dan/california

So, speaking of over analyzing key hole observations. We have seen two videos in the last week or less of drones harassing Russian soldiers to point where they offed themselves. Now that is only two videos, but it the first two I recall seeing in the whole war. And as been pointed out, it is the kind of video that tends to spread widely. I think I am obsessed enough to know if there were a bunch of these floating around from earlier in the war. So how many off these unpleasant keyhole vignettes would it take to qualify as a trend, and a real indicator of the state of Russian morale, or lack thereof?

Ok, I am only on chapter one, but A, it is a really good book, and B What is his Forum name? C. last but not least, is he on the beta test team for the new version of game Steve swears he is making? For the record, so far he seems to split the difference between team APS can solve it, and team all drones, all the time.

Speaking of knowing positions. Is the canal the Russian 72 brigade was pushed back from the same canal we got video of in the last week of the Ukrainians using a MICLIC charge as artillery?

One can only hope these problems are widespread!

The turret in this video gets more altitude that SpaceX's first attempt at launching Starship. And I am only barely kidding.

Key quote here, AFU general staff have turned the tap on. Very curious how widely they have done that. We might see a lot more running Russians soon.

Crossing the Dnipro towards the southern end would be the highest risk, highest reward way to do it. But if the AFU can just attack at two widely separated points on the land bridge they put all the Russian forces in between at risk of being cut off. This could dislocate a massive piece of the Russian defensive line, and approximately nobody thinks these so called battalions of mobiks are capable of fighting a complicated maneuver battle. With or without a river crossing this give a real chance of the highway of death part two. I have this vision of a platoon of Bradleys wrecking a column of retreating Russian trucks from one end to the other.

The geometry of the land bridge really matters here. It is pretty loosely 100 to 150 kilometer deep but 200 km wide, well over three hundred if you include the Dnipro. So even a 175 km smart munition in meaningful quantity is going to put the nearest safe depot the best part of 300 km away from the central part of the land bridge. I suspect the Russians will deal with that rather badly.

Ride them down!

Ukraine is apparently being less than brilliant at this. Zelensky needs to put someone in charge of fixing it with enough political pull to move the needle. https://www.instagram.com/alishamisha/?hl=en comes immediately to mind. I am sure there are many others who could do it effectively if it was made their only job. Edit: The quality of her instagram page is exhibit A.

Hey, someone worked very hard on that strawberry patch. In other sad news Ghirkin is VERY unhappy.

On the off chance he drops dead does the Belarusan opposition hav enough left to create a real uprising? Or does Putin just complete his annexation of Belarus in short order? I find almost any result in between to be very unlikely. There just isn't much middle ground left. I also seem to recall one of Lukashenko's stronger subordinates having a heart attack some months ago. No one seemed to think that pork fat and vodka were the primary culprits either.

Dara's thread does highlight something though, conscripts are the only meaningful reserve Putin has. It is noteworthy that he would rather continue to flounder on the battlefields of Ukraine than take the political risk of committing them. This implies Putin does think backing for the war is anything close to solid. My read, worth what you paid.

Is it just me, or does Lukashenko look rather less than well in this picture?

Is this picture of the Bren carrier real, and from today?

So the Kremlin is not too fractured to more or less competently make the best of a bad situation? i think this flows back to Putin being all tactics, all the time, without a strategy to actually win.

Well, after the rats find them, someone still needs to dig them up....

Given the vast amount of area to de done I expect in 18 months we will almost completely automated drones that pace off a field and spit a map of every piece of metal bigger than a quarter, with the probable mines highlighted in a different color and grid reference to the centimeter for each. This will be for actual farm fields. The tree lines are going to be no go areas for a hundred years, unless someone can train up a bazillion of those mine detecting African rats.

I have my fingers crossed so hard they hurt that that won't be the only upside surprise we see. Hopefully it won't be the most significant one either.

There are parallels with how Hitler waited FOREVER to put Germany's economy on a true war footing. Not saying it would have been transformative if he had don it sooner. But the war certainly ended a few months sooner because he he waited so long.

If it takes more than a couple of hours Russia is well into a multi sided civil war.

it is a very interesting study/map. We just have to remember that the AFU General staff are looking at one with ten or a hundred times the resolution that is updated daily, and overlayed with signals, thermal, synthetic aperture radar, and a great deal else. There is about to be a little test of how much that matters.

This is the thing worth getting back too. If the Russian procurement system is so utterly corrupt they completely bleeped the single most important electronic system in the entire country? Then tell me again why I am wrong about my theory that most, if not all of there nukes probably don't work either? Everybody up and down the chain could spend the money on real bombs, or their vice of choice. Remember, if someone presses the red button you are unpleasantly dead if it goes off, or if it doesn't. Furthermore these are exactly the kinds of cheating that would make a nuke not work.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/13b7wje/ukrainian_air_defense_takes_out_a_drone_seconds/ Crazy night time footage of air defense at work.

Well it would be the coolest thing ever, and all of a sudden Georgia would be fixable. But a wee bit ambitious I will grant you.