to be delivered:
1,875 assault rifles MK 556
319 CR 308
260 precision rifles HLR 338
MK556 and CR308 are both rifles on the basis of the Haenel CR223 wich is based on the AR15. The MK556 initially won the contract for the new service rifle of the Bundeswehr but Heckler and Koch sued and got the contract instead.
the 308 apparently is the larger caliber version and has a version called HMR, but no idea what got delivered
tl;dw Local Russian defense is concentrating too much in Korenevo in Kursk, allowing Ukraine to spider around to the flanks apparently for free, starting to threaten to pocket the town. Special forces have access to the supply road to the NW and interdicted reinforcements.
Still providing large quantities of those sniper rifles, I see. How many is that now? Must be well into the thousands.
Unless Ukraine's changed that part of their doctrine during their reforms in recent years, they might still have squad-level marksmen like a lot of Soviet-derived armies try to maintain. There'd be a lot more demand for those sorts of weapons on a rifle-per-soldier basis than most western armies.
Aren't the CR308s sent to Ukraine the HMR variant (ie optimized as sharpshooters/designated marksman's rifle)? Ie not a sniper rifle, but not a "regular assault rifle" either.
Still providing large quantities of those sniper rifles, I see. How many is that now? Must be well into the thousands.
Unless Ukraine's changed that part of their doctrine during their reforms in recent years, they might still have squad-level marksmen like a lot of Soviet-derived armies try to maintain. There'd be a lot more demand for those sorts of weapons on a rifle-per-soldier basis than most western armies.
I'm given to understand that Ukraine has some truly absurd sniper rifles:
This absurd monstrosity is a domestic production rifle that fires .57 calibre rounds, weighs 25 KG (55lbs) an effective range of 2000 meters and a maximum of 7000.
They call it a T-rex and technically it's an anti-material rifle but I'm putting it here anyways.
Anti-materiel in the sense that the soldier's helmet was materiel, and it's definitely gone. As well as the soldier, the guy behind him, and the vehicle behind them probably needs some serious engine work as well?
(this is not a serious post, I'm not considering the angle this would have to happen at, it was an excuse to be cheeky, while also recognizing that militaries have been using such weapons in such a manner for a long time.)
Canadian forces in particular have ended up in the news a couple of times for making long range kills with anti-materiel class rifles, if I'm recalling correctly.
Though I hope/imagine whatever that ammo costs, that for 7km ranges, it's probably not being used on something as small and mobile as a person.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
+2
Kane Red RobeMaster of MagicArcanusRegistered Userregular
It turns out soldiers are made out of material. Who knew?
Those anti-materiel rifles are especially handy for infantry taking down thinly armored transports and IFVs, stuff like your BMPs and BTRs, as well as unarmored transport trucks. They're not anti-tank, per se, but for most Soviet-made stuff below a tank you can do some real damage with a well-placed large-caliber round -- probably won't score a vehicle kill with just one bullet, but very potentially able to knock out tracks or optics or other significant systems in a way that makes it much easier for heavier ordinance to hit it on a follow-up
Lots of jokes about using the 14.5mm anti-materiel rifles against people.
However, the main problem with that is that there isn't a lot of match grade 14.5mm rounds available. So despite looking like a sniper rifle, and intended to be used at ranges like that of a sniper rifle, and that it has on a very few occasions been used as a sniper rifle... it's not really a sniper rifle.
It's really an anti-materiel rifle, because a lot of Russian gear took a look at the .50 BMG and said "We want to be resistant against that!" and then someone took a look at the 14.5mm (a WWII anti-aircraft gun) and went "Those vehicles are resistant to .50BMG/12.7mm Russian. But what about that?"
90% of the time you want to use a KPV machinegun rather than a bolt action rifle (or semi-automatic in the case of the monomakh), but the KPV is notoriously heavy (50kg without a tripod. M2 .50 cal is 58 kilos with a tripod) and nobody has developed a tripod mount that allows the KPV to be fired accurately at the kind of ranges you want to fire if you're infantry manning an unarmored high-value piece of equipment and facing armored vehicles with 30mm autocannons (KPV is almost always vehicle mounted or mounted on a gun-carriage).
