Vanir Ausf B

This is a very strange time for Armenia to be disarming itself. I'd wait for confirmation.

A sobering thread from a pro-Ukrainian Russian, for adherents of “effective sanctions”.
...An old acquaintance from Moscow writes to me, who knows firsthand about the habits and expenses of the upper stratum of metropolitan society (at the same time, he is sober-minded and not a beneficiary of the war):
“Moscow has noticeably increased the number of luxury cars. This year’s Range Rover models cost from 300,000 euros and above.”
"We flew to Thailand on vacation. Aeroflot, Dreamliner, separate cabins, everything. Boeing sanctions? No, we haven’t heard" “We are flying to Chamonix for New Year’s Eve. As of December 23, all Moscow-Geneva tickets via Istanbul have been sold, the business price is 2 million 700 thousand rubles (27 thousand euros)”
Moscow is bursting with money, military orders, and rising oil prices. TC Kolokol XXI writes: “Since the beginning of the SVO in Ukraine, Russia has earned 550 billion euros from the sale of oil and gas. Such data was published by the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air. The EU remains the largest buyer of Russian energy resources. The main buyers are Germany (28 billion euros) , the Netherlands (18 billion euros) and Italy (17 billion euros). After the EU, the list of main buyers is followed by China, which spent more than 143 billion euros for these purposes. In addition, the Russian Federation exports energy resources to India, Turkey and South Korea.
Just think about it. Over the course of a year and a half of war, Putin spent about $170 billion on the extermination of Ukrainians. This is three times less than the money he received from trade with the world and in particular from the ever-preoccupied West.
You can throw stones at me, claim that everything is really bad, Russia is in a hole, and the current fever is just a blush on the cheeks of a terminally ill person, but in fact, Putin has settled down very comfortably in this hole. While we read with bated breath about the square meters won by the Ukrainian Armed Forces and about the brave landings on the left bank of the Dnieper, the war is going on as scheduled, and just as scheduled, Russian missiles are killing Ukrainian civilians every night.
In Russia itself, the flow of people wanting to play Russian roulette during the war is not decreasing, so the authorities can completely do without the drama of a new mobilization; there is enough meat for minced meat from both former mobs and contract soldiers and conscripts. The state defense order is working, Kim and Iran are customizing shells and drones. The United States is distracted by the Middle East, and the calendar is already 2024 and the shadow of Trump hangs over the world (if he doesn’t win, he will definitely shift the aid agenda to Ukraine). And from all sides, from Kyiv, and from Brussels, and from Moscow, serpentine speeches about a dead end and a truce are heard. Everything is going according to plan - a long, decade/s, hybrid world war.”
 

@Vanir Ausf B
Here is full artilce on Censor in English (but some words translated, alas incorrect, for example machine translation of UKR "posadka" as "landing" instead correct "tree-plant")- Military Land version is VERY shortened and many of interesting details are removed: https://censor.net/en/resonance/3453607/company_commander_of_the_47th_brigade_mykola_melnyk_the_russians_knew_our_routes_of_advance_and_everything
@MikeyD
Here an opinion from this article about Bradleys:
- ... "Bradley" withstood everything. The shell hit the right side, the track assembling was damaged. The armor withstood the debris, but the blast wave tore the wiring in the car... The only time the Bradley could not withstand the impact was the work of helicopters, a week later. The Ka-52 hit the cars, and one Bradley detonated. But there are cases when they did not detonate when they withstood such blows. In principle, it is a very reliable machine. This is not a BMP-2 where the entire crew dies, no. The Bradley may be shot down, but the crew survives. And the engine is always running. The driver-mechanic recovers from a concussion, the engine is running - we drove on.
Yes, chaos. In this chaos, it is important not to lose touch with the senior commander. Because you need artillery, you need current orders. And when this stops happening, when the battalion commander's orders are given to you by a battalion sergeant, it's not very good. Because you didn't hear the order to hand over control to a sergeant. And on the walkie-talkie, you definitely hear that it's not your battalion commander who is talking. Again, it is very important that senior commanders understand what is happening on the battlefield. You know, the control system in '47 was so high that I could see where each of my cars was on my tablet. It helped in management, you understood who was where. And the brigade commander understood who was where, and the battalion commander understood. The only thing they did not understand was what was really happening on the battlefield. And the situation was quite simple: ATGMs in each tree-plant. The Russians knew our routes of advance, and everything flew along these routes – the 152nd, 120th, and Grads... And here you go, where are you going to maneuver? Only back and forth, because everything else is mined. By us. 

