Sarjen

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FM811OdXIAQG3qz?format=jpg&name=medium

Look at his history. Every time he started feeling his grip was being weakened by economic or social conditions, he has slapped a neighbor to increase his public standing. I know that coincidence doesn’t equal causation, but it’s a mighty solid trail.

Well, they do now. But they don't have any money anymore. This war has proven that without good APS tanks are not worth the logistics tail to keep them running. It is a damed good thing Putin is not a CMBS fan. He could have learned this lesson for $50, instead of several trillion.

It is very hard to argue with this, under the circumstances. The *Russian people* are ultimately responsible for stopping this unconscionable aggressive war that their leaders have unleashed. If they do not, it is they who will bear the terrible consequences of failure.
[Sigh, I've bit my tongue on this one for a while now. Feel free to kick me out for a bit, @BFCElvis]
....That being said, I feel I must say that, like many others here, I am tired of you using your country's righteous anger as a cloak for beating the drums of anti-Russian bigotry on this board, which you have doing now, for page upon page:
- that Russians as a people are an ignorant easily gulled mob of Mongolized barbarians or bandits, deeply alien, with no indigenous culture
- that they 'live and breathe war', and that their neighbours have received nothing from them for centuries but invasion and rapine.
- Ergo, nothing but violence and treachery can be expected of such people, now and forever.
These are ancient slanders, and within living memory they carry the vile stench of Hilfswillige and gas vans.
(as noted, I have dear personal relationships who are all too familiar with where this kind of thinking leads)
...To take it further, I am a honestly a little suspicious you are presetting the table for the vengeful 'cleansing' of millions of ethnic Russians out of Ukraine once this invasion collapses and is repelled, as it will be.
I have never credited the 'neo Nazi / Banderist / Azov SS' agitprop pushed by Putin et al., nor its '2 headed coin' dog whistle, but it is surely true no side has a monopoly on bigotry, and I regret you are showing it here now.
Your anger towards Russians now is quite understandable, and I hope you are doing your bit for the defence -- but know that such binary Us/Them thinking ultimately undermines and retards the Ukrainian nation, condemning it to remain an 'Okrajina', disputed borderlands. Bloodlands.
Feel free to refute any of the above!
...Finally, in this time of crisis, I suppose the ultimate proof (or refutation) must be: how many ethnic Russian boys and Russian speakers are out there right now, fighting and dying for the blue and gold?
Slava Ukraine!  But keep your wits, remain civilised, and don't lose the peace!

OK, I’ve read just about enough of this that I can stand without commenting. While I completely understand why you feel this way, and not being one of the “boots on the ground” in Ukraine or Russia, have no place to exalt or vilify your comments. This attitude is is a prime example of the vindictiveness that led the “Victors” of WWI to level such severe reparations and conditions on Germany that it caused WWII. 
 Please try to tone it down a bit, or unfortunately, I’ll have to put you on ignore, because I don’t believe in “Stirring the S*#t.” It really is nothing except extreme prejudice of the Russian people, and no peoples anywhere deserve that attitude.

As I was going through militaristic russian social network channels to report and hopefully shutdown - I found that the narrative now shifts towards the following, quoting one example:
"it's now obvious that a special military operation won't be a quick one to even the most stubborn of us - so we must prepare to shift our peaceful economics to a full wartime mode and prepare to mobilize all our resources to bring peace to Ukraine"
So that martial law and possible mobilization rumour looks to be less and less of a rumour

