Rokossovski

Frankly, I'm curious how sustained, at a large scale, this Ukrainian "counteroffensive" can be. Their operational logistics process still seems very ad hoc and often driven by local demands, rather than operational plans determined by clear strategic principles and objectives. Failure to professionalise their materials supply chain will undermine and retard any theater level offensives, giving them to short lived gains then stalemate, then another short attack grinding into yet another stalemate. 
This will doom any national victory as it will give RUS strategic breathing room. 
All these Spanky New Fisher Price Nato toys are nice, but if UKR logistics are not up to snuff and dont drastically improve very rapidly then RuA will get the stalling of the war's momentum that it so desperately needs.
Russia is on the operational offensive but on the strategic back foot. Now the strategic imperative and pressure is on UKR to keep unbalancing Russia.
But half assed UKR logistics will only give half-victories.
@Haiduk or @akd can you shed some light on the UKR logistics state, process and capabilities?
...
Ref this new UKR offensive itself, I suspect it will be series of reinforced localised offensives, shoving and pushing at battalion level, seeking the weaker (low morale) units and breaking them in the hopes of a domino morale collapse.
In comparison the RUS offensive needed to physically destroy UKR formations, as their morale is rock solid, a much harder task. They needed to blow up/kill/capture a lot of UKR gear and troops, very quickly, to have any chance of success.
They failed (indeed a plodding, arty-driven pace was the deliberately chosen tactical approach). In the process Dvornikov hollowed out his larger formations as he attempted to maintain a sharp edge against a highly mobile, tactically flexible and determined resistance. 

Gotta take a quick dig at Muslims huh? Good one. Being Muslim has nothing to do with Russian brutality in the war. There are white Muslims too. And if a Muslim soldier commits a crime it’s an individual issue not a religious one. I’m astonished someone put Russian brutality on Islam when the Russians been killing Muslims for a long time 😂

The problem with pulling Russia towards Europe is the grand bargain Eastern Europeans have suspected would occur with bringing Russia closer to the West, where the West and especially Germany and France sacrifice Eastern Europe to Russian sphere of influence and instead conclude a grand European alliance with France and Germany controlling the EU, and Russia controlling EE. Its one of the reasons why NATO's bulwark has always been the United States and not France or Germany for EE states. 
As this recent invasion has demonstrated, the Russian demand for her rightful sphere of influence remains intact. I would argue that old guy in 2015 was stating the same endgoals as the rest of the teamwork and capitalism people, only via some nebulous "history and culture" vs "teamwork and capitalism", but with the same reality bringing both to failure, Russia does not seek to join the Western bloc as a partner, it seeks its own Russian world, that may well ally with the West vs China but with the prestige, worldview of equality, and competition with the West and China.
In effect, as much of Western Europe is stunned to realize now, Russia was never going to accept joining the West without her own Empire to do as she wished. 
As I've stated before, China does not need a subservient Russia relying on it to survive. As Russia was never going to join the West without her Empire and the West would never accept a new Russian Empire, Russia was always going to be closer to China than the West, what China wanted to see was a strong Russia seize Ukraine, show the uselessness of the West to stop it, herald a new age of emerging power blocs, and strike a blow against democratic states, in effect become a strong ally to China, yes, China and Russia could compete in Central Asia and the Pacific, but again, the biggest Russian want is the gaining of her western territories.
China has to compete vs the U.S, and the fulfillment of that goal via seizure of central asia and pacific areas of Russia, is basically fulfilled by a strong Russia who will economically cooperate with China instead of the West. 
What is going to happen now is a weak Russia that cannot compete militarily or economically with the West, meaning China will need to secure Central Asia and the Pacific with investments to continue maintaining the exploitation of resources, and invest to rebuild a Russian military to actually contest NATO.
Yes, Russia is in China's sphere, but Russia was always gonna orient to China due to competing with the EU, instead of being a equal partner to China, China has to spend money on supporting a state that may well become a black hole instead of something that can stand on its own two feet. 

