Vanir Ausf B

Recently, I noticed that my UKR listening skills have improved noticeably. With the aid of translators and some effort, I can watch and translate UKR videos. So, let check the following interview with UKR AFV expert (former AFU tank officer)
 
 

It's not just some amateur narrative, it's official Ukrainian policy.
Zelenskiy has always said the goal was to get the whole country back.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/09/20/zelensky-keeps-maximalist-war-goals-despite-gop-opposition-aid/

They are awefully modeled in SF2.
The muzzle velocity is far too slow and they are less accurate than at4s somehow even though they have proper optics for aiming and rangefinding rather than just iron sights.

I never could hit anything w these in CMSF2.  My guys would fire at ~400m and it would miss by 100m, up, left right, down.  I hope they are better in real life.  
But they look damn cool. 

I don't think this is new information though?
There were two lines, each with two pipes (A & B). Nordstream 1 had both pipes destroyed, Nordstream 2 only had one pipe destroyed.
But, interestingly, there were four explosions. Nordstream 2 Pipe A was blown up two times at two different times, in two different locations. Leaving Pipe B intact. All this is on the Wiki.
To me , this suggests that whoever was behind the bombings intended all four pipes to be destroyed, but that they made a mistake and hit the same pipe twice. Probably because they were in a hurry and there was poor visibility in the water.

It is a very good comparison, in that it shows that there may be different wargoals for different participants. To crudely simplify that very complex topic: UK and France wargoals included lengthy mobilisation and then defeating III Reich via a combination of blockade, strategic bombardment and positional warfare. They assumed that Poland can well be defeated in the meantime, and intended to fulfill the alliance by reinstating Poland after the final Anglo-French victory. Poles were not officially told that, though. Some Polish officers and politicians understood that just from their own analysis of the situation. But most people waited for the French to start their relief offensive after the first week of the war, and the actual expectation was that we will hold the Germans at worst at the Vistula before the French destroy the Wehrmacht from behind .
Official position of the Ukraine being full return to legitimate borders, my hunch is that their minimum win condition is to reinstate the pre-2022 border in the south while retaining freedom to join Nato and EU. An armistice line in Donetsk and Lugansk changed in Russian's favour could probably be accepted after much wringing of hands. Now it is a moonscape anyway.
On the other hand, some nations supporting Ukraine can have entirely different perspective on what constitutes a win. No nuclear exchange and Ukraine avoiding total subjugation, possibly.

I am hoping for that as well, but I am not sure how this could happen.
Russian glide bombs are tossed from the distance of 50 km to front line on the Russian side. AFAIK Su 34 (and as of late also Su 24 unfortunately) approach high and fast from a direction roughly perpendicular to the frontline and at the furthest possible distance, they make the toss - pull up and release the bomb. Then they immediately reverse direction and head for home. Apart from the height and distance being higher, the technique is roughly similar to Russian helicopters tossing unguided rockets. 
This means, that in order to counter those attacks Ukrainian aircraft would have to be able to reliably shoot down Su 34 and Su 24 on their approach flight to the bomb release point (say 70 km behind the front on the Russian side?). Assuming the Ukrainian aircraft are F-16 with AIM 120 C they theoretically could do it, the missiles having a 100 km. range. However, F-16 would be fighting from big positional disadvantage. In order to hide from RUS SAMs and air-to-air patrols, the F-16s would probably be approaching very low. Therefore, once they release the missiles they would be firing from low up, at targets first fast approaching and then fast egressing, close to the far end of AMRAAM maximum range, from the frontal aspect of the target and then in a stern chase.  Would this scenario still yield a significant enough probability of kill? I do not know, but there are a lot of factors decreasing it compared to the theoretical optimum.
While doing this, Russian air to air patrols are a non-trivial risk factor, even now from time to time they account for Ukrainian aircraft with the R 37s. Also, while trying to hit Russians 70 km on the other side of the front, the Ukrainian F16 would have to pop up in Russian SAM envelope. In light of those risks, I do not think Ukrainians would be willing to risk their few precious F-16 if the probability of killing the glide bomb carriers is low. So I am afraid that your scenario might not happen in real life. But maybe I am wrong somewhere in this reasoning, or the Ukrainians surprise me with something. Hopefully they will. 