New game coming soon?
Combat Mission: Paper Bear

First step, sealing of urban centres and countryside.  Russia would have to commit it entire professional ground force (208k) and then call up reserves and do conscription to even look at sustaining it - we are talking about a country the size of France.  Also what do you do about the other nations you are trying to menace?  Harsh language? Because everything is now tied up In this operation without full mobilization, which creates enormous domestic resentment.  But you are all in.
Second step. You dig into firebases/FOBs whatever to try and control the ground.  This is setting yourself for continuous attrition, now with reserves and conscripts as your professional forces can only go so far.  Now you start taking a steady stream of dead and wounded with spikes and horror stories, compounded by you own troops war crimes and massacres (see: sustaining resolve of the west for the long term).  Because you never really break the will of the nation to fight and in reality you only control the FOBs and about 1000m from them and insurgency has got all the room.  Your LOCs are the stuff of nightmares, ambushes and captured troops.  Troop morale is a total mess and discipline will follow.
Step 3 - Go on the Offensive, search and destroy and all that good stuff.  Here you even have fewer troops as this is very dangerous and specialized work.  But you are all in, you got all the sigint firing, you are working humint and even doing nasty infiltration stuff (you do speak the language), you get some wins but this takes a very long time and for most of it especially early on you are coming up empty and losing people…and ever time you screw up you deepen resentment and resolve of locals to fight. You never get enough intel to really swing things your way.  You bag some insurgency leaders but it doesn’t seem to make a difference. You kill the #2 insurgency leader, 17 times.
Step 4- Wasteland.  Ok, so you give up search and destroy and go all Rolling Thunder, start breaking things.  Short of nukes this will take a mountain of ordinance and money you no longer have, and this whole time you are still bleeding.  By this time you might even start seeing terror tactics in Russia itself.  But you are now starving people, so mass migration for many, for others nothing left to lose.  You also cannot stop all supplies, these cities and countryside are just too big, so there will be a network of Selensky trails over the parts you control better and pretty much freedom of movement where you don’t.   
Ok, so you have spent let’s say 18 months now, entrenched in FOBs barely controlling your own LOCs, bleeding daily so some really big numbers start adding up, focused on a single operation so other nations are getting cocky, you are really going broke, you have not broken the will of the Ukrainian people or at least enough of them and somehow you have not had a domestic revolution.  So let’s add up the bill for what you would need to make this work:
- a new economic system because this semi capitalist one Russia currently has will not survive the plan.  Something insular and self contained.
- a completely new and huge internal security mechanism to keep domestics in line backed by even more military to back them up.
- an ideology that somehow glues it together to try and win the hearts and minds of your own people.
Well we have just re-invented the Afghan War and the communist system to try and sustain it…and it still failed. Except this time the Ukrainians have the entire western world onside backing them with weapons and support, no yellow jugs of homemade crap, no we are talking EFPs and next gen autonomous stuff.
You say the Ukrainians should not base a strategy on domestic Russian pressure, why not?  It worked very well for Vietnamese and Afghans (twice) and is the strategic centre of gravity for the Russians.  By the approach above you have elevated “killing Russians” as a new Ukrainian religion so their will is solid, the domestic home front is where it always fails in these messes.
The fundamental change in calculus that needs to be made here is that light fragmented forces that 1) are armed with some very advanced western equipment and munitions, 2) can sense, connect, communicate and synchronize in near real time and 3) is motivated, desperate or just really pissed off, are not “light or fragmented”, they are distributed warfighting mass resting on a foundation of home field support.  They can, and have, won in the long term without #1 and #2, they really only need #3.  And Russia would need to go full Genghis in order to try to shoot their way through that, which neither their own population or the west could tolerate.
 

I dunno after watching Dan's post on that Pantsir about 4x now I think there is no way Russia is gonna be able to supply this effort.  That is a unit that you would think would get more attention than most and yet it has been reduced to junk by.. driving down the road.  Regular supply trucks being treated any better is too far fetched for me to believe. 

This is the single most useful piece of information I have seen all week.  Really informative, his whole feed is excellent. We need to get a copy of the game.

Nonetheless, Ukraine won’t survive without the West, and the support of the West can become quite tenuous if the war starts to be perceived as “both sides” for war crimes, or more of a civil war with Ukrainians turning on each other and abandoning the rule of law.  Just how it is.

It's possible, at least, that there's an understandable "innocent" (nearly) explanation for this: the weather isn't too good over the Black Sea at the moment, and I'm sure Romania are sortieing a few more jets than usual. If one of them got into trouble and then the SAR bird mucked up in the rescue, there's no need for hostile actors to have been directly involved. Of course, the reason for the extra hours on those old airframes is currently cursing the inconvenient gallantry of the Ukrainian defenders...

The M-72 is still being produced by Norwegian firm Nammo, 2000 of them are on their way from Norway to Ukraine now. 
Pål

Interesting thread on maps and narratives. 
 

Borodianka town NW from Kyiv after yesterday battle. Russian bomb ruined the middle of house.

@Kinophile
I'm ok, thanks. About arty, I'm hearing it work somewhere  in our district. Several days ago that was 2S7 Pion, and now some less powerfull

To be honest I think a lot of people outside of A) the gaming space and B ) the professional (ie military) wargaming space dont really value the contributions of wargaming as much as they ought to I think. From my own field, academic history, I know a lot of historians who just totally dismiss wargaming as a toy or a distraction. I have only ever seen one(!) work of history which tries to incorporate war games as a source for its conclusions, it was fantastic IMO but it never got broad coverage. 
Not all war games are alike. Not all war games touch on the questions you want to ask. But if you mate the right games up to the right questions IMO there is a lot that can be learned from 'trying to do it' yourself. CMCW has changed how I view both American and Soviet doctrine, because at least I've tried it once right? I've seen some of the limitations and some of the strengths of each system and I've seen what both sides need to go right in a battle to win. CMCW has its limitations, as all games do, and is only a simulation of what would have actually happened. Nobody knows what would have happened in a WWIII situation except a lot of people would have died. But in terms of the tactical/battalion scale, CMCW offers an interesting and IMO important look into how the US and Soviets meant to fight. And I'd say the same about the other titles as well. 

