Holien

Well, they've sent expeditions to Angola, Somalia, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, CAR, Congo, and Yemen. They're also working towards NATO membership which would implicitly mean being expected to be capable of sending an expedition to eastern Europe, at least.
So, no. I'm not kidding.
But let's flip this around; why does Spain need a defence force - who're you planning to invade? Portugal? France? Andorra? Great Britain? Morocco?

Yup, that tracks.  US/West came up with an obsolete solution that was only going to work in narrow context, definitely not this war.  A “single concentrated” strike would have been seen well ahead of time by the Russians and countered.  More mass just means more casualties - the RA has proved this repeatedly.  Western planners have no combat experience in this sort of war either.
Ukraine tried a more dispersed approach akin to what they did in Kherson (after trying the concentrated method a few times).  Which simply cannot pull together enough combat power to crack the defences.   Further they made the mistake of moving towards “western mechanized” when it was likely clear that is not what they needed, nor would it work under these conditions.
US/West designed and supported a solution for them.  Ukraine tried to use a solution for them but equipped and trained for the western one.  And they lost time trying to equip and train for it as well. They ended up with a Frankenstein’s Monster while the RA sat back and waited.
Third Way: focused corrosive warfare.  So rather than spending billions on making western mechanized forces, spend that effort and money on - UAS/UGV, Deep strike and infantry…lots of infantry.  Do corrosion and then infiltration…deep infiltration.  During the battle for Kyiv the UA had light infantry very deep into RA lines.  So deep they could be called SOF.  Focus on air superiority below 2000 feet.  Go semi/full autonomy hybrid on unmanned.  And then hit the Russian system everywhere all at once.  You are still going to lose people but your chances are better.  Russians do not like being surrounded and the inexperienced troops they have are more likely to bolt once UA infantry start showing up all around them.  Once the RA starts to buckle, then do the mech thing to pursue/breakthrough.
And here’s the, thing I am not even sure that will work but it is probably better than what they tried.
Edit : [dear gawd, I think I just signed onto LLFs Ranger Bns idea]

Guys, I have a problem with forum sign in on my PC. I can sign in on my phone w/o problems, but on PC I have notification about wrong name, email, password, though I changed password and deleted old cookies. 
While I will figure out what's happened I can only read the forum or sometime write small messages, because it's completely awkwardly for me to write big posts and repost pictures from the phone 

From what we saw with the Prigozhin revolt and the aftermath, it looks like the moment some faction has the power to knock off Vladi there won't be a free for all. This is a demobilized state with demobilized politics run on a system of kickbacks and kickups. Until that system is threatened, I would suggest that a change power would look more like a mafia coup than anything else. The guy who was bad for business goes and the new guy is fine if he keeps the money flowing. 
With Prigozhin we literally saw how little of the security apparatus was willing to get involved.  

I question if the drone operator wasn't doing more harm than good. His directions are vague and untimely.
The Ukrainians are holed up near the dead Russian? I think there's probably more than one dead Russian in that field and the one near the Ukrainian trench is probably not the corpse the Russian attackers would seen as they went forward. This presents the attackers with (incorrect) information that they cannot ignore or even question: They just walked past a Ukr position.
 
Same with the direction of "to your left". Left of our line of advance? Left of where my body is proned towards? Left of where I am looking? Left of where I was looking 5 seconds ago? Because that's the time it takes to pass along information. For that matter, left of where any of my fireteam was looking at any point? None of it is usable information and is only likely to wrongfoot the recipient. Note that they eventually face away from the threat! Meanwhile the dipstick drone guy has compass right in his view! There's a reason you are trained to read a compass!
 
And again with his "He's reloading". He's late on making the call, understandable as he needs to interpret the actions he sees from afar before he passes the info along. But that is the problem, he passes it on to his buddy who repeats it into a radio. By the time anyone on the business end even gets the word the Ukr is reloading, the Ukr has reloaded and is ready to work. As a result any Russian acting on this word of warning does his heroics at the absolute very worst moment to do it.
 
If that drone operator used his tablet to download and view porn instead of giving guidance to the attack, the attackers would have had a better chance.

It's not really zero-sum though. Russia not-winning doesn't mean Ukraine isn't losing (and ... my apologies for asking you to parse through multiple negatives there)
In any negotiation there is win-win, win-loss, lose-win, and lose-lose. Right now we seem to be firmly in lose-lose territory, and the ongoing negotiation (all war is negotiation, remember) is over who loses least.
Losing least can easily be framed as a kind of success by way of "yeah that hurt, but you should see the other guy!"
 