Enter the T-Rex/Alligator/Monomakh. Ridiculous guns, but they are able to punch through a BMP-2 or the radome of a Tunguska AA vehicle at ridiculous ranges. And in the case of the T-Rex it's even infantry-portable enough for long walks in the Ukrainian countryside (with Alligator/Monomakh you really want to use a vehicle to get into position due to the bulk of the weapon).
Which is probably the big reason why there aren't a lot of videos of the guns in use (there are like. 5 videos of the guns in actual field use?). Puffs of smoke from a round hitting a target the size of a barn isn't sexy, even if it's at several kilometers away.
Fiendishrabbit on
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
+4
Psychotic OneThe Lord of No PantsParts UnknownRegistered Userregular
tl;dw Discussion of Russian command and communication problems in Kursk which have led to multiple friendly fire incidents, one of which was alluded to in Perun's last video.
There seems to be a lot of chatter about Ukraine cutting the three bridges over that river, so effectively cutting off ~700 sq km of territory, and reportedly up to 3,000 Russian soldiers who don't look to be getting much help anytime soon.
In any case, they're still taking more territory. That's not a small river either - if Ukraine decide to do the obvious and use it as the new front line then there is the potential to make it very difficult and expensive indeed for the Russians to cross. Pontoon bridges are much more vulnerable to artillery/HIMARS than reinforced concrete ones.
A U.S. Air Force veteran who was facing a possession of child pornography charge when he fled the country appears to have confirmed, in a propaganda video released Monday, that he has joined the Russian army. He insisted he is not a traitor.
"I’m Will. I’m from Massachusetts,” Wilmer Puello-Mota, who is also a former City Council member in Holyoke, Massachusetts, said in the five-minute video released by Russia's Defense Ministry. "My call sign is 'Boston.'"
Puello-Mota, 28, is serving as a reconnaissance drone operator with the Russian military units fighting the Ukrainians in the Donetsk region, according to the Defense Ministry, which identified him as both an “American with Russian citizenship” and a “former American citizen.”
"I don't consider myself a traitor," Puello-Mota, dressed in combat gear, said in the video.
Puello-Mota made no mention in the video of the criminal charges he was facing when he fled in January to Russia via Turkey.
Instead, he said, “I’m from Boston, Massachusetts, and I served 10 years in the U.S. Air Force, some years in the Massachusetts International Guard, and I did two years as a city councilor.”
Holyoke City Council President Tessa Murphy-Romboletti said she recognizes him in the video.
"I can confirm that it appears to be Will in the video," she said via email.
Puello-Mota was supposed to show up in a Rhode Island courtroom on Jan. 9 and plead guilty to possessing sexually explicit images of a child and other charges that could have sent him to prison for at least five years, his lawyer, John M. Cicilline, said in an interview with The Boston Globe.
Cicilline said Puello-Mota told him the day before that he had other plans.
“He said, ‘I joined the Russian army,’ or something like that,” Cicilline told The Globe. “I thought he was joking.”
...
Two months after he fled the States, The Republican, a newspaper based in Springfield, Massachusetts, reported that "Holyokers were abuzz" after video surfaced on Instagram of a man in a Russian uniform planting a U.S. flag in what appeared to be the wrecked Ukrainian city of Avdiivka.
His face was blurred, but the newspaper reported that people in Holyoke who knew Puello-Mota were convinced it was him.
In April, according to The Moscow Times, the Defense Ministry released a video of a man who appeared to be Puello-Mota inside an army enlistment office and identified him only as a former U.S. soldier named “Will.”
In the newest video, Puello-Mota explained why he joined the Russian army.
“When I got involved in politics, I zoomed out into the international level of politics, and you really stop and pause and think about what’s going on here,” he said. “You feel like you have to do something about it.”
