Hapless

Another Reddit link: https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/upz9f6/mz21_9m22s_fired_from_a_bm21_landing_on_the/ Russians firing incendiary cluster munitions on Azovstal. Not sure how effective that's going to be at setting things on fire in a steel works, but it certainly looks unpleasant. The main reason for linking it though is that you get to see the individual submunitions falling and it looks remarkably similiar to the cluster munitions in CMCW, what with the orange/red projectiles: obviously Battlefront nailed it!

I'm probably going to upload the original at some point. Might make an interesting video about how powerful OSINT has gotten. Also yes, there are multiple BMDs and trucks being towed. And some Pantsirs going forward, a military police vehicle, a tank with a Soviet flag, some kind of fire strike in the background, random civilian vehicles passing through. Loads of stuff.

On this note, back on Day One over the CM Discord we watched the Russians rolling up to the bridge at Nova Khakova on live Ukrainian traffic cams. I recorded some footage the morning after and at one point there was at least a couple of VDV companies stacked up on the road in a traffic jam. One air/arty strike and they would have a seriously bad day. [Edit: And here it is:] (Then some Russians climbed up the poles and started knocking the cameras out. Which was also fun, because you could chart the progress of this one truck camera disabling team going down the road.) The sheer volume of OSINT at the start of the war was crazy, the tricky part as always is how to deal with the information overload and exploit it in a timely fashion (if possible).

Obviously not quite there yet, but I wonder how long it'll be until you can dump AI controlled recon drone swarms on the enemy a la cluster munitions. Plus, they sound scary.

BINGO! I didn't see Gerasimov, but could easily be that I just didn't recognise him

Funny how the technophilia creeps in. Why photoshop a mobilisation card when you can get an old one and change the date with a pen? On a related note, guess we either spend hours sifting and cross-referencing sources to find out what Russian mobilisation cards look like... or... wait until tomorrow. See you in the morning

On a lighter note...

Bayonet lug. More seriously, the bit in the middle looks like a muzzle reference device. On tanks, it collects data about the gun barrel (like, how much it's bending due to heat expansion on the sunward side) to feed back to the fire control system to maintain accuracy, I'd imagine it's the same sort of thing.

Zooming down from 30k feet to about ten feet: apparently CCTV footage of the attack on the Transnistrian Ministry of State Security building (or whatever it's called). https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/uddy8q/the_footage_of_the_shelling_of_the_building_of/ Doesn't exactly look professional: maybe it's not supposed to, maybe whoever it is is just crap. I for one can't help but hear Benny Hill music when I watch the first guy trying to dodge the other two backblasts... and failing.

I guess I'm thinking more in terms of a ceasefire leading to a static front, rather than anything like peace. If nothing else, I don't think the Ukrainians would accept it. Actually getting to Odessa seems very unlikely, while I would expect at least some kind of deniability from something like mines that would be workable during a period of peace.

Especially if they're denying Ukraine the Black Sea right now anyway. Why bother trying to grind all the wall to Moldova when you can play sea-denial? Mine up the ports, station some subs, supplement with anti-ship missiles and aircraft from Crimea... job's a good'un (with the caveat that the Black Sea Fleet should be able to pull that off). Hence, they could drop the goal of a land corridor to Moldova in negotiations and still retain important long term effects. What's interesting about this batch of Russian aims is that they pretty much reflect the situation as it is right now, with the notable exception of the Donbass. So, the idea that this is endgame (or at least ceasefire) posturing or a sign of the Russians recognising their limited means seems pretty on the ball to me.

One alternative on the political front is that Putin isn't actually in power anymore: that there's been a quiet coup behind the scenes. The new bosses have all the power, but they're keeping him in position to soak up the failure while they try to bring an end to hostilities. Probably tremendously unlikely, but that video of him talking to Shoigu seems so off. Slouched, unhealthy Putin gripping onto the table for dear life, tapping his foot with his shoulders up by his ears. Shoigu in a suit and not his uniform. The tiny table and the uncomfortable proximity. Looks like the same room that Putin gave his hour long history lesson from just before the war started (the one with the Kremlin screensaver and the array of 70s phones)- but he's not behind the desk in a position of authority here, he's out in front face-to-face with Shoigu. I mean, I've only seen a short cropped video but it definitely doesn't has the same vibe as the pre-war stuff.

