Mattias

Perhaps it is my naive positivity again, but It looks to me that for most people FEAR comes before selfishness.
It is fear that drives us to make "bad" decisions. And with "bad" I mean bad for the long term collective. Which is selfish, I agree, but the reason is fear.
Being afraid of getting into trouble, afraid of being different, afraid of failing, afraid of being an outcast.
Afraid of not having enough money, not getting enough appreciation, not being pretty or sporty or intelligent enough.
Scared of being alone, of speaking one's mind, of lacking of basic needs, of lacking love, and so on and so forth.
 
I believe that if we humans could, or would, be a little less scared, selfishness would lessen considerably. And as a weird by-product of that being less afraid, dictators would have less grip on people.
But I know, current times do not reduce fears at all, and the global ****show gets worse before things get better. Eventually though, things will get better again.

Actually, there have been a large number of studies that show that the majority of people aren't 'selfish & brutal' and are altruistic in many ways ... perhaps most ways ... sure, there will always be sociopaths, psycopaths, malignant narcissists and others with anti-social personality disorders, but they are in a minority.
The problem is when such people gain control over the levers of power ... they can do a heck of a lot of damage.
Putin in Russia, the Kims in Korea, Xi in China are all good (bad?) examples ... 

Both Mark Galeotti and Vlad Vexler are in agreement with you and have lately been talking extensively about the matter.
/Mattias

When I was in the Army DPICM was *just* being fielded in any significant numbers. The original idea for usage was to fire it at a target of opportunity - a mass of armor forming up to attack in front of you, but more likely a mass of armor/vehicles in the second echelon that was forming up to exploit or continue the advance, in order to halt that advance through lack of support. We didn't have unlimited supplies so it was planned to be used when it could be most effective, usually in a Time on Target, Battalion FFE.
Since we expected in Europe to be completely on the defensive as the Soviet Army advanced into West Germany, unexploded munitions were not really seen as an issue, since they would be the Soviet's problem, behind their lines. (of course the pie-in-the-sky projection was that all civilians would have evacuated west in advance of the Soviet Army, and we know that wouldn't be the case - not everyone anyway.)
In Ukraine with a more static, back and forth front line, this is much more of a concern, for obvious reasons.
Just a little background from the olden days 🙂
Dave

An interesting look on the Oplot and its crews. Lots of of juicy snippets for the attentive. From the ever productive hromadske
 
 

An interesting look on the Oplot and its crews. Lots of of juicy snippets for the attentive. From the ever productive hromadske
 
 

An interesting look on the Oplot and its crews. Lots of of juicy snippets for the attentive. From the ever productive hromadske
 
 

Things are becoming hotter and hotter. I'm still struggling with time. But hopefully, it will improve shortly.
I believe you have seen the recent Prig video with the map. Based on what Prig stated, I decided to add a few notes to the map. Although it is Prig, it is really interesting, and I believe it will help you understand what is going on in the Bakhmut area.
It can be a little confusing and crammed at times, but if you examine each block carefully, it should be straightforward enough.
Number 1

Number 2

Number 3

Number 4

I have a few comments but due to lack of time I will post them later.

Woha! Sorry if this has been posted previously. But it is a curious one.
 

Woha! Sorry if this has been posted previously. But it is a curious one.
 

Woha! Sorry if this has been posted previously. But it is a curious one.
 

