dan/california

If they are still doing the grand encirclements, then Putin and co. are still not acknowledging the reality of the Russian position in Ukraine. Perhaps some of it is the military lying to Putin, lying to themselves, I would bet they still cling to the idea that caused them to underestimate Ukraine in the first place. What is certain, if their expectations are unrealistic, so will be their goals, Putin still desires to take the majority of Ukraine soon. A grinding attrition in eastern Ukraine while the Russian army reorganizes and regroups for the rest of the year does not fulfill the goal of taking Ukraine. Tho I wonder if this is even possible anymore, with sanctions sapping their ability to replace losses, could it be that their ability to undertake offensive action will simply decline as time passes vs Ukraine’s increasing ability to mobilize, train and equip their forces (with Western aid)?
or maybe they are just stupid and refusing to accept temporary defeat.

Which is why I am in favor of the NATO lays waste to Russian invasion force bit, but I digress...

Would the Russians have crushed Ukraine in less than a week, of hard fighting. I belive the respect for the Russian army, Would still be strong. But after this? The Russian Bear, became the Russian Lamb. And I do belive, that no one in any western Army, still have the same respect for the Russian Army anymore! 
I mean, even the kontraktnikis (the proffesional soldiers), Was drunk, high, or just deserted their vehicles. Even the so called elite of the Russian armed forces, the VDV. Showed themself, to be of no other use. Than to be blown up, and then move back in bad shape, to safe areas!
But what the Russians showed. Is why it´s so utterly important, to never, ever. Let these Drunks, Junkies, and criminals. Ever to be within your borders! Becouse they do the only thing they can there! Murder Civilians, rape Civilians, get drunk, get high, and die!  

It changed for the better because every european learned the lesson that aggressive expansion and especially killing other ethnicities is bad. And germans had it literally beat out of them. But russians have fully embraced nazi ideas in their own twisted way. Even if it's backwater nazism (can you imagine any german soldier looting worn panties?) - it's nazism still.
Because unlike germans - nobody has tried to punish them and instead rushed to feed their warmachine since 1991.

Mike? Mike Sparks? Is that you buddy? Where have you been!?

Russia reporting 3 people injured (with pictures of destroyed houses) due to 'shelling' in Golovchino, western Belgorod region. That's about 20 km from the border with Ukraine. Not impossible I suppose, but I'd have though that any Ukrainian artillery capable of firing > 20 km would have better things to do right now than lobbing a few shells at non-military targets just to be annoying.
 

In the meantime Zelenskys' aviser shed some light on the ongoing operations. According to him Russians didn't take Kreminna yet, no mention of Zarichne at all. He confirms the push at Sloviansk from Izium.
https://odessa-journal.com/arestovich-four-tasks-of-the-russians-in-the-new-offensive-in-ukraine/

Question is how many we can get there? AFAIK Germans have 150 available, this is not going to cut it in a long term. Unless Greeks are willing to part with more or less their whole fleet of 500. That's actually a way for Ze Germans to step up to the challenge - cancel those debts in exchange for the tanks.

Well for the Battle of Donbas there will be no armor reinforcements apart from Czech and Polish T-72s that are already there. Godspeed to Ukrainians manning those.
Assume all of this is to take longer, like in scenario when Russians do a full mobilization and somehow manage to bring The Horde to the borders in 6 months. M1 is the only modern western tank that there are a considerable reserves of. I really hope that USians are vacuuming sand from those as we speak. Same with remaining Bradleys if there are any lefts, M109 and M270 above all.
Scrapping single Leos and other European vehicles from around the continent won't produce much (as there are hardly any reserve) and will create logistical nightmare. USA has to save the day again I'm afraid.

And to point out more important than the 60-70% support for NATO membership is that the people opposing is only around 10%. Rest don't have opinion.
Meaning if there was a referendum it would be something like 80-90% result for NATO membership.
 
The NATO membership application will be send in the next 1-2 weeks.

I know you guys are really smart but  I think you are overlooking the operational benefits to this route. Looking at Combatintman's map it is the roughest route with the most forest. Rough Terrain and Forest = Less Agricultural land = Less tractors = Less operational losses. In order to keep the loss of equipment to a minimum they have selected the least tractor friendly terrain to conduct their assault!!  

Well he does have the good vs evil part right, but seems confused on who is representing which side. 

Where there is a tank, there will be a fuel truck very soon. Seems more profitable to wait unless things are desperate. Though there is a lovely thought about catching the BTG commander with his head out of the hatch.