Puello-Mota also blamed the U.S. for the war in Ukraine, said he has a girlfriend, and sounded thrilled to be a member of the Russian army.
Series of images and videos from various satellite sources showing one of the bridges that Ukraine destroyed, followed by the deployment of a pontoon bridge about 500 meters away from it, followed by FIRMS satellite data showing fires around the location of the pontoon bridge.
FIRMS is the Fire Information for Resource Management System, a satellite system with publicly accessible data designed to track wildfires but also useful at detecting activity in war zones. It's not particularly precise however so it's difficult to tell if the fire is directly at the pontoon bridge but there was no fire at the site of the permanent bridge's destruction so there's also the question of *what else* could it be.
Putin's been appealing to alt right people all over the world to come move to Russia and the only other one I'm aware of was at last I heard living with eight children in an airport terminal because his accounts in Canada with the money from selling his home are frozen, his accounts in Russia with his streaming rvenue were seized, he was nearly arrested for saying it's been hard, and they failed the literacy test for residency.
It's somehow going even worse for them than the ones that moved to the USSR because at least they were used for PR so they got a free setup and a job before learning that authoritarians gonna authoritary. The Canadian face planted into suppressed speech and this guy was immediately given a dick grinder and told to strap in. Bet he doesn't even get the real bullets.
Hevach on
+1
FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
I love that folks have been calling the invasion of Russia proper a "special military operation." Just twisting that knife and spitting the words back into Putin's face.
It helps that Putin is himself calling it a terrorist action, because to admit it’s an invading army means it triggers all these responses and protocols and promises Putin doesn’t want to make, or no longer can make
Speaking of which, Ukrainian news are reporting that Putin has "ordered" that the Ukrainians be pushed out of Kurst by 1st October. That's less than 6 weeks from now, btw.
So within 6 weeks, the Russian military has to form, supply and execute an operation that will certainly include a crossing contested large river, in the Little Mud Season, and liberate as much territory from the Ukrainians as they managed to take in *checks notes* a year and they also have to do it without withdrawing any resources from the Donbas...
The Russians cannot ignore this operation, or even react to it slowly and carefully: they have to immediately respond. But they're also barely sustaining their Kharkiv offensive, and they have no reserves on hand. This is a recipe for tactical Bad Decisions and strategic Mistakes.
And we have seen before that once the Russian military is forced to start reacting to rapidly evolving bad news, they don't react very well.
Speaking of which, Ukrainian news are reporting that Putin has "ordered" that the Ukrainians be pushed out of Kurst by 1st October. That's less than 6 weeks from now, btw.
So within 6 weeks, the Russian military has to form, supply and execute an operation that will certainly include a crossing contested large river, in the Little Mud Season, and liberate as much territory from the Ukrainians as they managed to take in *checks notes* a year and they also have to do it without withdrawing any resources from the Donbas...
The Russians cannot ignore this operation, or even react to it slowly and carefully: they have to immediately respond. But they're also barely sustaining their Kharkiv offensive, and they have no reserves on hand. This is a recipe for tactical Bad Decisions and strategic Mistakes.
And we have seen before that once the Russian military is forced to start reacting to rapidly evolving bad news, they don't react very well.
My favourite kind of dish.
If the Ukrainians can't get push the Russians back quickly in Ukraine, I'll take watching them do it in Russia any day.
as long as ukraine keeps advancing even a field per day that is just awful for russia... im sure they could sleep at night even in a stalemate
i think even ukraine didnt expect that they'd just be able to walk around kursk they way they are and might be wishing they committed even more stuff to this
they're moving slower now but im not seeing anything reminiscent of bakmut where they are just running into a huge russian wall.... it looks mostly like the B team defending Kursk.... maybe even the C team...
I recall such deadlines being handed down from Putin before. Maybe during the Kharkiv rout in September 2022? Didn't amount to much.
