acrashb

Its that period between any sort of noticeable operational movement where the thread goes full schizo

What some posters need to do is ask themselves whether they have anything useful to add to the conversation and avoid posting fan fic about striking civilian columns.

I think you are reacting in a very one sided way. An army that starts refusing orders undermines the authority of the state.  That army doesn't function independent of the state apparatus.  It doesn't mobilize troops, it doesn't make economic decisions, it doesn't drive the overall political process nor negotiate with the few allies Russia has. It undermines all that by making the state appear to not have control and therefore authority.  Think Xi wants to be in bed with a guy whose own army is in revolt?
Who decides who in the army gets resources?  Who decides that X artillery brigade supports which corps?  Who decides what aviation resources support which sector of the front? Chaos absolutely serves the interest of the UA.  With confusion as to who is in charge, the ability to respond to UA advances declines.  The RA isn't suddenly going to start fighting smarter, it is simply going to fight even less coordinated than it does now.
 

My attempt to add useful linguistic context has failed completely. Or, as one might put it, my wording and the response was probably not ideal.

To be straight with you, as I reflex on this point, and not to be obtuse, I understand it depends in full on whether they are right or acute.

I hate to comment when Steve asked to give the topic a rest.
But there has been a lot of talk about Byzantium, so I couldn't resist adding that Moscow as the "third Rome" (has anyone ever heard such rubbish?) always wanted control of Constantinople / Istanbul. 
Russia had every intention of expanding westward until it was stopped. They would have happily gobbled up Romania, Bulgaria, the Balkans, European Turkey. They invaded the Danubian Principalities in 1853 and this was an unprovoked war of expansion into the West.
Russia has expanded an average of 50 square miles a day, every day, since the reign of Ivan the Terrible. That's the sixteenth century. No other nation is as consistently greedy of their neighbors territory as Russia. The only people that came close were the British for the 200-300 odd years of their imperial hubris. But the Russians are still at it today.

My attempt to add useful linguistic context has failed completely. Or, as one might put it, my wording and the response was probably not ideal.

You don't even have to go back that far in time to find when the Russians last looked West. A lot a Russians very conveniently like to forget that they started World War 2 on the same side with Germany. In September of 1939, they helped invade Poland. Two months later (and still allied with Germany), they started the Winter War with Finnland.

And that happens when you cut a small snippet of a quote and use it out of context to make your point.
The (relevant part of) the full quote:
I don't see any threshold applied there. He just states that currently the usefulness of a limited number of F-16s is probably not that high for the ongoing counteroffensive because of Russian air and AA capabilities. That perfectly fits our understanding of the current situation. Ukraine already has air capabilities, they just can't use them all that much at the moment because we basically have denied air space (for both sides btw). A handful of F-16 will not immediately and fundamentally change that equation, right? As he goes on that may change over time.
If that's your definition of a moron...
Now I have to defend US generals because you guys are too lazy to look up original sources? Really?

I wouldn't get too far into refining the definitions down. No two power struggles are the same nor...whatever that clown Edward Luttwak claims...are any two coups alike. And sometimes one begins as one thing and ends up being another.
In this particular case, it actually represents the kind of thing one would have seen in the medieval era with powerful nobles directly threatening the king, going out of favor, coming back in but ultimately not being severely punished for fairly violent chevauchée's aimed at the central power. And that makes sense. Putin's Russia is in some senses a feudal state even down to the allocation of resources to powerful figures who are then expected provide armed forces in return. Wagner is the most obvious of those but Gazprom, Roscosmos and others exist and are growing. As the Russian state further regresses, that trend will accelerate. 
I agree that the Prigozhin faction...which we still don't clearly perceive...did not want to actually overthrow Putin in order to avoid taking the blame for Ukraine, to minimize personal risk and to avoid the potential for really revolutionary chaos. But I don't think there's a progressive change happening. The revolt happened and a deal was struck but nobody is really in enough control to make incremental changes. It was a spasm and this is the aftermath where everyone is figuring out what it means, what the new rules are and what winning the next round will take. And you can be *very* sure that both sides are thinking about both a post Putin *and* a post Prigozhin future. Neither one of them promises stability. 

V1 is back baby!!! Can’t keep a good doodlebug down.

