dan/california

They could use the Russian cellular network, for instance. Shouldn't be that hard to get a Russian SIM.
Or maybe they don't need to at all. Oil refineries are big and very stationary targets. With modern vision systems, this could be preprogrammed as well.

This is the kind of thing I would like to see more of:
 
 

Ignoring Trump for the moment as I personally don't think that he is the determining factor.  The war will not end regardless of the US.  This is Ukraine's decision and EU support will continue.  Not sure why you assume the EU will just follow the US on this.  What could happen is a drop in US support levels but there are many in the GOP who want to continue support for Ukraine to the point they helped force the vote in the house despite Trump.  It is worth watching the response to MGT's motion to vacate on C-Span.  She got booed from both sides of the aisle for what was essentially her reaction to Ukraine aid passing.
Russia has made clear what it wants from this war and those demands are not ones Ukraine can or will concede to.  If there is a push you can be sure that references to Munich "peace in our lifetime" will be blasted everywhere.

Not really for this forum but don't be so sure, so quickly..
Trump can't even get 100% votes of the core Republican base. Nikki Haley who stood down from the primary campaign has gotten close to 20% of the Republican base in vital swing states without campaigning!!!
There are a lot of Republicans that won't be fooled a second time around and will vote Biden instead.
You should look more carefully at what is actually happening than assume he will win. There are some strong headwinds, and not just his potential jail time for contempt of court.
Personally I would comfortably bet some donuts that he won't be reelected...
 

One point missed on the Trump thing:  he has borrowed money from RU oligarchs.  We know this because his son admitted it on video ~10 years ago or so.  He was mocking the US banks the wouldn't loan to the serial defaulter anymore and said (paraphrase) 'we just borrow from RU instead'.  Also RU oligarchs had bought some of his properties at oddly non-market prices, leading to some wondering about money laundering.  So when we talk about what Trump would do we need to recognize the very high probability that he is on some level a leveraged RU asset.  And his behavior toward Putin/RU has certainly been like that over the years.  
Plus Zelensky refused his extortion racket which led to Trump's first impeachment (he was completely guilty, by the way).
So pretending he'd be doing anything statesmanlike or diplomatic is absurd.  He would serve Putin and abandon Ukraine.  

54th Brigade (K-2 drone unit) stops a 3 wave mechanised attack of more than a dozen vehicles.
Video has good english CC translation and explanations
 

Robin Williams had a great gag about men having both a brain and a penis, but only enough blood to run one of them at a time.

I understand it was a simple case of”d#$k gets hard, brain gets soft!”

Three different stories in Defense One that indicate the army is learning from the Ukraine war.

The Bradley is pretty close to the only AFV in this war getting decent press. Do we think this is reflective of its actual effectiveness, or is it that Ukraine finds it useful maximize its exposure. And if the effectiveness differential is real, why?

I listened to this on my way to work this morning: https://pca.st/episode/4f1c5971-2b30-4198-9047-da1050e9f673
It's a good podcast. They don't always have things right but it is interesting to listen to them talk about politics in various eastern Europian countries.
This episode is about Turkey, China and Russia battling for influence in the Asian former USSR republics. 
Gives some glimpses in the internal rot inside Russia and China's growing influence.

We've seen a lot of videos of AFU Bradleys using their 25 mm cannons. Here is a new video of a TOW in action. 😎

Honestly I always felt that this was Putin's hope all along. It's not even Trump specific. Putin has done everything he can to just sew chaos (I call him a Chaos Monkey). If he can get an adversary focused on something else he's happy. If he can get allies to squabble his double plus good happy.
Not exactly a grand planner just create as much chaos as possible and throw your weight around while everyone else is busy trying to figure out who did what to whom. It never was a grand 4D chess game with.
Not exactly a new thought here.

I tried my best to find the source, couldn't find it so.

Ok...I gotta dozen Krispy Kreme jelly donuts for a stake. 
How many dollars you want to bet?

Three things it is important not to underestimate: 
1. Trump's essential physical cowardice. 
2. Trump's affinity for dictators. 
3. The chaos a Trump victory will create in the effective use of American power.

My anecdotal experience with The Kids™ is actually quite different. Without any education in nukes/deterrence, they tend to assume the most hysterical posture when someone like Putin flexes his ICBMs. I get it. It takes some getting used to when someone keeps talking about putting a gun to your head but the understanding of these things is woefully inadequate. And by The Kids™, I should be clear that pretty much covers everyone under 40...to include a whole lot of journalists in this neck of the woods. 

