acrashb

Please don‘t take this post as bait for country bashing. It is just facts.
Europe (EU & non-EU) has now twice the amount of (pledged!) support for Ukraine. Dark blue is short term, light blue long term support.
Took us a while but it is not that the US bears the brunt of the support alone anymore. Article in German.
https://www.ifw-kiel.de/de/publikationen/aktuelles/ukraine-support-tracker-europa-sagt-jetzt-doppelt-so-viel-unterstuetzung-zu-wie-die-usa/
 

Yes the smallest drone is the size of the common sparrow. Wait and we have mosquito size or even smaller. 

The difference is between 'smart' and 'wise'.  And there's the issue of values - good or bad. poor values lead to a lack of wisdom, and poor outcomes when 'smart' is used to accumulate wealth.  Not that there's anything wrong with wealth, if honestly achieved.

You wrote earlier that Prig had enough money to retire in grand style.  But for people like him that's not the point - the point is power, and you don't get that in retirement.

Good God he's incessant. 

Yeah, I wish the US would push energy independence, nukes and solar as national security policy. We are so favored in natural resources and everything else that a state could want that it’s pure laziness and a lack of a good vision for the next American Century that is holding us back.
“The Natural Resource Curse” is honestly kind of garbage. It’s entirely about rule of law. If you don’t have rule of law, and you have billions in oil, diamonds, gold etc kleptocrats and criminals will pillage it. There are lots of countries with plenty of natural resources that do great, and the common thread is rule of law.

At least it died with a gender neutral pronoun.

Speaking as a retired artillery officer....three other reasons to explain this:
1. They have insufficient radios and field phones to communicate with the battery command post.  
2.  The clearing in the trees is too small for proper dispersion of the guns.  Knowing that drones are sweeping treelines for targets, the russians may have chanced putting these guns into a small clearing in the middle of a forest with a trail going into the clearing for the tow vehicles.
3. They lack fire control calculators/computers to calculate fire patterns like converge, linear, etc.   The spacing looks about right for just doing a common bearing and range shoot to all guns and the spacing of the guns is about right for overlapping lethal burst patterns.

One more movie scenario
Driver ZSU
As we have taken, our stormtrooper was found, who  missed in action on 23rd of July during next assault of the village and hide there whole month in basemants. 
Fella on Bradley
This is dude from my company. I have a thread of his history as a draft. I await for "yes" from the top-brass and then I will issue this. Mykhaylo is a legend about whom the movie will be make )
In further comments Fella on Bradley told this guy have been stealing food of Russian soldiers in houses, where they were deployed, when they went to positions. He came up only in the night. Once he has collected panama of the soil and poured it out on mechanic of Russian artillery gun. 
 

Ok, having “worked on the inside,” and having a discussed or been a party to discussions on “creative” ways to obtain money fo “pet” projects, I can say with much certainty that virtually every Administration, Agency, Department, Division, Directorate, and office unit, including the Judicial and Legislative Branches of the Government has done, and continues to do the same, no matter which Party is in power.
Regarding the U.S. Federal shutdowns, there have been four. They were one under Clinton in 1995-1996, one under Obama in 2013, and two under Trump in 2018 and in 2019. I was personally involved in the shutdown in 2013. All four shutdowns occurred basically after almost all of the Moderates in the House and Senate had either retired from office or been voted out by the two groups of extremists. Before that time, the opposing parties actually negotiated their positions in “good faith.”
Fun fact, most Federal employees actually look forward to a shutdown (starting  saving up in August for the bi-weekly income loss) because Congress has always passed a bill to pay everyone in arrears after the shutdown ends and there is a new budget. Basically extra vacation time for which they weren’t charged.

Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, while on a visit in France, told a story, how small group of 31 fighters maintained success in Robotyne, after weeks of unsuccessful assaults

...One Ukrainian unit had been conducting continuous assaults in this area of the front, and due to exhaustion and losses, at some point, this unit lost the ability to continue the offensive. And then "radical decisions" were made: the unit's leadership was changed.
New commander asked to assemble soldiers who were motivated and ready to perform combat missions. A combined group of 31 soldiers was created, a third of whom had no combat experience, but all of whom had the knowledge and will to win.
Thanks to the leadership of the commanders and sergeants, this group established "horizontal links" with neighbouring units and started working on the contact line. For 18 hours, they crawled literally on their stomachs through kilometres of minefields, where the Russians had placed six mines per square metre.
Finally, the unit reached a strip of trees dividing farmers' fields. Everyone in Ukraine knows this word - "posadka" ("tree-plant, tree-line"). It’s in these plantations, invisible on maps, that the greatest tragedies and heroism of the war take place. So, our unit drove the Russians out of there and held the position for two days until reinforcements arrived. Subsequently, this group walked another 10 kilometres with backpacks weighing 35-40 kilograms through minefields. They only had time to catch their breath briefly and immediately stormed the fortified Russian positions, drove the enemy out and held out until the main forces arrived.
In total, this unit conducted six assaults and two reconnaissance missions in 40 days. A group of 31 men did the work of an entire battalion, which should have consisted of about 400 men. The losses amounted to seven wounded, including only one seriously injured after stepping on a mine.
In fact, the work of this group made it possible for an entire brigade to attack Robotyne and liberate it after weeks of assaults.
https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/08/30/7417687/

The one weapon on the battlefield that never runs out of ammo.