I think the problem with this sort of point of view is that it still assumes that annihilation through manoeuvre was possible. And even if it was, would it have been worth the costs at that point in the war? 
Russia got itself out of Kherson; however, 1) we do not know the full scope of attritional losses over time - how much critical equipment did they leave behind? and 2) how do those stack up with Ukrainian gains compared to their loses?  This point of view mirrors more than a few western pundits as “lost opportunity = loss”, but skips over the cost-benefit equation on retaking a regional capital essentially unopposed.  I strongly suspect that the UA looking to a longer game was not interested in bagging whatever was left of the RA at Kherson because the cost was too high for the gains.  Worst scenario for Kherson was a large urban battle that would still be raging.  If Ukraine had boxed the RA up into that city that is what likely would have happened.  Instead Ukraine left the back door open so the RA would simply leave - it was less about killing Russians there and more about liberating Ukrainians.
We keep making the error of looking for a western style victory in this thing.  I have seen more bold offensive arrows, both red and blue, being drawn all over the place.  What we have seen though is bold arrows of red collapse, with a blue follow up.  This is a war of Russian collapses and contractions, some better controlled than others.  This is what victory looks like, yet we keep demanding a Gulf War metric as an indicator of success, which does not track in this environment.  The losses are over time, erosion, not fast forced crushing.  It is the environment that drives this - death of surprise, mass dilemmas, long range and precision.   We are talking about a war where both sides have had to relegate their armor to indirect fire roles - something is happening in a fundamental way.
So what?  Well this does not mean that the 30k prisoner haul is impossible in this war, or the bold strokes we all want to see.  However, I strongly suspect that they are going to be a finishing stroke/final note at the end as a result of corrosive warfare, not the cause of the end itself.  The core warfare principle we in the west adhere to will become a punctuation mark, not the primary means of delivery of victory.  We should not hold Ukraine to a standard of success that I am not sure even exists anymore in this sort of operating environment.  This war is still about killing Russians, but it is all over the place, all the time, not in a single concentrated area.  Why, because concentration kills in this environment unless you have already eroded an opponent into collapse - be it slow or fast.
In the end Kherson along with Kharkiv were major corrosive warfare victories.  At Kherson the UA with nearly 1:1 force ratio pushed the RA across a major river because they made their position untenable.  They retook a provincial capital of 300k taking very few losses which was a major strategic blow to Russia - no one could call this war for Russia after Kharkiv and Kherson (or at least no one credible).  We should not apply our own western experience to this war because we have not fought one like this since Korea, and the rules of the game have shifted dramatically since then.
I for one am surprised that Kherson did not turn into a protracted bloodbath, there was a lost RA opportunity that speaks to an idea that perhaps Russian Will is not made of steel.  Now if Russia is finally so badly beat up that the old rules of warfare apply - a la Iraqi Army - then yippee!  But that 1) does not validate our western doctrines as “right all along” because that final stroke took a year of broad scope high speed attrition pruning ops and 2) will be a signpost, not a decisive point.  The result of months of shaping and eroding that has already occurred over the winter. 

Perhaps in this context an excerpt from latest RUSI report about Russian plan of subduing Ukraine can serve us what we could expect if Putin and his NeoMongols managed to do it:
The approach to establishing the occupation administration was systematic. In the first instance,
Russian forces were tasked with seizing all forms of records. This included public health,
education, housing, tax, police, electoral and local government records. One of the first acts
upon seizing the Chornobyl and Zaporizhzhia NPPs was the seizing of all hard drives from these
sites.67 It also included private records from utility companies, insurance providers and NGOs.68
This data would be used to build a map of who was supposed to live where, who they were
related to and whether they had any connections with the Ukrainian state. The population was
divided into five core categories:

1. Those deemed leaders of Ukrainian nationalism who were specified for physical
liquidation on a high-priority target list, or for capture to enable show trials.
2. Those suspected of intending to support acts of resistance who needed to be recruited
or suppressed including anyone associated with Ukrainian law enforcement, local
government, the military or related to officials that were not actively collaborating.
3. Those who were deemed apathetic.
4. Those actively collaborating with Russian forces.
5. Individuals who were necessary for running critical national infrastructure and had to
be controlled.69
Perhaps, since knowledge of @Seminole of the region seems to be based on Russian declarations rather than centuries-long observeable behavior of all parts of muscovite state apparatus (not mentioning Ukrainian tendency to not comply), let me translate: since number of most active post-Maidan Ukrainian citizen body can be counted in low milions (roughly 1st and partly 2nd group), if we wouldn't help UA and they would collapse, we would probably have concentration camps several kms from NATO border now. I mean true, not filtration ones. On the top of massive survaillence program, zachistki (google the term, please, mate, if you don't know it) on truly horrific scale and of course resistance like Europe did not see from WWII. Ukraine is not Andora, it's largest European country with 44 mln people. Could anybody seriously believe we would just stand and watch?
We are in very optimistic scenario, and possibly the one in which violent confrontation between Russia and West is less probable than in beforementioned.

Is that really a thing? Aren’t the “laws of war” specifically tailored to avoid the hysterical nit picking that would ensue if war and warriors, where subjected to scrutiny under laws actually based on the assumption of decent human behaviour? I mean, common, what kind of world would that be - were people that in power, big and small, were actually held responsible for every single little trifle?

Is that really a thing? Aren’t the “laws of war” specifically tailored to avoid the hysterical nit picking that would ensue if war and warriors, where subjected to scrutiny under laws actually based on the assumption of decent human behaviour? I mean, common, what kind of world would that be - were people that in power, big and small, were actually held responsible for every single little trifle?

Is that really a thing? Aren’t the “laws of war” specifically tailored to avoid the hysterical nit picking that would ensue if war and warriors, where subjected to scrutiny under laws actually based on the assumption of decent human behaviour? I mean, common, what kind of world would that be - were people that in power, big and small, were actually held responsible for every single little trifle?