Yeah, though this time it's Russian territory, so he might actually mean it. And I'm not super sure Russia can just throw conscripts into the grinder like they're doing with the contract guys in the east. I'm not sure he can't, but there might actually be some popular opinion considerations.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
Agreed, there's a huge difference between "we're not winning in Ukraine fast enough" and "They've invaded us and captured an area the size of greater Los Angeles already, not to mention literally hundreds (perhaps thousands) of soldiers"
I'm still not sure exactly what Ukraine hopes to achieve in their advance, I still can't imagine they TRULY plan to hold the ground. It would seem that advancing too far would place them at severe risk of envelopment by a counterattack, or being forced to rapidly retreat to the border in a demoralizing retreat. The latter clearly would have still offered them real benefits, but, would not be presented as such in the news media or by the 'concerned' surrender advocates desperate for Ukraine to submit to a genocide.
I guess perhaps the economies of Russias frontline provinces are more interlinked than I had thought (usually imperial possessions aren't, so that uprisings in one place don't create unrest in other regions) but perhaps there is sufficient road, rail and power infrastructure in Kurst that Ukraine feels they can effectively degrade the ability of the other frontline regions to support THEIR civilian infrastructure and the Russian military units using them for re-supply. As ever, conquering territory won't make the civilians surrender, but, perhaps they feel that if the people in the cities and towns on the russian side of the frontline have to deal with food rationing, power outages and shortages of general goods that they may be less supportive of the Russian invasion force.
It's clearly not a bad idea to invade! They have already destroyed numerous roads and bridges, and made Russia look bad. But I do wonder if they have a specific goal in mind beyond just disruption.
I'm still not sure exactly what Ukraine hopes to achieve in their advance, I still can't imagine they TRULY plan to hold the ground. It would seem that advancing too far would place them at severe risk of envelopment by a counterattack, or being forced to rapidly retreat to the border in a demoralizing retreat. The latter clearly would have still offered them real benefits, but, would not be presented as such in the news media or by the 'concerned' surrender advocates desperate for Ukraine to submit to a genocide.
I guess perhaps the economies of Russias frontline provinces are more interlinked than I had thought (usually imperial possessions aren't, so that uprisings in one place don't create unrest in other regions) but perhaps there is sufficient road, rail and power infrastructure in Kurst that Ukraine feels they can effectively degrade the ability of the other frontline regions to support THEIR civilian infrastructure and the Russian military units using them for re-supply. As ever, conquering territory won't make the civilians surrender, but, perhaps they feel that if the people in the cities and towns on the russian side of the frontline have to deal with food rationing, power outages and shortages of general goods that they may be less supportive of the Russian invasion force.
It's clearly not a bad idea to invade! They have already destroyed numerous roads and bridges, and made Russia look bad. But I do wonder if they have a specific goal in mind beyond just disruption.
I think the objectives are as follows:
Moral: Ukraine needed some wins to stoke their internal moral. Even apart from any other reason this probably was enough.
Diverting resources: the mud season is about to start russia has a month or so to take it all back or ukraine probably can hold this for basically free into the winter. If russia wants to kick them out by oct 1st as putin is saying they are going to need to take military forces/equipment and a significant number of them and move them to fight and wreck towns in their own country for a change. This alone should take some/a lot of pressure off of the front somewhere in ukraine.
Bargining chips: Pushing into russia has allowed ukraine to take what appears to be a significant amount of Russian military conscripts prisoner replenishing the troop exchange pool to get their own troops back from Russia.
Even if they don't plan to hold that area long term short term it already has accomplished some major objectives and even if ukraine retreats back out they can mine the crap out of russian soil seeding a lot of problems back onto russias lap that russia has been doing in ukraine. Also god knows how many infiltration teams/sabotage groups are now roaming russia. With as fast as they pushed in that is a great time to send out the special forces to run wild inside of russia. The hard part was getting them over the boarder with equipment but with the door kicked in there was a week or two where there were no real defenses or check points so a lot of sneaky dudes could get in and go to ground and go hunt for tasty objectives with full kits of gear.
+7
Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
I don't see why they can't hold the ground? At least until the war ends.
