Tux

While military aid is absolutely important, and its important to recognize that Polish assistance is awesome, its also important to recognize the wholeness of western aid to Ukraine, for example, France offered 25% of its active duty Caesar SPGs, something no other state has offered in terms of active duty, in-use military hardware, Germany offered essential hardware like long-range AD, and short-range AD essential to keeping VVS away from the offensive in Kharkiv, the UK is hosting thousands of Ukrainians for training, and news has arrived Denmark will be hosting troops as well, NATO aircraft are ferrying munitions from states like Pakistan, sneaking stuff from Iran thru 3rd parties, smaller NATO states like the Baltics, Norway, Finland, Macedonia, have contributed good stuff, like the Harpoons on trucks, air frames, etc.
It is also extremely important to understand that the EU, being the biggest trading partner to Ukraine, and bordering Ukraine, is a essential part of keeping the Ukrainian economy afloat. I don't think it can't be understated that if Ukraine's home front was not upheld by EU money and EU access, Ukraine would been having a extremely tougher time keeping her home front secure, and by extension, keeping her frontlines going. 
States that see war, see huge economic effects, usually negative as hell, and I'm sure Putin and those RU nationalists were relying on turning home front Ukraine into rubble and poverty as part of any threat to Ukraine, and it can't underestimated, that things like the Polish warmth to Ukrainian refugees, is assisted by EU economic aid to Poland and other states to assist refugees for example. 
I mean, money is important just for defense needs, Pakistan ain't giving away 152mm ammunition that is newly manufactured (nor should they, poor bastards, that flooding is horrible) for free, and I think its not the foreign reserves of the UKR central bank paying them either, its gonna be some sort of money from the EU or otherwise from the West getting those shells made. 
End of the day, its important for understanding that Ukraine ability to fight back is not just due to Ukrainian resolve alone, but Ukraine has done a great job harnessing the ability and resources of the West to equalize the playing field more against Russia, and I bet some of the reasons why the analysts were wrong on Ukraine pre-war, did not take into account stuff like the West backing Ukraine. Ukraine isn't fighting with just the Poles standing a little bit back, and the rest of Europe really far away, that is undermining the work Ukraine has done to ensure that the playing field is what it is today, where Europe is a safe harbor for Ukraine to dock in, and I think Putin absolutely did not consider Europe to be Ukraine's friend, and was expecting his efforts in Europe to make it much, much colder for Ukraine, and not a safe harbor where thousands of Ukrainian civilians can live safely from Russian missiles, and thousands of Ukrainian soldiers can train in peace and quiet, and where hundreds can be treated in safe hospitals. 

Canister has an effective range of, maybe, 2-300 metres. The 30mm cannon has an effective range of 2-4,000 metres.
You could, presumably, design a 30mm canister round with a prox or time or distance fuze, at an extravagant development time and cost, and production cost. Plus the weapon will need to be modified to allow for fuzing at a rate of 2-3 rounds per second.
With either a basic shotgun-style canister round or a whizzy fuzed round, you now have a specialist round for a specialist purpose. How many of the 450-odd rounds carried in the vehicle are this specialist round, where are they carried, and how does the crew access them quickly when required.
Canister has negligible armour penetration. 30mm will readily penetrate whatever a helicopter can still fly with.
A radar requires power.
A radar is fiddly, fragile, and readily prone to battle damage.
A radar requires additional internal wiring, plus display and controls inside the limited turret space.
Who operates the radar? Who now does their role? How much of their training year is allocated to training for this role? What other role(s) gets less training?
Radars are emitters, making the BMPs even easier to find.
 
All of that is solvable with aenough time, money, and manpower, but what is the opportunity cost? And that still leaves you with the question of which vehicles are conducting the IFV role while the BMPs are off pretending to be SPAA?

