The_Capt

Gotta tell you, I am kinda in the Hodges camp right now. Russia controls 15% of Ukraine, and it controlled about 7-8% before the war started. So all this has been over 6-7%. I agree that Crimea is the way to go, however, it will need a successful offensive in the next few months to split the land bridge, bring the new missiles within range of the Crimean Bridge and roll the RA back into the bottle neck south of Kherson (on this, why are we not hearing about terror/harassment arty into Kherson...did I miss that?). If Ukraine can retake Crimea, and Russia does not start WW3 over it, we have a very clear and undeniable Russian defeat. Donbas, as we have discussed here is a solid "meh", not critical, not a lot of Ukrainian left there, open would insurgency possibility - just a lot of bad, hell even kraze agreed in the end.

Kinda looks like they were trying to pull into low ground, which is the standard old drill - won't do much for NLOS or even a Javelin that gets a lock because it just carries that lock with it at altitude.

So that is about 833 casualties per day, Jan-Apr 23. That is approx half of the daily rate of WW1 on the western front when things got going. That is double all the KIA in 80s Afghanistan in 4 months. What we do not know is how much of this was cannon fodder and how much as enablers and operational level capabilities.

Working on it. No screenshots yet expect for a bunch of maps, you guys want to see shots of German countryside?

I honestly think someone is going to put a brain on these AD systems at which point stealth will require "invisibility". Stealth is very effective against radar; however it gets worse against thermal - airplanes burn a lot of gas. Even though they shield some heat, physics is a harsh mistress. Once you get into multi-spectral imaging coming out of a JADC2 type system and attach it to a onboard "AI brain"- and frankly that is right in front of us. Then anything big, manned and hot is going to need to stay way back, much like tanks are having to do now. Now small 5th gen UAS, now were are talking turkey. As to the whole "war shifting" thing. We have been seeing this coming from a long way out (e.g. RMA). It is just that every time someone is ready to call it we get into a fight that demonstrates that "it is not there yet". This war is really the first time that there are unavoidable phenomenon occurring. The central question remains, how much is unique to this war, and how much is more general and will apply to every war after this one? And I do not claim to be able to answer that one. All we can do is not what we are seeing and try not to talk ourselves into a false-certainty.

Well if the UA loses the ability to deny air space then Russia will likely fall back on "airplanes = artillery" doctrine and start using that a lot more. That said though, as far as I can tell Russian airpower is not what one could call a highly integrated and precision force. When they say "artillery" they mean Soviet artillery. Pick a grid square and hammer it. This will be problematic as the UA tends to disperse up and take advantage of Russian ISR asymmetry. It could definitely effect the UAs ability to concentrate and attempt a breakout battle. Assuming that Russia can glue together a better integration of air and land power, which has not really been that great. Now as to what "Ukrainian air defenses get degraded" well I suspect that is a spectrum. It may free up higher altitudes, but the lower one goes MANPADs start to kick in, and below that UAS space. So sure more high altitude strikes, likely low precision but massed much like we saw the use of artillery last summer. But the Russians are likely going to be pretty cautious. Aircraft are really expensive and hard/long to replace. Russia has a big sky problem and cannot lose too much in Ukraine or risk holes in their ability to control their own airspaces. I guess we will have to see if the Ukrainian air defenses really do start to fold- and if they do shame on us. It would be like investing in a car with only two wheels. I mean you buy the whole damn car or what is the point?

What is weird about this one is that the UA did not need to construct the "most extensive systems of military defensive works seen anywhere in the world in many decades" and they held off multiple assaults that went on for months all along the line.

Fair across the board. I guess my only push back would be that whoever did the figuring on the Ukrainian staff side of the calculation turned out to be right. The RA did get out with forces intact but not enough to really make a difference down back in the Donbas. If the RA had seen a lot of success over the winter on its offensive than maybe a case could be made that this was a UA operational error at Kherson, but it really did not go that way. The RA did not have enough of anything, let alone "best units" to actually take Bakhmut - or pull off a breakout battle they needed to really get this thing going back in their direction. The RA could not even conduct decent corrosive warfare in depth as far as we can tell. So maybe the UA simply went "good enough" for #2, and did not want to take the risks given it was a harder go and they were still playing catch up on force generation. I am a strong believer that Kherson should not be viewed as a failure or lost opportunity that colours whatever happens next until we get a lot more data. I also am allergic to western biases (not saying you were going there...more the pundits) because we simply have zero proof that our way of war is somehow superior in all this. Until we have that confirmation we need to be very cautious in projecting failure on Ukraine because they do not fight like us - I am not sure fighting like us even works anymore.