At the bare bare minimum, holding this land undermines calls to freeze the conflict and just let Russia keep whatever they happen to be holding, because by that logic Ukraine gets Sudhza, which would be unacceptable to Moscow. That land also makes a decent bargaining chip in the event of November not going well and Ukraine being strongarmed to the table, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was conceived as insurance against that very outcome. By extending the lines it puts more strain on Russian logistics, and makes it harder for them to keep up their grinding assault in the Donbas. And of course it makes Putin look bad, which helps contribute to undermining his legitimacy and thus his hold on power, though that one is definitely a longterm project.
I don't think Ukraine had a set goal or a belief that this one weird trick would roll up the Russian army, it's an opportunity they availed of, and even the current advances are probes that revealed another place to push. I doubt they'll crazily overextend, and the bridges over the Seym river being blown give them a relatively secure fallback line.
+29
El SkidThe frozen white northRegistered Userregular
Russia has also been free to leave only token defences on their long border with Ukraine and concentrate them all in one area for an offensive.
If this push has done nothing else it’s ensured that either Russia properly defends its whole border with Ukraine (as Ukraine has had to do for the whole war), or risk this same thing happening in Belgorod or elsewhere.
At the bare bare minimum, holding this land undermines calls to freeze the conflict and just let Russia keep whatever they happen to be holding, because by that logic Ukraine gets Sudhza, which would be unacceptable to Moscow. That land also makes a decent bargaining chip in the event of November not going well and Ukraine being strongarmed to the table, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was conceived as insurance against that very outcome. By extending the lines it puts more strain on Russian logistics, and makes it harder for them to keep up their grinding assault in the Donbas. And of course it makes Putin look bad, which helps contribute to undermining his legitimacy and thus his hold on power, though that one is definitely a longterm project.
I don't think Ukraine had a set goal or a belief that this one weird trick would roll up the Russian army, it's an opportunity they availed of, and even the current advances are probes that revealed another place to push. I doubt they'll crazily overextend, and the bridges over the Seym river being blown give them a relatively secure fallback line.
I suppose that it definately makes sense as an insurance policy against a Republican victory in November. Holding the Russian counterattack back until then would indeed be a fine distraction from the main front line, divert pressure from the units there, and perhaps overstretch some Russian units, and prevents the 'everyone keeps what they have right now' outcome.
Clearly Ukraine knows what they are doing far better than I do, and perhaps it happened now genuinely out of a realization of quite HOW degraded Russian border forces had become. I suppose the 'exploited advantage as it emerged' strategy is as good a reason as any. I just hope they can exploit their forward firing positions as much as possible and rain some hell on Russian factories, rail lines and power stations which had previously been out of range and thus weakly protected.
Posts
3,125 assault rifles MK 556* (before: 2,425)
250 precision rifles HLR 338 with 240,000 rounds ammunition* (before: 240)
531 rifles CR 308* (before: 481)
to be delivered:
1,875 assault rifles MK 556
319 CR 308
260 precision rifles HLR 338
MK556 and CR308 are both rifles on the basis of the Haenel CR223 wich is based on the AR15. The MK556 initially won the contract for the new service rifle of the Bundeswehr but Heckler and Koch sued and got the contract instead.
the 308 apparently is the larger caliber version and has a version called HMR, but no idea what got delivered
Unless Ukraine's changed that part of their doctrine during their reforms in recent years, they might still have squad-level marksmen like a lot of Soviet-derived armies try to maintain. There'd be a lot more demand for those sorts of weapons on a rifle-per-soldier basis than most western armies.
Well let's not split hairs here
I'm given to understand that Ukraine has some truly absurd sniper rifles:
This absurd monstrosity is a domestic production rifle that fires .57 calibre rounds, weighs 25 KG (55lbs) an effective range of 2000 meters and a maximum of 7000.
They call it a T-rex and technically it's an anti-material rifle but I'm putting it here anyways.