No, Russia is being judged by it actions, not what it says.  We have a saying in the west.  "Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck.... therefore it is a duck."   The acts of Russia in Bucha, Maruipol, all over Ukraine are in full display for the world to see.  Ergo, if Russia troops acts like uncouth, uncivilized barbarians, we are within our rights to call them out for it.

Must be hard to be a Russian  and   watching this thread  DMS  . Your attempts to rationalize  or explain away the behaviors of your countrymen is a Herculean task indeed - I don't envy you it .

It is all good.  If I ever find the time, I need to write up a piece on the phenomenon of this thread itself.  We have a bunch of people who are largely only connected via a small wargame, but who are also a collection of expertise in a lot of different fields.  We coalesced here and have produced assessment and analysis that frankly compares to the paid stuff out there in the world.  We even became self-regulating, without - I hazard - becoming too much of an echo chamber.
And all this time no one has really posted their bona-fides.  I mean a few were already known going in, but a lot of this has really just been the quality of discussion and opinion.  Not sure what to call this "emergent analysis", "organic" but it has been really fascinating to watch and participate in.

I numbered the above to simply my response (hope that's ok!): 
1. Two things...I said "basic unity" and meant that precisely. There will be ups and downs, fractures, etc but the essential set of interests shared by NATO  has certainly been clarified. You are correct that China is using Russia which was my point about the instrumentality of the authoritarian bloc. 
2. I agree that China will adopt a more oblique approach. That's a good thing! We do not need another nose to nose destabilizing military confrontation and China vs US/Japan/Aus/etc would be *much* worse than this one so far. 
3. I agree that we haven't solved for China at all. If you ask around this town, the very first thing you hear is that Russia is an unwanted sideshow and China is the real opponent. I think that's self evident. But China has quite significant problems including severe economic issues to resolve, a demographic transition of epic proportions, flaccid political and economic returns for all the Belt and Road money spent, absolutely collapsing opinion globally, etc, etc. China has money and manpower...for now. We'll see in 20 years.

Bayonet lug.

More seriously, the bit in the middle looks like a muzzle reference device. On tanks, it collects data about the gun barrel (like, how much it's bending due to heat expansion on the sunward side) to feed back to the fire control system to maintain accuracy, I'd imagine it's the same sort of thing.

White House sends Congress $33B request for Ukraine:
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/28/ukraine-funding-request-congress-biden-00028552
"The Biden administration is asking Congress for a massive new $33 billion funding request to bolster Ukraine’s military as its war with Russia enters its ninth week, ensuring that Washington, and Europe, remain all in on beating back Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion."
 
Well, apparently Ukraine is getting the strongest land army in Europe, brought to you by uncle Sam.

https://www.defensenews.com/land/2022/04/07/us-army-initiates-plan-to-replace-stingers-with-next-gen-interceptor/
Found the article, army has been in the early stage for at least a year. Is hoping for test/demo launches 2023-2024. And delivery 2027. I am sure they are scrambling to see if they can move that up, since it looks like they will have to scramble fairly hard anyway to build more stingers. They are doing a LOT of work on drone defense, too. It seems like they get that the low altitude battle has changed completely.

In reference to the not knowing they were going to war and thinking they were only on training ops etc, unless there is a huge difference (which is possible) I'd call bull***t. The only time we were issued live ammo, especially a full combat load is if you were expecting to go into harm's way. I doubt there is a "training" exercise anywhere involving 200,000 troops that are running around with real bullets. Range time, yep. CQB, yep. Field maneuvers, nope.
We always knew real bullets meant real world. The 100% indicator that you are going in is when the morphine gets issued. So unless the RA just wanders around all the time with full combat loads for all their vehicles and people I'd say they had to know. There was never a doubt in our minds when things were training vs real.

Boy, did they ever. 
Same principal was literally how the Irish Republicans were able to infiltrate and negate British military intelligence on the island during our war of independence - plenty of WW1 vets on the Republican side with British military experience. Not harping on again but underlining the point that an enemy who can pass for you, talk like you and knows how you think and is deeply motivated is absolutely your worst nightmare. Pretty much impossible to fully defend against.