Fair. Some bitterness is understandable.
"Mykola Melnyk was seriously wounded during one of the assaults during the Ukrainian counter-offensive in Zaporizhzhia Oblast. A Russian large-caliber gun hit him when he was trying to navigate a Bradley through a minefield and lost his leg. During an attempt to get to the nearest Ukrainian positions, he stepped on anti-personnel mine and fell on another one. Mykola is now slowly recovering, and just recently was able to stand up."

Fair. Some bitterness is understandable.
"Mykola Melnyk was seriously wounded during one of the assaults during the Ukrainian counter-offensive in Zaporizhzhia Oblast. A Russian large-caliber gun hit him when he was trying to navigate a Bradley through a minefield and lost his leg. During an attempt to get to the nearest Ukrainian positions, he stepped on anti-personnel mine and fell on another one. Mykola is now slowly recovering, and just recently was able to stand up."

https://militaryland.net/news/offensive-through-the-eyes-of-a-soldier/
Interesting, about summer offensive.
Yup, unfortunatelly our ability to make them is one of causes of current stalemate. I am not sure if any business company collectivelly understand what sacrifice even means; it's concept coming from a world beyond corpo-language. And what cannot be expressed, cannot be thought.

Not a done deal, has to get through parliament first.
Wanted to mention that because I have seen this news several times now, but parliament is a hurdle many well-intentioned Ukraine-related proposals did not manage to jump through. German parliament contains a small but adamant libertarian faction aka "no spending - no taxes - yes I need 23 secretaries who are all the sons and daughters of my best friends from school and the taxpayer needs to finance them" (in addition to the other "Putin is our misunderstood friend" faction).

You should have went with the “drinking” off ramp.  Been awhile since I did Asian history but let me just say I have some reservations about your overall theories here.  First off the Mongol Empire began fracturing in the 14th century, with Mongol-Chinese rule failing completely by late 1300s.  They seem to have had aspirations after this but were kept in check by the Ming dynasty.  Main cause was Chinese internal rebellion (Black Death did not help).  The entire Empire had fractured by 15th century, last Mongolian Emperor dead by 1370.  I can accept “it was complicated” but not really seeing a conative origin story here.

https://www.britannica.com/place/Mongol-empire/The-Yuan-dynasty-in-China-1279-1368
This was all well before the rise of imperial Russia in the 17th and 18th centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia
Mulan btw is a legend from as early as the 4th century…so really muddling here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hua_Mulan
So I am not entirely sure I buy Russia put Mongolia in a box and kept them there while China yearned for several million acres of Siberian wastelands…on the other side of the freakin Gobi Desert.
Now to your main point - Chinese Lebensraum.  Ok, there have been some pretty intense “border skirmishes” between these two nations.  But has China ever demonstrated any expansion aspirations in that direction?  Great Wall says “nope”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Wall_of_China
Ming Dynasty had their chance for a few hundred years between 1400-1700 to “go north” but built a big @ss wall instead.
So I guess what my poor North American fixed brain cannot see is a real theory here based on real estate.  Now what does make a lot more sense is one thing China has definitely demonstrated a desire for…energy.  Russia has a lot of it an China wants it on the cheap.  If recent history holds, China does not want to own the land and people that energy comes from (they are already flush with human capital) they just want cheap and easy access.  So Russia weak and vulnerable - to which this war is helping immensely- is advantageous to China in the short to middle term.  In that vein China supporting, but not too much while cheering Russian quagmires in Ukraine begins to make sense.  Russia as a Chinese propane tank to pay for this senseless war makes a lot of sense.  Now if they want to keep some of their population happy by owning more of the Risk board, then this may provide options.
So What?  Why argue if we land on the same square?  The reason I oppose any weird Chinese land expansion theories is that they feed into a Conquest Dragon narrative.  First the Island chains, then Taiwan, then Nebraska!!!!  Wake up Sheeple!  The issue with China is far more complex and Chinas strategic objectives far more nuanced than “Evil Empire Redux”.  That sort of thinking dooms us to a war we do not want.  Are we in for vigorous, even hostile, negotiations, oh ya.  But simplifying the Indo-Pac down to land grabs with Disney sound bites is not the way to go. 

