dan/california

Flanking the the Russians out of Robtyne would be pretty significant.

I was mostly just hoping that Prig's seizure of Rostov would result in a complete and epic seizure of Russian logistic support for for their forces in Ukraine. I am still bummed that didn't happen.

These seem to be the most significant bits of today's ISW report.

Regarding the post above Ukraine keeps putting pressure on this axis. They are basically trying to follow the road Google Maps calls the T0518 down to Mariupol. Obviously there are a lot of Russians, and a lot of mines between them and the Sea of Azov. All the public satellite info though suggest there are fewer prepared defenses on this axis than there are on some of the others.

"Blyat, these t55s are ancient like mammoth crap". Another Russian realizes the are REALLY not winning the war in Ukraine as train load of rotting T-55s rolls past.

OSINTtechnical has about ten new posts of Russian stuff going boom. About half grenade drops, and half drone spotted PGMs.

Yet another "appeal to the Czar" video. What i can't understand is how these guys can be quite so slow on the uptake. They can try to surrender, they can start shooting at their officers and/or the blocking troops, or they can die of for the great purpose of making the Ukrainians expend a little ammo. There is no third choice. I am not saying any of those choices are particularly good, but they are the ones on offer.

It is time for NATO to make the redlines even clearer, and MEAN IT. If anything, happens at the plant, and i do mean anything, Article 5 should be declared, and NATO planes should start killing every Russian soldier in Ukraine. And they should keep dong it until they all are dead or gone. If Russia wants a wider war, give it to them, and sink every surface ship in the Russian navy, just for starters.

It is quite possible to regard this particular statement as a simple acknowledgement of the logistics and time lines involved, and utterly furious that it wasn't all started a year ago.

I would assume if Grey Zone is posting it, it is at least this bad for the Russians. There is always some chance he is overstating the Russian problems to lobby for more help in this direction. Although that too would be helpful for Ukraine, since the entire point of this phase is to get the Russian reserves committed.

This would be the absolute visually confirmed minimum, still quite interesting.

h Deep dive into how a helicopter looks on radar, with a lot of the actual math. The relevant bit of the Ukrainian government should be talking to these guys, or someone just like them. The idea is to teach a drone to find the chopper on its own. Then you can just tell it to fly circles about ten kilometers from the planned breaching action. see a rotor signature, go meet your destiny little robot. Edit: It could be very useful to get the pieces of some downed Ka-52s to the right people...

Helicopters may be an unsolved problem, but Ukraine finally has the assets to kill Russian artillery systems wholesale. Uragan fireworks are the best kind of fireworks.

https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1675922256352903169/photo/1 His version of the current map, The resemblance to the hedge grow battles after Normandy grow ever stronger. The breakthrough will happen when the available Russian forces have just been ground down to nothing.

So much of the helicopter problem is Ukraine not having any airborne radar to speak. of. Even a couple of F-35s flying CAP fifty miles back and at 40,000 feet could probably find helicopters easily, and either fire an AMRAAM with a supersonic boost, or cue some other system. I am leaning ever more into the idea of just burning the long range strike assets to kill them on the ground.

Couldn't NATO put some sort of surveillance aircraft over theBlack sea that would be able to spot helicopters and send the data around? I quite like the idea of theRussian choppers being spotted from one side, and hit by long range SAMs from the other.

A nifty SAM cook off, too. This one has much better video quality.

No clearer sign of a good hit than rockets cooking off in random directions.

Governments can be incredibly persuasive when they set their minds to it. And this is so important that if nothing else works just arrange for them to be bought out buy more reasonable owners. This really is an important lever we haven't pulled. Their is also the option of finding someone on the engineering staff who has a bad habit that isn't quite legal and telling him he can cough up the codes or someone might have to notice his little hobby. There also needs to be a real effort to feed the Russians bad parts as they try to get around sanctions on chips and such. A few missiles cooking of their launch tubes would do wonders for the black sea fleet for instance. The CIA had some real successes with things like this during the cold war.

Even more than that the European companies that make the machines must be persuaded to wipe and fry the controllers for those machine tools. Kinophile said it just exactly perfectly.

A lot of this was discussed a thousand or more pages ago. and the real problem is a minefield with even a few defenders left alive in the trenches behind it. With modern tech you have to suppress everything within ~5km of the breaching attempt that has LOS, and even that doesn't solve for drone directed artillery and helicopters. And if the bad guys are doing it correctly they will start tossing artillery/rocket delivered mines directly into the breach as you are trying to make it. It is a ridiculously hard problem. If the U.S. finally come through with the M26 rockets for the HIMARS it might make a real difference in discouraging the Russians to either side of the breach. And as discussed above NATO assumes it will have the full capability of NATO's air superiority complex to kill the helicopters, and the Ukrainians just don't.

Both agree and disagree. And it depends on the definition of elite as well. The MOD bureaucracy, the rail system, the defense industries supplying the war continue to function, if their normal state can be described as functional. The best cases for Ukraine is obviously either new management taking over that system and telling the army to quit and come home, or so much chaos about who is in charge that the system just stops working. To the extent that Prigozihn's coup was not simply about maintaining his personal power and position it was a demand for the war to be run more competently. He was met with very little resistance, but not enough actual support to get it done. if the next person to try it explicitly copies the spirit Lenin's original promise of "peace, land, and bread" results might be different. I do agree that the pre war economic elite becomes less relevant by the day, but at the moment when the Kremlin manages to give direction, they get followed by people in other buildings in Moscow that turn that direction into the detailed orders that make the whole mess sort of work, and they really are the only people that matter, call them what you will.

It is REALLY hard to be less sympathetic to Russia than I am. That said there is simply no point in doing things inside Russia that do not not have a more or less military effect, or very directly affect the elites in Moscow and St Petersburg. The elite considers the rest of the population to be herd of domestic animals to be managed for profit, and if anything, cares less for their welfare than most ranchers do their cattle. Edit: Added the last five words above for clarity The current fighting across the river from Kherson is a classic demonstration of patience by the Ukrainians. The apparently rather large advantage that the higher right bank gives has obviously been there since the day Kherson City fell, but Ukraine let that advantage lie fallow until it could leveraged for larger goals.

Remote mining has become one of the most effective tactics of the second half of this war. It has been specifically brought up by more or less official sources of both sides in the last week.