I dunno, maybe.  I think Trump learned a lot from the pandemic, it basically killed his second term.  Public screw ups one cannot blame on someone else easily, stick.  I am sure Putin is confident he can handle Trump but the stakes are extremely high if he gets it wrong.
Putin's best bet is that Trump is so focused on revenge and retaliation which will result in a tidal wave of law suites and counter-suits, the US becomes even more dysfunctional.  We are likely to lose the US as a global leader because it is all caught up in its own sh#t.  
We can definitely agree that Russia will be in no position to take on NATO - even a reduced NATO in less than 5-10 years.  Hell, if we are smart we keep piling onto Ukraine an bolster them to a deterrence via denial situation.

Consistent elements about Trump:
- Needs to look like a "winner" at all times.
- Control freak.
- Onion skin ego.
Putin had better damned well care about how Trump looks because his entire freakin plan is resting on Trump as president actually moving in directions that support Russian interests.  If Trump makes a deal and then gets screwed by Putin, I will put money on the bar that the outcome will not go well for Russia.  

That podcast on wargaming was interesting, and it reminded me of a wargame we played in highschool sometime in the late 80s/early 90s. It was a mandatory part of the curriculum and took about a half day if I recall. A huge map of the world was pasted onto the assembly room floor and students were randomly grouped into different countries with different resources and requirements. We had to self-organize to elect leaders (or not), make alliances with other countries (or not), then declare the actions we would take to try to satisfy the requirements of our population - attack, trade, build and so forth. It was similar to Diplomacy.
Anyway, the gimmick was that after a certain number of turns we all reflected on the state of the world, which had by that point deteriorated into exactly the sort of clusterfunk you would expect if you had random highschoolers try their hand at managing global affairs. Then the organizers dropped a huge vat of beads onto the floor where each bead was allegedly the size of the blast radius of large nuclear warhead - one bead for every active warhead at the time. And then we were made to clean them all up, soberly contemplating this worst possible outcome.
I assume this was less of a tool for research and more a tool for education - or propaganda, depending on your perspective - but the impact was real. I was often surprised to hear kids growing up just a few years after me didn't go through these sorts of activities. I think about this when each round of Russian propaganda comes through about how "this time, the nukes really could fly!", and I wonder how hollow that sounds to people who didn't grow up in a Cold War context. "Nukes? Okay, boomer." I doubt it's as visceral to people who grew up with the Global War on Terror as "their" war.

This sounds about right.  The reality though is that this is a poor strategy in many ways.  This is betting a lot on a single highly chaotic horse.  Not only does a Trump admin need to sign off on forcing Ukraine into a disadvantaged peace, it needs to begin renormalization with Russia under a Putin regime - this may or may not happen.  And even if it does, the EU still gets a vote.  The EU has already pulled away from Russian energy (at least directly) and no western company is going to be eager to jump back into Russia after watching what happened to companies stuck holding the bag back in ‘22.  And forget about loans to Russia from the West, or possibly anyone else for that matter.
So Russia’s military and economy are seriously degraded from ‘22 levels and they may very well remain isolated. That is not a good start point for planning a second invasion in 4-8 years.  An invasion would need to be after Trump leaves office otherwise Putin risks making him look like a weak chump who got duped, and Putin definitely does not want to do that.  So Russia winds up in an overall weaker and more vulnerable position post-war while gaining literally meters of blasted wasteland that have no real strategic significance.
This could very well be the beginning of a slow motion Russian collapse in the making…and this is Putin’s best scenario.  In reality Russia and Putin are the ones running out of time.  Most assessments put a 2026 best before date for Russia before things start to really fall apart.  So what happens if Biden wins?  What happens if Trump decides he can make a better deal elsewhere?  Basically this reduces Russian option spaces down to a singularity, which historically is never a good thing.

OK, my answer to the question "what is Putin actually up to?" (which should be read with a massive dose of skepticism, as it involves making a theory of mind of man having massively more information and usually thinking in massively different way than I; i.e., a wild guess)
1. Putin thinks the war will end through Donald Trump becoming the President of the US and successfully implementing his plan to pressure Ukraine politically into armistice on the basis of status quo in early 2025.
2. Therefore, the war has a probable end date in early 2025 which is based  on external political considerations and not dependent on any actions of Ukraine or Russia. All territorial gains must occur in 2024 and on the other hand, the risk of all losses is also limited in time to 2024. Timeline after early 2025 does not matter much - Russia is not worried about NATO or the Ukraine rekindling the conflict at any reasonable time after 2024, and even if its army is generally wrecked, it thinks it will always be beenough to defend the armistice line (even provided that NATO and the UKR muster political will sufficient to even think of restarting the war). 
3. Therefore Russian army is going all in to maximise territorial gains in 2024, particularly in the Donbass area which Russia claims to be its own, but has not conquered it yet. If they are successful in Donbas or if they statemate in Donbass, they may try to do the same thing in the Zaporozhie area. They do not care about the losses, they do not care about the war materiel stocks (they know they won't be attacked) and they do not care that much about their economy either, which they think will somehow limp through the rest of 2024 anyway, and Russians will start rebuilding it in from 2025.