Then where is it?  Ukraine is pecking away and all we hear about are RA artillery shortfalls and tepid responses.   I have yet to see a single crushing indirect fire response from the RA side yet.  I can understand the UA keeping a lid on these sorts of things but the Russians are feeding every success story they can into the info-verse, they would not be shy about crowing on major c-fires successes...yet we do not see them.  Something in the RS fires system is off.

This would be the part about how this war is about a lot more than Ukraine trying to defend itself.  To be entirely brutal (yet accurate), this was became a major opportunity after about Apr 23.  An opportunity to knock Russia back in line with the international community and a global status quo that has endured for about 30+ years.  Russia was dumb enough and ill-prepared enough so the West scrambled for the chance at a nasty proxy war that 1) would not lead directly to NATO being pulled in/WW3, 2) could be contained to Ukraine and not blow up and out from there, 3) shore up NATO in both membership and funding, 4) result in regime change in Russia that we could do business with but not risk security everywhere, and 5) did not turn Russia into a complete freefall.  Not a great or easy opportunity but there it is.  The other option was to simply let it happen but that was simply letting things slide too far.
This is why we are doubling down on Ukraine - intersection strategic interests.  Not because we like them so much, or really care about their suffering.  There are lists of nations who were (and are) burning right now that we averted eyes and changed the channel.  There are conflicts that we stayed out of that were worse than Ukraine but that happened on the periphery.  Russia in Ukraine is right smack dab in the wheelhouse of challenging how we thought the world works.  We thought that nation states negotiating with war was over.  Intra-state and non-state, sure and nasty business "over there".  To have an international great power go "nope, we like the way of the gun and there is nothing you can do about it" risks the entire scheme.
So, no, we are not sending billions in military support or opening up our entire ISR architecture to Ukraine because it is the right thing to do in defending "the little guy".  Politicians are going to spin it that way because people buy it.  But this is harsh calculus time - we defend the scheme or risk it failing entirely.  Ukraine was the opportunity of a generation to have a war with Russia without really having a war.  Don't believe me, if Azerbaijan invades  Armenia again does anyone think they are going to see this sort of heat and light?  Why?  Because the rules based order can tolerate small side powers scrapping away, but one of the big boys...nope. 

🤣

Do you think things were different if we were talking about M1s instead of Leo2s? Do you really think the US government would say "The Poles are perfectly able to service their M1s, we'll just give them our taxpayers' money instead of letting it flow back to US companies."?
These deals are always made in a way that supports domestic economy.

Who wants to bet that Russia deliberately mines the most productive wheat and other agricultural areas to deny their use to Ukraine after the war?

After all this Mumbo Jumbo about EU membership, this came through right now:
 
 
https://twitter.com/jensstoltenberg/status/1678484703060324359?s=20

At this point I don't even consider the UXO DPICM situation worthy of argument. Very little, if any DPICM or general purpose cluster munitions are going to be used anywhere that Russia hasn't already placed hundreds if not thousands of AT and AP mines. Areas that will have to be demined post war ANYWAYS. Whatever unexploded DPICM remains will just be another part of the clean up.

While I do not dismiss the UXO/ROW of side of this debate, if we are going to use maths:
- On a 200 km front with 50km depth (basically the central frontage from Zap to Donetsk) we are talking 10,000,000,000 sq meters of real estate - it is late so check my math (200,000 m x 50,000 m).  185,000 duds across that sort of area comes to roughly 1 UXO for approx 54,000 sq meters (about 500 x 100 m area, or 5 football fields.) 
Of course there this will not be uniform distribution, there will be areas of high concentration of UXO, here battlefield recording will be key.  High res records of each DPICM shoot will need to be kept so that contamination can be tracked.  The good news on DPICM is that they are technically surface laid unlike mines; however, that is not a guarantee as they can and will be covered up by vegetation etc.  
- This will also render roughly 7.2 million live fully functioning submunition rounds able to do no small damage to both RA mech and infantry forces if applied properly.  That is the payoff as it relates to utility.  In regard to these weapons usage, as there is no legal issue, it is a Ukrainian decision as to whether the risk is worth the payoff.  Clearly the Ukrainian government has decided that “yes” it is worth the risk.
Further given the context, post-war these munitions will fall under a public health/hazard risk.  Currently in Ukraine roughly 102/100,000 people die every years from cancer.  Out of nation of roughly 44 million that is around 45k deaths every year.  Every one of those 185k duds would have to kill someone at that 45k rate for about 4 years to match the hazard of cancer as a disease.
https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/GO.22.00123#:~:text=According to the Globocan database,927.6%2F100%2C000 in the country.
More realistically these UXO will fall much lower, likely lower than vehicle accident death rates pre-war (around 5k depending who you ask):
https://www.roadsafetyfacility.org/country/ukraine

