rocketman

I honestly do not know.  Ukraine is in a tricky situation right now. Unless they want this thing to drag on for months they need Russia to have an out (as in "get  the hell out") but at the same time they need to keep up the pressure so that Russia does not get too comfortable.
Second to this I am not sure about UA offensive combat power.  This hybrid/crowd sourced warfare worked very well in basically integrating a bunch of local defence into a living nightmare for invading forces.  If they can somehow point that at something and get it moving we then have to see how it does against conventional troops dug in WW1 style.  My honest bet is this will look like steady chewing until they see an opportunity for an operational move (if they see one).  But again too large a gesture and Russia might dig in a choose the hard way.
UA will definitely pursue c-moves, my bet would be around Kyiv as top priority and then any other major urban centers they can to get the guns out of range.  Then once they do that then it will depend what the political level want to demonstrate.  I am not sure the UA can do large scale offensive actions, it will be Xmas morning if they can take their current approach on the road in a big way.
Donbas (DR/LR) are definitely in play, but I gotta tell you I honestly think Crimea is off the table.  The West was ready to basically live with it, I am sure Ukraine is still pissed but we are talking Sevastopol and the Russians are not going to give that up.  As you point out the Russians might just play the race card and declare it an attack on the homeland, which not only means mobilization but we might still get a chance to see them WMDs we were all worried about.  And I am not sure the West would see a tac nuke on a UA offensive in the Crimea in the same light.  We were definitely not cool with killing civilians but UA conventional troops advancing on Russian soil makes this really awkward and weird because every nuclear power has pretty much declared they will do the same thing.  It probably also explains why we have not seen deep attacks into Belarus and Russia before now, all those railyards are actually in drone range.
So stay strapped in cause it could still get wackier.

Just a ruse to redeploy to the south and to Donezk. They hope they can extract and shift more forces this way unharmed. Ukraine should wipe them out whenever they get the chance. Only the dead don´t fight another day. 

Please! Can we not have the discussion of these pictures!! Of prisoners of war! Real, or not!! No POW´s Should be filmed according to the Geneva convention!

Never interrupt the enemy when he's making a mistake.
trad., anon.

John, 
 
having read your last post, I’m sincerely hoping for a vacation coming your way soon.
 
the crisis actor “application” regarding the Boston bombing (for those of you who understand Reddit, read the section it was posted to) is the final straw for me. 
 
You truly are acting like a buffoon. 

Re conspiracies - my wife is Polish, escaped the iron Curtain as a child, so her parents were heavily influenced by Soviet paranoia etc. When we met she very regularly repeated conspiracy theories (not too insane, tight wing nonsense, more the THE GOV IS OUT TO GET YOU AND IS BEHND EVERY DAMN BUSH! - which, of course was TRUE in Poland in the 80s. 
Buuut she then grew up in Canada. So, to me, her readiness to jump to a conspiracy was baffling. Eventually I developed a line:
Could this be cause by basic human incompetence and/or laziness?
Disprove that to me First, THEN let's talk about the possibility of a conspiracy.
Because a true conspiracy requires a lot of hard serious dedicated work from a lot of people and I'm sorry, I've worked with a lot of people and a lot of them do not work hard or with dedication.
The VAST, VAST majority do the bare minimum and GTFO home for dinner.
Conspiracies require homework. Who the hell wants to do homework after work!?
This is why so many actual conspiracies quickly fall apart - they're a lot of bloody work and at some point, someone is going to say - fuuuck another goddamn photo to doctor? Goddamit. K, after this last episode of The Batchelorette...

