c3k

And there's a strong suspicion that the defenses of Kherson were compromised by treachery, so even that example of apparent competence may flatter.

RE: Ukrainians being pocketed South of of Izium.

The Russians haven't shown the capability to fight their way out of a paper bag excepting the first 2-3 days near Kherson. While the Ukrainians have shown good capability to fight defensively and at the same time I've not seen any evidence that the Ukrainians are capable/wanting to launch counter-offensives that have to wrest ground from the Russians.

Keeping troops in the area seems to make good sense. It plays the UA strengths and RUAF weaknesses. I'd also just question the capability for the Russians to seal the pocket and liquidate it? How many men would you need to seal the pocket, then to defend against UA attacks from the outside of the pocket, and also liquidate it?
Troop comfort seems tied pretty tightly to economic power so I'm not entirely sure how important it is on its own. During WW2 the USN had entire ships dedicated to ice cream production. Did the U.S. win the war in the Pacific because it cared more about its troops or because it had so much excess economic power that it could just dedicated an entire ship/crew to ice cream production?
 

Australia, 57 years?
That's a long sentencing. What did you do!? Just how many damn sheep did you steal?!
Teasing as I'm Irish

Indeed ... illustrated perfectly here ...

Ok - I get its a cat and not a human but @TheVulture is bang on.  I recall remarking very early on in this thread during the first 24 hours of this conflict that all I was seeing on MSM was journos on the rooftops of hotels in Ukraine miles away from the shooty-bangy end of the conflict bumping their gums about nothing that added any value regarding the shooty-bangy part of the conflict.  My analogy is it would be like coverage of a football match where 90% of the footage and commentary is about who is in the crowd, the dressing room, in the carpark outside the stadium etc and the final 10% is Liverpool won 2-0 and here is footage of the goals.
They need to give their heads a wobble.

^^^ (and fixed that for you with the bold)
This.  It's nauseating at (most?) times.
Someone, in this thread, posted a picture of a horde of "journalists" clustered around a cat and rabidly filming it, while they were in the midst of some destruction in a Ukrainian city. To them, the cat was more important than anything else in that situation.

You are confusing issues.  Conscripts who were sent into combat in Ukraine were already serving past the minimum training period, possibly approaching the end of their conscription period.  There is no law against their use, but Putin “promised” on TV that conscripts would not participate in the “Special Operation.”  It’s not a violation of law, but a political liability.  The people who are being conscripted now and sent directly into combat are not Russian Citizens, but Ukrainians in previously occupied areas.  Reports surfacing today that they are even now conscripting men in recently occupied areas, including people fleeing Mariupol and people in Kherson (that should end well!).  No evidence at all that any young Russian citizens from the current draft have been sent directly to Ukraine, and this would likely trigger a large number of court cases if it was happening.

And I'll repeat, if Putin chooses to ignore conscription rules or the law , it comes with consequences. Even he knows this!  

Princeps legibus solutus est seems to be an idea that is alive and well in Putin's Russia.

Many people in those reserves have previous war experience since our military prioritizes such people over everybody else.
Even in TD they get the priority.

^^^
Regarding Xi, and China's renewed push for more nukes.  
What Putin's invasion of Russia has shown is the need for the West to put their troops in friendly territory to show commitment and resolve. Would Putin have green-lighted the invasion if there were several NATO brigades doing "training and familiarization" in eastern Ukriane?  Think about setting several USMC battalions in Taiwan on a "friendship tour".
The post-invasion rush of PGMs to Ukraine should also be a lesson. To protect Taiwain, a PRE-invasion flood of PGMs would be appropriate.
This would be a strategic counter to the PRC's expansionism in the South China Sea.
 
Back to Ukraine:
The 100-200k reserves that are expected to start arriving on the battlefield soon...how will they be integrated into the fight? Will they plus-up the existing formations, or get plugged in directly (and have to learn the lessons endemic to all green units when first in the line)?
How many NLAWs/Javelines/Drones are left for Ukraine to use? Are they sufficient to beef up the entire east front, or will they be pushed to proven units? Will they use the attritional approach, maneuver, or a combination?
I agree that Russia has lost their strategic aims, but there's still a LOT of fight left in this war.

