According to the Ukrainian armed forces on April 3, Ukrainian troops have regained control of the area around the capital Kiev for the first time in more than a month since Russia launched a "special military operation against Ukraine." Russian troops are "rapidly withdrawing" from the periphery of Kiev and northern Ukraine, and the focus of Russian attacks will shift to the Donloo region in the east.
At present, the entire Kiev region, including Irpin, Bucha, and Gostomelli, has been "liberated" from the Hands of the Russian Army. Ukrainian troops have begun to launch a counter-offensive against the Ivankov region, a major town in the northwest of Kiev and the transportation hub, and some settlements have been retaken by the Ukrainian side.
The drive from Ivankov to the center of Kiev is about 80 kilometers, and in the last two days hundreds of Heavy Russian weapons have retreated through Ivankov in the direction of Belarus. The Ukrainian army was obviously attacking and blocking the Russian army in a state of contraction and retreat from the flanks.
Ivankov was heavily fought in the early days of the war, and on the 27th of last month, U.S. satellites photographed the Russian army's huge convoy of hundreds of military vehicles, including tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and self-propelled guns, crowding the road and slowly squirming, it was here in Ivankov.
In military operations, retreat is sometimes more difficult than offensive and can easily lead to collapse. For example, mechanized troops need to use the road network to travel, and troops marching in long snake formations on the road are more vulnerable and can be ambushed or harassed.
If there is a group of 10 vehicles, the spacing of the groups is 500 meters, and the distance between each vehicle is 30 meters, then the formation length of more than one hundred vehicles in a battalion-level tactical group is seven or eight kilometers. The formation of the brigade-level troops is even longer and more complex, and may cover tens of kilometers of pavement. At this time, if it is surrounded and attacked from the flanks, the loss will be more serious, and even some heavy equipment will be abandoned.
At this time, many people feel very questioning, where is the invincible Russian army that was advertised by the media in the past? Why are there so many casualties?
War is not a matter of words, there are always people who will die. If you don't have the psychological preparation to die on the battlefield, then you are not worthy of being a soldier. The fighting courage and sacrifice spirit of the Russian army are still admirable.
Moreover, the Russian army's foreign war in recent years has indeed performed very well, almost winning every battle, and in the case of far inferior investment in technology, equipment and manpower and material resources to the United States, Syria has achieved the most outstanding results among the powerful countries participating in the war, which makes the Western army ashamed.
Through the war on terror in Syria, the Russian military not only achieved the return of influence and strategic initiative in the Middle East strategy, but also shocked NATO's expansion by fighting in Ukraine. At the same time, the Russian military's foreign operations have also verified more than 600 kinds of new weapons and equipment, and the air force pilots have basically realized rotational training and rotational warfare. It has also greatly facilitated arms sales.
According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, in order to help the Syrian government, since September 2015, 63,000 Russian servicemen have participated in the round of combat in Syria and gained valuable combat experience. These included 25,000 officers, 434 generals, and 4,349 armored, artillery, and rocket force specialists. Nearly 90% of all Russian pilots are fighter and land aviation pilots, 98% of transport aviation, 60% of strategic bombing crews, and 32% of air defense units have participated in Syrian military operations and gained combat experience over Syria. Coupled with military operations such as the operation in eastern Ukraine, the Russian army has nearly 100,000 officers and soldiers participating in actual combat in the past 8 years.
All the commanders of Russia's major military regions, synthetic army groups, and air defense army groups, all division commanders, 95 percent of composite brigades, and regimental commanders have fought side by side with their staff officers and units in Syria. Commanders, chiefs of staff and directors of operations departments with combat experience will make the army stronger than ever.
Many people emphasize that the Russian military has actual combat experience. Russia has experienced wars in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia, Eastern Ukraine and then Syria, and after experiencing so many wars, it has accumulated considerable practical combat experience.
After the founding of the People's Republic of China, war experience was very rare, and peace was maintained for a long time for more than thirty years, and even though the army made outstanding achievements in modernization and reform, our army still lacked actual combat experience. The valuable experience gained through actual combat can enable the army to improve its tactics and ideas, which is of great significance. When Russia intervened in the Syrian civil war, the actual combat experience compiled by russia played a great role in improving our military and played an important role in improving the future.
In fact, the Russian army does not have much experience in large-scale operations, and several wars in which the Russian army has participated in recent years have been small-scale operations, and ground operations mostly serve as guides for air-to-ground strikes and artillery shooting, which is not of universal significance.
The Russian military is very short of conditions for systematic confrontation exercises, and several super-large-scale strategic exercises conducted by the Russian military in recent years are traditional "exercise" habits, which are only very spectacular and good-looking, but they are not obvious in testing and improving actual combat.
For example, the Sino-Russian "Western -Joint 2021" military exercise held last year has attracted the attention of the whole world. The live-fire exercise stage has a width of 6 kilometers and a depth of only 7 kilometers. The density of firepower was extremely high, gathering a team of more than ten thousand people, more than a hundred aircraft to throw bombs here, more than two hundred armored fighting vehicles, and more than a hundred artillery shells to project shells here. It is estimated that the slag of the target explosion is gone. The Russian army was also shocked. However, the difficulty of this kind of exercise is not high, and it is mainly based on "performance". Nor is it the main focus of the PLA's current form of exercise.