The airpower conundrum. So here is the thing with AirPower - it is only about a century old as concept and we do not know if it has been a transitory phase in the evolution of warfare. Everyone assumes that it must be a thing because we can "do air" now, and this part is correct. However, "how we do air" is really in its infancy when compared to maritime and land military domains (and they have been bouncing around too), and is by no means decided. So the question as to Ukraine is a bit chicken and egg. Is this what they have to live with, or is this just how things are now? The issue is military economics. Airpower is really expensive right now and built around projecting airpower mass. Big planes with big payloads in big waves. One side has it and takes it away from an opponent - Bob'd your uncle and the war is over in a bibby, accept for all that nasty uncon stuff which really does not count - unless we are talking places like Algeria, Palestine, Lebanon Vietnam, Afghanistan (both times) and maybe Iraq - but we are not talking about them. In a real war airpower is definitive and deterministic to an outcome. Ok, sure...right up the point it no longer works. Now why is it not working? We the problem looks to be similar to the problems of other military mass - a concentration dilemma. Technology has created small little nasty systems that can be carried around that have suddenly gained ridiculous range and lethality. They are also really hard to suppress and toxic to massed concentrations. "Oh but we have all the SEAD". Well true but even our SEAD cannot solve for things like MANPADs and IADS, especially when they are hooked into a C4ISR architecture that can see everything. The cost gets too high very quickly. "Well we won't go there"...whoops, that is never the right answer. If we can't go "there" someone else will. So when we go there we will have to accept less than total air dominance, in fact we might have to live with air denial above certain altitudes. And then there is the below 2000 feet problem. It is the freakin Wild West for air power right now and no one is controlling it in any meaningful way. We get some denial but those UAS are so cheap that they can just keep lobbing them at the problem indefinitely. So we are looking at denial risks above 2000 feet and not being able to control below 2000 feet...none of this is good news that magic western might is going to wave away. Someone is very shortly going to figure out how to mount a Starstreak on a modest UAS and then we have a whole new set of problems. And then there is ersatz airpower in the form of long range strike. No one has the technology for whatever version of Chinese HIMARs looks like ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHL-03 that took seconds). Bottom line is that I, personally, do not think that the air denial and control problems we are seeing in Ukraine are specific to this conflict. The technology is moving too fast. We are likely going to have to accept that the airpower picture is going to be compromised and that we are vulnerable to whatever it is becoming and its cousins in long range strike. We do not have a magic suite of capability that can erase what we are basically arming the Ukrainian's to do against the Russians. I do no think the western assumption of air superiority, or space superiority, or EW/Cyber superiority or good old fashion land power mass and manoeuvre superiority are currently safe regardless of what conflicts we see them in.

I think the problem with this sort of point of view is that it still assumes that annihilation through manoeuvre was possible. And even if it was, would it have been worth the costs at that point in the war? Russia got itself out of Kherson; however, 1) we do not know the full scope of attritional losses over time - how much critical equipment did they leave behind? and 2) how do those stack up with Ukrainian gains compared to their loses? This point of view mirrors more than a few western pundits as “lost opportunity = loss”, but skips over the cost-benefit equation on retaking a regional capital essentially unopposed. I strongly suspect that the UA looking to a longer game was not interested in bagging whatever was left of the RA at Kherson because the cost was too high for the gains. Worst scenario for Kherson was a large urban battle that would still be raging. If Ukraine had boxed the RA up into that city that is what likely would have happened. Instead Ukraine left the back door open so the RA would simply leave - it was less about killing Russians there and more about liberating Ukrainians. We keep making the error of looking for a western style victory in this thing. I have seen more bold offensive arrows, both red and blue, being drawn all over the place. What we have seen though is bold arrows of red collapse, with a blue follow up. This is a war of Russian collapses and contractions, some better controlled than others. This is what victory looks like, yet we keep demanding a Gulf War metric as an indicator of success, which does not track in this environment. The losses are over time, erosion, not fast forced crushing. It is the environment that drives this - death of surprise, mass dilemmas, long range and precision. We are talking about a war where both sides have had to relegate their armor to indirect fire roles - something is happening in a fundamental way. So what? Well this does not mean that the 30k prisoner haul is impossible in this war, or the bold strokes we all want to see. However, I strongly suspect that they are going to be a finishing stroke/final note at the end as a result of corrosive warfare, not the cause of the end itself. The core warfare principle we in the west adhere to will become a punctuation mark, not the primary means of delivery of victory. We should not hold Ukraine to a standard of success that I am not sure even exists anymore in this sort of operating environment. This war is still about killing Russians, but it is all over the place, all the time, not in a single concentrated area. Why, because concentration kills in this environment unless you have already eroded an opponent into collapse - be it slow or fast. In the end Kherson along with Kharkiv were major corrosive warfare victories. At Kherson the UA with nearly 1:1 force ratio pushed the RA across a major river because they made their position untenable. They retook a provincial capital of 300k taking very few losses which was a major strategic blow to Russia - no one could call this war for Russia after Kharkiv and Kherson (or at least no one credible). We should not apply our own western experience to this war because we have not fought one like this since Korea, and the rules of the game have shifted dramatically since then. I for one am surprised that Kherson did not turn into a protracted bloodbath, there was a lost RA opportunity that speaks to an idea that perhaps Russian Will is not made of steel. Now if Russia is finally so badly beat up that the old rules of warfare apply - a la Iraqi Army - then yippee! But that 1) does not validate our western doctrines as “right all along” because that final stroke took a year of broad scope high speed attrition pruning ops and 2) will be a signpost, not a decisive point. The result of months of shaping and eroding that has already occurred over the winter.