Two things seem to have to happen in order to  attain offensive capability in a big war: 
1. Total and full spectrum EW domination. 
2. ISR denial. 
That means space operations, that probably means denial of one’s own drones. It likely also means a whole other suite of sensor jamming per Watling’s envisioned future of sound sensors, etc. In other words, it probably means offense is the privilege of an already pretty dominant military. 

It's a workaround for an engine limitation. Vehicle weapons can't be rearmed within a mission or dismounted.
But certain vehicles, here the Jeep, can dismount their weapons.
For this reason, they have a second TOW launcher with it's own ammunition as their team weapon, while the model of the TOW disappears, when no crew is mounted.
As this is a combat vehicle, only the original crew can mount it.
As the TOW launcher carried by infantry, and the TOW launcher mounted on the vehicle are independent weapons, they can't share their ammunitions.
It also works the other way around. If you dismount and shoot all 3 three missiles, they jeep will still have its original 5 missiles loaded.

But this way, it is possible to simulate the team to dismount with the TOW launcher at least in a similar way, as it would be in real life.

Michael Clarke is a popular military expert who is often interviewed on TV.
If he squinted a bit, he might read the small letters on the image of the press conference, which was held in January 2023. The news he is commenting on is a year old.

Equipment loses, yes, but casualties are probably less lop-sided.
 

Equipment loses, yes, but casualties are probably less lop-sided.
 

Equipment loses, yes, but casualties are probably less lop-sided.
 

https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/brussels-playbook/fear-and-loathing-in-munich/
A reminder for all America's uselessness, Europe remains a close competitor.

Three FSB agents got medals for their diligent work at dislodging it.

On the topic of rotation and casulties, situation in Zenit and Avdiivka overall. 

I'd like to a bunch of back-of-the-envelope calculations and present them here for "public scrutiny". Lately I have been fascinated by this data set on confirmed RU KIA. Sadly, I can't embed the individual interactive plots, so I'll just use a screenshot or two, but I'd encourage everyone to take a look for themselves. Especially the breakdowns by branch of service and by time are really interesting.
So these people have been collectively gathering data on at least 43,460 killed RU soldiers from all branches (including PMCs and convicts), sampling from a variety of sources, ranging from social-media obituaries to on-site graveyard visits. I am not sure, if this data set includes L/DNR KIA figures or not, but it seems likely to me, since I found a couple of individual records of KIA high ranking officers that fought in (former) L/DNR formations. Now the total figure is obviously too low and one must also keep in mind that the degree of inaccuracy in the weekly KIA figures may also vary, but I think it is not totally unreasonable to assume a factor of roughly 7.2 for total casualties, overall (x3 for WIA/MIA, x2.4 for unreported losses). Note, the site makes a convincing argument, putting the probable WIA:KIA ratio in a range between 1.4:1 and 4:1. Using a 3:1 ratio would put the total figure at around 315,000, which matches with the CIA estimated as stated on this site (I didn't double check this figure or how recent it is). The UKR MOD currently claims just short of 400k for total personnel losses, btw.
Below the figure I am referencing here it says that only for 34,388 out of the total of 43,460 KIA (~79%) the exact date of death is known. I take that to mean the remainder is not included in this figure and, assuming an even distribution of these cases, will include a factor of ~1.26 in all subsequent calculations, i.e., x3.033 for probable KIA and x9.099 for probable total casualties, based on the number of (date) confirmed KIA.