Some other weapon slang (usually common for UKR and RUS): 
- Dashka (was heard in this video) - hypocrism form of female name Darya - DShK HMG
- Kalashmat - combined "Kalashnikov"+"avtomat" (SMG), but also similar to the Russian word "koloshmatit' " - jargon, which means "to inflict many punches, to beat up" - AK-rifle 
- bekha - jargon name of BMW car -  BMP 
- Kabanchyk ("little boar") - 120 mm or 122 mm shell
- mishka - hypocrism from Russian "medved' "(bear) - tank. I don't know why
- motolyha  - combined from "motor" and consonant jargon word "kolymaha" (eng."rattletrap") - MTLB
- Grach ("rook") - Su-25 
- Sushka - any Su-aircraft
- Krokodil - Mi-24
- Sapog  ("hight boot") - SPG-9  

Yeah, I suspect there is a significant amount of variability in warfare that is distinct from changes over time. Just as, in WW2, the fighting in North Africa was very different from fighting on the Eastern Front, and both were different from the fighting in the Pacific, I suspect that if another high intensity war between two different peer or near peer armies broke out in another part of the world it would look very different from this one in a lot of ways. It's not that this war has its peculiarities, so much as every war has peculiarities. Differences in objectives, scale, level of commitment, doctrine, force structure, and terrain may create a massive amount of variability even in wars fought in the same time period. Time period/technology obviously does make a big difference. If you reran WW2 with modern technology, but all other factors kept identical, it would still be a very different war. But I think it is far too simplistic to think of time period/technology as being the only thing that makes wars different.
For an obvious example, there is probably a comparable amount of difference between a modern land war in eastern Europe and a modern air/naval/amphibious war in the Pacific as there is between a modern land war in eastern Europe and a 1940s land war in eastern Europe, or between a modern air/naval/amphibious war in the Pacific and a 1940s air/naval/amphibious war in the Pacific.
So I don't think we should be talking about how modern war is different from war of decades past, as if modern war and war of decades past are homogeneous things, but about how specific types of war are different from their older counterparts. How is modern European ground war different from European ground war of decades past. How is modern counter-insurgency in desert/jungle/etc... different from counter-insurgency in desert/jungle/etc.. in decades past. How is modern air/naval/amphibious war around scattered island chains different from air/naval/amphibious war around scattered island chains of decades past. How is modern peer vs peer desert combat different from peer vs peer desert combat from decades past.

My wife edited this

Russian soldiers are as disciplined as the rabble participating in Trump rallies...

Given the amount of data that has to be processed I would say it is impossible.  For the ground war alone - this is a Theater Intelligence Cell's job.  That will be a lot of people working in specialist areas - eg current battle, future plans, order-of-battle etc to feed the grown-up who's going to make sense of it and then brief it to the guy who's going to make the decisions.
I am that guy in Afghanistan - On average I read 500 individual reports a day and it takes me about three and a half hours to make sense of them all.  About an hour or so to write up the individual incidents of interest and about 45 minutes to 90 minutes to find and plot where they took place.  About 20 incidents is a busy day for me.  Databasing the incidents takes about 20 minutes.  On top of that it takes me about an hour and a half to write slightly more in-depth pieces for my daily summary.  In-depth collation or in-depth reading?  Forget it ... not enough time in the day.  This is small beer compared to the amount of reporting that's coming out of Ukraine.

Btw. a good reading of how life was for civilians in Bucha.
https://cdn.occrp.org/projects/the-banality-of-brutality/
There was a game called This war of Mine about civilians struggling to survive in warzone... it strikes how realistic it was in retrospect; like CM but from different angle.

this thread right now:
ukr.mp4    

Well first off I am very wary of western analysts declaring anything "settled" in this war considering how much they got wrong in the first place.  By their metrics of tank-power Ukraine should be a puppet state of Russian by last Apr.
So I am curious as to how the tanks have been essential or have been employed.  For example, "15 tanks did the break in battle at Balakliya", that is a single Company, so what/how were they integrated into a break in battle that was kms wide?
It is not so much that the "tank is dead", it looks more like its role is evolving.  Nothing we have seen in this war looks like it was supposed to wrt mech and armoured warfare - so here we have a successful breakout battle and I am still not sure how it was integrated into it.  And then there is "what the hell happened with RA armor?", but by this point I doubt the Russian can keep theirs in gas, let alone in combat.
And then we have this Light Infantry/SOF breakout, unless some of these maps have been wrong.  We wont answer it here but the most dangerous thing we can do with this entire experience is validate pre-existing biases and promptly ignore all the other weird signals.  Especially when the validations might be the weird signals, not the main.

