dan/california

NYT quoting the ever popular "American Official", anyway the Ukrainians are not just making it up when they say they are killing Russians by the trainload. About ~600 Russians paid in full for Putin's imperial fever dream today. It isn't crazy to think the Russians could have half a million casualties by July if they keep trying compensate for their vast military inadequacies by trying to bury the Ukrainians in rotting corpses.

Washington Post is both siding like it means it. It does seem the Russians have finally figured out how filter money into the think tank morass to get their side put out with Manafort type gloss over.

A very good graph for keeping things in perspective.

And towards the end the Russian source straight up admitted that they had run through the supply of prisoners who were suitable for this form of supposedly productive suicide. The new plan is to torture mobiks who wanted to fight the least into doing it Wagner's way. Keep in mind they haven't taken Bakmuht yet with this plan. Edit: Back of the envelope that the Russians would have to expend several hundred thousand KIA just to get good and stuck in FRONT of Kramatorsk, never mind what it would take to get past it.

So Ukraine happened because Putin thought the actual fighting would be short and easy, and that NATO/The West would crumple like a wet dish rag instead of doing anything about it. He was wrong on both counts, but the human and Economic wreckage of his miscalculation is immense. How do we send a signal to Xi he CANNOT misinterpret that all he is getting of a Taiwan adventure is sunken ships, dead soldiers, and the destruction of China's economy. Worrying about "provoking" dictators that have been in the self licking ice cream cone for too long just seems to convince them that we are scared.

I recall reading somewhere that the AFUs pre war planning assumed that Mariupol would be encircled and then fall in a full up Russian invasion. It was just to close to the front and vulnerable on too many axis. Obviously things collapsed around the pre war Crimean fortifications, and then at Kherson far faster than hoped. By that point, as mentioned above, Kyiv was the sole focus.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/02/01/why-the-wests-oil-sanctions-on-russia-are-proving-to-be-underwhelming Te Economist is rather unimpressed with the effectiveness of the oil sanctions. I think they are underrating the marginal cost of the things Russia is doing to get around sanctions, and the willingness oof the Indians and the Chinese to bargain brutally when they are basically your only buyers.

Somebody wanted to see both halves of that rig BURN...

Great post, will look for that book. Mariupol is the only battle where the AFU's defense and maneuver plan was not entirely deliberate. Mariupol deserves not just it own post, but its own book and staff college thesis. Let's put that that one aside for now. All of the others you site were deliberate defenses that Ukraine maintained for exactly as long the loss ratio was sufficiently in their favor, and withdrew successfully. Now they took/are taking losses in all of these places. But this is an attritional artillery focused conflict, because neither side has the capability to to do anything else right this minute. Based on what we know, which a small fraction of the information the AFU command is working with, they have made good decisions over all. There have been mistakes, tragic and expensive mistakes. But those happen in a real war. There is just no indication that Ukraine is doing anything but fighting a least cost deliberate defense, and doing so rather well. As discussed at length above the next decision point is when the weather gets back to a point where real offensive action is possible. Which side shows up with ability to do a meaningful attack? Edit; Cross posted with The_Capt, he said all of it much better.

Not the most important person in Europe, but not nobody either. Every election that goes Ukraines way matters.

920 killed or badly wounded, the Russians are paying by the square centimeter.

BBC article on Wagner, nothing we haven't discussed, but a LOT of detail on prisoner recruitment and pardons. Prigohzin appears to be keeping his promises.

Just the fact of a border with secure rail connections to multiple NATO countries is transformational compared to any post 1945 conflict. It is both why we can win, and why we must.

Forecast temperature for Luhansk for the next 48 hours are basically -1C to +1C, that is not exactly the kind of hard freeze that lets you drive an AFV around a cornfield with confidence.