A good shot of the new Lancet EFP drone. Looks like it detonates about 3 or 4 meters from the target.

https://twitter.com/cvetko35/status/1722589902347383131
 

Missile got GPS jammed?
 

On one fine day, I was concussed when an enemy shell exploded literally a meter from a hole into which I jumped at the last moment. Then another stone flew into my ribs and I thought with relief that now I was wounded and would go to rest.
              But it was just a stone, and all I got was a very bad headache for the next few months. When the very active phase of the assault ended, the service was established, then I finally transferred to Petrichenko's gang to fly the Mavic. How it was and what it cost is a separate story.
              It was there that we encountered the moment when the enemy left Kherson. Yes, the enemy left in November. But in my opinion, these were the first steps towards them leaving. In the next thread, I will tell how they left, how we entered the villages, how I climbed the enemy's positions and how I almost died.
              Were there any wild moments? So. Were there any problems? So. But let me tell you about them after the war. Not to go storming Pisky now.
 
 

Looks like it penetrated through the turret and out the other side:

About these upgraded Lancets with LIDARs and over-target HEAT activation - here presumably the first documented video of it's attack on Bradley near Avdiivka. Looks like HEAT charge was reduced by ERA and didn't make serious damage to IFV, but situation is not good
Also reportedly new footage has appeared with Lancets or their cheaper version Skalpel, equipped with thermal camera, allowing it night usage. Sanctions are working...

Minor update on shell production.
 

Perhaps instead of focusing on things that evidence-based and seem to be very true you could spend a little more of your time telling me things that make me feel good instead?   What is it with you anyway?  🤪
I do keep hoping that RU gets weak enough that UKR can make some solid gains, somewhere.  I don't actually think this is likely, unfortunately.  Seems RU can lay mines faster than UKR can get through them.

This is Mashovets I presume? Where the hell does this guy get his information from that he can cite enemy single-digit precision personel numbers? He too has become a source I've lost some trust in over time, especially after he claimed in June or July already that the Russians had to throw most of their strategic reserves into the South to hold the line or some similar nonsense.
Saw this yesterday already and felt incredibly saddened. My wife was still pregnant when this tragedy occurred and now our daughter is taking her first steps, while lies dead besides his. Words can not describe how much I hate this war.

