dan/california

I seem to agree with virtually every word of this. I really like this bit. And this one. I agree with so much of it there must be some terrible flaw...

The question is about the third, fourth, and fifth sides who think they are looking at something between impoverishment, and dying very slowly in a gulag. It is entirely possible their risk tolerances might be different.

I will simply point out that amidst threats death, torture, and worse, Putin cut a deal. My 2 cents is because whatever he had to fight Wagner with, it would have to pulled out of Ukraine weakening things there even more than Wagners own withdrawal. In addition those forces would have shown up right after Wagner had taken the Kremlin, and some other important bits of central Moscow, and dug in like really unpleasant ticks.

The thing about mines that can move themselves around is that you only need a few percent of them in a large field of dumb mines to complicate things a lot. The_Capt brought that up pages ago, and at least in Ukraine there is quite a bit of evidence that REALLY bad weather stops most of the fighting, too. Furthermore Ukraine apparently demonstrated in the last day or two that dumb mines delivered by smart drones have a charm all of their own.

All I can say is that the west needs to increase munitions production by 20X, and stack missiles on Taiwan until the island sinks a foot or two. It is a lousy alternative, well yes, but all the others are worse.

It depends entirely on the the ability of the Ukrainians to get supplies across the river. If they can put up a high capacity multilane bridge and keep the the Russians from vaporizing it, well the land bridge is just done, and probably a large portion of the Russian army with it. The Russians have a very small number of less than brilliant quality troops guarding things along the river. Unfortunately, as The_Capt mentioned it is a high Risk thing, because if the bridge gets cut before Russian lines disintegrate Ukraine could get a lot of troops hung out to dry.

The argument for a slow defeat to allow for rational decision making was far stronger last Thursday than is this morning. The larger problem is that we have been expecting Russia to behave like a rational adult super power for fifteen months. What they have actually been doing is shoving every last gram of state capacity they can physically mobilize into Ukraine and setting it in fire with a torch. people, money, and the vast legacy Soviet armory. It has been incinerated while Putin prays for a miracle. Instead the Russian state is starting to fail, and Putin's idea of a peace offer involves crucifying Zelensky, and Russian troops owning the entirety of the Black Sea coast. On this trajectory Russia is not going to give up until it has no state capacity left to hold itself together. I think that point is coming rather soon as this weekends rather large cracking sound demonstrated loudly. We need to tell the Russians they have weeks, not months, weeks, to make a rational offer. Or we will make very sure things get ten times worse for them on the Ukrainian battlefield, and in every financial market on earth. It is literally for their own good, not to mention several billion poor people who were just getting used to eating regularly. Blowing the Khahovka dam was crime against them at least as much as it was Ukraine proper.

I plead guilty to overstating the case. However Prig's little meltdown points out two thing rather strongly. We don't have all that much control over how Russia decides to lose this war, and Russia losing slower will not necessarily lead to the Russians making better decisions than Russia losing quickly. Slower just gives all sorts of bat s%^t crazy, and extremely unpleasant people time to hatch plots where the only thing worse than their failure would be their success. If Ukraine had had the the resources to drive home the success in Kharkiv last fall we would at least have been negotiating with Russian government that everyone, including most importantly the Russians, believed was in control. That assumption is gone, any guesses on how many decades it will take to get it back?

Well, he said that perfectly.

Pushing a real assault here at least implies a threat to cut the land bridge BEHIND Donestk city. Which I think would a war winner if Ukraine could pull it off.

"Peace, land , and bread" was a lot easier for the rank and file to understand.

Apologies for spreading it across two posts.

There is not enough discussion of the fundamental flaw in Prig's Coup plan. He was swearing to redouble Russia's commitment to the war, and be more competent at it. Lenin's coup succeeded because he promised the army it could quit fighting the Germans. He left out the bit about a savage civil war. You are always supposed to gloss over that in the elevator pitch.

I suspect when you add up all the cost and logistics of doing it in contested air space it makes more sense to buy a bunch more MICLUC vehicles. It would take a quite a few storm shadows too deliver an equivalent payload. Long term, I am betting on the robot dogs.

The future is surely a contest between a herds of these things trying to lay smart mines for their own side, clearing the other guys, and whacking each other. Whoever can win the robot attrition war can attempt to move to the next stage of the operation. As with so much else in Ukraine, the game is already underway with improvised COTS gear.

Lukashenko is is one slippery B^^%*^*#D. I guarantee you he is on the phone to the Poles or the Baltics right now scheming about how to sell Putin down the river and somehow survive Russia's impending total defeat in Ukraine. Of course in a just world he would meet a Wagner sledge hammer 12 hours before NATO tanks rolled thru Minsk.

Somebody really wanted this tank to burn...

Ukraine should have done a thunder run on Moscow. They would have taken the place in eighteen hours.

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4051618-invite-ukraine-to-join-nato-now/

Certainly the Russians i front of them are. There is a Russian engineering unit out there that needs a HIMARS visitation.

Cirillo is a lot like some of the foreigners wound up fighting for the Republican side in the Spanish civil war. She was sort of trying to figure out what to do with her life, and perhaps not doing a great job of it. But I have to give her absolutely 10,000% credit, she took one look at what Putin was trying to do too Ukraine and signed the bleep up. First she was doing some extremely hardcore war reporting from Kharkiv, in fact reading her stuff in the first few months of the war I fully expected to read about her being killed or worse. Then she signed on the dotted with the AFU, and appears to have served honorably since. We should all salute her.

And a lot of the minefields washed out. The dam was far more useful as a threat than it is as a wreck with an empty reservoir. And I expect activity across that reservoir any time now.

Ukrainians seem to be going for a at least a real distraction at the Antonovsky bridge.