It is a non-sensical dictum. No war ends until all sides decides it is over. The Gulf War, the winners had enough and no longer advanced. WW 1 Germany, the winning side did not pursue total unconditional victory, leaving clear communications of defeat on the table, and a lot has been written about how that was a strategic mistake. WW2 the Allies kept going to the point that the losing side was pretty much entirely out of options - pretty much how indigenous resistance went in NA. To say "the loser decides" is looking at one side of the coin to fit a narrative, not objective analysis and assessment. All sides have to agree to stop the war or it continues, war is a co-dependent system - to try and frame this as "loser decides + Russia is losing = Russia decides" is to over inflate Russian power and agency and denude our own - a trend some western pundits have had pretty much since the beginning of this thing. This whole "Russian's have all the initiative" nonsense, is garbage analysis and has not borne out accurate assessments of how this war has progressed pretty consistently.

Russia already did this from 2014-2022 and the sky did not fall. They are very likely to be complete a@@holes no matter how this thing goes. What I disagree with is the idea that Russia is somehow going to be willing to sustain complete Western isolation and grinding losses for the next century. There is a lot of "Forever Russian Bear" myths floating around and this just feeds into them and gives Russia far too much credit and stamina. It also runs paradoxical to other narratives of "backward Russians who wont do anything so long as they are fed vodka and propaganda", because decades of a slow burning war is a lot of "something". "It's up to the loser to decide when a war ends"...nonsense. Gulf War One, Korea, WW1, all of these were ended when both sides decided to quit, not the "loser". Gulf War, US coalition decided to stop at Iraqi border. Korea, both sides decided to sign the cease-fire. WWI, Allies did not invade into Germany for a full occupation driven victory. The loser decides when to stop resisting and the winner has to decide when to stop winning. The history of warfare is full of examples where the winner went "good enough" and tied the thing off. And plenty where the loser refused to quit and slowly petered out until they wasted away and were unable to continue - like the entirety of indigenous resistance in NA. What Russia doesn't have to do is normalize with the West, this is not the same as negotiation. We will very likely arm the ever living daylights out of Ukraine after this war and invest very heavily in its reconstruction. One thing that has stuck in my throat since this whole thing began is a myth that the West is somehow weak and barely holding on against the might of an unassailable Russia. "Russia will win this in a matter of weeks" (they did not), "Russian mass will eventually wear Ukraine out" (it did not), "Russia has escalation dominance" (they did not, we did), "Russia will decide when this war is over." no they won't all sides will have to decide that. We could be fighting a containment and compression war against Russia for years and based on how the last one of those went I would be very concerned to be Russian right now.

