Vanir Ausf B

Not impossible, but pretty extreme by historical standards.

That's a fair assessment, but it circles back to the question of how believable the 50k number is. 50k at 20% loss rate means a million Russians cycling through Ukraine in 6 months. That is why I have been skeptical of the 40-50k Russian KIA numbers.

Well, yeah I remember Girkin predicting last spring that Russia could raise a few "tens of thousands" of volunteers that would get swamped by the Ukrainian horde of millions. I'm sure he was spitballing, but still. I don't know what the number is but several hundred thousand would surprise me.

I can't escape the feeling that some of the "lessons" we are seeing are artifacts of this war's peculiarities and may not be transferable to other conflicts, even near-peer. Is it that mass doesn't work or is it that you can't mass without denuding vast swaths of frontage, as the Russians are discovering to their chagrin. One can hope

I'm not sure where the 250,000 number comes from. The numbers I have seen are more like 140,000, or maybe 190,000 if you include DPR/LNR and Rosgvardiya. That would be 300% turnover if we're excluding DPR/LNR. I just don't see where they got that many replacements.

I keep thinking about the video posted yesterday of the Humvee leading an assault on a village, .50 cal blazing and AT4s popping off. This is exactly what tanks were designed for. Have the Ukrainians discovered that light vehicles are just as good or are they making do with what they have because tanks can't be everywhere?

500,000 seems improbable to me. Unless the Russian "stealth mobilization" has been far more successful than we thought. RE: Tanks Ukraine has about 5 armored brigades to cover a frontage of somewhere around 1800-2000 km. I think this is why we see tanks penny-packeted in company-size units and also why we are seeing wheeled vehicles used in assaults. It's not so much a deliberate decision to avoid mass as it is a condition imposed by this war. At least that's my guess

I'd love to learn more about what the Gepards are doing. Because prior to this article the last we heard was that the ammunition painstakingly sourced from Norway didn't work.

Ouch

They actually did try it but according to Steve it cratered the frames per second.

Russians need to play more Combat Mission. Anyone who has played Black Sea or Cold War knows that when a tank fires it can't sit there admiring the result. You gotta MOVE!

Girkin mentioned this tactic. It's straight out of WW2. "Sources noted the outstanding audacity of enemy attacks - "on armor and wheels" seizing positions, breaking into them at high speed directly on armored and other equipment, as a result of which artillery lost the ability to strike the enemy on the way to our positions." https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1567434170460160003

He meant what Russian unit has T-90M. They're rare and have mostly been seen in the Kharkiv area. The new 3rd Army Corps has some.

ninja'd, as usuall

Would be an explosive combination.

Apparently Ukraine is being very tight-lipped.

WaPo is reporting it was neither HIMARS nor Neptune. "A U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity, told The Post on Tuesday only that a U.S. weapon was not used in the attack."

Fair questions, and the interview with General Kryvonos that LLF serendipitously posted addresses those points. _____ Kryvonos: You don’t have to be afraid of the opponent, but you have to respect him and evaluate him correctly. So here again, I say that the Russians, having a great experience of wars over the past almost 30 years, quickly draw conclusions from their mistakes and promptly adjust the tactics of their forces and means. (I): I don’t ask for absolute numbers, the number of losses of Ukrainian troops. But I want to ask a theoretical question. And the public thinks that offensive losses must be many times greater than defensive losses. It seems to me from my couch that this was correct in the 12th century when they stormed a fortress. But in twenty-first-century wars, that’s not the case at all. And the fact that you describe the Russian offensive this way does not give us any reason to hope that our losses were many times less than the losses of the enemy. Kryvonos: Unfortunately, that’s true because the real advantage of domination on the field of artillery duels resulted in our losses being far greater than the Russian losses. Because one might imagine war from the old movie, when people go up to the attack and go there in chains, they are shot by machine gunners. Unfortunately, in this war, it’s a bit different. There are considerably fewer shooting contacts than artillery fire. So, at the expense of the artillery advantage, the Russians suffered fewer losses than we did. And the fact that the counter-battery was not tight enough because there were simply no shells. So we were taking more casualties than the Russians. Unfortunately, we have to recognize this fact. And it is not the fault of the military; it is the fault for not creating the state’s correct military and economic capacity in the last 30 years

Yes, good podcast. Another item that stuck out to me is that the UAF never really trained for offensive operations.

I am not going to read that whole article, but if it says that taking over Russia's eastern oil and gas reserves wouldn't greatly alleviate their reliance on middle eastern supply chains then by all means, let them have Siberia. Heck, let them take everything east of Moscow.

And yet so far the reaction from NATO has been the opposite: MORE defense spending. An energy-independent China would be bad news for Taiwan.

Western intelligence agencies guesstimate Russian KIA @ 15,000 - 25,000.