A testament to the quality of this thread:
it took 2814 pages before the subject of racism popped up. That must be a worldrecord for any thread on any forum these days.

Like trenches?

Well, all good things can be used in bad ways, sure. All men have a penis, but we aren't all rapists, for example.
Ethnicity also isn't a binary - a person can legitimately be multiple things at once. I'm a Wellingtonian (which comes with a different set of assumptions than being either a Mainlander or an Aucklander, although neither of those distinctions probably mean much outside the country), and a Kiwi (similar but different to Australian), and sort-of British (somewhat similar but also very different to American), and sort-of European (different to Asian or African). None of them completely describe me, but all of them provide some degree of insight, depending on the audience. Theres nothing inherently racist about any of those categories, even though of course Wellingtonians are naturally superior to Aucklanders.

Wow, way to make it all about you.  Pretty sure people had the same complaint about the Roman Empire.

One thing I could add to this. That 10% may (or will) force the leadership to propose a vote to cease aid to Ukraine, but it will not pass either the House or Senate, based on current feelings among Representatives and Senators. There currently are more than enough to support aid to Ukraine, with supporters coming from both parties. That could also lead the 10% to force a leadership battle, even though they did what the 10% wanted, but it failed (the reasoning being the leadership cannot lead).
Democracy can be very messy 🙂
Dave 

Well, it is said that militaries tend to train “to fight the last war.” Unless a Country is planning to fight a “new” type of war, e.g. Germany rebuilding it’s forces for combined arms (infantry, air, and armor), the upper echelons of any military will tend to be very conservative in it’s thinking. The current leaders of the U.S.M.C. and USN have shown what I consider to be excellent foresight to determine that the next U.S. regional conflict as the South China Seas, and realigning the U.S.M.C. assets by divesting itself of it’s armor and long-range artillery. I applaud the foresight of the Commandant.

This is where the “it will be fine camp” are sucking and blowing at the same time.  “All the bad people will leave back to Russia, the locals will do nothing but we will need to hunt down collaborators before they try to get us killed again”.
I do not disagree with you or Haiduk in the least.  The stakes here are very high.  Collaborators can become the skeleton of an insurgency and they will try and kill you.  The problem is finding them without alienating or pushing larger groups of the population into a situation where they see violence as the only way out.  It takes precision. These situations always go badly. Neighbours snitch before they can be snitched on.  People get mis-identified.  People take the law into their own hands. All of that can turn very ugly very quickly.  
This will take a masterful steady hand and an intelligence architecture for the ages.  It may take outside the box thinking like amnesty for low low level offenders to catch the big fish.  Or accepting a few big fish to get the rest.
 

I cannot express enough that I hope you are right.  And I totally respect your identity and citizenship.  If there is any justice left in the world Crimea will be liberated - let me be clear on all of that.
It is human: error, fear, biases, ignorance, hatred and greed that I point out as major concerns on post conflict…and not just for the Ukrainians themselves.  The conditions for things going badly and organized resistance/insurgency exist in Crimea and the Donbas.  They did before the 2014, they do now.  A major weakness of this thread is to put Ukrainians on an unfair pedestal.  The defence and retaking of their homeland is one for the history books but they are still human beings and are just as capable of losing the post-conflict bubble as anyone else.
The points of failure have already been outlined.  Loss of property, deportation, revenge killings/swift justice, collaborators.  All of that will be done within a very large population overseen by a Ukrainian military who is very pissed off.  An idea would be to bring in international security forces to assist but that comes with its own issues.
Regardless, I think this topic has been flogged enough.  I have provided my analysis and assessment, everyone can take it or leave it as they wish.  Hopefully it does get people thinking about post-war and the challenges we are likely going to face.

Well as Haiduk has already mentioned, revenge killing do happen and are very likely to continue.  Plus we are comparing areas that were occupied for about 6 months to a region that has been under Russian rule for nearly a decade - untangling that mess is going to pretty brutal.  I honestly hope and expect that official government process will be done in accordance with the law but these are slippery slopes for all the reasons our friends in Ukraine have noted.  Finding “collaborators” on the scope and scale of the Crimea or entire Donbas is going to be messy no doubt about it.  If that messy starts to look like oppression we are back to feeding fuel into resistance.
I honestly do not understand what it is about Westerners and their firm belief that rule of law will triumph.  We keep running headlong into situations completely missing the fact that war and conflict are deeply personal and build resentment that last generations.  How many interventions where we don’t get the bloody parades or locals running into our arms do we need to experience?  How many crappy civil wars that are never really settled and conditions for re-emergence are always just under the surface do we need to see?  War is not about military units firing at each other and the rules we try to throw over that.  It is about entire societies killing each other.  It is deeply personal and tends to unravel the best intentions. 

