chrisl

It's a way for all the educated men, and maybe some women, to get a free trip to somewhere they can find a better job. There's certainly some risk involved - you could get shelled on your way to the collection point, or lose your white flag and have trouble surrendering, but it's arguably not that different risk-wise from what a lot of other migrants go through. Anybody who goes from skilled job to POW inside of a week is probably not intending to go back to Russia, at least not until there's regime change in a direction that won't punish POWs. And at this point what can the Russian military do? The right thing is complete withdrawal - their army is getting weaker and less organized while Ukraine's gets better trained and equipped every day. Probably no amount of operational pause will let Russia catch up at this point - they arguably lost the war in the operational pause from 2014 to 2022. Both armies were in constant contact with their current opponent. Ukraine used the time to cycle everybody who spent time in the army through the front for at least a short period, so that at the start all their reserves had at least been in a combat zone before. And they got training and equipment from the west and developed international relationships that looked away from the former USSR. Russia had exactly the same opportunity to improve training and equipment against an opponent they had already attacked and planned to pursue, but apparently chose corrupt business as usual, if not worse. So even if they know it's hopeless, all anybody at the middle and above can do is follow orders and stay away from windows until something happens to Vlad. All anybody at the bottom can do is hope they can get across a border before they're drafted, or get their hands into the air and surrender before they get shot or blown up.

40K more and they'll have gotten their 300K mobilization. Just all pointed in the wrong direction.

Wouldn't it make more sense for them to negotiate this in advance rather than getting themselves indiscriminately obliterated? This is the kind of thing that's very negotiable and can probably be worked so that Russia loses badly to NATO but there's minimal injury all around. Maybe we ship boxes of various NATO flags to the UAF and they learn some phrases in multiple languages, they ramp up the offensive (with lots of flags!), RU withdraws completely and both Ukraine and Russia avoid further losses.

Post-war, I'm not sure that Sevastopol will ever actually be helpful to Russia. If Ukraine has access to modern ISR and anti-ship missiles, the only threat is missiles from subs. There will be no invasion threat. Throw in some ASW and the sub threat likely goes away, too. It will probably go away anyway - postwar Russia isn't going to have the resources to maintain a Black Sea fleet, and it will only be a matter of time before you just have to keep an eye on the tugs to know where the subs are. Given the way the Russian military has self-destructed, Russia is going to need to come to terms with the fact that the only thing providing the facade of it being a world power is the nuclear weapons, and it no longer has the economy, or likely the technical capability, to maintain those indefinitely. Russia can try to maintain a BSF, but it really won't be able to project power and if it tries to project piracy or destruction after some kind of peace agreement is reached, it likely won't take much for other Black Sea powers to erase the remnants of the fleet.

If they were using real time satellite observations, that interval would likely be to account for which satellites were going to be passing over and available to watch. Do we have accurate clock times of the explosions? There's enough in orbit that they could have been counting on both realtime imaging and short delay SAR (which can see through smoke) to see the after effects. As far as the Kerch bridge goes - I'd consider just hitting the rail bridge first. It would eliminate the best supply route that Russia has available, and put pressure on the trucks/motor vehicles that they need for supplying the main fronts.

Not more expensive because we can- more capable because it’s cheap. Anti sat already exists, but is much harder against the masses of satellites that we’re headed for.

Moderately fancy zoom and thermals can be cheap if you have the technology to build them in enormous quantities. See modern smartphones. You can also put the ones at "higher altitude" up at a few hundred miles altitude and fly enough of them that you have continuous coverage. Starlink and Planet Labs are really just the beginning. Both of the above depend on a depth and breadth of technological capability that's available to the west, marginally available to China (who can probably catch up), and potentially available to India eventually.

I don't think I saw this NYT link on the Kharkiv offensive posted here (may be paywalled - gift link valid for 14 days here). To the surprise of absolutely nobody here, the US provided a ton of ISR for the offensive. Slightly more interesting is that the US and Ukraine are admitting to Ukraine sharing more of their plans with the US than they had done (or admitted to) earlier in the war.

Our county fire flies various flavor of UH-1 plus UH-60 Firehawks, so I hear those a lot. I think Cal Fire flies mostly UH-1s, and we don't get much forest service stuff unless there's an actual fire, but it's fun to hear and check out the various helos. Some of the contract fire companies fly some interesting aircraft. The county contracted to get a couple Chinooks the last couple years, so those are cool to hear flying over. And when there are fires you get all sorts of old fixed wings that have been converted, too. I started watching on ADS-B Exchange so I don't have to go outside to see which helo it is unless it turns out to be something unusual that I want to see.

Every time I see a reference to the Guards Tank Army by its initials I think of GTA, the game. And it looks like the Ukrainian army had similar thoughts.

It really depends on the flow rate through the gates and how much the downstream channel can handle. We have a series of dams around here that look comparable in what they hold back. They get completely drained regularly (sometimes every year) through a 60 km long channel that is normally nearly dry. The water level comes up quite a lot when they drain the reservoirs, then settles down.

With nets to tangle propellers.