You really can if one is trying to negotiate towards a workable victory. I think what a lot of pundits are missing is that the West (US in particular) need Russia to lose - just enough. This drives an incremental approach of slow eroding pressure as opposed to a coherent campaign plan that sees Russia tossed back over the border completely by X date. As of today and the pending Ukrainian offensive the risk from a western perspective is not Ukraine doing enough, it is doing too much or going too far. I disagree with the idea that Russia can sustain a 5 year war. It ignores the main principle of corrosive warfare which is eroding an opponents operational system faster and better than they can repair it. Russian forces would need a serious inject of external support to shore up its failing system. So unless China steps in and gets really serious about reestablishing a level of symmetry, Russian is on the wrong end of a devolution curve. In the 21st century one cannot simply stuff ill-trained and I’ll-supported troops in holes and hold ground. Not if your LOCs remain in clear view and actionable ranges. Your armor is blunted, your AirPower denied and your guns are wearing out. We are about to see how well a conventional defence hold up under these conditions and my bet is “not well”. The risk of Ukraine over-reach is not small. It could create shock and panic at political levels in Russia, and those conditions are when major mistakes start being made. This entire thing has hallmarks of threading a pretty tricky strategic needle. It may feel good to see ATACMS hammering everything in depth but it could lead to an uncontrollable Russian collapse, which we have discussed at length, and clearly regardless of our opinions this is a serious concern to those in political leadership in the West. To summarize - slow motion collapse with off-ramps = good. Uncontrolled collapse in a suicidal game of chicken = bad. The strategy we are seeing is aligned with the first one. The_Capt’s second axiom - “strategy must not only encompass a theory of one’s own victory, it must also encompass a theory of an opponents defeat.”

What happens when you hit a tilt rod mine under the water. When we were doing underwater clearance drills for landings or crossings, tilt rod mines were of particular concern because they could be rigged easily for triggering against silent clearance operations. Impossible to see at night, even with NVGs and could be daisy chained, sometimes with nasty stuff like wire. Looks like what happens is that one gets blown very high into the air and spread over a large area (nod to Blackadder). Always knew they were bad news but never actually saw one used in combat.

Well I guess that answers an age old combat diver question once and for all.

Easy now, it is a new century. I believe "dockside majesty" or "dockside royalty" is more acceptable in these times.

Hit with what? A tilt rod mine?

Look fair points and I do not want to punish counter-thinking, that is not what we are about here. However, it really needs to be based on some fundamental indicators. We would need to see a shift in RA capability on a systems level. A few TU22s with napalm does not an effective CAS program make. In fact given that platform we are more likely going to see incendiary terror attacks because Russia is all “FU LOAC!” - note: see no-normalization, which is no doubt Putin’s plan as he does not want Russia to have a viable out as it would undermine him. I do want to unpack just one thing further - the Putin Line. Ok, so obstacles are basically inert in reality. They cannot move or cause effects at range. They exist solely to create enormous friction on an opponent in a very narrow window. When properly supported this can be decisive as a smaller force can really cut a larger force to pieces. Problem - you need well coordinated and agile smaller forces. When it comes to quality capability Russia has the smaller force. Guns that can rapidly respond and shoot and move. C-move forces that can quickly reposition. The RA has basically been throwing up all over itself for over a year. The quality forces it needs to actually exploit those narrow windows of opportunity are in the minority. Instead they have wads of infantry stuffed into holes and even those are mauled up. When I saw Russia attacking this winter, I was shocked (and probably should not have been). It is pure madness to bleed out a force on useless objectives when one is trying to freeze a conflict in place and play a long game. So now the RA is badly beat up. It has lost a lot of operational connective tissue and enablers it simply cannot make up for. One could argue that Bakhmut was not a Russian Offensive as much as it was a Ukrainian shaping operation. So what? Well they can have mounds of dragons teeth and AT ditches but their ability to actually cover them with effective fires is highly in question. These are really big frontages they have to cover off. Further the west is pushing all the ISR to the UA so they can see the weak points. The UA can also conduct deep strike campaigns to make things worse both before and during the offensive. Then, as has been noted, once the shell is first rotted out, and then broken, there is nothing substantial behind it. Finally, I am not even sure obstacles work like they used to anymore. If I can see your entire operational system and hit it, I could stand back and hammer it until it collapses under its own weight and simply walk over the obstacles. The actual ROI on obstacles as they stand now is in question. This is a lot like back in the Gulf War. People saw the massive, and amazingly professional Iraqi obstacle belts and got really concerned. In the end it did not matter, massed AirPower followed up by GPS enabled manoeuvre made all that work useless. I do not think the UA has the same level of advantage here but they likely have enough to crack this egg and make some break outs, likely in a couple locales. Gonna be one for the books…and stay tuned in right here kids, we will be providing colour commentary the whole way!

