womble

Wasn't really a matter of trust. If Ukraine could've gotten guarantees out of the West (specifically USA, really), they would've, I'm sure. But "Assurances" are as far as they managed to push it, and they are accepted diplospeak for "We won't infringe on your sovereignty, and it'll take something additional for us to intervene if someone else does," and Ukraine's diplomats knew that, hence so should their subsequent governments. Decisions should have been, and I'm pretty sure were, made bearing that reality in mind, rather than hoping that the USA "meant 'guarantee'". That said, I firmly believe that it is in the interests of the entire world for this assault by Russia on the prevailing order of things to fail, and am very pleased that this realpolitik seems, for once, to align with the moral imperative to drive out the invader.

And since you're arguing in circles now, that'll be where I bow.

And that is as plain as the nose on Ronald Macdonald's face. So why is he continuing his doomed actions? Because that makes no sense either.

Nuclear war is not his preferred outcome. It just might be less unpalatable to him than it is to you and me, since we: expect to live a fair few years longer yet[ don't have a luxurious bolthole in which to spend our dying days.

And yet he's carrying on with his current course of action, which, by our metrics, is also dooming Russia as any kind of a world power. An inglorious end is coming. He wouldn't be the first megalomaniac to think that his followers' fiery death would be the best thing for them, to avoid the ignominy of becoming "just another kind of World Citizen". No, swimming in a champagne pool and wrestling (carefully parametered) robot polar bears isn't his first goal, but it might be what he settles for. Or maybe he thinks he's the Actual Russian Orthodox Messiah, and he actually thinks that after those two years he'll lead Russia's rise from the ashes to global primacy. After all, who's going to be there to stop him, the Superman?

It's not "merely" to live. At least not now. Right now, he reckons that there's a chance (who knows whether he thinks it's 50-50 or one in a million?) that Western resolve will fade, leaving Ukraine all vulnerable to Russia, before he gets to the point of hiding away and before he carks it from non-lead-poisoning/gravity mishap causes. As it sinks in that his desired result is never going to happen, he's going to look for an exit strategy. Maybe he'll run off to Venezuela/Qatar/Saudi/PRC or whoever will have him (and trust to their assurances that they won't cash in the political capital of turning over the C21st's greatest mass-murderer so far to justice), or maybe he will head for his bunker from where he knows he'll never face the ignominy of trial, because the ICC will be a smoking radioactive ruin and everyone will have other things on their mind than finding his bolt-hole and digging him out before his cancer catches up with him.

No. He dies in his bed surrounded by [pecadilloes] before he's 73. Old. Dying. Those are the important bits. Nothing to lose that he can't bear to see the back of. Which is where he'll be if his regime is crumbling. Sure, his bodyguards/concubines in the bunker might murder him when they realise he burnt the world down for his own funeral and wasn't ever planning even to be there, but hey, he's going to swing from a lamp post if he doesn't, so why not push the button out of spite?

I'd guess it's because, in the minds of those who make these decisions, tanks lead major offensives (that can drive deep into Russia) whereas artillery just blows things up, and can't create the conditions for sweeping movements. Or, at least, they think that's how the enemy will see them. I mean, all the evidence so far is that tanks aren't necessary, and certainly aren't the point of the spear for, sweeping offensives (that's those bois on quad bikes with Javelins and point-and-click "summon 155mm death" systems), and that mobile artillery is no longer just King, but Emperor of the battlefield. But hey, it's going to take the military a long time to come to grips with the changes, and 10 times that long for the politicos to catch up.

I think Putin is fine with nuclear death for nearly everybody else. He's old. He may be terminally ill. I don't know what his personal peccadilloes are, but I'd bet money that there's a bunker under the Urals, or even under Moscow, just stuffed to the blast-resistant doors with them, waiting for Armageddon. Two years underground with all the distractions his billions and absolute power can procure for him? Think he reckons he can probably stand it. If he's suffering from late stage cancer, two years is optimistic.

The "reluctance" about which I remain the most puzzled is the continued prohibition of the sale of Rheinmetall corporate assets (Marder) to an export customer (Ukraine). Setting aside whether it's an effective employment of Ukrainian foreign currency reserves, the day has long passed (it passed, I'd ballpark, when the first PzH2000 crossed the border into Ukraine) where this would be at all escalatory, so if the UKR government wants to buy them, why stand in the way of Rheinmetall making a buck off some "pre-loved" equipment sales to an ally whose goals and objectives align more strongly with NATO's than almost all their other allies, and even better with Germany's than some of NATO's members agendas do?

And remember leave some slack for language barriers, too (which extend way past simple vocabulary differences into modes of expression).

They get the (eventual, once they're fully in compliance) removal of national sanctions, and the beginning of being readmitted to the "Community of Nations". I guess. Again, sanctions. It's all that's left after the shouting and running about is over. Some of the "sanctions" that lift won't be so much official "thou shalt not"s being withdrawn as much as renormalisation of trading relationships. Being able to sell petrochem to the West at a market price, for example. Of course, all this relies on Russia not just crawling into its shell and telling everyone to bugger off, like the North Koreans have.

On Anti-drone warfare: How scalable is the tech for MANPADS/air-to-air missiles? Obviously, it's not cost-effective to shoot down a quadcopter with a Stinger or an IRIS, but could a smaller, less capable missile be developed that has "just enough" range and payload (or inherent KE, if you go for a collision solution rather than a flak head/shotgun shell) to neutralise a small or medium drone? You'd need to detect the loitering spy's presence first, but there seems to have been some work done on audio-location and recognition of the noisy li'l critters. Perhaps a larger drone airframe with the kill-missiles, and some friendly little drones scouting out as its 'ears' and then 'eyes'? Or a backpack sized thing with the audio detection and ranging stuff and a magazine of mini-missiles to fire off.

And what's going to happen to the rest of "whatever the Russian Government usually does"? If other nations struggle to spend 2% of their budget on defense, how can the Russians shake loose so large a proportion of revenues? I know they aren't exactly supporting an NHS/DHSS-standard social safety net...

Even when APCs were recognised as "just taxis", there were some occasions when they could be used in direct support roles, aye: once the anti-armour weapons of the opposition were neutralised, they could come onto the firing line or be used to get infantry through a belt of small arms fire. It's going to be a rare situation in Ukraine 2022-plus though, with effective responses to light armour, with enough range to answer HMGs so broadly distributed. I think the suggestion upthread of arming the troop transport with indirect fire weapons like auto-GLs, which, with the emergent battlefield net, could be almost instantaneous fire support responses available to a front line observer. I don't know how effective CB radar is against a "stream" of 40mm projectiles, but I suspect it will localise the origin less well than it could pinpoint mortars. Such a system would still be a target for enemy eyes covering your backfield, but at least wouldn't be fodder for every shoulder-held LAW.

Is that the same calming down he did when he asserted that Russia would not invade Ukraine? I mean, it is possible to argue that he's not invading anywhere, because Ukraine is Russia really, and I'm sure that's at least a part of the internal monologue of the arch-Kleptocrat, so if he can turn that sort of mental pike somersault with half twist, how hard is it for him to create some sort of internal delusion that his first-use of nukes isn't really a first use; it's just a test in battlefield conditions (or some other nauseatingly insupportable twaddle)? I should be clear that I don't think we're actually any closer to nukes getting detonated than we were, it's just that Putin's words don't in any way indicate that we're any further away either. And those other BRIC countries have people at least as cynical about the Russians as I am on their payroll, being paid to employ that cynicism; realpolitik is not a uniquely Western approach to international relations. So, Putin is just flapping his gums for his own benefit, since his putative fellow-travellers trust him no more than we do.

Lol. Thanks Grigb. And we're all glad you're still with us, however constrained your posting is. Good luck sorting out RL.

Except that everything he says is (well, might* be, therefore must be considered) a lie. His Mendaciousnous' words reassure me not at all. Edit: * At least 50% of everything he ever says is. "Might" is quite a large chunk of probability, here.

I think the West joining in with more earnest would be the trigger that Putin needs to capitulate and remain in charge. He can't lose to Ukraine, but he can perhaps, spin an "honourable surrender" to the "overwhelming force" of NATO. Even to the point of withdrawing from Ukraine (including Crimea) entirely. It'd be kindof a one sided surrender, as he wouldn't be able to go down the "reparations and repatriation of the abducted" route (though he would pretty much have to return the vast majority of the POWs Russia is holding). So he'd declare defeat-as-(moral)-victory, pull back over the border and hope that would be enough for the psy-operatives to swing a route to the cessation of sanctions and return to status-quo-ante (without Russians in the wrong country). Hopefully the resolve would remain, now that the traumatic severing of the NG umbilical is pretty much a Done Thing, for sanctions to remain until someone in Russia gets their act together to hand over all the frellin' criminals to The Hague and actually do some material apologising (though hopefully all the kleptocrats' billions will already have been seized and turned over to the reconstruction effort. Perhaps this is a contributory cause to the lines that NATO have set for aid to Ukraine. They want Ukraine to beat Russia without "too much help", so that the "we lost to perfidious NATO" line cannot be more strongly pushed, and Putin has to go as part-and-parcel of whatever collapse eventually causes the Russians to give up and go home. And perhaps Ukraine is in (private) agreement that a Russia that "gets away with it" (which just clearing off with their tails between their legs with a semi-credible justification would constitute) is just a threat for further down the road. Perhaps the theatre of "Give us long range rockets" "No, we don't want you crippling Russian infrastructure, however justified it may be," to-and-fro is political theatre.

Not sure it would. Concrete in large blobs takes a while to cure, and you'd have to wait to tip each batch out of some pretty significant shuttering. Half-assed welding of hollow mild steel sheet pyramids would be pretty fast and either hand-plastering some concrete on the outside, or using the steel as the inners for wooden moulds could be pretty quick, relative. And as has been pointed out, the weight and volume savings for deployment would be very significant indeed. Cost-wise, I'm pretty sure that much steel is more expensive than the concrete, though maybe not much more expensive than the rebar needed to do the task properly.

I take this as strong evidence that good gameplay trumps graphics for game popularity and longevity...

And they're going to have to find replacements for the civilian trucks we saw them dragoon into service once their military logistics started to crumble (that have since probably been abandoned in a muddy Ukrainian field, or been blessed by St Himars).

Yeah. He got ahead of the game a decade or more ago, getting the okay for an illegal mercenary company to establish itself with the Kremlin's (sub rasa) sanction. But he's "pushing from behind", AIUI, rather than being "encouraged" to provide for his own security at the front.

The later engines are iterations on the earlier. They're just upgrades, with bug fixes and feature improvements. There's very little reason for a player of the game to even consider the differences; progress is pretty much uniformly positive.

I thought it was interesting that he ascribes his command's failure to inform him that he was surplus and supernumerary to the additional resources being directed to the unit of which he was nominally part. How did that come to be? His personal fortune? I mean, he's an opportunist bandit, so I suppose he has some misappropriated personal means. Bit irregular, however. Or maybe the Kremlin orter conscript some of the kleptocrats and let them pour their personal wealth into their units' log trains...