 
If we now look, for example, at the weekly breakdown of all recorded KIA for the duration of the summer/fall 2023 offensive (roughly 01/06 through 4/10, or 18 weeks) we come up with a total of 5,591 confirmed KIA, with the intensity of the fighting seemingly steadily declining after June. So a probable total KIA count for this timeframe would be around 17,000 and 50,900 probable total casualties. On average and per week, this is 310 confirmed KIA, 940 probable KIA and 2,820 probable total casualties. These weekly averages are much lower, by a factor of ~2, than those during the two bloodiest months of the war (01/23 and 02/23) and lower by a factor of ~1.2 than weekly RU losses in 10/23 (right after cessation of the offensive, when the assault on Avdiivka began). Between 29/12/22 and 01/03/23 (9 weeks), which is somewhat arbitrary but roughly coincides with the deadliest fighting for Bakhmut and Vuhledar, the Russians suffered a total of 5,878 KIA, 17,800 probable KIA and 53,500 probable total casualties. On average and per week, this amounts to 653 confirmed KIA, 2000 probable KIA and 5,900 probable total casualties.
I am not totally sure what to make of these figures, maybe others can gather meaningful insight from them, though. I really hope I didn't miscalculate anything. If I did, please correct me. To me, they seem to underline that, considering a RU replacement rate of about 20k per month or 5,000 per week (although we don't know since when and for how long this rate has held or will hold), a strategy focused on personnel attrition is probably not a viable option. Not that anyone would have made that claim. Even in their worst time, this replacement rate would have been almost sufficient to absorb their casualties (at 5,900 weekly casualties only 84.5% over a period of 9 weeks). There are some further caveats to that, I think: Before the fall 2022 mobilization and through early 2023, the RU replacement rate seems to have been much more inadequate before they managed to reach the current high levels, that allow them to absorb even absurdly high casualty rates. So there would have been a serious backlog of unreplaced losses, that would only slowly have been filled by that time. This might serve to explain the RU unwilligness to demobilize (or even just rotate) the fall 2022 mobiks and to just keep them for the duration. These figures also seem to indicate that the 2023 summer/fall offensive was probably never adequate at inflicting debilitating losses to the Russians, at least from a global perspective. How serious these losses affected RU troops locally can not really be concluded from this, although my gut feeling tells me that it probably never got all that serious for them, given that they managed to absorb roughly the same number of casualties in half the time during the winter (while on the offensive).

Good summary from Tatariagmi.
Judging by various accounts aggregated here and there, it seems to be one of first Russian successes in coordinating airstrikes with infantry assaults. FABs were flying naturally before, in Severdonietsk, Soledar etc. but this time they indeed report of great concentration of hits by this type of weapon, supported by near-constant presence of Russian drones over city. Relatively crude tactics, but effective over time- muscovites definitelly were able to concentrate a lot of resources here.

In the case of Europe I'd say UKR is cut off not due to political will (or lack thereof), but lack of means. The last aid package from Germany mentioned 2500 artillery shells. That's one day of firing and this was a couple of weeks back. And last time I checked, UKR seems to be losing around 3 artillery guns, self-propelled and otherwise, every other week. Europe can't replace those. Shell production will eventually reach useful levels (although we don't know how many of those will actually end up in UKR hands), but I am afraid they will have run out of guns at that point.
 
From what we know, Russia is recruiting 20k (GUR estimate) to 35k (Medvedev bragging) men per month. Their losses are obviously high, but I'd guess given these numbers they are ultimately sustainable, not so for UKR it seems. And how many brigades were they able to smash against Avdiivka, one after the other? If they can keep this up, they'll whittle UKR down eventually this way, if they don't get a grip on their own issues.

To me this looks more like desparation than sound military logic. Why throw a specialist assault unit into the fray after only a couple months rest to fend off long looming disaster at the last moment (and lose the fortress in the process), why throw in the 47th (basically already spent) right after the failed counter-offensive, why is a single brigade (110th) required to hold out in Avdiivka for 1.5yrs of war and 4 months of sustained assaults? If things were okayish, the 110th would have been pulled back sometime in October, replaced by the 111th and maybe later bolstered by the 112th (or whatever), both rested and fresh from the Belorussian border. Instead, UKR is force to pull one act of desparation after another. It almost looks as if they just don't have any strategic reserves, at all.
The underlying issue, at least to me, seems to be that RU has been running circles around UKR in terms of force generation for basically all of 2023 and ongoing. They may use these forces inefficently, but are able have brigade after brigade mauled while storming some fortress town, while UKR is forced to send the same couple of fire brigade units from hot spot to hot spot. The fact that UKR is basically cut off from foreign assistance and is likely going to be for the foreseeable future does not help in this matter, but their force generation issues seem to be a largely internal problem.

The reminder very emphatically did not come from the White House. It came from GOP Rep Mike Turner and Jake Sherman actually did a press briefing to express bewilderment that a Republican on the Gang of Eight would publicize the secret subject of a meeting scheduled for the following day.

Quick update regarding Avdiivka.

RU reached Industrialnyy avenue cutting it off RU reached City park RU did not reach Brevno There are conflicting reports as to who controls Avtobaza Overall situation seems to fluid at the moment.