dan/california

What Nato tactics require is Nato ISR, and Nato Style training, and both have been supplied in ample quantity. The Ukrainian's are not only demonstrating that they paid attention in class, But they have surpassed their teachers in many areas. Although are quite content to let Lockheed make the missiles as we keep sending enough of them. And even there The Stugna-P is a brilliant piece of good enough engineering.

I still think that at some point Xi will realize about Taiwan what the Japanese learned the hard way about Hawaii. It cost 1/1000 as much to buy the place as it does to invade it. Oh, and China's northern neighbor has no friends, and virtually no population east of the Urals...

Vlad has forgotten the first rules of holes, stop digging when the one your are in is big enough to bury yourself five times over. Firing up a mess in Moldovia will result in his little transwhatever project there being vaporized. It may well result In Moldavia simply becoming a province of Romania. Stalin basically broke it off after WW2 and it really isn't a viable country.

That was the purpose of course. But Lavrov and friends are not going to end civilization unless there are Nato heavy brigades closing in on Moscow. They are quite content to reign in the totalitarian hell they are turning Russia into short of that. They barely care if the serfs getting the worst of it are Russian or Ukrainian. The war in Ukraine is now an internal regime contest to see who gets the blame for failure, and position the various factions for the inevitable AFTER Putin contest.

Rough day to be a goose in southwestern Russia

What Putin's big parade needs is an epidemic of sugar in gas tanks. Just imagine if half the vehicles just stopped moving right in Red Square.

A BTG a day, every day. Can't do that forever.

Russian reconnaissance element bypassed Dibrovne and pushed south. Ukrainian forces were able to stop the enemy movement near Pashkove. Russian troops have found a hole in Ukrainian defensive lines and are now threatening to cut the railway between Barvinkove and Slovyansk. From Militaryland.net summary today, Some on the Russian side has found the tiniest bit of a clue, and maybe the ground is drying out a little bit. Going to get hotter in the kitchen it would seem

Are the Russians drunk ALL THE TIME? These guys don't even look like getting spotted is a possibility. Just casually set up and adjust the sight, with good relaxed camera work.

Unless I grievously misunderstand the situation, the only possible explanation for the Russians attempting this is Putin playing with the Russian version of pixeltruppen, BADLY.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-april-24 Todays ISW, not a lot of changes.

Do we know if the Russians are down to trying to actually hold pieces of their line with LPDR conscripts yet? Because those guys would evaporate even faster than the Romanians outside of Stalingrad with a decent push.

Or as someone just said, let them bleed to death in place . Losing a BTG a day is not even a short term plan, much less anything longer than that.

My vote is for dropping the Bridges and cutting off Kherson. They just shattered the command structure there apparently. I am thinking those units would not do well cut off from resupply. The bridges are already rigged to blow, so it isn't like you are going to capture them intact barring a true SOF miracle. And even then The Russians could probably bring them down with PGM. So why not just whack off the five-ish battle groups and liberate Kherson. Edit And it would be a huge propaganda/ info war win.

SOMEONE in Russia is definitely running out of time. There may be SEVERAL someones running out of time at somewhat divergent rates. The extent to which we can understand which faction is in the largest hurry helps predict what happens next. Are the Generals desperately trying to meet Putin's irrational deadlines lest they be shot or worse. Or are they desperately trying to LOOK like they are, and hoping Putin runs out of time before they do. Everything needs to be looked at through the lens of the different factions. It is worth thinking about the security services as a faction separate from Putin, they know better than anyone the Tsar has lost it, and want a succession that leaves them in charge. Absent a quick and total victory they are NOT going to get, the factions interest do NOT converge.

Excellent news! And a rare case of photoshop being used to tell the truth.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/23/ukraine-belarus-railway-saboteurs-russia/ Well deserved credit!

The next test The Ukrainians have to pass is setting up their own version of the Red Ball Express. As Russia belatedly degrades the rail system, the bigger road bridges, and the civilian POL system. It is going to take real organization, creativity, and probably some Nato bridging assets to keep things moving east from Lviv.

I thought these were funny.

If we really are finally giving the Ukrainians some missiles with 150 mile plus range it seems they should start with the logistics nodes that have been out of reach until now. As the Capn has said war is a form of communication. And breaking the Russian army's logistics in Ukraine is the best way to say "just leave now". If the Russians have been pushed back to 2/24 lines and are still blowing things up, that is when to start systematically wrecking airfields in Russia.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2022/04/23/ukrainian-and-russian-tolkien-fans-battle-over-the-legacy-of-the-lord-of-the-rings_5981383_13.html Apparently everyone wants Tolkien on their side....

That sort of sums up every significant Russian action in this war doesn't it? The people making decision are just so detached from objective reality they can't rationally plan/evaluate anything. No sign they are getting better at it over time either.

This is pure speculation on my part, but I think BFC are going to do a "future of ground warfare something, something" that explores many of the things revealed by this war, and many of the things whose development has suddenly been accelerated by a factor of 10. The big question is when anyone not in a NATO/allied military will get to see it. The Pentagon types are trying to revise decade or two procurement plans and CM has pretty much proven itself as a pretty good tool for evaluating ideas before you spend several billion dollars. Hopefully they will be able to release something to the public eventually.

The Poles have been all in from day 1, they really could not have done a whole lot more without just joining the war. I have a deep suspicion there are also a lot of people in Ukrainian uniforms with "distinctive accents from the border around Lviv".

This opinion is worth what you are paying for it, but I think I have had a revelation about the Ukrainian campaign plan. The mud has absolutely wrecked whatever plan the Russians had, Right? Everybody agrees on that. So not being stupid the Ukrainians are just letting the Russians bleed themselves until things dry out. Then at whatever point looks most promising, all the armor they have been husbanding like baby chicks, and the 100 plus new pieces of 155 hit like the hammer of god. The Russians in the way just evaporate, and the armor just FLOODS into the Russian backfield, and a third of the Russians in Ukraine are cut off by the third day, and prisoners by the sixth. The only thing I haven't figured out is if they do this at Kherson or Izium. To be clear I have no information except this board and twitter, but I am strongly of the opinion that the Ukrainians are going to make Long Left Flank very happy sometime in middle too late May. Which is when sane people launch offensives in this part of the world.