Good find man, this is really interesting! Haven't gotten all the way through yet, but when he starts talking about what they did when they reached Hostomel, it's so fascinating to listen to someone describing the blunt end of a battle drill army. "We came off the helicopter so we made a horseshoe formation- because that's the drill." "The commander told us to hold a position, so we dug in- because that's the drill." Drills are not tactics, but they're easier to teach and judge. To train a platoon attack, go through the checklist from the manual, tick the boxes, training complete, well done, schedule again the next time the qualification comes up. Free play exercises- where you *use* drills to practice tactics- aren't just harder to pull off effectively, but harder to justify in a budget because you can't be certain of the result. When you've got 3 platoons to qualify and a limited time to do it in, it's difficult to explain how you spent x hours on an exercise where all one of those platoons does is sit there, or where another one gets wiped out and the other is the only one that passed. I don't think I've ever seen anything from the RU side approaching a free-play kind of exercise. Things like Zapad are most operational/strategic and the filmed chunks are clearly just highly scripted demonstrations. Certainly nothing like the NTC. I don't mean to imply that drills are useless- everyone learns drills and they *should* learn drills, but when you can't use the building-blocks to make a coherent effort, or your drills fall apart because war is a kaleidoscope of chaos, confusion, uncertainty and stress in a way that exercises aren't then you sit on an airfield for a week getting pulverised by air and artillery. I'm over-exaggerating a little, but I do think there is a drills vs tactics tension we're seeing play out at the tactical level. Or, you know,... seeing a battle drill army that has been ticking off that it's been doing it's drills properly for the last 20 years and selling off the ammo allocation for vodka...

Not storming Azovstal is an intersting one. On the one hand... why try and clear it when you can (hopefully) starve the defenders out? Or at least, let their supply problems grind them down until attacking looks like it might result in fewer casualties. What's interesting is the potential that this reflect shifting political/military priorities: raising a Russian flag over Azovstal and thus the entirety of Mariupol is taking a backseat to something else. Like, for example, a need to get more replacements for other, now more important operations. On the other hand... not clearing Azozstal because you can't, or because you can't afford to seems like a serious admission of failure, will or capability. It doesn't feel like a victory. Perhaps more interesting is the reporting that it's Putin's decision not to storm the place. So it's his responsibility: he's no longer the benevolent Tsar mislead by his generals, he's getting personally involved. If that comes back to bite- in the same way that it came back to bite Tsar Nicholas II, then... well that would be interesting. Russia moving from a "We know it's terrible, but if only Putin knew how bad it was then he'd be able to fix it" to "Sergei, get the pitchfork we're going to Moscow" is probably unlikely, but historically similar illusions being shattered hasn't ended well.

One potential (and emphasis on the 'potential') for that "10-20k" force could be that the Russians are looking for a screening force to supplement the DPR etc. This would hark back to 2014-15 where you have the militias out in front doing the grunt work and Russian regulars staying back and executing limited heavily planned actions to destroy Ukrainian forces or seize ground, which they immediately hand over to their screen before bugging back to safety. Or, to mirror another war, kind of like the Iraqi Republican Guard in the Iran-Iraq War. The regular army holds the front, the Republican Guard with all the toys works out and rehearses the script for the upcoming battle, executes it until the wheels start to inevitably fall off the operation, then pulls out. Rinse and repeat like it's WW1 and, if you're Russian, worry about why people are now comparing you to the Iraqis. Pretty sure you'd need more than 20k men (of questionable quality!) to hold a useful length of front and I'm pretty sure the Ukrainians wouldn't take it sitting down, but on the other hand the idea of minimising Russian casualties while inflicting a Zelenophillia every now and again is appealing to someone. Or... it could be an admission that the lines are going to solidify soon and someone- preferably not someone Russian- needs to hang around at the front exposed to angry Ukrainians for Russia to hold onto it's ill-gottten gains.

If it makes you feel better, it does have some limitations. I can see why it got pulled, and so can all my vehicles that ended up in ditches

Relink, because it's interesting. My take was more tactical- that they were only likely to get a couple of shots off and were holding out for something juicy, a by-product being the joking that most Russian vehicles didn't justify the expense of the missile. @Huba You got the right one , this is just the longer version I think.

(Admittedly a long shot:) Maybe Mariupol isn't about Russia vs Ukraine anymore. Maybe Putin has realised that that ship has sailed and he's concentrating on post-war internal issues. I'm only saying this because it looks like there are plenty of Chechens in Mariupol: is throwing them into the grinder an exercise in attempting to neuter Kadyrov before he starts getting crazy ideas about an independent Chechnya? Not enough to reduce his ability to police Chechnya, but enough to stop him doing anything else. Alternatively re: Mariupol- support for the Ukrainians kicked up a notch after the Russians pulled out of the north and everyone could see what they had been doing. That might have been preferable to military collapse, but it was also a significant blow on the information-diplomatic front that seems to have significantly increased support for Ukraine. Given that the Russians have potentially (probably) done much worse in Mariupol- or done so on a larger scale- they may feel that they can't pull out for fear of the world finding out.

That might be a pretty good analogy for the Russian army actually: Contemplating a decaying orbit in a malfunctioning spacecraft short-circuited by the free-floating graphite shards of a broken pencil point; trying desperately to solve the problem by sharpening the pencil some more and adding to the cloud of pencil shavings clogging the instruments. Should have invested in a pen guys! Or, you know... not gone to space. (Not to say that COTS products and components aren't a good idea, providing they're being used because they work and not because Ivan found it in the bin and it happens to fit.)

I didn't get very far. The concept was mostly to show off how ridiculous a concept Squad is in terms of force-space ratios. @LukaFromFallujah This looks awesome though man, great work!

Because it (almost inevitably) appeared elsewhere:

RE: Drones One of the issues with giving everyone a drone is that you get a kind of information overload/ information bog where soldiers have to (or feel like they have to) process all feeds of information before they make a decision or make a move (after all, self-preservation is a thing). A bit like turning the OO dial up to eleven and never DA-ing. Case in point: the British Army has done some testing adding, amongst other things, GoPros to the end of Challenger main gun barrels- the cameras are mounted to point left and right so that a tank can roll up to a corner, edge the barrel out of cover and be able to get a good look without exposure. Sounds good until the tank crews (reputedly) lost all speed and momentum, stopping at every opportunity to look around corners with their new toy. Now, if you can create a universal feed where the data from all your drones is synthethised in a cloud and then disseminated to all participants in near real time, via a Blue Force Tracker type thing (Red Force Tracker?) or some kind of augemented reality feed, thereby cutting the processing out and simply overlaying the info over soldier's basic tasks... then you'd be cooking. (As a side note- giving that laser warning recievers are a thing I wonder why no one has decided to put a tank's laser rangefinder on a drone and do all the lasing from a different angle?)

Good one of a Ukrainian ATGM team in action: Handful of guys, ATGM, pre-prepared ambush site.

20 minute walk around of what is apparently an abandoned Russian position near Kharkiv: Plenty of MTLBs and a few tanks (think he calls them T72-B3s), loads of kit lying around (MANPADS, ATGMs, tank shells etc). Starts going at about 1:31, tank at 14:19. Also an indicator of how crappy that terrain actually is: obvious linear concealment in open fields, windy as hell and probably freezing too. I'm not sure which is more distressing: the profusion of white sandbags or the way the cameraman walks around with no apparent regard for booby traps.

Not sure what's going on in this one, but I'm sure it's stupid: Longer video towards the end of this https://www.seznamzpravy.cz/clanek/zahranicni-reportaz-z-prvni-linie-pohled-do-hlavni-domobrany-a-s-pistoli-proti-tanku-195688 Looks like they were getting an RPG-18 ready and then the guy in black decided to close assault it with a pistol. On the one hand, seems easily staged. Dedicated cameraman, key character all in black so he's easily tracked, hard to tell exactly what's going on, BMP doesn't have it's engine running etc etc On the other hand... apparently Russian basic tactical skills as demonstrated over the last month.