In the artillery system I'm used to (towed guns, computer fire control system, voice comms, manual survey transitioning to semi-automated survey) there are a range of jobs from simple to hard to complex to artisanal.
Being a forward observer is physically demanding, takes a lot of training. The process of adjusting rounds onto a target to get to FFE is fairly straightforward and can be rote learnt for most mission types and conditions with a few weeks of intensive training and a large ammo budget. But integrating the effects of fires with the maneuver arms commander's intent (ie, the whole point of having an FO at all) is more art and black magic than it is science, and takes a lot of time, experience, reflection, and mutual trust to develop. But, the good news is that all of this paragraph is largely independent of the gun used - a well trained FO party will be able to adapt to an entirely new gun with a just a few key pieces of info specific to the gun.
Command post procedures for turning orders from the FO into orders for the guns are similar; the drills don't really change just because the gun has changed. But, that does assumes that the technical data for the particular gun is loaded into the fire control system. It also assumes that the fire discipline that informed the design of the gun is compatible with the fire control system (FCS) that's being used. With modern FCSs the role of the CP has largely transitioned from a place were a bunch of smart people do a lot of maths under pressure in a poor working conditions, into a place where gross error checks are conducted to make sure some numpty hasn't fat fingered a number on the data entry keyboard. Knowing the steps and process is still important, but again the good news is that all of that is largely independent of the specific gun being used.
It's on the gun line and along the log chain that the differences really start to become apparent. Can the ammunition movement and handling system be utilised with the 'new' gun's ammo - if not, how long will it take to train personnel to employ the specific kit? How is survey for the new gun achieved, and is the output of that compatible with the FCS being used? And, finally, how many personnel are required to man each gun, what are their roles, and how do they execute them. Someone above also pointed out seemingly simple things like making sure that instruments are annotated in the language being used. Also to be considered is whether the vehicle fleet will be changing with the guns - can the old tractor tow the new gun? If not, you'll also have to factor in driver courses. The gun and vehicle maintainers will also need to be trained and equipped to service the new fleet.
All of this trainable, but training does take time. The time taken also depends on who and what you're training - if it is a fully ready battery transitioning to a new gun with a partially new vehicle fleet, but retaining their old FCS, you could probably get up to speed in 2-4 weeks, with most effort allocated to the maintainers, then to ensuring that the gun crews get the new drills really squared away. But if they also have to learn an entirely new FCS, you'll probably need to add at least another month to get the command post up to speed. All of this has the underlying assumption that the battery has no other tasks during this time, and is fully and completely oriented to learning the new gun and systems. If you're just grabbing folks off the street, with no prior knowledge ... yeesh ... then you're probably talking about 6 months before they're ready to go, since you're effectively creating an entirely new unit from scratch and while for them the specific gun doesn't matter (learning one gun is much the same as pretty much the same as any other if you're doing it all from scratch) there are a whole bunch of other soldier skills that can't be taken as given.
Preceding that training - or re-training - is the courses required to get the trainers up to speed; training the trainers. We've already seen hints of what seems to be a lot of that going on in various parts of Europe and the US.

I'm usually down in the weeds on this stuff but there have been some really good eye openers about Russia in this thread. That, and the storm outside, has led me down a rabbit hole today of looking at a lot of the macro, geopolitical and historical stuff with Russia. That all leads me to question if the Russian Federation survives this. 
Militarily they are sunk, we have established that they will hit a point of no return where they can't come back. The longer this goes the more contract soldiers they lose the worse shape the whole structure is in. Sanctions are already causing their large armaments and high tech armament factories to shut down and it will only get worse with time. I suspect they will try to intensify the campaign which will only intensify their losses. The other place we are going to see high attrition is in their air force. Airframes need a lot more maintenance and their high end stuff relies on high tech spare parts so once the stocks are depleted the air force is grounded. With a gutted army, an impotent navy and a flightless air force Moscow is in trouble.
They are trying like h*ll to keep their economy running but it isn't going to work and it is going to crash and burn. They suffered a big brain drain over the past couple decades which was just spiked and will only continue to get worse when those with opportunities abroad don't have opportunities at home.
The Federation is made up of ethnic Russians and conquered peoples. They have had a lot of trouble with the conquered peoples the last couple decades. Even their "friendly" neighbors like Kazakhstan have been friendly pretty much only out of fear. The mighty RA was able to beat down the smaller regions but if it is gutted and burned out in Ukraine that changes the game for all the other regions. No one other than Russians likes to be under Russian rule. Those that have suffered under it and are now free appear to be very passionate about maintaining their freedom. They are also beacons to those that would prefer autonomy.
Most people are talking about whether or not Putin survives this. I'm thinking the question should be does the Russian Federation survive this? With or without Putin the fundamental problems of the country don't change. I don't think we can 100% predict what is going to happen and everything I've said may be wrong, but I'm putting my money on the Russian Federation being a really big Yugoslavia 1990. 

