LukeFF

Hold the phone a minute...Russia is purchasing millions of indirect fire ammo from NK.  I thought Russia had a bottomless ocean of artillery ammunition stocks?  Why do they need to buy more?  "HIMARS were a minor irritant and the RA was just going to blast the UA off the battlefield inch by inch with a never ending supply of ammo."
Whoops. 

That's a good laugh. 

Ok...STOP.
  I am not a moderator on this forum but I have @BFCElvis on speed dial.  This thread is about the war Ukraine and, yes we have discussed surrounding issues and possible 2nd and 3rd order effects this war could have on the region.  This thread is not about:
- Bafflingly narrow or simply out of date concepts such as solving human cultural overlaps with policy.
- Vilifying the entirely of all Russian peoples as somehow less than human.  No human society, culture or whatever has or ever will be entirely homogeneous, good or bad.  So sweeping ideas of how to solve a "Russian Problem" by a bunch of old guys with too much time on their hands, which they should spend learning more, are not 1) viable or 2) useful here.
- I get we are sore on Russia right now, they earned that one; however, at what point on this incredibly myopic line of thinking do we become worse than that we assign to them?  All in the name of "safety" - a whole lot of atrocity and historic marks of shame lay on the feet of "safety".  I have been to one genocide and trust me none of you know what you are talking about, so stop hijacking the thread.
- FFS, we did not even take the approaches some are proposing here during the Cold War, we went with "contain and attract/entice", and we won that one.  In fact we look back on the occasion of the McCarthy era - which is where this is going- as a dark chapter 
You wanna talk about mass deportations, forced migration, race/ethnic cleansing/purity or any other whack-job nonsense there is literally an entire internet out there, let's try and keep this one small "sane space".    

Sigh…
 

Op COBRA stands out as a conanical example here - the first couple of days looked like, well, maybe not "failure", in absolute terms, but re-emergent stalemate and the failure of the hopes that had been laid on it by the buildup and extraordinary expenditure of resources.
Then suddenly, on day 3, hey ho we're off to the races.
Edit: and, of course, exactly the same dynamic - on different timescales - played out over the Normandy campaign writ large, and also at el Alamein in Oct-Nov '42.

After 6 months of this I believe RU sources about as much as I believed this guy in 2003. 😀

Longest range tank vs. tank kill ever? (Probably could argue this is more an artillery kill)
 

He didn't. As a kid I witnessed the brutal beat downs of local pro-Ukrainian protests in 1990 by the "OMOH", also due to living next to the central square of my city where they tended to happen. Almost got caught in one of those with my mom. It also kinda contributed to my outlook on these things since. I mean when you are 5 and see a trolleybus driver block the street and go on a roof with a big Ukrainian flag, as the crowd is resisting the "riot police" - it lives an impression for life.
Later in life I also learned that nothing really changed in regards to Ukraine during his rule - people still went to jail for supporting independence, many didn't return and never witnessed it happen just a few years later.
Bonus is that Gorbachev also held a "referendum" to save USSR, where he expected local "general secretaries" of his to give him very positive results - but only 6 agreed and gave him "70%+ people want to remain in USSR" results. That included Ukraine as well (russian propagandists now use this as another "reason" to "cancel" our independence). Other "gensecs" just knew better where the wind was blowing, so to speak.
And in Lithuania Gorbachev even tried to quell the resistance by actually ordering shooting of protesters (probably wanted to gauge if he can do the same in much bigger countries without consequence). That didn't go well thankfully.
It's also why I wrote here about that good old russian "liberal" trick of "hey West, look, have Perestroika OK? You let us kill people now OK?" a few pages back.

@FancyCat
If you meant this... 
...that's obviously mockery. "Negotiation" = "Offensive".
"Gesture of goodwill" is a Russian "new language" terms is "we got fu...d and forced to retreat"

Some alleged photos:
 

UA Mig-29 carrying HARM:
From this video:
And today is  the farewell to Slovakian MiGs. Poland and Czechia will pick up Slovakian air-policing duties for now. One of the Polish journos mentioned that at times only 2 of 11 Slovakian MiGs were in flying condition, it looks like they managed to get 4 airborne. Hopefully in wartime conditions without all the red tape more can be flown:
 

now RU claims Recon group approached along Mykolaev-Kherson highway and was spotted around 6:30 in the area of infection clinic.

This one is even funnier - UKR Recon group simply walked in through the front door. Seems RU does not control Kherson as tight as they want us to believe.  

Lol okay. You've heard of games like Microsoft Flight Simulator, right? They're designed around single player game play. 
I'm not going to dignify the rest of your childish response with an answer. 