(this is not a serious post, I'm not considering the angle this would have to happen at, it was an excuse to be cheeky, while also recognizing that militaries have been using such weapons in such a manner for a long time.)
Canadian forces in particular have ended up in the news a couple of times for making long range kills with anti-materiel class rifles, if I'm recalling correctly.
Though I hope/imagine whatever that ammo costs, that for 7km ranges, it's probably not being used on something as small and mobile as a person.
However, the main problem with that is that there isn't a lot of match grade 14.5mm rounds available. So despite looking like a sniper rifle, and intended to be used at ranges like that of a sniper rifle, and that it has on a very few occasions been used as a sniper rifle... it's not really a sniper rifle.
It's really an anti-materiel rifle, because a lot of Russian gear took a look at the .50 BMG and said "We want to be resistant against that!" and then someone took a look at the 14.5mm (a WWII anti-aircraft gun) and went "Those vehicles are resistant to .50BMG/12.7mm Russian. But what about that?"
90% of the time you want to use a KPV machinegun rather than a bolt action rifle (or semi-automatic in the case of the monomakh), but the KPV is notoriously heavy (50kg without a tripod. M2 .50 cal is 58 kilos with a tripod) and nobody has developed a tripod mount that allows the KPV to be fired accurately at the kind of ranges you want to fire if you're infantry manning an unarmored high-value piece of equipment and facing armored vehicles with 30mm autocannons (KPV is almost always vehicle mounted or mounted on a gun-carriage).
Enter the T-Rex/Alligator/Monomakh. Ridiculous guns, but they are able to punch through a BMP-2 or the radome of a Tunguska AA vehicle at ridiculous ranges. And in the case of the T-Rex it's even infantry-portable enough for long walks in the Ukrainian countryside (with Alligator/Monomakh you really want to use a vehicle to get into position due to the bulk of the weapon).
Which is probably the big reason why there aren't a lot of videos of the guns in use (there are like. 5 videos of the guns in actual field use?). Puffs of smoke from a round hitting a target the size of a barn isn't sexy, even if it's at several kilometers away.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Bone marrow, donatable organs, and blood.
In any case, they're still taking more territory. That's not a small river either - if Ukraine decide to do the obvious and use it as the new front line then there is the potential to make it very difficult and expensive indeed for the Russians to cross. Pontoon bridges are much more vulnerable to artillery/HIMARS than reinforced concrete ones.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/us-vet-wanted-child-porn-appears-fighting-russia-ukraine-rcna167157
On this point:
https://x.com/kromark/status/1825637544408789053
Series of images and videos from various satellite sources showing one of the bridges that Ukraine destroyed, followed by the deployment of a pontoon bridge about 500 meters away from it, followed by FIRMS satellite data showing fires around the location of the pontoon bridge.
FIRMS is the Fire Information for Resource Management System, a satellite system with publicly accessible data designed to track wildfires but also useful at detecting activity in war zones. It's not particularly precise however so it's difficult to tell if the fire is directly at the pontoon bridge but there was no fire at the site of the permanent bridge's destruction so there's also the question of *what else* could it be.
Putin's been appealing to alt right people all over the world to come move to Russia and the only other one I'm aware of was at last I heard living with eight children in an airport terminal because his accounts in Canada with the money from selling his home are frozen, his accounts in Russia with his streaming rvenue were seized, he was nearly arrested for saying it's been hard, and they failed the literacy test for residency.
It's somehow going even worse for them than the ones that moved to the USSR because at least they were used for PR so they got a free setup and a job before learning that authoritarians gonna authoritary. The Canadian face planted into suppressed speech and this guy was immediately given a dick grinder and told to strap in. Bet he doesn't even get the real bullets.
If russia gave two shit's about reality we wouldn't be in this mess.
If the US didn't blush at making a rapist conman their president, why should Russia balk at this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5d5FSjxW18
https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/putin-orders-ukrainian-forces-to-be-pushed-1724143578.html
So within 6 weeks, the Russian military has to form, supply and execute an operation that will certainly include a crossing contested large river, in the Little Mud Season, and liberate as much territory from the Ukrainians as they managed to take in *checks notes* a year and they also have to do it without withdrawing any resources from the Donbas...