My two cents, probably worth less than that. The initial invasion plan was basically thought up by Putin and the FSB, they literally didn't tell a fair bit of the army what was actually happening, and made a whole series catastrophic assumptions we have discussed exhaustively. The results were more or less catastrophic. What is happening now is the army's plan. They now have a realistic view of what their forces can do, and what the Ukrainians can do. Although Putin may be channeling his inner Hitler, and rushing things. So this time a round the basic plan is less likely to be just stupid, although depending on the aforementioned pressure from above it may be under resourced. Of course a more rational plan doesn't fix the now obvious problems with their doctrine, force structure, procurement, and and general tactical incompetence. Hopefully the bill the the Ukrainians have to stop it isn't unbearable.

What I'm saying is that while Russia exists nearby - there will be no peace. And if there's no Russia - there's no conflict or issues in Donbass and Crimea. It doesn't really matter if Russia has larger or smaller borders - as long as they have borders with us.
The only way it works is if Russia goes deep down into some kinda civil war and we get a really really fast track into NATO and by the time Russia is ready to come back and start a new war - article 5 makes it being too late.

Through deportations into far east and mass murder russians made sure only pro-russians remain a vast majority on occupied territories of Donbass. And yeah, we can't even imagine what sort of mass graves will eventually be found there after 8 years of occupation.
Not to mention that they mass brought in their broke ass looters they call an "army" to live in "vacated" homes over those 8 years.
So much like Crimea those territories should be retaken using a complete set of sanctions banning russian oil and gas so that Russia is so unstable - caring about occupied areas will be its last priority. If those sanctions will ever happen. Losing thousands of soldiers just to take areas too mentally infested with "russian world" - is not worth it.
It's important to save people in newly occupied territories though.

TheUkrainians appear to be quite willing to dispute who is going to encircle who, if this map has any bearing on reality. If valid this seems to support Steves position that the Russians are COMEPLETELY fought out.

Yes it is enough of an obstacle in many places - hence the 'Severely Restricted' marking in many places.  Severely Restricted in IPB terms = cannot be bridged by an AVLB.  I haven't finished doing that river yet but a lot of it is 'Restricted' which means that it can be crossed by an AVLB and some stretches will be 'Unrestricted' which is 5' gap or less (1.5m ish in new money).  Russia needs tactical bridging whichever Avenue of Approach is used and will likely need a lot of it.

I said awhile back that I think Putin is awaiting the fall of Mariupol and then he could announce to his people that Ukraine had been denazified and that the military objective of destroying the UA was complete. Then they would hunker down in the LDNR and south of the Dnepr, try to get a western or UN backed ceasefire and hold onto the LDNR and the land bridge. 
I agree that I don't think the UA or the Ukrainian people will settle for that now. So does Putin wait for Mariupol to fall, announce the above bullcrap and then pull back to the starting lines? Sell that as a win to his people and beg the west and UN to help get a ceasefire in place? Does the UA and the people of Ukraine settle for that or do they try to take back all their territory in Crimea too?
That might be a question for Haiduk and Kraze. Does Ukraine say that due to all the separatist stuff in the previously occupied areas it isn't worth taking back at the cost of however many UA lives? Or is the majority of the population in those areas wanting to be part of Ukraine again? Doesn't make too much sense to waste blood and treasure of Ukraine if it would be a drawn out anti-partisan operation but it might if the risk of that is diminished with the RA defeat.
Thoughts?

Sending the people who make your missiles to the front is a whole new level of eating your seed corn. Not only is that factory shut, they don't ever expect to reopen.

In a nice bit of irony when I tried to give this post a like I was met only with the notification that I am out of likes for today. 
So, I'll have to do this the old fashioned way: +1 good post
#morelikesplease

Today's shelling of the center of Kharkiv, reportedly 5 dead, 13 injured. Brave paramedic stayed under fire with wounded woman and shouts to the rest of wounded: "Lie down! Don't get up!"
 
 

I might dare for a longer post later, but confined to a phone I'll only say that what @The_Capt describes can be summarized as two robotic swarms battling it out - in the long term I agree that that's where we are heading. Technology is largely there, we just need to develop particular solutions and overcome ethical restraints
The concept was explored by various SF authors quite a bit, but I'd really like to recommend Stanislaw Lem's book "The Invincible". It was written in 1964, yet the maximalistic concept of the robotic swarm described there is really amazing even by today's standards, with 60 years of technology advancements. A pure hard SF gold, can't praise it enough. 