Remember how everybody thought that Brexit was a terrible thing that was helped in no small part by russians?
Wonder how many russian FSB guys went to jail when putin realized UK can do whatever it wants with its NLAWs and sanctions without asking another 20 countries if it can.

So for those keeping score, wayyyyy back on page 9 of this epic thread @db_zero was the first to suggest that Russia might have bitten off more than it could chew, edging out @The_Captby 4 posts.
Although the point then was occupation, not conquest.

Yea, and if you have to build a new fab from scratch it takes about 4 years until it starts producing stuff.
Intel made the decision to build a new fab in Magdeburg/Germany to cover the european market. Start of building the fab is 2023 and they are looking forward to have it ready for production in 2027. The invest in building the fab is about 17 Mrd. EUROs!
Milliarden-Investition: Intel baut Chipfabrik in Magdeburg | tagesschau.de
Intel set to build a new €17 billion chip manufacturing hub in Germany as it pours money into Europe | Euronews

Informative post. Appreciate the community. I'm an enormous lurker... 😀
 
Found this regarding the Russian have no Tochka - U missiles... 
 
Belarusian Hajun project (@MotolkoHelp) Tweeted:
7:50
A column of Russian equipment with “V” marks was moving from Rechitsa towards Gomel along the M10 highway.
There were at least 8 Tochka-U, several BTR-82a, about 9 KamAZ trucks, some of which are carrying Tochka-U missiles, communication vehicle and a crane. https://t.co/UFF0cmrgv5 https://twitter.com/MotolkoHelp/status/1509099435262976000?s=20&t=cXZm_JJAOIr14QSs79t45A

The 10th man/devil's advocate stuff:
Putin can't register a "win" by any standards that we are putting forth, but he doesn't have to. He only has to register a win that he can sell to Russia. To him it doesn't matter that the strategic and operational goals of his invasion won't be met, he only needs to do enough to spin it as a win to the Russian people.
With that being said, here is how he does it:
Keep the Izyum bridgehead alive and pressure on the Donetsk front. That is where the Ukranian general staff keeps talking about the next offensive coming from. The units that pulled out from around Kyiv are in that general area resting/refitting/whatever, but they are a distraction and pinning UA troops to that area to repel the coming offensive. If Steve is running the show 90% of their arty is also deployed in that area, which degrades their ability along the rest of the line. No grand offensive will be launched, just keeping everyone tied down there.
Dig in, probe north around Kharkov and south all along the rest of the line. If there is an opportunity to seize better defensive positions, take them. Otherwise pin as many UA forces as possible with the threat of attack and use arty to grind them. 
The only place the RA keeps attacking and doubles or triples down, whatever it takes, is Mariupol. As soon as Mariupol is taken and secure he can announce that all objectives were met for his special operation. Immediately withdraw away from Kharkov back to the border of Luhansk. Withdraw from Kherson to the south side of the Dnepr and hold. 
The RA has a proven inability to successfully conduct flexible fast paced offensive operations, but if they dig in like ticks and rely on masses of arty they can make it very expensive for the UA.
Putin shows the world by his withdrawals that he is willing to cease fire and claims an end of the special operation. He sells it as a victory to his people as they liberated Luhansk and established a land bridge to the Crimea. He hands over several scapegoats to take the hit for the atrocities to be tried as war criminals and denies all knowledge of the systemic abuses committed by his forces. The west finds it hard to persist in supporting the UA in what is now an "offensive" war against the RA and of course becomes bored and the support of the western masses dwindles quickly. The front becomes a low intensity meat grinder for 10 years until the RA thinks it is strong enough to take another bite out of Ukraine.
Putin saves the day for Russia and doesn't care too much about how all of us on the forum say he lost the war. We don't matter. Only the perception of the people in Russia matter and he will be the great savior and further demonize the west for the ongoing sanctions and crumbling economy.
 
Option number two that everyone is focused on is the actual offensive encircling the UA forces in Donbas. Not gonna happen. Can't happen. Will get smashed. Steve has already emailed Zelensky the plans on how to do it and the preparations are underway.  
Actually, it could succeed, if it wasn't being conducted by the current RA. The combat power  numbers are still there, but in order to be successful it would have to be a very fast, sustained, completely mobile action that encircled, pivoted and crushed the pocket in 48 hours(?). That won't happen. The RA is simply not capable of such operations as they have already proven in this invasion. They couldn't conduct that sort of thing at the beginning when their chances were the best for that type of operation and now it just isn't possible. 
So plan A it has to be. I don't see any other option to spin a win out this for Putin. 

This is what terrifies Putin such that he threatens nukes
 

As many others have said here repeatedly, rectifying systemic deficiencies on this massive scale takes years. You don't just conjure up working NBC filters for AFVs etc, or order them from China.
1. Putin is a cold-blooded technocrat turned cynical caudillo, and he has miscalculated, terribly. And he knows it now.  But frankly he shows no signs of insanity or irrationality. There is no other figure -- or grouping of figures -- I can see who can step in as 'White Tsar' to rule Russia in its current state. So I don't know that even a total defeat in Ukraine ends in his fall.  Excepting some of their intelligentsia, Russians seem determined to double down on lalalala-I-can't-hear-you-stupid, as is being amply shown day to day. The army is in no position to execute a coup; the Soviet/Russian state has carefully kept things that way since 1917.
2. Joe Biden (and whoever else is running his admin) would give their left glands (pick one) to be able to do a non ground forces (which aren't really needed tbh) intervention in Ukraine on 'humanitarian grounds' and claim credit in the midterm elections for ending the crisis. A Russian use of NBC would provide just that opening. Putin knows it.

I just saw report that UA had advanced SE of kharkiv along the M03 taking Malynivka.  If they can continue to advance on this axis then RU northern 'offensive' via Izyum area would be cut off.  That would be really funny -- if before the russians can even get going they are cut and scrambling backwards. 
This would be just like the Russians so far in this war.  Advance too far w/o protecting their LOCs, like they did east of Kyiv w those tendrils that looked so menacing at first, then just started to disappear.

My opinion (worth what you paid for it), is that it has more to do with lack of discipline and professionalism in the army. That's an indictment of the NCO corps and the junior officers. Nothing we haven't talked about there.
Lots of my troopers came from rural areas in the South of the US. Lots of them. BUT they were well trained and the NCOs that were my team sergeants were the best in the business. There was never a question that our guys would behave.
Dave

Nice to see you two have got a room ❤️.  And this is an interesting thread...

Because it (almost inevitably) appeared elsewhere:

Just to clarify: With my post about the Bucha satellite imagery, I didn't mean to start an entire discussion about various Russian disinformation efforts. I just came across this yesterday, found it easy to debunk, and thought it might prove helpful as a reference for anyone getting into a discussion about this particular Russian narrative.

Sorry, yes - by "software problem" I meant it's something that it needs a solution other than hardware, as in it's not a question of bigger guns or more of them, but of co-ordination and control. Some of that will literally be software, but some of that will be as simple ("simple") as changes in organisational structure.

Comms are a massive part of that, but to a large extent how it's achieved isn't the important thing, but that it involves a change to the thinking, infrastructure and employment.

A much more useful measure of politics uses a different spectrum. (BTW, "right wing fascist" was a label used by the Communists in the '20s to differentiate two different forms of socialism).
The spectrum to use is linear. On the far right is total individual liberty. Call it anarchism.
On the far left is total government control. 
Using that, one can see that fascism, socialism, communism are much more closely related than democracies.
There are variants on this, but freedom vs. control is a much more useful measure. It shows that "right wing fascists" are really just a form of left-wing totalitarianism. (And, boy, do they hate being reminded of that.)
 
Back to the fight: Izyum is, once again, the focus of a huge offensive. This is key to Russia's move to try to encircle the Ukrainian salient just south of there.
And what a great opportunity this presents. When the Russians attack, the Ukrainians can slaughter them.
 
Post-war: Clearing out the Russians from the Luhansk/Donetsk/Crimea would be important. Would it be possible to tell the pro-Putinists living there that they need to move to Russia? Similar population shifts have occurred before.

A launcher similar to how the Switchblade is launched mounted to a tank could provide OTH surveillance for a tank crew.  Those could be launched remotely with the crew buttoned.