In light of latest discussions about Russian replenishment equipment capabilities, it is worth to paste here Wolski's (one of PL analitics) post about tank production of both sides. Roughly translated but you can get the idea:
Yesterday, there was a discussion about what she posted in Le Monde by [...].
. The article mentions 600 tanks A YEAR in UWZ (T-72/90 family) and Omsk (T-80) And yes, it is possible. But not as the production of new machines, but as the production of new ones, the restoration of old ones and the renovation of shot machines recovered from the battlefield. After the collapse of the USSR at peace, in the best years UWZ could produce about 250 - 300 T-90S/T-90A tanks, where the main limit was the availability of W92 and W92S2, then - here there was a limit of about 250 tanks per year, and in 2A46M5 barrels with a bayonet connector which are incompatible with older guns 🙂 Oska built about 60 T-80BWM per year.
Is it possible to double production on a war footing? In theory, in practice it didn't work out very well for the Russians. Otherwise, we would be talking about 1k+ machines delivered this year to MO FR together with renovated vehicles. And so we write "only" about the delivery of 600 tanks in 2023, including refurbished vehicles. Of course, La Monde forgot about Chita and other factories where the T-62M is currently manufactured using components from North Korea. It was planned to deliver 260-280 vehicles this year, but production, or rather reconstruction at the factory, is to be completed by about 130 tanks, and the target capacity will be achieved next year. As a result, we are talking about the fact that the Russian Armed Forces will receive about 700 tanks this year - new tanks, restored from warehouses and renovated after evacuation from the battlefield. The Russians have so far lost about 2,500 tanks in the war, and as you can see, within a year they managed to regain about 25-27% of the loss they suffered. This does not mean that they will be able to make up for all the losses by 2026 - for example, the process of restoring machines from warehouses is non-linear - in 2024 there will be a peak in capacity and then the pool of machines (capable of doing so) will begin to run out. Therefore, RUS is trying to expand the production of UWZ and Omsk because they know that from 2025 they will have to rely mainly on new tanks in the process of reproducing combat losses of armored weapons.
Personally, I estimate that in 2024, the RUS will be able to incorporate about 1,000-1,200 tanks of all categories into the Russian Armed Forces (new, recovered from warehouses, repaired after evacuation from the battlefield). Well, what does it look like in Ukraine? Ukrainians repair about 30 tanks a month recovered from the battlefield OUTSIDE Ukraine. Which is approximately 360 recovered machines per year. From T-64BW, for which there are no components, through T-72M1 to Leopard 2. Deliveries of new machines in 2023 and those contracted until the end of the year (including Leopard 2 and Abrams) will make up for the irretrievable losses from this year, including those from the failed offensive. Perhaps even slightly positive at the end of the year. Of course, this is only possible because Poland has donated over 350 machines to the UA in less than two years. And we can give another hundred (PT-91). But so far, the cars renovated in Ukraine + delivered by the West this year give a value approximately equal to the Russian 600-700 cars 🙂 Yes, you read that right. Please make a note of this.
However, we have an elephant in the room here, which I have been writing about since November 2022 - the pool of Western machines that can be delivered is a finite value, and this year is only "saved" by surprisingly low UA irreversible losses. Unfortunately, the year 2024 will see an almost double increase in the reconstruction capacity of RUS and a significant decrease in the reconstruction capacity of UA (by over 1/3, how much more - it is debatable). However, what does the ANNUAL production capacity look like in the "West"? South Korea: 40 to 80 K2 (confirmed closer to 40) Israel: up to 100 Merkavs and Namers (approximately) Germany: 25-30 Leopard 2A7V USA: 180 in one shift in LIMA 🙂 Yes, the US's production capacity is about the same as the rest of us combined. The above data is OSINT ofc - just read parliamentary interpellations, congressional reports, state senators', annual reports of companies, open statements of company presidents and directors, etc. Of course, the above may be increased: Lima produces 15 Abrmas per month and 5 Strykers, there is an option to produce 20 M1 m/c (240 per year) and when the second shift is launched: 33 vehicles per month (396 per year!). South Korea's capabilities are difficult to estimate, and KMW personally estimates it at double what it already has - although deliveries to Hungary and Norway indicate that there will be around 25 tanks per year there.
What's the moral in this for us? 1) In Abrams we trust because only GDLS has the appropriate production capacity 2) Licensed production of either M1A2SEPv3PL or K2PL should be launched in Poland, but care should be taken to ensure that it becomes the basis for a mobilization plan for renovations and distributed production based on components already produced in peacetime. And most importantly: I challenge the author of the fall of the Panzerwaffe (article)@WojenneH because Norbert wrote several epic articles about what happened to the Panzerwaffe in 1943 and 1944, that it collapsed.
What matters is not how much you produce/renovate, but how much you lose during this time and... whether your production base can be effectively attacked by aviation and production interrupted and disrupted. And at the end of this long entry, one more question: In the event of a NATO vs. Russia conflict, UWZ and Omsk would not stand in one piece for long 🙂 . And the need to disperse production and hide it underground would quickly reach the scale of the Third Reich's needs in Russia in 1944. Unfortunately, Ukraine has no room for maneuver here and we are seeing a material war in its worst form.

I've read Tat for a while; my impression ref his opinion on Bakhmut was that while the strategic defence had certain value, the chosen defensive positions and terrain negated that benefit.
The cost for Ukraine was increased because Bakhmut was not a defence-favourable area -  the ridges West of it provided far better defensive value and far too many Ukrainians were killed defending useless terrain with low tactical value. 
The kill ratio was not as favourable as it could (and should) have been.  Even as high as it was, there was better terrain very close by. 
I've tended to agree with him,  albeit also agreeing with Crunching any Russian advance. Any topological survey of Bakhmut highlights what a bad place it is to defend. It was no Verdun. 
 

Shashank. On Zaluzny's Economist interview. 
 