The main exercises of our military have been transformed into all-element real-force confrontation exercises that are comparable to those of the US military. The Russian military is still relatively unfamiliar with such confrontation exercises.
In recent years, with the stabilization of the economy, the number of exercises by the Russian army has increased. For example, in 2018, Russia held a total of 2240 military exercises (even at the company level), and the "Vostok-2018" strategic exercise, which was jointly participated with China, was the largest and most high-profile exercise. Subsequently, the Russian military held large-scale strategic exercises every year. These exercises are almost all traditional exercises, that is, the troops move in place, then work on the map, guide the operation, and then concentrate on the firepower demonstration, then summarize, and then parade.
The Chinese military conducts about 400 joint confrontation exercises at or above the brigade level every year (according to the People's Liberation Army Daily), ten times the number of which is that of the Russian army. Among them, there are more than 100 large-scale exercises in four series, such as joint exercises on mission topics, joint special exercises, inter-service confrontation exercises, and Sino-foreign joint exercises, so that modern exercises can better test the combat capability of the armed forces.
For example, our annual series of joint exercises on mission topics code-named "Joint Operations 201X/A-D" can dispatch more than 100 regiments of multi-service units to engage in fierce confrontations, with a total of more than 100,000 troops participating in the exercise. Our army has more than 10 large modern confrontation exercise bases, both on land and in the air, capable of realistically simulating the battlefield environment, which the Russian army does not have.
NATO countries led by the United States and our country believe that a large-scale strategic exercise like Russia's is a repetition of the routine of large-scale all-out war during the Cold War period, and it is a waste of money. This is because after the new century, the United States, the West, and China have stopped engaging in such extra-large-scale strategic exercises of the general mobilization style, and at most they have engaged in some joint exercises at the theater level, but the number of exercises is relatively large.
How effective is the real-force confrontation test exercise supported by the modern system?
The most typical is the large-scale training of the US military in the 1980s. At that time, the U.S. military had just crawled out of the humiliating quagmire of the Vietnam battlefield and had just experienced a tragic defeat, and they learned that the military needed to train in an environment close to the real battlefield to have the advantage in future wars.
As a result, the US military has placed great emphasis on integrated confrontation training exercises since the mid-1980s, and strives to simulate the real battlefield environment. Beginning in 1985, the US military's tactical exercises adopted a revolutionary training method that was completely close to actual combat, and they immersed themselves in hard training.
Five years later, the effect of the large-scale military training of the United States was effectively tested in the 1991 Gulf War, and you all know the specific results. A million troops of the world's third-largest military power, who had just fought the 8-year Iran-Iraq War and had rich battlefield experience and hundreds of veterans, were annihilated by the US army in 100 hours.
On military training, compared with the People's Liberation Army, the Russian army is still far behind.
In recent years, in many Sino-Russian joint exercises, the Chinese side has often brought some huge shocks to the Russian military. The main reason is that the PLA is making progress too fast.
For example, as early as 10 years ago, in the Sino-Russian joint exercise, the Chinese side equipped with self-propelled artillery with an automated command, positioning and data link system, received the task to enter the position, directly raised the barrel of the gun to fight, and immediately withdrew after the fight. At this time, the target of the Russian artillery was not yet finished.
For example, in the SCO joint exercise in 2014, our army dispatched a large number of new generation main battle weapons such as 99A tanks, GJ-1 Tada integrated unmanned aerial vehicles, 35 mm self-propelled anti-aircraft guns, 122 mm modular rocket launchers, and Red Arrow-10 missiles. The Russian Army participating in the show was envious.
What shocked the Russian army the most was the "Orient" -2018 strategic military exercise held in Russia in 2018. The Chinese side sent a heavy composite brigade and a medium composite brigade that strengthened the support of land aviation helicopters and electronic warfare, and the two brigades of the 78th Group Army each produced 2 composite battalions, with about 3,000 personnel. All of them were meritorious units, especially the combined battalion of a certain brigade, who had participated in the battle against the Soviet Army on Zhenbao Island, and during the exercise parade, they shot the battle flag of the "Iron Hammer Regiment" on the chariot.
It is said that at the beginning of the war, the Chinese side "annihilated" a Motor Infantry Regiment of the Russian Army in an integrated manner, so that the Motorcycle Infantry Regiment, which numbered 4390 people, had to be eliminated in advance and launched into battle.
However, the original Script of the Russian Army was not like this, and the setting of the director department at the beginning of the exercise was that "the Chinese armored group encountered a complete motorized infantry regiment of the Central Military Region of the Russian Army, and after a long period of firefighting, the Chinese side withdrew from the battlefield with a fierce victory." However, as soon as they engaged, China's heavy composite brigade cleanly "completely annihilated" the Russian motorized infantry regiment.
Although this is an unconfirmed result, it can also represent the combat capability of our army to a certain extent. The Russo-Ukrainian War gave our army some very good opportunities to observe, to study actual combat, to analyze the process and results, the reasons for winning and losing, and then to go back and examine their own development.