Hapless

I would suspect it's some kind of culturally embedded fatalism rather than fanaticism.

The quick version is that it's (probably) an exercise in economy of force. The flooding is a serious obstacle, meaning Russia can take troops out of the line opposite Kherson and use them to react to the Ukrainian offensive.

Quick TLDR: Inundation is an ancient defensive measure- if the Russians are worried about Ukrainians crossing the Dnieper in the south then it makes sense to make improve the river as an obstacle. This obviously works below the damn because of rising levels, but also above in the Khakovka reservoir because as the water level drops it's going to make it potentially less navigable (ie. anyone crossing now has to worry about running into silt beds, rocks, wrecks etc that are now closer to the surface). If the lack of water for the nuclear power plant makes a melt down more likely then, well, bonus. The risk might encourage Ukraine to be more cautious around the plant and an actual (if particualrly catastrophic) melt down might make the area a real no-go zone and secure the Dnieper flank even more. What's really interesting is that Russia has only now blown up a major dam. It could be that dams are such chunky hardened structures (and that Russian stand-off precision weapons are not precise enough) that sneaking in overnight and packing the interior of the dam with explosives is the only way to blow one up. The Dnieper has plenty of dams with an awful lot of water behind them all the way up to Kyiv. If the Kyiv reservoir is opened up, the mass of water might (big might, I don't know how the dams are rated) be enough to overwhelm the dams downstream, resulting in sequential dam failures all the way to Black Sea. That would not only obviously be an atrocious ecological and human disaster, but cut the country in half and sever Ukrainian logistics. Oh, and if that's not bad enough there are layers of radioactive sediment in the bottom of especially the northern reservoirs that could get churned up and added into the mix to make things even worse. So I assume the Russians haven't done that because they can't... and hopefully it wonudl never work because all the dams along the Dnieper are massively overengineered Sovet megaprojects.

I suspect the intent of targeting energy infrastructure was to try and freeze Ukraine to the negotiating table: now that we're past Winter, there's not much point turning the heating off. Not that it was a fantastic strategy to begin with- chalk up yet another failure for strategic bombing to achieve strategic effects.

Yeah. I missed the speech, but apart from massed marching it looks like there was a single T34-85, a load of Tigrs, S-300/400s, ICBMs and some Bumerangs. To quote one of the commentators on Sky: "Is that it?"

@Bearstronaut mentioned this earlier, but I think it got a bit lost in the mix. A little too close, if true.

Meanwhile... https://www.eucom.mil/pressrelease/42314/russian-aircraft-collides-into-us-unmanned-system-in-international-waters

Now that is an amazing resource! Obviously just seeing wrecks tells an incomplete story, but there is so much information in there. Very nice find man!

Well, Russian strategic decision making mysteries solved, I guess:

Now this is great:

Re: Naval Blockade of Russia What are they importing by sea that isn't already sanctioned? Maybe oil etc from Venezeula, but they've got their own right? I'd imagine supplies from Iran, China, North Korea and the other CIS members are much more important and they're not coming on ships.

Still fascinating that this pretty much exactly what we find in CM.

So, my quick 2p on the Polish Missile Incident while we wait for more facts to come out: On the one hand, it seems likely that it was an accident, or at least unintentional (which is not quite the same thing). Missiles can do funny things in flight- I don't think it's unreasonable to think that a Russian cruise missile got lost somehow, that a Ukrainian air defence missile missed it's target and keep going west, or that a Russian missile was damaged by a Ukrainian one and went off course. We've got some spectacular footage of a missile in Luhansk deciding to do a 180 and return itself to sender- it's not a stretch to think that one might be damaged or off by a small error when fired and end up miles off target. On the other hand... it seems like there's a lot of potential deniability to this and thus uncertainty. The fact that missiles malfunction and get lost, the fact that Russia and Ukraine both use similar weapons, the fact that the missile hit a random location in Poland rather than a specific target... this is all leads to a pretty murky picture (at least, right now). Does that deniability and murkiness make it more likely that it's actually some kind of Russian signalling attempt? The timing is interesting- NATO leaders are split between Europe and Bali because of the G19 (those in Indonesia, including Biden having to be roused at stupid o'clock over there to be briefed) and the Russians have just suffered a significant set-back at Kherson. They certainly blew the Nordstream pipeline after the Kharkiv Offensive took off in what was almost certainly a signalling attempt... that obviously did not warn NATO off, so are the Russians taking a step up the escalation ladder? Just drop a missile somewhere on the Polish border at random- enough to pass off as a malfunction, or ideally a Ukrainian error- but also enough to say "Look guys, we can hit the cross-border supply routes. You've been warned." Signalling? Coincidences? Or the unfortunate but natural result of firing a hundred cruise missiles at Ukraine? Of course, it stands to reason that it could be both, with the risk of missile malfunction generating this kind of incident accepted as an opportunity to send a signal. But, too early to know yet. We'll see.

Another shot. Fascinating to consider that sustained long range precision corrosion didn't blow the bridge, but instead made the enemy do it themselves. Also, I guess one for the engineers to turn around to the missileers and say "That's how you do it!"

My money is on cyber being the dog that didn't bark... because it's not a dog. And it can't bark.

This tickled me. In particular- "In the books everything is written, you just need to know it and be able to apply it." There's a website floating around listing VDV manuals (http://russianairbornetroops.info/) and while I can't read Russian, judging from the pictures, knowing and applying what's in the books might not help: Which is just... wow. Advance down a street with dismounted infantry sandwiched between two BMDs? No thank you. Then there are elements in these manuals that seem fairly sensible, but are somewhat sabotaged by the er, quality of the art: This is all from the manual with the CMx1 screenshots in, for extra bonus points. Of course, there's a chance it's not legit, but still the mind continues to boggle.

Good point. The size of the beam in the pictures also seems ridiculous if it's supposed to be hitting a satellite at 1500km, so maybe they are trying to light up the cloud base a la Artificial Moonlight in order to mess with satellite surveillance. I have no idea how well that would work and it definitely doesn't sound like you would need a fancy high tech laser for that.

Bit of background on the Peresevet laser that might be responsbile for funny light columns in Russia: https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3967/1 Raises some questions with interesting answers, such as: Does dazzling/blinding US satellites constitute a direct attack on NATO? These are supposedly systems designed to accompany road-mobile ICBMs in order to make it harder for the US to track them- so (aside from the way it looks like it can't function on the move) what are they doing in Belgorod? Is this just posturing to reinforce nuclear threats, intended to reassure the Russian people or part of scheduled nuclear exercises? It looks like Peresevet lives in very easily identifiable shelters at/near bases for Russian road mobile ICBMs that the US have got to be monitoring constantly, so what countermeasures has the US got up it's sleeve? Would it be cheaper to get a load of searchlights and point them at the sky on a cloudy night to pretend you have some new Wunderwaffe?

Well, those two diamond shaped enemy icons are tanks. So being 1km away means those CV90s are definitely not safe. But like Chuckdyke says- you can override the "I want to live" behaviour to some extent by using the Fast command.

You can select Rhino tanks in QB, but it needs to be July or later

Now this is an interesting list of coordinates: Which makes this (from further down Girkin's thread): Assuming it's not been leaked out in an attempt to give Russian milbloggers an aneurysm, it seems like a good example of the kind of ISR support Ukraine is getting from NATO.

Ok, maybe a few pages before the actual end

Everyone remembers how Red Storm Rising ended, right?

Looks like an update on the blog, but not the site yet :https://www.iswresearch.org/2022/09/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment_10.html