t have the mission command or lines of communication? (Institute for the Study of War)
🇺🇦 This is turning into an offensive insurgency
⚠️If anyone cares, I post updates in the afternoon, then immediately start writing the next update. That means some of the data is 24 hours old, some of it is minutes old.
⚠️ If you ever hear anyone say “What about America…” in an effort to redirect attention away from Ukraine and onto America, that is called “Competitive victimhood” and the associated meme is *always* created by Russian-backed media. Russia has three primary propaganda efforts directed at the West, and that’s the third.
⚠️ Note: I’m getting lazy with my citations and I apologize. It’s all the same sources as it’s always been…NATO planners, official statements, major news, other open source researchers, people who send me leads, reputable pundits like Aaron Parnas, Kyiv Independent, Institute for the Study of War, etc. Thank you especially to CP Scott, former Army and former NATO planner.
⚠️ Note: War happens fast and even high fidelity news needs a ton of corrections after the dust settles. Also, I’ve been spoiled by social media’s format where I can update the final product every time I find a typo. While that’s still the case, that poses a problem when…
⚠️ I started a substack newsletter to accommodate the individual emails requests. Feel free to subscribe!