Guys,
So beyond the obvious competing narratives out there (nazis, bio-weapons, crisis actors etc) let's remember what this entire thing is, an egregious violation.  There has been no, and I mean zero, casus belli established for this invasion. 
People are pointing to the US invasion of Iraq in '03 in some weird "well two wrongs make it ok to kill thousands of civilians", however, the US did take their case to the UN, they were attacking a strongman dictator who had; invaded a neighbor for "reasons", used massive oppression on his own people, and had even employed chemical weapons against civilians.  So we are not even in the same strategic context here as Ukraine; a free democracy that had not even coming close to behaving like Saddam Hussein.
I have stayed out of a lot of these conspiracy theories floating around but even if the wildest ones are true (which I do not believe for a second) and let's say the Ukrainians were employing a combination of recovered nazi-occult and alien technology to make all Russian bears impotent...in the modern world your first response to that is not rolling in 120 BTGs!!  Worse, you cannot back that up with "well they were gently rolling in 120 BTGs"...no such reality exists.  That much metal + ammo + scared teenagers is never going to equal "gentle violation of sovereignty".
We can play the point-counter point game all day and try to gain political points but all of that is noise around the central and incontrovertible fact that Russia illegally invaded another sovereign European nation in a gross violation of sovereignty and global order...this is not "ok", this will never be "ok".
Finally, I know there are theories floating out there that the Russian Restraint can explain the slowness and stalling on the Russian side.  This is abject nonsense.  It is much, much harder to try and do a soft invasion.  The US military tried in Afghanistan and Iraq and they found it nearly impossible to avoid collateral damage and civilian deaths.  I have seen nothing to suggest that Russian ISR and Joint Targeting is so sophisticated and disciplined that they have any idea what they are hitting beyond..."hit there".  This baby hospital thing has been brought up, right sure....how exactly did Russian Joint Targeting know the hospital was empty (which it was not)?  How did Russian C2 know this when they don't even know where most of their own troops are?
So I am going to offer some simple rules that people can chose to adopt or not:
- Precision is hard, incredibly hard.  If your theory depends on greater Russian precision in anyway shape or form stop and think.
- Organization is hard.  If your theory depends on highly organized Russian capability...stop and think.
- Conspiracies are hard, in this day and age nearly impossible.  If your theory is relying on a "big secret"...stop and think.  All western governments leak like a sieve and even the autocratic ones bleed data like a stuck goat.  No government on earth, even NK, has an airtight seal on what information it leaks out.  So if you are relying on a "star chamber" or "black sites"...stop and think.
- If it looks like a Duck, stop calling it a Kitty Cat.  War is incredibly hard so the simplest explanation tends to be the right one.  It is the principle that has actually put this thread and forum out in front.  We have avoided over-analyzing (I know right?!) compared to others chasing some theories.  If Oryx has 297 open source pictures of destroyed/abandoned Russian tanks, well given the UA was outfitted with thousands of next gen ATGMs...it is not a hard squint to see the freakin quacking water fowl.  This is not some photoshop campaign for the ages, the Russians have lost a lot of tanks.  Is it 297, probably not could be more or Orxy might have some double accounting but it is a lot. 
- Assumptions, Factors and Deductions.  All this comes down to Assumptions, Factors (or Facts) and Deductions.  As I tell dead-eyed Majors, "make sure the line between these items is as straight and short as possible".  Make damn sure your Assumptions and Facts stay on speaking terms and then do not under any circumstances let the line between Factors and Deductions turn into a Pollock painting.  War is hard enough, complex enough and weird enough...it does not need your help in any of these areas. 
Go with the god of your choice grognards,  and try and stay out of trouble.
 

As soon as you see the words "crisis actor", you should know whatever the story is, it's nonsense.
I'm not aware of any event in the world that was actually staged using "crisis actors" - it's just a right-wing meme.
In fact, if you thought about it critically for a bit, you'd realise that such a thing would be almost impossible to pull off - you'd have to get everyone for miles around to buy into it, or someone would be saying "they're not from around here" and variations on it.
PS: the woman you're calling a "crisis actor" died of her wounds.