kind of funny.  With a significant amount of the armaments supply being former Russian equipment from former members of the Warsaw pact... Russia isn't really fighting NATO, they are fighting the Warsaw pact.    History is weird. 😎

Someone on here a while back was talking about how U.S. Grant or one of the Civil War generals suddenly realized the enemy commanders were as scared of him as he was of them.
At some point, the UA is going to need to take back their lost lands and eject the RA. There are always good reasons for waiting, but the other team isn't idle.
I disagree with the view that the Russian war machine gets notably weaker with the mere passage of time, bleeding out from sanctions and whatnot. I mean, even if it does at a macro level, that weakness will take some time to become meaningful on the battlefield. In the meantime, they are still humans; even Russians learn and improvise, especially when sheer survival is at stake.
At *this moment*, RA frontline combat power and C4I (or whatever it is now) is as shoddy, their vehicles, ammo stocks and ready reserves depleted, their air and missile forces overstrained, their troop morale as low as it is going to be in the foreseeable future.  A 60 day respite is a crucial breathing space that could make a UA attack far costlier.
Don't let them off the ropes, Ukraine! they are 4x as big a country. The stakes are existential.

you guys are making me feel depressed.  Can we get another picture of a tractor hauling a tank?

I can't imagine they don't have roubles to physically pass to the soldiers, just print some FFS. This story sounds like UA PsyOps to me to be honest. 

I know you guys are really smart but  I think you are overlooking the operational benefits to this route. Looking at Combatintman's map it is the roughest route with the most forest. Rough Terrain and Forest = Less Agricultural land = Less tractors = Less operational losses. In order to keep the loss of equipment to a minimum they have selected the least tractor friendly terrain to conduct their assault!!  

Grognard objection:  The Italian battleships were at anchor; the British were underway: Big difference for the RN. From "Death of a battleship: The loss of HMS Prince of Wales" (p.63):
"Prior to the deployment of the Prince of Wales and Repulse to the Pacific, the Royal Navy had been operating for over two years (September 1939 - December 1941) in the Mediterranean in the face of intensive attacks from German and Italian land-based aircraft. These airplanes were able to damage the convoys but not totally stop them. British battleships had been repeatedly attacked but never sunk. Based on that recent war experience, it certainly appeared risky but possible to operate in waters covered by enemy land-based air. What was not understood, due to a serious intelligence failure, was the fact that the Japanese bombers based in Indo-China were not an ordinary formation of aircraft but were a force especially trained and equipped for "ship killing". These planes were specifically stationed there because of the predicted arrival of Prince of Wales and Repulse in Singapore. No other enemy or allied air force had this equivalent capability at the time. As the war progressed, ordinary land-based bombers (US B-17s, the Germans and Italians in the Mediterranean) continued attacking ships at sea with limited success. The RAF, using torpedo and rocket-equipped twin engine planes against German coastal convoys, and USN carrier-based planes (using torpedoes and bombs) and USAF B-25s, using skip bombs against Japanese coastal shipping, would finally gain the equivalent potency of these Japanese land-based aircraft later in the war."