I still cant get my mind straight to get a reason why Putin began the war now.
Nordstream2 was built and ready to transfer in short notice natural gas to Germany and the EU. Europe ignored for too long the consequences a possible cessation of all Russian natural gas transit through Ukraine to the EU would cause. Both in social as well as technical terms it would have heavily affected Ukraine. The upkeep for the pipeline in Ukraine is high and could have become financially unviable to operate once Russia would have ceased all gas transit. The pipeline is vital to Ukraine's chemical and heavy industry. And for Russia the geo-economic leverage the Ukraine had over them through its control of a share of Russian gas exports would have been gone. A subversion of the economic and social life of the  brother nation may, in fact, be a main function of the entire logistically and economically, in fact, unnecessary Nordstream2 project.
So why by all means did Putin rush to the war? And with a bad start too? Why did he not wait a bit longer for the economic downfall of Ukraine. Why didn't he use the normal way of subterfuge and propaganda to get a more cheap victory?

A well-written and cautious summary of developments (in Spanish)
https://www.revistaejercitos.com/2022/03/01/guerra-de-ucrania-dia-6/
of most interest for folks here are the three situation maps shown in the article: the first one which comes from a Russian source and looks very optimistic, another from the Institute for the Study of War which seems to underestimate the progress of the Russian Armed Forces along the coast of the Sea of Azov, and the third one, which neatly interpolates the 2nd with clear reports of Mariupol having been encircled (and fierce fighting around the city).
Also very useful to make sense of the stream of videos and photos is this website 
https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html
that works quite hard to geo locate videos/photos/claims and cross-reference all that data. A few days ago I was wondering about where was the "top-end" Russian kit, and it does seem that is starting to appear in the lists of confirmed destroyed vehicles.
I am with @LongLeftFlank and other OSINT people that these supply raids and interdiction may snowball and become a very important factor in how things play out over the next few days. What we're seeing is very much in line with the analysis of the article from War on the Rocks that I (and probably others, this thread is a monster) shared a few days ago. From that analysis the most sensible strategy was to avoid a "decisive" engagement in the frontiers and go for the supply lines, and it seems that is precisely what the UKR forces are doing for the moment.
The other very significative thing that many of you have raised is that there's seemingly a lot of open radio comms that are being snooped by radio aficionados from around the world. I look forward to see if someone can make sense out of all that Russian armed forces radio chatter. There are also several reports of equipment being just... abandoned.
I am also very much horrified by seeing the effects of Russian artillery on civilian areas, again, after what transpired in Aleppo (or with less means, in Sarajevo, going back in time). I have no words for that.
To all the Ukrainian friends here, please take care of yourselves if you have not already joined your army. To all the peace-loving, decent Russian friends here, I am not going to ask impossible stuff. I just remember this quote from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich:
A genius doesn't adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant's taste

They might've. But they set their own forces to "Elite, Fanatic, +2 leadership, Fit" and they used "Conscript, Poor, -2 Leadership, Unift Uncons" for the Ukrainian opposition.

I don't know about you guys but the past days have played havoc upon my blood pressure. Never forget this, people, never forgive this.

Also do you know that this tower is directly across the street from the Babi Yar massacre memorial? 33,000 Jews were murdered and thrown in to a ravine not too far from there. Maybe 100k more were buried over the course of the war. The memorial there is totally interfaith, a monument to all the victims of the Holocaust. It even has a memorial cross built by Ukrainians in 1943 for their dead. But now because of his hissy fit, the great "denazifier" Putin stains the monument to the tragedy of hate with the blood of new martyrs. 
Absolutely disgusting. ****ing livid. 

Long time lurker who harkens back to the original beyond overlord days.
Thank you Steve and BFCElvis for letting this thread go on, and your reasonable moderation policy.  Thank you as well Steve for the insightful commentary; I find it a very useful and informed source of information -Your background in Soviet and Russian military history and the time spent beforehand in scoping out the backstory around CMBS which has turned out to be prescient.  Thank you as well for the countless hours of enjoyment I've had over the years playing your creations!
To the contributers -thank you as well for the information and commentary.  It makes for a good sanity check against the other sources of information that bounce around out there.
To Haiduk -I wish you all the best for success and safety in defending against this onslaught driven by one man whose actions right now do not seem rationale
To the people of Ukraine: Slava Ukraini!
To the people of the rest of the world -keep pressure on your governments to continue to help Ukraine with meaningul aid and punish Russia till they withdraw.
Finally to the people of Russia: I hope that Vladamir Putin's days as your leader are short and that you have a real democratic opening.  I think the west bears no ill will to Russian people.  I think most of the world would welcome a democratic and economically thriving Russia.
Chris
 

Here is the video where it was taken from. Seems legit. Even the patch of 1st CAV.
 

Who said they didn't try? In the first night they launched nearly a hundred missile strikes to take out airfields and air defenses (that's how I learned that an S-300 launch sounds like a salute pop and can be heard 30km away).
Most of those MISSED. Because russian precision munitions aren't precise at all.
Not to mention all our planes weren't there thanks to US intelligence and, quite possibly, are not operating from Ukrainian airfields.

The most detailed information on Russian forces involved that I have seen so far: