dan/california

The harsh discipline is a big influence in what makes the Russian effectively have a different morale effects table than other nations' units.  But there are other factors, which IMHO include at least the following significant ones.
1) fear of being captured by the Ukrainians; this creeps up consistently in the videos - RUS soldiers consistently talk about surrendering being the worst fate. This would be a huge factor as it eliminates the simplest option of getting away from combat. I do not know the reason for this belief - obviously we do not see everything on videos, but those we see do not suggest that the Ukrainians subject the POWs to atrocities. As opposed to Russians themselves, who seems to starve the prisoners to the edge of death.
2)Culturally low value of human life - I think that the evidence of this war in particular strongly supports the thesis, that Russians culturally assign low value to human life, which includes their own. It has long been a subject of jokes that Russians use human life as a disposable asset in lieu of machines * but I was not sure if it has any relation to reality. Well, it has.  A hypothesis suggests itself, that the Russian life feels so unpleasant and dangerous, that they are not willing to expend much effort to keep it. To a psychologist trained in the West, they probably exhibit symptoms of a depression.
 
*e.g. An old Polish joke recounts a dialogue in a Russian trench during WWII: Comrade commander, German tanks incoming. How many? 20. Take a grenade, make them run away. 5 minutes later: Comrade commander, the tanks have run away. Good lad, give the grenade back .

I don't think Ukraine is holding back on hitting airfields because they are too far down on the priority list 😉 Long range drone strikes have been successful because they are hitting undefended targets. Airfields are defended.

Maybe not with F16s and ATACMs or Storm Shadows, but I think once Ukraine runs out of refineries and radars to blow up with long-range drones, they might go back to these sort of actions.
They don’t need to take out every plane, but if they can destroy a few percent every few months, that will have an effect.

I would postulate that any attempts to seriously mutiny or otherwise disobey orders are treated very harshly. We hear a lot of horror stories about caging soldiers, denying them medical treatment and just general poor levels of treatment by other units or officers as typical measures put in place.

The thing with such measures is it does not eliminate the reasons why the soldiers are understandably upset, and one wonders if it might lead to more dangerous implosions down the line as things drag on. Incidents where Russian officers are killed are ones to look out for if large enough units of soldiers finally snap and decide to take matters into their own hands. Its happened before in Russian history in similar situations and these were not exactly pretty. 

That is not an indirect fire system, it is an industrial party noise maker.  If I am not mistaken that is a rocket pod from a helicopter?  

I know and the reality applies for either side, not just russia of course.
Probably to more western armies than many people here think. A couple hundred planes won't solve this, you would have to solely win by air and only the US can realistically do that. 
It was meant as a jab at the idea that russias vehicle losses at Krynki dont matter because hordes of infantry and their chicken cage motorcycles will frontally assault a ww1 trench better than a BTG or 10, that are listed on Oryx now instead. 
 

I have been asking myself how on earth the RA is holding itself together for about 6 months now.  The first year, ok, any military has built in resilience.  That winter offensive in ‘23, pretty horrendous but “crazy F’n Russians”.  But the fall-winter offensive this last year…?  I have no idea how a military holds itself together after these kind of losses. Not just the dead soldiers but we are talking NCOs and officers too.  Granted the RA never really made any significant gains but still, all these losses in people and equipment have to add up eventually.  Every human organization has a breaking point and cannot sustain attrition forever.  I can say that I am confident that whatever military the RA is now, it is a shadow of the one that crossed the borders in ‘22.  All of the peacetime qualified crews, technicians and specialists have to be so severely attrited by now that all the RA can do is “meat offensives.”  Or dig in and hold on.  The professional RA has been shattered in this war.

This is the complication with the idea of beating Russia slowly, in a way that doesn't cause it to collapse. The entire system has rebuilt itself to commit to this war. There is zero chance of a course change with Putin in power, and very little chance of one if the is wider regime continuity when Putin leaves. So this is going to go on until Russia obliterates its capacity to function as a coherent state. 
 

"destroying russian vehicles doesnt matter"


 
the new drone proof Z-Sturm assault chicken cages. 

Umm, except @Letter from Prague didn't present that stark binary at all, so it's your logic that is faulty in this case. Please go back and reread.
What he did say is entirely correct: backing and arming Ukraine's ongoing evisceration of the Red Army DOES carry a risk of creating a broad collapse in Russia. Just how it is. 
...I'd also observe that LfP's English is many orders of magnitude better than our Czech. We are lucky to have his commentary.

I am not so sure the elites in RU really want a larger state more than they just want to stay rich and powerful.  And I bet a majority of them don't give a damn about UKR or the baltics more than they care about making money.  There's plenty of money to be made in a dictatorial petro-state like RU with a pretty good internal security apparatus.   This war has been a disaster for the oligarchs.  Some have suffered greviously, even losing their mega-yachts!  

Exactly why we should pursue it. Two decades where we can buy time and hope something shifts.  Good strategy is always about keeping as many options open for as long as possible.  You point to 1918 Germany, I point to 1952 Korea.  We can risk manage a frozen conflict and slowly dying Russia.  We cannot risk manage rapid shifts and movements.  20 years is long enough to pull Ukrainian into NATO and make it freakin Poland, complete with NATO forces on the ground.  This war would not have happened at all had we done this in 2015.  The lesson here is to not waste strategic pauses.

Galliotti checks in on the very things we are discussing.

Galliotti checks in on the very things we are discussing.

Fine with that, so long as it gets dragged out.  We got incredibly lucky back in 89-91.  The Soviet Union folded up quickly but did so into pre-existing states.  Where there was no coherent pre-existing state we got war (see Yugoslavia).  A Russian collapse does not have that safety net, so it needs to be gradual. A fast boil collapse has every chance of having very bad things happen, and (frankly bafflingly ignored by some on this forum) in the modern age bad things do not stay neatly within lines on maps.

Exactly.  Putin is working very hard to keep Russian misery pointed at the West and not him…and on this one he may be winning. Now whether Russia hits a boiling point is a good question, and like so many of these things unpredictable.

opportunism, 
Take the most out of it as you can as long as the rules of the game are like this. Ever noticed that when people play poker for real money (how Ukr values its troops) they play different than when its with beads (how RU seems to value its troops).

They've been made since early Feb 2022.  The Biden admin even posted pictures to the world to make clear that they were visible.  What's changed is Ukraine's reach and precision at the end of that reach.
You can't move a vehicle in the open without being seen by Planet Labs.  You can't move a bicycle without being seen by Maxar.  The NRO can probably see you move a Big Gulp to the other end of the picnic table.

Twitter hates me so this is a reddit link of a Ukrainian FPV causing a Russian SPG to vaporize. This is at least one piece of proof that either the Russians are pushing their guns stupidly far forward, or that the Ukrainians have figured both the range issues for both the drones themselves, and the comms links to start hunting Russian artillery at its usual deployment ranges. Or perhaps some level of drone autonomy. If it is happening at scale the Russians won't like it very much.

So on that first post, this is what we mean when we say “illuminated battlefield”.  Neither side can move vehicles or even pers without getting picked up well out and then lit up. This was up near Sumy which is over 100km from Kharkiv.  We have seen this again and again in this war.  The larger the concentration, the greater the likelihood of interdiction and annihilation.  So we then see both sides penny packeting mech to sneak them forward, and everyone in the west goes “see, they don’t know how to do combined arms!”  I am beginning to think that it is us who don’t know how to do modern combined arms in this environment.

Definitely not an elite well trained mercenary you would see in a Hollywood movie.
Sounds like they are trying to explain the concept of a backblast area to this merc. However much the Russians promised to pay him, something tells me he may will not live enough to collect that money.

That's an interesting observation from Tom Cooper. Do we have more evidence for that claim? 
https://xxtomcooperxx.substack.com/p/ukraine-war-29-may-2024

Getting the distinct impression that in true Russian fashion, nobody bothered to prepare staging areas across the border to effectively minimize the damage should the rules of engagement imposed by the US and other nations change. Plus ca change plus c'est la meme chose.

Karakurt-class can carry 4 Kalibr cruise missiles.