There it is...moving the goal post.  I have avoided getting into "well here is how the Russian's could have succeeded" discussions too deeply as there is still a real war and it is kinda disrespectful to people still fighting and dying but maybe we are far enough along to offer a few ideas.
If Russia had made the Donbas and the infamous "land bridge" to the Crimea to sole operational objectives of this war, they may have actually achieved, or at least had a better chance at their strategic and political ones.  If they had focused their main efforts to 2 main axis of advance with a limit of exploitation pretty close to what we are seeing on the maps now in the SE, along with "shock and awe" strikes across Ukraine they could theoretically have:
- Achieved their objectives much faster by concentrating their combat power and logistical capability.  This would have prevented or at least mitigated the UA build up and influx of western support.
- They could have simply dug in, took Mariupol and the land bridge and declare "mission accomplished".  Russia would have demonstrated its "immense power" to the world.  A shortened war (and I am not talking 72 hours but maybe a couple weeks) would have lessened western resolve and shaped the negotiation table.
- A short hard modest successful demonstration would have left a lot of "doubt" on the table for the West and Ukraine.  This would have made a threat of "further special actions" much more effective on the calculus on the West.  It also would have kept a lot more strategic options open as compared to where they find themselves now.
- It may have fractured the west more than fused it.  If Russia could demonstrate restraint and humanity in a "internal border dispute" it immediately call into question the economic sacrifices the rest of Europe will be making in what has become an economic war with Russia.  Further, it would play on the ever widening political divides in just about every western democracy.  It would have kept China very happy, without risking becoming one of their provinces. 
- If Putin really was a "genius", his play would be to immediately call for UN Peacekeepers in a ZOS once he had gained what he needed to.  Not western troops but Malaysians or Brazilians, a crew he could keep in his pocket.  We would have crumbled into a hot burning mess if Russia, backed by China and India, called on the global collective diplomacy and security body to intervene...it would have broken us.  If we say "no freakin way", then who are the warmongers who are pushing their agenda and supporting a massive military industrial complex?  If we say yes, we are in for years of negotiation and diplomacy, likely false but we built the system now we have to use it, all the while those sanctions start to go stale and erode.  
But here we are on the possible threshold of some really scary stuff, led by an insulated and deluded madman surrounded by yes-men, who decided that he could pull off a modern land invasion on the scale of the Fall of France with a couple hundred thousand poorly supported troops and complete failure to establish pre-conditions or align his strategies. 

Whatever scenario happens - in the aftermath the West should send an ultimatum that any sanctions go away only after complete nuclear disarmament of Russia.
Because anything less than that will mean another big war very soon - as Russia will keep threatening the world with a nuclear war and remain an ever present threat.
And if they refuse - then they should become an isolated backwards country with ever rotting nukes.
But who am I kidding.

Fixed that for ya
Personally, I suspect that reclaiming Donbass and giving up Crimea is enough of a save to shove Putin off UKR.
BUT, before formal peace takes hold, Ukraine should trash the Crimean bridge with PGMs, as a final last FU. If they can hit those landing ships they can sure as heck drop-kick that 2nd rate make-work.
Turn the Crimea into a deathly financial albatross around Putin's neck. Plus the joy of destroying such a high-profile project, directly attached to him.
"You want Crimea? Sure! Here! Oh, wait one sec - [BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM] yes, NOW we're at peace. Go explain to your useful idiots in Sebastapol why you don't have another 225 billion rubles to repair their land bridge with the Motherland.
****er."
Russia isn't the only nation that can communicate with violence.
 

Should we really be supporting a country 🇺🇦 where everyone films vertically?

So this was from this board on 26 Feb:
"Overall Summary:  As of the first 72 hours of the war, it appears that the Russian military has overestimated its own capabilities and/or the capabilities of Ukrainian resistance and has not likely met the timelines it had set during pre-war planning.  The assessment is that the next 24-48 hours will be critical in the outcome of this war and if Russian forces are not about to take Kyiv and inflict some serious damage to the Ukrainian people's will, their own strategic center of gravity will become more vulnerable. "
That was 2 days into the entire thing.
Since then we have heard a lot of pundits and retired military folks try and wrestle with this whole thing.  I am not surprised formal DOD, MOD assessments are showing what they are to be honest because pretty much from the start of the this war just about everyone has been using macro-quantitative calculus to try and predict/model what has been going on. 
On a CNN video just a few days ago Gen Petraeus was describing the situation in Mariupol and why it matters.   He did a pretty good job describing the drive for a "land-bridge" between Crimea and the Donbas and why the Russians are trying so hard in this area.  Then he slipped right into the old macro-quantitative thinking.  He outlined how once Mariupol was taken it would free up Russian forces to advance north and cut off great swaths of Ukrainian in the East.  I have seen various predictions of Russian "pincer moves" and the like.  This all makes perfect sense if one is applying conventional warfare metrics, all largely based on macro-quantitative calculus of force sizes/ratios and combat power.
What they are missing, and frankly it is not surprising to see it emerge on a wargaming board, is a view through a lens of micro-qualitative calculus; playing CM, in all its versions, has changed the way we see warfare.   All CM veterans see the signs of something different at a micro-level: abandoned vehicles, loss of high value assets, loss of high level commanders, videos of embarrassing Russian cluster-f#cks and evidence of UA successes just about everywhere.  A lot of these metrics are qualitative and when combined with the macro-quantitative they create a very different picture. 
Social media has allowed us to see a macro - micro-qualitative view as well; we can basically upscale our micro-view through very wide sampling.  By doing this, a lot of us have noted that the texture of this war is looking very different.  It is one, for the Russians, of extreme friction caused by the UA approach.  The Russians are fighting in an operational tar pit, the entire battlespace is sticky for them.  Some of this is by their own shortfalls, while in many places it is by design by the defending forces. I do not know who the military master-mind is on the Ukrainian side but he has clearly been reading about Finland, Giap and the Comanches.  The UA has not only stopped the Russian military, they changed the fabric of the battlespace for them.
This thing is not over yet and will likely continue to evolve.  I am not entirely onboard with the Russian collapse scenario, but we are literally a couple key indicators away.