It seems that the current (apparent) Russian offensive plan is a fractal of the original.
Too many axis Bad topology for them Still too wide a frontage (even after adjusted for the force reduction) No air superiority  Not enough PGMs Crappy ground Crappy units thrown against determined, better equipped defenders Same tactics  Same road-bound columns Same ****ty small unit "leadership"  

As you can tell @Battlefront.com, I'm more of an avionics guy than a ground systems person.  But here's a little window into some of what the USAF is up to (I'm sure you're already savvy to).
@Huba, or should I call you Black Adder , you say tongue in cheek, but the USAF takes that seriously.  It has rules regarding vehicles that operate autonomously just so we don't get ourselves into a SkyNet situation.  Mostly -return home type commands if they lose the ability to control the vehicle remotely. 
But that is not always the case.  Take, for instance, the new B-21.  I was never privy to the OFP (Operational Flight Programming) for that vehicle (and obviously if I were we wouldn't be having this discussion), but the OFP for these kinds of vehicles have more of a -complete the mission and -return home type programming.  And the drones designed to accompany an F-35 on attack/bombing raids, those reach another level of autonomy along side their human operator.  I'm fairly certain those type drones are not operational yet, and if they were, the USAF wouldn't be shouting about it either.  Those commands probably go a step further with -complete the mission, -defend the F-35, and -return home in high ECM environments.

https://warriormaven.com/air/air-force-mini-drone-swarms-could-be-operated-by-a-b-21-or-f-35
The thing is, the drones used for air missions are in a much closer to 'pristine' environment than the ones used in the mud and sand on the ground, at least relatively speaking.  As mentioned earlier, what happens when one of these UGVs becomes immobilized?  I imagine a lot of future ambushes will center around this very situation.

(In the above quote The MonkeyKing was paraphrasing an argument from someone else, so, to be clear, my below comments are not intended to criticize The MonkeyKing in any way.)
I've been seeing similar arguments elsewhere as well: that there is nothing on hand to replace the tank, so therefore the tank is not obsolete.
When I read such arguments I think back to a book I ran across years ago in a university library. It was an English translation of a German book on tactics, published in 1914 just before the outbreak of hostilities. (I would provide a cite, but this was decades ago and of course pre-internet). The book's author described the history over the 19th century of increasing dispersion of infantry on the attack in reaction to increases in defensive firepower. The author stated that in his view further dispersion was not longer possible while maintaining command over forces, and so "therefore infantry attacks will be successfully made under current [1914] conditions without further changes." [Not a real quote, this was decades ago, but that was the thrust of what he concluded].
In other words, the author was stating that there was no available alternative to massed infantry attacks into the teeth of machine-gun fire, and therefore such attacks would continue to be completed successfully. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that the absence of a ready alternative to flinging infantry into machine-gun fire would not make such attacks any less foolish or costly. It would be the same reasoning behind the old quip that "something must be done. This is something. Therefore this must be done." 
The correct answer (that the 1914 author did not have the foresight to grasp) is that until alternatives to massed infantry attacks could be devised then attacks would generally not succeed. He failed to consider the possibility that in 1914 the correct answer to the question of "how do you successfully attack into machine-gun fire" was "you don't." 
Along the same lines it's possible that the statements "(1) we have no ready alternative to tank" and "(2) the tank is obsolete" could both be true.
I'm not actually sure that the tank has reached that point, and, even if so, it is also possible that an alternative will be devised. My objection is to the misconception that whether there is or is not a ready alternative to the tank has any bearing on whether it is obsolete.
[For the purposes of this post I am defining "obsolete" to mean "no longer capable of reliably performing its duties in a reasonably cost-effective manner" or something similar. Tanks are plainly still being produced and used, and so under some common definitions they are technically not "obsolete"].

Some News 
 
Tractor of Ukraine so important as the tank himself !
 

Basic and perhaps not John Deere  !
 

 
Trying to have the correct size with T90
 

 
 
Some references .
 
 

 

 
Waiting to yours advices to eventual correct the size !
 
JM

Hi Guy see on my page, waiting to yours comments !
JM