You know the more I think about this the angrier I get. This is an egregious double standard against Ukraine coming from the “experts”. The course of this war for Russia - I will invade and crush you…fail Ok, now I will create 20 sieges and crush you…fail. Ok, getting serious now. I will WW1 blast you in the South - we really only wanted that anyway, create cauldrons and crush you…fail. Ok, ok, you asked for this, I will create multiple Stalingrads on defence and you will die trying to take your country back…fail. Alright you have really ticked me off now, prepare for human waves and a winter offensive…fail. That is it! I am all out of patience and now you are in for it. Prepare to die on the Putin Line! (And western pundits are buying into it) Meanwhile “Ukraine is barely hanging on and maybe we should rethink about support because they have not driven the RA into the sea yet.” I mean c’mon, with friends like these…

Well I can’t speak to “smug” - perhaps you meant “informed”, but we have been seeing these sorts of reports since this war began. Some come from a place of honest fear that Russian superiority will assert itself, others from hope that it will (e.g. Macgregor). As to the “hundreds of Russian aircraft”, well the other factor is the Russian willingness to lose them. Unlike mobs of poorly trained men, Russia has a limited amount of effective fix wing aircraft and a big @ss sky that it needs to control, largest sovereign airspace in the world. So I expect, much like this entire war to date, the Russia’s willingness to throw its remaining AirPower away in a denied airspace is pretty damn low. As to your points: - not sure where you are getting “easy” from, nothing easy about any of this. What it won’t be is “impossible” which is what both the OP and articles seem to suggest. Seems like many fear/hope for the opening of the Somme. - We really need to get over WW2 and the Russian defence myths. In this war Russia has failed on defence pretty consistently. We had no siege of Kherson, or Kharkiv. Instead we have seen three operational level collapses. The biggest issue with the “bloody Russian defence” is that they are not defending Russian soil, this is a discretionary invasion war in another country. I am sure some units will dig in but a lot of others - now mauled by whatever this crazy winter assault was - are likely going to buckle early and fast. We should see a new line being drawn somewhere but I suspect it will be a scramble back to the Crimea bottleneck and an Eastern line N-S. - I am a military engineer by trade and frankly have no idea how obstacles will work in this environment. Given the effects of corrosive warfare that we have seen so far, I am not even sure these will work as viable investments. The Russians are clearly thinking “force multipliers” but there are basic calculus’s in the wind right now. - If Russia had the ability to conduct deep operational battle (e.g. static bridges, rail etc) via AirPower, then why has it waited until now to use it? It bled itself white over the winter trying to grab something/anything and we did not see a single coherent operational level air campaign. So now while it is being assaulted it is suddenly going to figure that out? I am sure we will see some weak disjointed attempts but if Russia could do this - do it freakin now before those reported 9 fresh UA Bdes form up on the start line. - Russian EW and UAS will add friction to the attack. But they need to to more than that. They need to disrupt and dislocate. This means Russia need to be able to employ a defensive form of corrosive warfare (the ability to project enough precision attrition and friction on an opponent to create wide systemic failure in their military operational machine). We have not seen this. Russia has been relying almost entirely on old school front edge combat attrition, trading 3 men for 1 theirs type stuff. - Ukrainian formations are green? What kind of shape do you suppose the RA units are in? They are 1) pretty banged up and replacements likely rushed into place and 2) have not had a free and donated western force generation stream to pull on. The UA has experience in conducting operational level offensives, the staffs and HQs that pulled that off are anything but green. All of it rested on an increasingly more integrated western supported ISR and targeting enterprise. In the competition of “who is in rougher shape before the spring/summer offensive of ‘23”. I gotta go with Russia. I am not predicting a rout of the RA back to its borders (but if it goes well enough that is not off the table), but this thing has the hallmarks of another Russian operational collapse in the making - highly eroded operational systems, significant C4ISR asymmetry, and still no sign they can establish favourable strategic or operational pre-conditions in any domain. If they do manage to hold the UA back effectively, then something fundamental will have changed and we damned well will need to understand what that is because it might mean that this war is done pretty much where they stand now and we are out of military solutions. But I am not there yet, quite the opposite, I am wondering how successful the UA will be and whether not it will be enough to keep the west engaged in this. As we saw at Kherson - which many western pundits ping to with disappointment- the bar of western expectations is sometimes unreasonably high, largely because we have no modern experience in wars like this one. Regardless, I guess we will see soon.