So ATGM, Drone and "EW AAA Light UGV Tank" are all the same species...unmanned systems.  My guess is that we are finally at the emergence of the unmanned RMA.  It is a misconception that RMAs happen suddenly, we get surprised by them because they evolve to a tipping point and then break.  Every RMA in history has taken decades and in some cases centuries to build up.  The reason for this is that they often rely on a combination of technologies and the doctrine of employment of those technologies to coalesce into the phenomenon.
So "unmanned" is pretty old as a concept.  Wiki says 1849 at Venice with "incendiary balloons" but Genghis used "flaming swallows", the Romans had flaming pigs and the Egyptians had freakin "war lions".  Then there are legions of "human unmanned systems" which span the gambit from "local partners" to "colonials" to "Indigenes".  This is not a new idea is my point.
So ATGMs are really just an evolution of "unmanned" which has evolved to "unmanned that carry and fire other unmanned" in the form of UAVs and UGVs.  So what?
Well unmanned, up until now, has never been able to combine autonomy with range, lethality and ISR that we are seeing in this war. These systems are going to get better in all these factors but the most important is "autonomy".  Fully autonomous systems do not need a continuous communications link back to a human to do their job.  One cannot cut that link because it is not required except to send ISR data back, which has work arounds. So the first thing we will likely see is a race to the bottom on autonomy because "more, better autonomy" will win.  Here AI/ML and CPU technology will be critical in creating unmanned advantage, all based on the ability to miniaturize processing power and create the software.
Range and lethality depend on energy.  How much can a system carry, how far and for how long. Energy production and storage technology also continue to accelerate, as does explosives technology. (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-29880-7_3)  So what?  Well it means that lethality will weight less and the energy systems that power carrying it are getting more efficient, so more lethal, longer and further.
Roll into this materials technology in both strength, weight and manufacturing costs and you now have a system one can mass produce easier and cheaper than a human based one.  
"No, Capt...so freakin what?!"
Well that one is hard.  The actual impact on the battlefield is really hard to guess because a lot of really smart people have not fully played all this out.  My guess (and it is a guess) is that warfare is in for a major shift at a texture level because you are basically changing a building block component; this is right there next to the impact of the changing "bullet".  Accept this time it is not the kinetic penetrator, it is information processing.
What might that look like?  Well I think it will look more like a knife fight in Frank Herbert's Dune but at really long ranges.  Each side will know where their opponent is; however, what is competitive is the resolution of that knowledge, higher is better as it allows for better precise targeting.  One will need precise targeting in order to know what and where to have the first stage of this kind of fight, "unmanned battle".  This will be highly attritional as it is hard to manoeuvre against unmanned systems in the classical sense because they cannot be shocked or scared.  So we will likely see and exchange of long range unmanned systems, all with high precision capability being counter with other unmanned defensive and offensive systems.  This may very well occur over the horizon before "people" even see each other.  
So back to the Dune knife fight, land formations will still have to manoeuvre quickly but it will be to positions of advantage for the slower body shield penetration battle (unmanned attrition).  Once one side buckles then we may see second stage forces, likely a combination of manned and unmanned close in quickly for the positional kills we are used to seeing in manoeuvre warfare, so fast finishing thrust once inside the body shield.  And for anyone taking notes, there is a spectrum between these two conditions so it won't be simple or predictable...this will be why we still need a human brain on the field, and that brain will need to be "forward enough". 
The "follow-ons" to all this are significant.  Mass and speed still matter but now mass has to be "dynamic mass" in ways we have not seen.  Systems have to be able to de-aggregate and aggregate much faster than the human based land warfare systems we know and love.  Slow mass is dead on the future battlefield, and I do not mean linear forward movement, I mean how fast it can change its nature.  So we will still need hammers, but before they become hammers they will have been wire-feelers, pliers, spears, arrows and hornets, all on the same axis of advance.   This requires a different military mind-set, far more inductive reasoning and frameworks than we currently employ or select for.  It will require a new logistics model, C4ISR enterprises that now include a concept of "AI/ML superiority"...the list goes on.
So you can see how there is a lot more at stake here than the venerable old tank.

There is a big shift towards unmanned aerial combat vehicles, a fancy name for unmanned fighters. The Loyal Wingman program is a precursor.  Removing the pilot from the airframe frees up a ton of weight...literally. Pilot, ejection seat,  life support gear, instruments: that's roughly a ton of weight. And, you're no longer limited to 9g (and that only for short times).
(And, one ton at 9gs means 18,000lbs of structure that does not have to be accounted for...or could be replaced with weapons, fuel, sensors, etc.)
The language is still catching up to the technology. Drone, quad, kamikaze, loitering munition, weapon truck, UCAV, etc...  
Optionally-manned equipment in combat is going to happen, both on the ground and in the air (as well as on/under the sea). 
These innovations will prove crucial when we battle Space Lobsters.    (Hey, you're still planning on making that, right?)