That's a good laugh. 

Well, this seems fairly definitive
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/30/zelenskiy-tells-russian-forces-to-flee-as-ukraine-counteroffensive-begins-in-kherson

RUMINT
UKR forces are conducting combat actions on 12 sections of Kherson frontline, on 4 we have advance. Involved all, what we have.

Said to be from offensive ops in the Kherson direction (YPR-765s):

Listening to MSNBC talking about nuclear power plant in Ukraine. It would have been better to have some kind of expert to talk to and not just a reporter and the host discussing it. Their general mood was, OMG they are distributing iodine tablets because a leak could occur at any time. Potassium iodide (KI) is what they are talking about. It's actually standard procedure that people living in the immediate area of a nuclear power plant have them on hand. When I lived in Niantic, CT we had them in our dresser drawer because the 3 unit Millstone power plant was across the bay in Waterford, CT. 
Potassium iodide when taken in the immediate aftermath of a radioactive release involving spent nuclear fuel will flood the thyroid gland with stable iodine, leaving any radioactive iodine-131 no place to attach too. The biological half life of iodine is pretty short, so it's quickly excreted from the body if it has no place to attach itself. This is also the reason that it must be taken immediately, 1) before the radioactive iodine can be ingested, and 2) any remaining excess iodine of any isotope is quickly eliminated.
Saying all this, it's a very good precaution to go around and make sure everyone has them. If they were ever issued, they may be misplaced, there may be refugees from other areas living there, etc. Or who knows, maybe they never had them. Thyroid cancers resulting from I-131 ingestion are the most common long term effect from exposure to radiation stemming from a spent fuel accident. "Fortunately," these days it's also one of the most treatable and survivable. Fortunately in quotes because cancer patients/survivors kind get peeved when you tell them how lucky they are that they have a "good" cancer. Cancer sucks, no matter which kind.
Most of the rest of the spot discussed Chernobyl and how it was run by the Russians and look what happened to it (paraphrasing). Yup. It was on Ukrainian soil and they suffered for it. A lot. Still do. Chernobyl was caused by a combination of poor reactor plant design and incompetence. This reactor design is more robust. Russian competence? There is obviously still a severe problem there, Russia wide - nuclear, military. Chernobyl would have been much more vulnerable to combat damage had there been combat around it as an operating power plant. They have no containment. At all. Russia claimed no containment was needed since their stringent operating procedures would assure safety. Then they violated about 6 of those stringent operating procedures, did not understand the problem they were having and made choices that aggravated the problem, leading to the almost simultaneous steam explosion followed by hydrogen detonation. (there was no nuclear explosion - that's physically impossible), and release of millions of curies of activity to Europe.

Dave 

Nothing important, just interesting.  Although jokes about German weapons deliveries do present themselves.
 

Thanks? I guess I don't understand what you post was supposed to be about. It came across as "This has gone on too long! And look! The French were on the poo in a completely different context!"
So, um. Yeah? The Ukrainians have lost some land, but they do have a (very) modest foreign legion, and far more importantly they are getting free toys from something like 75% of the global economy who are meanwhile very definitely not supporting Russia. That's worth far more right now than a few fields of sunflowers on the far side of the Dnipro.
In terms of duration, so far this war has lasted about one (1) operational rotation. Or half of one if you happen to be in the US Army. This has simply not been a long war. There are any number of examples of existential wars from the last century that lasted multiple years. People have astonishing endurance when they're motivated - do you really doubt Ukraine's motivation? I don't.

6 months is not a 'long' war, by any stretch. The only shorter one I can think of is the Falklands. And the Football War. Even GWI was longer, although granted not by much. And the French /were/ on the winning side in WWI.

That's a good laugh. 

Exactly. Easy to come up with places where you can get by. I think it's the second scenario of KG Peiper? where you start out in a long road column in the woods with a large setup zone. The only way forward for a bit is down the road until you (I believe?) cross a bridge, then it opens up. It's waypoint tedium, and selecting all and clicking out of the set up zone is pretty much impossible. Waaaay too many paths to pick out the one you want to edit next.
When I've played this one I just sat for one turn so there was no setup zone and then start the click fest. Less frustrating. This one would benefit hugely from a convoy order. Just to pick one example.

Dave

Decommissioned plants have been disassembled and the sites returned to green space successfully. One is only about 15 miles from me. The storage/disposal/conversion of spent fuel waste is a political problem and not a technical problem.
And with that, I'm done with this, which Steve will be happy for. 

Dave