Well I think a lot of this depends on which Russia is left after the war. If it is Putin’s Russia, they can expect continued diplomatic and economic isolation while NATO turns the Baltic Sea into its personal swimming pool (except for that weird little Kaliningrad rump thing). Russia signed up to being a demonstration of western global order reasserting itself. That means the “rules” that Putin pooped all over last Sep in his victory speech will be applied very visibly. So think 1) war reparations - work around to link these to turning the oil back on so we are not talking Versailles. 2) War crimes prosecution - do not even try to wiggle out of that one. 3) Regime change - we are pretty much done doing business with Vlad and Co. Now a path to re-normalization needs to be on the table but it will come with a penalty box. Russian Will have to decide to live with that or join North Korea in the “outer club”. That is a soft Russian landing. It goes without saying a total Russian military withdrawal is also a requirement - we can solve Crimea and Donbas as a separate issue but it cannot be done under the barrels of Russian tanks. Now if we have to live with less. Say the Ukrainian offensive fails and this conflict does freeze. Well then we are back to isolation. We were pretty close to simply ignoring Crimea and Donbas - way over there and we still need gas. Right up until the point that Russia started bombing things. Now we care very much about these issues. No way do things go back to normal until things get addressed. In fact they are likely to hardwire as “not normal” pretty quickly, in many ways they already are.

I think I would need to see some clear evidence that Russia can actually achieve air superiority, or even parity in order for them to “stop shows”. My honest recommendation is to stop reading any online “expert” who solely talks about capability. “Look napalm bomb”, “Look a Russian HARM”. Arguing solely from a tactical capability perspective is the hallmark of an amateur. First off the Russian C4ISR system would have to dramatically increase its ability for rapid target queuing and joint integration between air and land power pretty much from tac to strategic. Can anyone point to where this has actually happened? The Russian air war is still happening in glorious isolation of the land war from what we have seen so far. Second, we would need some indication that Russian can establish conditions where they are able to create freedom of action to exploit that C4ISR advantage (which they do not have). We have not. If Russia could establish even pockets of air superiority they would have done it at Bakhmut or any of the high profile offensives they tried over the winter. And third, one would need some evidence that Ukrainian Air Denial ability is slipping. So far we have a leaked report (which may or may not have been doctored) and a few Russian “ARM” strikes. There has been no degradation of Western ISR support, in fact it has gone the other way. Ukrainian Air Denial is more than just Radar AD, the MANPAD situation has driven the Russian’s batty. And more Air Denial systems are coming online - not less. So this one is dodgy at best. Finally, we did not see a Russian Air Apocalypse last Fall during the last two Ukrainian offensives? Have things gotten better for Russia in the interim in the air picture? About the only positive they have is that as they lost ground and while retreating they were in fact shortening the time and distance to air support. Beyond that I do not see why or how the Russian Air Force suddenly becomes a wall of steel and precision fires only 5 months after being totally ineffective while the UA took back about 50% of Russian gains had left after the Northern front fell. I mean seriously, the Russian Air Force is able to stop a major UA offensive now, but they stayed out of Kherson? I have no doubt the Russian Air Force will be in play but it would need full air supremacy to turn things around at this point. That is complete C4ISR dominance, watertight SEAD and a demonstrated ability to integrate air and land battles. And this still would not solve for UA deep precision fires superiority. Why do people keep coming up with Russian “magic rabbits in hats”? Seriously if Russia had one or two they would have used them by now. One does not wait until you are teetering on operational collapse to “finally get serious”.

Heard this one before too. The biggest problem is that Russia did not fall apart back in 90, the USSR did. This was more like the EU falling apart than a homogenous nation. The USSR had a lot of central control but it did not remove the internal governance of the nations states within it. Russia falling apart has no such safety net. The provincial and regional governments can go some way, but a lot more points of failure in that construct. Enough to make me nervous.

Well Door #2 in all this is much worse. A Russia in complete free fall is really risky. We have never had a nuclear power disintegrate below the state-level - the USSR devolved into a bunch of pre-existing states and even then it was touch and go for a bit. So as good as a burning Russia might make everyone feel in a whole "rightful comeuppance" sort of way, it will very likely lead to greater regional insecurity. In the worst scenarios the stockpile of WMDs (and there are a whole suite of them) gets loose and we are talking about Sum of All Fears type stuff. There is the more mundane civil wars leading to massive refugee crisis, starvation etc. The idea that it wont spill over is wishful thinking. We might end up with Ukraine and Europe as a whole in worse shape in the event Russia completely falls apart - a Yugoslavia with nukes. So somebody better be on top of this or we could be just getting the appetizer in this dinner with this war.