Also extraordinarily helpful and eloquent 'facts on the ground':
1.  Black Horse HQ redeploys to IVO Izium, with cantonments and training grounds sharing defence responsibility with fully 'Westernised' UA mech forces deployed in the central Karkhiv-Izium-east Luhansk oblast 'bulge' of Ukraine.  Think CENTAG -- UA [Bundeswehr] fully integrated with US commands. Fulda Gap. Whatever 'heavy' means, it is deployed at full scale right heah! Go ahead, make our day....
2. Polish-Czech heavy armoured division IVO Dnipro and Poltava (which btw is also a forward TAC base and EW command centre). Attach heavily subsidised Romanian pioneer brigade (come on, you DID get your frontier restored to the Dnistr postwar in 2025, by popular referendum. Do your bit!)
....Here, my pathetic little US satrapy 🇨🇦 can even contract some cranky old EOD sea lawyers to manage private contractors (I could accurately name the nations providing the actual sappers, but it would be distinctly nonwoke) clearing about ten bazillion mines/UXO in Donbas... that is actually the most dangerous postwar work, no joke.
3.  101 AB RCT in Kyiv backstops UA forces on the frontier from Chernaiv to Kyiv. TBH, the UA has nothing really to learn about  combat from the 101st, but it's always nice to professionalise and integrate the 'tail'.
4. Ideally, Anglo-US HQ advisory and training elements -- perhaps Étrangère as well? --  are based around Gomel, in a newly democratic but utterly Anything Goes Belarus. 
Minsk becomes the weirdest, edgiest and most violent city in Europe, the sole entrepot of the post-Soviet Mafiyas.  Tombstone 1889, or Shanghai 1924....
Я твой Гекльберри.
...Notice that 'NATO' plays no formal role in any of this for 10+ years.
****
So now we wander off the map of military into Emerging Markets possibility space.
1. By about 2032, Ukraine, Europe's GMP compliant manufacturing hub, has already reached middle income status on a national average per capita GDP basis.
2. Fantastic yakitori, chaat and vegan Texmex, plus gourmet coffee, is standard fare in youthful hi-tech edge cities exploding in quaint Old Town / university areas of all Ukraine's major cities.
3. Ukrainian biopharma / biotech eats China's (and India's) lunch with amazing speed, moving to the world's R&D leading edge (daily nonstop flights Odessa-Tel Aviv). 
4. With avid lobbying from the private sector (fine, just say George Soros if you're into that kind of thing, but it's pretty ecumenical in reality), Ukraine achieves EU membership by 2028, well before NATO becomes feasible.
5.  @kraze , realising that Living Well Is the Best Revenge, claims 'reparations' from ambiguously legal Muscovite massage therapists, one lap dance at a time.
In addition to his tireless custom but stingy tipping, he also gains some notoriety in the trade by insisting the 'visiting artists' recite verses from Pushkin and Bulgakov on the karaoke machine whilst Performing, with the bass reverb cranked up to Eleven....
Ни мамы, ни папы, ни газировки с виски. Нет русской возлюбленной!
6.  Coincidentally, rumour spreads that certain videos are embedded as easter eggs in CMBS2 scenarios. Shall we say, ahem, 'Enemy Condition' finally becomes meaningful in achieving Total Victory.  Whose grass mod are you using, winkwinknudgenudge?
7.  CM product sales soar faster than a  Stalinist pig iron quota, particularly for the Professional Edition. Steve retires to Stalin's former palace at Yalta (several degrees warmer than Vermont) and makes bank as a docent, with the grudging assent of his wife, while obdurately refusing to fix the PzKwIII turret rotation bug, or sumfink.
6. Meanwhile, across the bristling 2023 frontier, maquiladoras flourish, first in Crimea and Kuban, then in Belgorod and Voronezh... and, wait for it, Chechnya (where Kadyrov  has finally achieved martyrdom after enjoying too much lamb with apricots at the halal buffet).
Bored, totally unfunded Russian generals are only too happy to put their mobiks/zeks/ fanatical brainwashed Third Rome Zoomers to profitable (for the generals) work in sweatshops, picking and packing pills and chips, since 'hohols' can no longer can be found to do those jobs across the (densely fortified and mined but increasingly porous) frontier.
....So yeah, about that combat Readiness for that Next War, against peoples who are presently funding your commanders' beach houses in Cyprus.
8.  Sadly, the shattered and depopulated Donbas will take at least 12 years and billions in reconstruction aid and subsidies to start showing signs of economic life again. 'Clean energy' on the steppes is probably the thin edge of the wedge.
(copains, please don't take this too literally, it's presented more as a counterpoint to the last 20 pages or so.  But such trajectories did /are happening in Asia, in spite of dysfunctional rulers and seemingly shattered infra and social contracts. Take a look at today's Cambodia, which quite literally devoured about a third of itself nearly half a century ago!)