"Komrad General, Sir! I'm here to report-"
"WTF!? Why are you here? REPORT WHAT?!"
"Sir, we are low on fuel, and-"
"Everyone's low on bloody fuel! You could have texted that, y'know! No need to come here trailing a comms signature like a goddamn skunk in a kindergarten!! Text, man, text!"
"I did. Many times. With photos-"
"Photos?! Are you nuts!? Have you any idea what that does to my data, you marsh-dwelling imbecile? We're literally ROAMING in Ukraine!!"
"Sir, I felt it my duty to-"
"-to get me KILLED!?"
"Sir, we're eight km from the front! They couldn't hit a barn at thi-
 
 
And SCENE.

Respected experts would be all over finding out why their assumptions that led to their conclusions turned out to be so far off base.  I don't see a lot of these YouTube types doing that but am happy to be surprised.
Next war I say we stand up a BFC/CM analysis channel and bury these guys....

Sweet.
 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for standing up to effing s**thead Putin, but the sad fact is that we have to factoring in the reality of the worst before deciding what to do. Personally, my fear turns to white hot anger in a somewhat productive way. If I didn’t worry, then I would start to worry if you get what I mean. So, when the war is over and we are all hopefully still here, I intend on turning that anger into a strong opposition to nuclear weapons. They are barbaric. It is insane that some countries can have them and thereby weild enourmous power over other countries. And they can have thousands of them. Can Sweden have one? Noooooo! So, my conclusion is that no one should have any. Is that realistic. No. Does that mean I will accept it. No. Anger/fear in this case turns to reaction/action which is productive for me. Accepting that people toy with the world for power’s sake (see lyrics for Dylan’s Masters of War). Am I a pacifist? No, but darn close to.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for standing up to effing s**thead Putin, but the sad fact is that we have to factoring in the reality of the worst before deciding what to do. Personally, my fear turns to white hot anger in a somewhat productive way. If I didn’t worry, then I would start to worry if you get what I mean. So, when the war is over and we are all hopefully still here, I intend on turning that anger into a strong opposition to nuclear weapons. They are barbaric. It is insane that some countries can have them and thereby weild enourmous power over other countries. And they can have thousands of them. Can Sweden have one? Noooooo! So, my conclusion is that no one should have any. Is that realistic. No. Does that mean I will accept it. No. Anger/fear in this case turns to reaction/action which is productive for me. Accepting that people toy with the world for power’s sake (see lyrics for Dylan’s Masters of War). Am I a pacifist? No, but darn close to.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for standing up to effing s**thead Putin, but the sad fact is that we have to factoring in the reality of the worst before deciding what to do. Personally, my fear turns to white hot anger in a somewhat productive way. If I didn’t worry, then I would start to worry if you get what I mean. So, when the war is over and we are all hopefully still here, I intend on turning that anger into a strong opposition to nuclear weapons. They are barbaric. It is insane that some countries can have them and thereby weild enourmous power over other countries. And they can have thousands of them. Can Sweden have one? Noooooo! So, my conclusion is that no one should have any. Is that realistic. No. Does that mean I will accept it. No. Anger/fear in this case turns to reaction/action which is productive for me. Accepting that people toy with the world for power’s sake (see lyrics for Dylan’s Masters of War). Am I a pacifist? No, but darn close to.

I really don’t get that casual attitude to total annihilation?!

I really don’t get that casual attitude to total annihilation?!

I really don’t get that casual attitude to total annihilation?!

I really don’t get that casual attitude to total annihilation?!

Are they already pulling the "hot stuff" from the depots? What´s next?