Makes sense if this report is accurate. Don't think Russia has enough personnel for them to sit around in Belarus. I doubt Russia is going to try another rush for Kyiv from Belarus anytime soon, like they tried in those crazy early days of the war.
AFU Bradley in action.

heh this Ukraine thread keeps edging towards "let's solve all the world's problems"

Yeah, I'm very aware of that, and I suppose that's a cue for getting a little into why we don't have anti-drone drones.
There are two parts to the anti-drone drone: detection and attack.  The detection is the hard part.  Destruction is easy - we already have no end of systems that can very accurately destroy anything that you give them coordinates of.  We can accurately fire projectiles, exploding projectiles, exploding projectiles full of razor sharp hoops, high energy beams of photons, rings with chains on them, rings with strings on them, giant wads of gooey stuff, or anything you want to take out a drone.  But you have to detect it.
For an anti-drone drone, there are sort of two categories of drone you're targeting: open loop (no comm back to the sender) and closed loop (some comm back to the sender, whether full two-way control, occasional updates, or whatever).  
Detection of the first type (no comm), which includes Shaheds, is tricky - unlike the F-35, these *start* with the radar cross section of a goose* and then you can make that even smaller.  These things are all small on visual and radar cross sections because you can paint them and they don't have a lot of metal.  You're going to track them with frustrating "visual" algorithms, where "visual" can mean different things in the optical vs. radar wavelengths, but you're still trying to pick out changes in the scene to decide where the thing is.  I'm not going to spend much time on it, other than to say that unless you have really high signal to noise and high resolution (both of which the target is trying to reduce), it's a lot harder than you think, and in general you're not going to get there with simple image differencing.  And this problem exists for commless drones whether you're using another drone, a gun, or a death ray to take them down.  Shaheds at least have a very characteristic sound that you can probably use for detection and targeting once they're within audible range.
Detection of the second type (active comm) is easy.  It's transmitting, and transmitting enough to get clear signal back to its operator, who is farther away than you are if it's attacking you.  Triangulation is old technology.  Piece of cake: you lock onto the frequency, have some kind of sensor so you know your own orientation relative to the sensor, and just maneuver in a way to make the signal from the drone stronger until you hit it and destroy it with whatever mechanism you prefer.  Or have a few sensors that are networked to give you the position (helloooo MLAT) and shoot it with your favorite method of action-at-a-distance.
Except for one problem: whose drone did you just destroy?
In the Ukraine environment, IFF is the hard part of doing radio based anti-drone systems.  There are tons of things flying around, as evidenced by the daily releases of yet another view of every bit of ground combat we ever see.  It's not quite Diamond Age concentrations of them, but they're working on it.  And they're all sorts of random drones, including commercial drones, custom drones made with commercial off the shelf parts, custom drones with a mix of commercial and special mil parts, totally custom mil drones, and who knows what else. And they're all using similar frequencies, because the combination of physics and the atmosphere force you to the same frequencies if you want a particular range and data rate at powers that you can reasonably supply to both the ground operator and drone with batteries.  If you don't sort out the IFF thing and you set an autonomous anti-radiation based anti-drone system loose, it's just as likely to attack its allied drones as the enemy drones, because it has no way to tell them apart.  That means you have to have your complete drone ecosystem integrated (ring that cash register over at Lockheed/Northrop Grumman/Raytheon!!) or you're just going to be attacking your own stuff.  
And part of why we aren't seeing even rudimentary versions of it in Ukraine is that it's not a function that people were already spending much effort on for commercial/hobbyist drones. You can't just pop over to Robotshop.com or Alibaba and order tunable RF sensor kits (or a few thousand of them) the way you can other types of sensor, or actuators for operating your 3D printed grenade dropper.  It's possible to get relatively inexpensive software-defined radio modules that are small (that's what feeds ADSBExchange so you can see who's flying around Ukraine), but the environment is so variable, along with the need to confirm what drone you're attacking, that at least for now you're going to need a human in the loop, even if you can semi-automate your remote control drone sensor.  And even with a human in the loop, nobody is painting national flags on their drones, so unless you know "this is one that our side makes" after you get up close to it (assuming you're doing that, rather than sending a death ray at it from 5 km), you really don't know who you're shooting down.  So the basic tech isn't all that hard, but because it's not just point and shoot or point and drop, it's a lot more dependent on integration of the whole system to be usable.
*geese, like all waterfowl, are incredibly mean and probably deserve to die. That's why there's a book entitled "Ducks and how to make them pay".  If we can do an autonomous system for drones, it should probably be immediately applied to geese and ducks.