Again if every one of those 185k duds kills a civilian it will take about 37 years before they are all done, at the same rate as traffic accidents.  Of course not every dud is going to kill a civilian, in fact with education and clearance over those “185 years” the death/injury rate will likely be well below traffic deaths.  The major cost is loss of land usage:

Worst case is about 925k football fields of land that will be unusable due to these duds (1 per 5 fields until cleared - basically that entire 200 x 50 km strip.  Ukraine has about 579k sq kms of land that had value in 2017:
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/ukraine/land-use-protected-areas-and-national-wealth/ua-land-area 
That strip of land we are talking about is roughly 10k sq kms - so roughly 1.7%, not counting whatever they have lost to Russian UXOs and mines.  Which is pretty has already (could be as high as 25%)
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/soils-war-toxic-legacy-ukraines-breadbasket-2023-03-01/

Of course right now the loss of that land to Russian occupation is also likely the greater threat.  However mitigation during post-war reconstruction will definitely be a consideration.  However is we are going to reduce this to strictly dollars and land, if these munitions result in similar gains as we saw last Fall, the losses in land due to US supplied DPICM will be far out stripped by the economic gains of re-taken lands being back in Ukrainian hands.
So What?  Well in this case the risk/cost calculus is a national decision, not one of international law.  There is a moral/ethical angle but again so are things like legalization of drugs and nation states reserve the right to weigh these issues internally.  Ukraine has likely done the math and decided that the risk is worth it.  The value of land retaken is worth more than land lost due to use of these weapons, even in non-contaminated areas.  Further the public health risk is also likely considered manageable and mitigable, again doing the math.
In the harsh calculus of war, I can see how this all makes sense to Ukrainian decision makers.  In fact the worst case is if they use the DPICM and the offensive fails anyway the contamination will likely remain on occupied RA territory, which at this point may be viewed as a positive in this upside down world we live in now.

Yeah, but whether someone has a blue or yellow checkmark is no criterium whether or not hes posting bull****.  Even before Musk took over there were lots of accounts producing fakenews which had blue checkmarks.

The problem with "being concerned with giving Ukraine cluster munitions" is that the reason they are getting it is that we (the West) are running out of the non-cluster munitions that are possible to give. We should have built more factories, we should have had more stockpiles, we should have given Ukraine more sooner so the Russians didn't have time to dig in, whatever - but now there's a shortage and the dual purpose rounds are the one way to plug it short term we have.
The alternative to giving Ukraine cluster munitions is not giving them different, non-cluster munitions. The alternative is that they get nothing, more Ukrainians will die needlessly and Ukraine will possibly lose, sentencing anyone on the occupied territories to Russian terror and genocide, not to mention all the international repercussions of showing the West as weak and rules-based world order as a farce.
Would it be better to give Ukraine the same amount of ammo in non-cluster versions? Yes. But it seems we can't do that (for reasons that should be fixed for sure, but likely can't be fixed in the short term). So it's either dual purpose or nothing.
I say dual purpose.

One of the best action movies I've seen so far. Fascinating stuff.

Maybe they can propose a counteroffer that would involve turning over all their Leo tanks to Ukraine.

Pardon my words, but the balls on this man to venture to Snake Island….for those who can’t see the video,  Zelensky visited Snake Island, leaving behind wreaths to honor the fallen. Did so by boat.
 

The fact they are DPICM doesn't matter. The fact that are artillery ammo and there are a lot of them immediately available, that is what matters.
Kofman clearly stated this.on the resent podcasts.

Let's hope the DPICMs headed to Ukraine pack a punch that was sorely missing in CMCW. 😂