I do have all the pre-2014 documents, both originals and digital backup scans in the cloud.
But it doesn't matter, because I have reasons to believe I may not reach your side of the border. Not particularly fond of the idea of figuring if I am wrong or not. I am 95% sure it's not gonna end well. So I stay put for now.
Uhm. I was born in Crimea ('89), so as my mother and grandparents. My father is originally from Russia, but came here also during Soviet era and was registered here with Ukrainian documents before 2014. I do have all the old documents, but I never left Crimea to renew them after 2014. It costs money, and there's always something more important, like dental, or clothes, or broken boiler. I was going to when I felt comfortable to properly resettle. But who cares? I've never collaborated nor commited any crimes. Those who did know it and take their own risks by staying.
I do get your point about documents disappearing when things blow up and burn, and it's a good one, but it's not like someone intends to repeat Soviet style deportations in the middle of the night with freight trains. Not the country commited to join the EU, at least. Ministry of reintegration and other state services have a lot of experience with this sort of thing by this point, I'm sure. 
 
The ethnic hatred, on the other hand, is something to watch out for, definitely. I've identified myself as ethnically Russian my whole life. I speak Russian in my head 75% of the time. 20% my thoughts are in English, and sometimes I think like 5% in Ukrainian (mostly Poderev'yansky memes ;D).
After 24th February 2022, it suddenly became clear that ethnicity and even culture does not define me. I felt it in my gut and still do. Our actions define who we are. But also laws. By international law, and by Ukrainian law, I am Ukrainian citizen. Even if Estonians did not recognize me as such. That's who I am.
I do see your concerns as valid and they are worth the discussion.

That statement alone sends shiver up the spine.  And I know you damn well mean it, you have every right to…but, shivers.

Because these things are always messy as hell.  Trying to find the “good ones” in these sorts of situations is always messy.  Totally hypothetical, what if he claims to have lived in Crimea before 2014 but can’t prove it?  Once stuff starts blowing up and burning you could have thousands in this position.  
And then there are Russians who try and fake their way into Crimea (especially if Russia is in such a bad state and they want to keep their homes), what proof will they have and how does one spot the fakes?  This is before trying to figure out who the 15% of the population prior to 2014 who were on the Russian agenda.  “All deals are legally void”, is exactly what some are going to see as repression “ie taking my house”, especially if how people are selected as “good” or “bad” is flawed, and it will be.  People always start to turn on each other when it gets like this. 
Post conflict is almost always one of the toughest stages to manage. Why?  Because we end up trying to fix human micro-social space with bureaucracy and policy. Re-integration has been done well but more likely it will be messy, “how messy?” remains the core question.  There will need to be an entire DDR effort along with massive reconstruction.  When do the Donbas and Crimea get to vote again?  You are not going to figure out good from bad “Crimeans” over a weekend.

You realize that a few pages back people here were calling for your deportation in the event of a liberation?  This is the mess.  You clearly are not a pro-Russian sympathizer but in the wrong circumstances unless you can prove Ukrainian citizenship and loyalty you could be on a boat out based on some of the rhetoric being thrown around here. The cause emerges out of situations just like this.
Anyway as I said before let’s honestly hope it does not come to this.  Hopefully people will be integrated smoothly and embrace peace.  It is when the honeymoon period ends that things may get weird.  For the record I am talking insurgency here, not partisan resistance during the war.  That I strongly suspect is off the table.  I am talking 6 months to a year after the war and something does not go right and Russia is still able to make trouble…because they will if they can.
And in all sincerity, take care of yourself.

I watched the documentary and I find it really bad. In german I would say "tendenziös" the english meaning would be tendentiously. A lot of known information was not presented. If this was intentional or just bad research I can not say but especially the spiegel has lost a lot of journalistic credibility in recent years and had a  pro russian tendency. Not long ago they did an article where their only source was a russian spy so they published direct russian propaganda and similar events.
They somehow forgot to mention in the documentary that Diana D. is a russian national, that wasn't born in Ukraine/crimea and only got an ukrainian passport in 2001. After she went to crimea she did a lot of pro russian activity. In the documentary she was portrayed as ukrainian and they found it not strange that she appeared in russia after the bombings.
And I don't know why they missed the seismic profiles of the explosions that clearly contradicts their assumption that only a small amount of explosives was used.
Some of the conclussions they draw there are not very logical. I would like to see how they picture the Andromeda doing the work on 4 pipelines in short amount of time on open sea. I work with specialised ships/ shipcrews that work in bomb disposal. The amount of specialised equipment needed to only work in depths of 5-10m with explosives is really high. I asked some of the divers if they think it was possible to do the work needed from Andromeda. They laughted in my face. Most of the divers have navy background......