Edit: I'm typing on my phone, which sucks. On each axis there's a spectrum which runs from 'win bigly' to 'lose like a republican voter'. The four quadrants - ww lw wl ll - above are just a convenient shorthand for a complex rainbow of possible outcomes.

"You are still Ukraine...you won."   It is that simple. 
And then they can read this: https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/special-resources/preliminary-lessons-russias-unconventional-operations-during-russo-ukrainian-war-february-2022
That is a systematic campaign to erase a nation.  Of everything I have read about this war, that document is the most brutal.  So ya, they won because that is what losing would have looked like.

Several pages ago, someone mentioned that Ukraine works with ClearView for facial recognition for IDing senior RU commanders and war criminals. Have they started to identify the dead RU soldiers, catalog them on a website, and target relative's social media feeds? It would make the Russian attempts to avoid paying death benefits more difficult, bring the reality home to the civilian population, and reduce state coffers. Or would this have the unintended consequence of raising support due to the payments? 

The Luttvak/Kissinger comparison is entirely apt. They are both courtiers who specialize(d) in telling elites what they want to hear under a veneer of respectability and a scrim of intellectual verbiage. 

A brief Kissinger anecdote:
At 28, Kissinger started a magazine called Confluence at Harvard in part to bring in Weimar Era folks like Hannah Arendt, Neibuhr, etc for both academic reasons and because he wanted the cachet he could accrue from collecting resistants to Nazism. He then realized that these folks weren't going to do much to get him into the corridors of power so he hit on the now common idea of cultivating the image of a maverick, willing to buck the establishment. So he ran an article by Ernst von Salomon...Strasserite, one time member of Organisation Consul and critic of de-Nazification. 
As he later said “if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern."
Don't buy any of the hagiography of Kissinger. He was all about proximity to power and utterly callous to anyone and everyone.

Thanks for the link.  I will read it a couple more times before the day is finished
Russia is splashing the cash for mercenaries and they have cash to spare for the time being.  Last time I looked their debt to GDP ratio was very sympathetic for ramping up domestic spending - well prepared, as I said, with several years of preparation..
The war will not be won via financial pressures - at least not short term.  Ukraine has to win on the battlefield which looks both difficult and ill advised - the lines are frozen whether we like it or not.  The remaining option is to get inside the  russian heads.  Even in Siberia being dead is less preferable than having a new car?
Your point on forcing the russians to spend elsewhere is a good one, despite their reserves.  One way would be to foment insurrections.  Another way would be to destroy vital infrastructure.  A third way would be to attack profit making enterprises.  Probably these three would deliver higher dividends than appealing to ukrainian troops to attack russian trenches through the minefields.
The ideological battle needs to be fought actively.  Hearts and minds!  The future looks a lot brighter when russians have the same impulse as happened in USA after Vietnam.

My malediction to Henry is all in the quote bubble above, as it's lengthy and not everyone cares. Apologies for the formatting issues.
 
 

Don't regret Kissinger's passing. He was of the realist school and did not hesitate to endorse a breakup of Ukraine and it's consignment into a Russian sphere of influence. He only changed his tune when it became untenable in the face of the unified disgust of the foreign policy establishment in DC. Being Henry Kissinger in the end was a business and Kissinger Associates takes money from everybody. 
I would also disagree that US intelligence agencies are being passive at all but that's not something we will understand fully for a decade or more. We do know right now that Putin certainly wouldn't agree with that depiction.

CM worthy. Would I had time....

https://nitter.net/Pouletvolant3/status/1729811441664872892#m
Bakhmut (RU source, via GirkinGirkin below)


 
This is DavidD, so season to taste. But I don't disbelieve it either.
 

https://t.me/operativnoZSU/125510
 
 

Fingers crossed this report is accurate, the less of these things flying the better.

Oh my God! Well, why do people located thousands of kilometers from my country think... 

Had a drink with a DC lawyer and we discussed this at length.
It's pretty clear that outside of two Justices, the SC simply will not allow a President to commute his own sentence or pardon himself because it's about as fundamental to jurisprudence as it gets that one cannot judge one's own case. If it's a state level case, the SC might say that he cannot be held in a state penitentiary while he is in office. In a Federal prison, Trump would start ordering people to release him and right away you have a Constitutional crisis.  
We then had six more drinks.