We would have had humans on mars by the late 70s... But really, it's cheaper to send a rover to Mars than to make a really bad movie about global warming. I suspect most of what the west is providing in the way of imagery is from space. The political risk of having a NATO plane go down over Ukraine is probably way beyond anybody's tolerance. And there's plenty of USG owned and contracted capability for both frequent high and medium res imagery and high res SAR. And I suspect that in most cases the US buys exclusive rights to the commercial data they're tasking. There's probably not much realtime because you're dependent on orbit passes, but the frequency of revisits is high and data can be downloaded from many systems in realtime. There are a few areas where there's a lot of airborne intel - there are a lot of ELINT and SIGINT aircraft that have been hanging around the NATO side of the Ukraine border, presumably hoovering up signals and processing them. Some of the aircraft also have sidelooking radar that goes all the way to the ground. They'll lose some resolution at long distance, but given that anything flying over Ukraine belongs to either Russia and Ukraine, and Ukraine presumably knows where their stuff is, you don't necessarily need to resolve things to know there's something that needs to be addressed. There are a couple small ones (a Guardrail RC-12 and another Beech of unknown capability) that have been on the Kaliningrad border almost daily, usually flying together. Presumably one imaging and the other SIGINT. And the Globalhawks have spent a lot of time over the Black Sea, but I think always in international or NATO airspace. And those are all just what you can see on ADS-B because they want you to. And Ukraine has the advantage that they can use Babushkanet to ground-truth all the information.

A certain large asian country likely has comparable EO capability at Mars to what Russia has over Ukraine. They're not at parity with the west, but can realistically get there. Successfully landing a functioning rover on Mars on the first time out (along with an orbiter to watch it and relay for it) is no mean feat.

Sounds like it was taken by an Improv Everywhere flash mob. Just wait til they roll out the no pants day.

Kherson as-is is more of a resource sink for Russia than for Ukraine. Everybody currently enclosed is going to end up dead or as a prisoner, and it's just a matter of them deciding which they'd rather be, and when. In the meantime, Russia has to keep using up supply-chain capability trying (or at least pretending) to support the units penned up there. Once they're gone, all that capability can go back to supplying what's left of their Donbas positions. So in some ways it's preferable to let Kherson stew a bit longer, running out the resources that are stockpiled there and using up supply capability (and bridging equipment) to keep supplies moving. So for now, I'd leave them as a logistics problem for Russia rather than turning them into a logistics problem for Ukraine. But it's also something of a humanitarian and political question, because there are a bunch of civilians in there, too, and it would be preferable to liberate them quickly.

So if the UA indeed has a third full division that it's holding back, can/will they take advantage of current Russian disorganization and start a drive towards Melitopol/Mariupol to cut the "land bridge"? Or do they have to go through the mythical 3rd Army Corps to do that?

If it's bigger than a bicycle and it's sitting around for an hour (maybe less), it will be seen by an opponent with SAR and EO space capability.

Vlad is asking the professionals for advice on how to surrender?

It's probably already on its way to Maryland.

And as long as there's a fair possibility of political collapse, it's going to be better to wait for the new regime, because there's no reason to believe they'd honor agreements of the old one. Particularly in the case of Russia.

I've been seeing some tweets (not yet verified) that Russian lines are collapsing faster than the panicked Ukrainian forces can keep up with them.

Since Russia seems once again to be the largest supplier of arms to the UA, stopping those arms deliveries from RU could be a starting point...

I've been thinking about this for a while from the technology side and what you really have to do is ask what the tank does for you and how to replace it, like you did here. And then reframe the question in those terms. I think the real question is "What's the future of direct fire for ground forces?" The "ground forces" part is important because we've already seen direct fire disappear in the Navy (WW II was the transition), and in the Air Force, where if you see the enemy plane visually before it's smoking on the ground you probably effed up somewhere. It hasn't happened on the ground because, as I think you pointed out, war always comes down to a guy in a hole in the ground with a gun. Somebody has to actually take and hold areas, and it's that guy and his friends. Tanks are just a way to bring fire against that guy in the hole, because until recently, indirect fire was imprecise enough that clever guys can make their holes in the ground fancy enough that when the "boom" stops they can come back out with their guns to defend the hole against the other guys who want to sit in them. But modern tech is at a point where we can almost identify all the holes with remote sensors (air and space) and send each hole its own targeted munition. Tanks are/were a way to bring up HE for addressing harder defenses and masses of guys, mobile MG pillboxes for addressing moving masses of guys, and AP sources for addressing the tanks that are there to do the same things to your guys. But it's also a big heavy target with a very demanding logistical tail, and you have to protect the tail as effectively as the tank or you just have big monument to build a park around when it breaks down or runs out of fuel. And now every squad (in some armies) is carrying a missile that can destroy that tank from the horizon just by pointing in the general direction and pushing a button. A swarm of loitering munitions with long dwell time can supply the targeted HE on-demand. Or a MLRS with PGMs if you need a lot of bang a little slower. Drones are at a point where they can knock on the door of a bunker like a land shark and wait til you open the door before blowing up. A swarm of lightly armored UGV with swappable modules can provide a lot of the other services: MG without a head that has to be kept down. CIWS for defending against the other guy's loitering munitions Rocket launcher for close (a 100 m up to a few km over the horizon) fire against various targets, including residual tanks Rescue vehicle to get the guys in the hole out to medical care quickly Contribute to the Borg spotting network, because it can have eyes in every direction at all times.

If a lot of Kofman's MIA in your link were vaporized in their vehicles, that would be close to 2:1. American Civil war total was ~1:1.3 (more KIA than WIA), but a lot of those were non-combat deaths due to disease, which is probably not killing too many Russians.