Strange nobody posted this:
She knew it 40 years ago!

A pretty good look at it. Being a swede I say an upgraded IKV-91.
 

A pretty good look at it. Being a swede I say an upgraded IKV-91.
 

Just in. Sweden sends Archer, CV 90 (Not specified but clearly indicated Swedish ”C” model - or possibly “D”) and more NLAWs to Ukraine.
 

Just in. Sweden sends Archer, CV 90 (Not specified but clearly indicated Swedish ”C” model - or possibly “D”) and more NLAWs to Ukraine.
 

Just in. Sweden sends Archer, CV 90 (Not specified but clearly indicated Swedish ”C” model - or possibly “D”) and more NLAWs to Ukraine.
 

Volodymyr Yezhov "Fresh", one of creators of S.T.A.L.K.E.R game from UKR GSC Games company (also developed known RTS "Cossacks") was killed near Bakhmut. In that time, when Russia is grindering own crimimals we are losing many good creative people...
 

Yes, they were, and some still cannot force themselves to reciprocate it- for example TV anchors here simply couldn't spell second part "glory to the heroes" for first months when interviewing their Ukrainian guests, who were probably blisfully unaware of the slogan's origin and what it means for Poles. Many here still can't, especially that ethnonationalistic cancer is unfortunatelly real, alive and growing among population of Western Ukraine. A lot of work need to be done on Ukrainian historical identity, and I am not sure if our current strategy of "leave it for later, now they suffer because of war and have other things than discussion about a past" is actually right one, given that this war is formative period for Ukraine state and society.
Still, some symbols change their meaning in time. People do not associate "heroiom slava" slogan with genocidal nationalisms anymore (usually narration of slogan as associated with Sicz's Rifles comes in handy), and they can even tolerate these "Blood and Soil" black-red flags if going to Ukraine with help. However, you can agree that supplying people at your own expense who venerate absolutelly genocidal morons who barely 80 years earlier would cut their throats for just being Poles (or Jews, Hungarians or any other) resonates with very strange vibes among people doing charity work?
Yup, some of historians here associate it with "Sicz Rifles" (not exactly correctly, but that is minor issue), just as famous Chervona Kalyna, which Russian trolls here also tried to sell as "UPA song", fortunatelly ineffectively.
Ok Haiduk it is not against you or other folks here, just a food for thought about future of your country and national identity. I am fully aware of many wrongdoings on Polish side in the past as well, I really attended several dozens conferences on these topics in my 12-year long historical career and heard zilion of arguments from both Polish and Ukrainian historians of the topic (even stopped two who wanted to smash each other faces in my student's years...), so believe me- I get basic facts around Ukrainian nationalism and there are probably not many things you can surprise me on it.
The question is if collectivelly Ukrainians really want this kind of hatred to be cherished for another generations- because that will be effect of tolerating OUN/UPA heritage in your public spaces. There will be some day when society will need to grasp bull by the horns and stand in truth about genocidal past of this organization (and large part of population in Western Ukraine, who were forced or otherwise encouraged by UPA to participate in it), without whitewashing, victim-blaming and doing endless circles around basic obvious facts (mirroring what Russians do with their own narrations), which is sadly situation now among many Ukrainian historians, with several exceptions (perhaps ironically- mostly from Eastern Ukraine, where they can approach topic without bias). And facts are indeed brutal- probably 50-80 k innocent people were ruthlessly murdered in one of worst cases of targeted genocide, in already harsh times of WWII. Rwanda style, with machette, axe and scythe- not some impersonal "industry of death" like projected by Germans for Jews. It was personal, it was long-planned, targeted and executed by the same people who are now fast becoming symbols of Ukrainian statehood. I really don't care what UPA become in Ukrainian national mythology after these events, because it will always inherently be bases on false premises. There is no place among civilized people for narrations supporting such guys.
I would even say in the future your attitude to OUN/UPA will be a major test if you really want to collectivelly be part of Western hemisphere or prefer to stay inside never-ending cycle of lies like Russians. We did our job on many unpleasant and shameful episodes from our collective past, still not enough of it, but I can wholeheartadly say it is always beneficial for society in long run. Germans serve great example here.