There is a fairly old expression about "that is why you play the game". None of KNOW which side will hit its breaking point first. All we can actually DO is send Ukraine as much support as possible and see how it plays out. As The_Capt likes to say, these things move very slowly, and then VERY quickly. I don't think the Russians can stand ~15,000 serious casualties a month, and massive economic pressure for very long. As you have eloquently stated Ukraine is not having an easy time of it either. The game stops when one side cracks. I said this a few pages ago but the possibly Chinese saying "may you live in interesting times" really is a curse.

Writing a nastygram to my Congresspeople about this right now. The way to win this war is to convince the Russians, from mobiks in the trenches, to the halls of the Kremlin that they have no hope getting any thing in Ukraine except full body bags. "Eventually" would have committed Biden to essentially nothing without giving Putin this lifeline. The fact what Ukraine actually needs is every ATACM in inventory, and permission to use them on Russian logistics nodes a couple of hundred kilometers into Russia is a different issue.

Ghirkin remains unimpressed with the Russian war effort.

450 dead or so wounded they might as well be dead Russians per day has been the minimum for months. Not infrequently it is double that. That would be a another 90,000 thousand dead by July if the trend holds. As The_Capt likes to say it is an attritional semi modern war with some new bells and whistles.

I still think Russia committing its better troops to grinding offensive action in the Donbas is a win for Ukraine. The Russians simply do not have a training pipeline to replace those guys. Virtually every piece of equipment Russia loses is replaced by something older or less capable, or both. To this point almost every single data point indicates that the AFU General staff has a coherent plan. I am not letting go of that assumption because the Russians gained a few kilometers of in the Donbas by literally crawling over a carpet of their own dead. That doesn't mean Ukraine doesn't need every every shell, missile, drone, artillery piece, and AFV that can physically be shipped to them. It does mean they will win if we keep shipping stuff to them like we mean it. And for an extra bonus the guy who planned the original fiasco back in March is back in charge. If you put that in a bad novel they would make you take it out.

That is true, and I think Boris made some LARGE mistakes in other areas. But Britain's support for Ukraine in last month before the war started, and the first month of the fighting REALLY mattered. It mattered on the battlefield, it mattered in how Ukrainian politics reformed into implacable opposition to Russia, and it mattered in formation of the near consensus in the West that Ukraine was going to get real support. None of that was a given on 2/23/2022. Boris may that rare lucky leader who is, (Edit: well may be), remembered for the one thing he got exactly right.

I think the Ukrainian position is that they can evacuate back to Russia any time they want. If they are in Ukraine, and not very actively waving a white flag, well that might be a poor choice.

I don't think he is the primary source for the aircraft. If he tries to really block something that is otherwise underway i expect he will by quietly ignored if possible, or run over noisily if he insists. He still thinks there is an acceptable outcome other than Russia just flat out losing. Twenty six or twenty seven members of NATO seem to be past that particular hang up.

Good video on breaching operations.

Everything that follows is my own opinion, and only that. Israel seem to think that its relationship with Russia is critical for peace on their northern border. They seem view Russian weakness as at least as much a problem as Russian strength. Russia restrains Iran from taking full control of Syria, and allows Israel to strike various targets it finds truly threatening. The Israelis appear to be substantially concerned that if Russia Pulled out of Syria completely they would forced to occupy much of it themselves. There is ample evidence that would problematic at best. So Russia, Israel, and Iran maintain this weird meta-stable triangular diplomatic relationship. The war in Ukraine continually threatens to destabilize this, as has so many other things, but so far thus weird balance has held. that could change at any time as the drone strikes in Iran this weekend proved. My biggest question is what do the Russians get out of it besides a naval base of the Mediterranean that NATO could obliterate on five minutes notice if it felt the need? I mean Russia's initial entry into Syria annoyed the bleep out of the U.S., but has to cost far more than it is bringing in. Is the base in Syria critical to Russia's other operations in Africa? The math just doesn't add up for me.

There was some mention of of bone about the new game a week or two ago? Or at least a bone about Battlefronts plans for the year?