Ya, I gotta agree.  His track record would make him one helluva deep plant if we is working Russian side. 
No, I think we got a guy who is just wrung out and really tired of being tired, and scared all the time.  I mean from his viewpoint maybe it is all doom and gloom.  We do need to keep trying to use and source facts though.  This cannot simply become an opinion pulpit.  In fact if he has corroboration I would very much like to see it.  We do need to accept that if Russia has a breaking point then Ukraine has one too.  I am not seeing it but he definitely is - I am just not sure how he got there.  

Zeleban is not a Russian troll. I have been following his posts for over a year and he seems like a really honest guy who just says what he thinks. I do not agree with a few things he said in the last few pages but in the grand scheme of things lets not forget he is actually living in Ukraine right now.
He sees this war in a way us who just follow it on the Internet cannot, so lets give him a break for passionately voicing his opinions even if we do not agree with some of those opinions.

Another one of those things I would not think I would ever see in my life .
Neat. 🙂

Ok, lets just put the brakes on this whole narrative because it is heading for Kettler levels of mis/dis information. I can't speak to what you are hearing at the post office but let's just step back and look at some facts:
Ukraine has received roughly $300B dollars in aid from governments around the world in 18 months (Jan 22 - Jul 23).  That comes to around 4 years of normal Russian defence spending and 150% of Ukraine's entire GDP in 2021:
https://tradingeconomics.com/ukraine/gdp
Russia has spent an insane amount on this little "SMO" and it is going to cost it even more:
https://www.ft.com/content/1e5d63a6-d5f8-4206-81fc-4ff324789ac3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine#:~:text=In November 2022 it was,%24500 million to %241 billion.
Militarily their losses could man and equip a national-level army:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War
https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html
Neither the Russia economy nor its "partnerships" with India or China are a good thing for that nation.  We have seen a lot of posts to support that.  What do you give us?  "No they aren't, because Su-35s, Ka-52s"...with freakin Iran.
https://www.thenationalnews.com/mena/iran/2023/11/28/iran-claims-delivery-of-russian-su-35-fighter-jets-is-imminent/  Ok, so is this a sign that Russia has so many they can afford to sell them?  Or is it a sign they are desperate for cash and are selling off assets they cannot really get anything out of? Wait, don't bother I think I know your answer.
If you are going to make claims that Russia's economy and/or military are somehow in "better" shape now than they were on 20 Feb 22 you had better start posting some facts to back it up.
What we have heard from you over the last week has been every worst case/perspective strung together to try and make a case...for what exactly?  No counter-thinking, no "here is what I don't know".  In fact you have openly called anything that counters your viewpoint, "Putin propaganda".  If you had just shown up here as a new poster we would have called you out as a pro-Putin disinformation pusher based on what you have been pitching.  Being where you are you get a lot of slack, all the Ukrainian posters do, but this is crossing some lines we try to hold onto in this forum.  Start posting something other than your own opinion.  Start looking at counter-points.  Tell us what you don't know. 
Because speaking for myself...got it: Zeleban is really, really...really sure Ukraine is totally screwed.
 

President Pavel is a decorated military officer and in my opinion a hero for what he did in the 90s. I'm sure some folks from Czechia and France who read this forum know what I am talking about.
I think his opinion is worth reading.
Source: Czech president: Western military support for Ukraine insufficient for high-intensity operation (The Kyiv Independent)

Now here is something we can fully agree upon.  How on earth anyone believes Russia has “won” is beyond me.  If winning means failing to achieve every strategic objective, stated and unstated.  In fact achieving the exact opposite effect in many ways.  And destroying yourself in the process.  Then I want to lose.  
If the war stops right now, Russia is going to gain something like 6 or 7 percent of additional lands, much of which is blasted and contaminated.  Lands they cannot afford to pull resources out of because that would cost infrastructure and expertise that left in droves.  They will never pull more out of the land they stole from Ukraine than what it costs them to take it. 
Weirdly, Russia probably had a better chance to simply offer Ukraine a mountain of cash for that 6% and it would have been cheaper in the long run.  Or free oil and gas, whatever.  Employing hard military power was the dumbest Russian idea since…well, 1905.