My favourite kind of dish.
If the Ukrainians can't get push the Russians back quickly in Ukraine, I'll take watching them do it in Russia any day.
i think even ukraine didnt expect that they'd just be able to walk around kursk they way they are and might be wishing they committed even more stuff to this
they're moving slower now but im not seeing anything reminiscent of bakmut where they are just running into a huge russian wall.... it looks mostly like the B team defending Kursk.... maybe even the C team...
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
Yeah, though this time it's Russian territory, so he might actually mean it. And I'm not super sure Russia can just throw conscripts into the grinder like they're doing with the contract guys in the east. I'm not sure he can't, but there might actually be some popular opinion considerations.
I guess perhaps the economies of Russias frontline provinces are more interlinked than I had thought (usually imperial possessions aren't, so that uprisings in one place don't create unrest in other regions) but perhaps there is sufficient road, rail and power infrastructure in Kurst that Ukraine feels they can effectively degrade the ability of the other frontline regions to support THEIR civilian infrastructure and the Russian military units using them for re-supply. As ever, conquering territory won't make the civilians surrender, but, perhaps they feel that if the people in the cities and towns on the russian side of the frontline have to deal with food rationing, power outages and shortages of general goods that they may be less supportive of the Russian invasion force.
It's clearly not a bad idea to invade! They have already destroyed numerous roads and bridges, and made Russia look bad. But I do wonder if they have a specific goal in mind beyond just disruption.
I think the objectives are as follows:
Moral: Ukraine needed some wins to stoke their internal moral. Even apart from any other reason this probably was enough.
Diverting resources: the mud season is about to start russia has a month or so to take it all back or ukraine probably can hold this for basically free into the winter. If russia wants to kick them out by oct 1st as putin is saying they are going to need to take military forces/equipment and a significant number of them and move them to fight and wreck towns in their own country for a change. This alone should take some/a lot of pressure off of the front somewhere in ukraine.
Bargining chips: Pushing into russia has allowed ukraine to take what appears to be a significant amount of Russian military conscripts prisoner replenishing the troop exchange pool to get their own troops back from Russia.
Even if they don't plan to hold that area long term short term it already has accomplished some major objectives and even if ukraine retreats back out they can mine the crap out of russian soil seeding a lot of problems back onto russias lap that russia has been doing in ukraine. Also god knows how many infiltration teams/sabotage groups are now roaming russia. With as fast as they pushed in that is a great time to send out the special forces to run wild inside of russia. The hard part was getting them over the boarder with equipment but with the door kicked in there was a week or two where there were no real defenses or check points so a lot of sneaky dudes could get in and go to ground and go hunt for tasty objectives with full kits of gear.
I don't think Ukraine had a set goal or a belief that this one weird trick would roll up the Russian army, it's an opportunity they availed of, and even the current advances are probes that revealed another place to push. I doubt they'll crazily overextend, and the bridges over the Seym river being blown give them a relatively secure fallback line.
If this push has done nothing else it’s ensured that either Russia properly defends its whole border with Ukraine (as Ukraine has had to do for the whole war), or risk this same thing happening in Belgorod or elsewhere.
I suppose that it definately makes sense as an insurance policy against a Republican victory in November. Holding the Russian counterattack back until then would indeed be a fine distraction from the main front line, divert pressure from the units there, and perhaps overstretch some Russian units, and prevents the 'everyone keeps what they have right now' outcome.
Clearly Ukraine knows what they are doing far better than I do, and perhaps it happened now genuinely out of a realization of quite HOW degraded Russian border forces had become. I suppose the 'exploited advantage as it emerged' strategy is as good a reason as any. I just hope they can exploit their forward firing positions as much as possible and rain some hell on Russian factories, rail lines and power stations which had previously been out of range and thus weakly protected.