dan/california

Sending the family a picture of the body, and a picture of the ID card does make the point rather thoroughly. The Russians can go home anytime. The only thing waiting for them in Ukraine is a zinc coffin, if there is enough left to bury, and the Russians bother to recover their dead. No but the Russians more or less systematically try to make every single problem worse. From Le Pen, to Assad, to who knows how many African dictators, they pick the worst actor on a given stage and back them. Sometime they back them a lot, sometimes jus enough to keep them from sinking. But there goal is alway more chaos, more disruption of the rules based order, and hey if there is some money to be made in blood diamonds or whatever, that's cool too.

Steve said To put this into perspective, a full strength BTG has about 225 infantry available to it. 300 if you're talking about a BTG that is infantry centric. Let's call the minimum force requirement 5000 dismounted infantry. That's the equivalent of 17-22 BTGs. Russia has something like 80 or so in the fight right now and they are all fully committed, so they don't count. It has probably another 30 or so reconstituting behind the lines with another 40 or so probably too shattered to even think about. Me From me, 5000 seems too low, 5000 seems WAY too low. Tre Russians have to attack on a front SEVERAL kilometers wide, just keep ATGMs from being able to shoot clear across the width of the breakthrough the are trying to create. Then they have to hold the flank of every kilometer they advance. Even if you assume they could get by with 50 men per linear kilometer, and I think that is totally in adequate, that only buys you a a hundred kilometers of infantry coverage, You have to cover both sides of your salient, and you SURELY need more than 50 men per linear kilometer to actual front of the attack. So 5000 men might get you a five or ten kilometer front 25 kilometers deep. I don't see that accomplishing anything except a great many dead Russians. If the game has taught me anything it is that a company of infantry can only handle so much contested ground, and trying to exceed that goes rather poorly.

I can see this being great ground for a Russian offensive in say late June. The current weather forecast though it isn't going to dry out enough to mechanized operations fun for at least a month. Do we have any feel for the Ukrainians' ability to induce localized flooding in some convenient spots?

Truly outstanding !

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ukraine-the-latest/id1612424182?i=1000557710309 Atrocity stories that are jus indescribable.

Another flawless Russian combat engineering evolution. I so hope tomorrow we get the after from a Ukrainian artillery drone.

There is an irritating LACK of evidence for much of anything, at least that is public. I am pretty certain the Russians aren't faking the demise of their flagship, though. Since the military sensors that matter are a LOT harder to fool. It is a pretty good lesson of how much less we know about what happens on a stormy night out of sight of land. Maybe the Pentagon will eventually share. I think there was a Global hawk over the Black Sea when the ship actually sunk, if there is any validity to the Russian timeline

I wouldn't rule out that any other significant Russian ships just ran as fast as they could, in case the Ukrainians had more missiles. It is getting ever harder to think of the Russians as functioning military, as opposed to particularly well armed mob.

https://smallwarsjournal.com/index.php/jrnl/art/why-russias-navy-ukraine-war-doomed-or-irrelevant This guy is in Steve's and the captn's league for getting it just exactly right.

How much anti-air/anti missile capability do the capability do the remaining Russian ships in the Black Sea have? And how much of the total missile magazine capacity was the Moskva? Are they just going to have remain 150 miles from the Ukrainian controlled coast for the rest of the war?

It was sunk by our own drunk, idiotic, and undisciplined sailors is perhaps the worst excuse in human history. At least have the sense to claim it hit a mine. I think the fifty were rescued by a Turkish ship of some description, it is too early to assume that is all the survivors. There were seevral ships flitting around the sinking wreck. I am laughing at the tidal wave of reasons the rescued sailors are spouting for why the should just dropped in Istanbul with a little pocket money, instead of fed back into the Ukrainian meat grinder as the worlds least competent, least happy infantry.

The Russians bailed on taking Kyiv, because it was just too expensive to keep trying, or even hold the ground they HAD taken. There is no reason the Donbas can't go the same way.

They are going to need Scuba gear. Glory to Ukraine!

we know anything else about this? Big deal if true. Mackay's heart is in the right place, but his entusiasm level can be a little high.

Posted 13 minutes ago And if someone was smart enough to try to stock some chips, what are the odds 85% of the money wasn't stolen.

From Steve Can you imagine Russia deciding to use a tac nuke in Ukraine and having it fail to detonate? Oh boy would that create problems for everybody. All the strategic implications of an actual detonation but without the effects that gets everybody upset. I can't even imagine how that would be handled. From me The worst case possibilities are quite bad, but let throw out two better ones. The first is that no one notices immediately, or maybe no one but the NSA types that picked up the signal traffic. It is just another dud SRBM, and they have had several of those, maybe more than several. So it is just another Russian dud missile until the EOD guys get around to it, and the first one to really look at more or less faints. The second vaguely positive possibility is that Putin makes a show of it, his whole I'm going to blah, blah, blah. Then it doesn't work, and the Russian military finally figure out that Putin is the real problem. I wouldn't say that either of these is likely, but they are both possible. And the Ukrainians just sunk the flag ship of the Black Sea fleet, so I am moving my usual odds of there actually being a God from zero, to two or three percent.

GLORY TO UKRAINE!

Is their fire discipline perfect, of course not, many of them are EXTREMELY new at this. But all we had to send was the missiles. If you want the war in Ukraine waged with perfect professionalism a couple of heavy brigades, and a Marine division can dispatched at any time. The Ukrainians would be very happy to have them, every ticket would come with an invite to the best victory party in at least sixty or eighty years.

Czechs. are getting things to front. Hopefully These showed with enough guided rounds to make this little offensive the Russians seem to be planning even less fun.

Insofar as I can tell, and my opinion is worth what you are paying for it, he is trying to execute an actual military operation, as opposed to a drunken cluster*&%$#$$^, in the place where the Russians are best situated to actually do that. of course the Ukrainians know where that is. It is sort of amazing that the Russian staff schools either don't teach the battle of Kursk, or teach it wrong. My bet is that the Russians run out of people willing to feed themselves into the meat grinder long before the Ukrainians have to give up any ground that matters. Hopefully they will deplete themselves so badly a Ukrainian counter attack can just run them right out of the country.

It is worth pointing out that the "take them by surprise bums/tank rush" is how. the Russians comprehensively lost the first phase of this war. There are just too many points of friction, from both outstanding Ukrainian performance, and their own limitations to do anything remotely creative.

I don't think one Russian tank would make it five miles past the Polish border at this point.

If there was point this could have been avoided, it was with truly massive support for the Russian economy immediately after the fall of Soviet union. But everything I have read about it implies that Russia simply didn't have enough rule of law, and technical capacity to absorb a lot more aid in any useful way. More aid would have just been stolen or wasted. I am almost certain that was never possible for Russia to transition to better government than it got. The Soviet system systematically eliminated decent people from rising to prominence, and the world just didn't get lucky there. Zelensky will have several hundred books written about him, because people like him are not common.

And because of that ratio they are winning the war. With enough missile density a frontal assault by massed armor just isn't a thing anymore. The same way rifled musket's and minie ball just made the calvary charge go away. The standard doctrine on how many ATGM infantry needs to be completely revised. It looks expensive, until you look at what losing costs