I just realized that these stupid orcs knocked down an ent! He'll be mighty angry when he gets up...

I’m with you on this. If you’re not in the trenches, I don’t think you have the same right to shed basic respect for humanity. When you’re half way round the world looking at this through twitter scopes, not personally implicated in this, I feel we actually have a responsibility not to drop decent values. 

That does presuppose the existence or possession of said values, which isn’t evident or granted of course.

Steve,
Your premise seems to hinge on me not fully understanding the need to relentlessly curb stomping of the russian war machine, in all its constituent parts, into submission - well beyond Ukraines borders of 2013 and the capacity of it threatening any of its neighbours.
I can assure you that notion is completely unfounded… 
The thing is, that at the same time I genuinely believe that “we” are fighting for certain values. Values that does not really include the unnecessary degradation of human beings (that definitely being everyone of us). 
My point here, in the forum context, is that he did’t post that video, made into a meme, on this forum. “We” did that. And what does that say about us? 
That said, I have zero interest in a prolonged discussion on this point. I love the thread and follow it religiously for all it gives. It really is a haven of sanity and life-affirming absurdity.
Please consider my post a soft voice, whispering in your ear as we roll along the colonnades on our triumph.

Having seen the actual clip that the picture originates from, knowing that it is an image of a human being in a moment of absolute terror and anguish, I personally am revolted by its use in a meme. I know full well that my emotions are shaped by what might be described as the arrogance of a western comfort, but could we please refrain from going that much orc and refrain from posting gore here?
 
Looking into the abyss and all that… 

So how many RA troops north of that river?  Was it 20-25k, assuming they only take half, that is a lot of PoWs to deal with.  Well looks like the Russians have a new clever strategy to hurt UA logistics; overburden it with Russian prisoners of war.  
Seriously, don’t mobilize just take 2 million Russian fighting age males, dress them in something that looks like a uniform, walk them over and surrender.  Saves a ton of money and cuts out the problematic killing/dying part.  UA buckles under weight of PoWs and sues for peace, the West sees poor Russian prisoners looking very sad and falters - now that is thinking outside the box!

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".    

I'd say that's called being civilized, not soft... Anyway, yes, the Baltics could throw out the Russians but what would they gain from that except some measure of satisfaction. I mean, half the conflicts in the world are about someone having thrown out someone else. For good measure let's start by "relocating" all the Russians to some camps. For their own safety, of course. While we are are it, let's just confiscate their property to pay for our expenses in this war.
We (the West) can rationalize each and every of these measure. Maybe I'm just naive, I mean we could just go full realpolitik and do whatever we feel necessary, morals be damned, but that would hurt our already damaged credibility and that is a kind of capital that should not be underestimated.
 

Tempted to take the risk: 

It's not like I don't enjoy this excellent discussion. But this quote applies to your predictions as well as to @Beleg85s. Getting a bit philosophical here: The issue with applying historical examples to current situations in order to predict the future is always that you can never use them to derive any kind of probability. History only ever happens once and so you can't use statistics. And so, as long as you can't come up with a model that explains the basic mechanisms, which may or may not exist and are likely to change over time, the only thing you can derive from an event is that such an event can happen given a set of parameters. (Re: the implications of e.g. the 1917 revolution for the current situation)
Now, Gentlemen, please go on. 🙂
 

No, that is not right. Germany's deal with Russian gas started in 1958 when Germany started to deliver gas pipes to the Soviet Union.  The first gas came in 1975. The decision to close the nuclear plants came in 2011.
The big mistake of Merkels government was not to do anything about it after 2011.
The anti-nuclear movement in Germany was started by conservative citizens and was only later joined by pro-peace and environmental groups. But don't think those were some fringe groups - the movement had and has broad support in many different parts of the population.
Greenpeace had historically nothing to do with this, although it probably shared many of its goals and supporters.
Germany's reliance on Russian gas is a mixture of opportunity, greed & ignorance. Very simple. No need to drum up conspiracy theories.

Really specific complaints there.  I am pretty sure the UA has the whole "leg blowing off" part covered based on even a modest take on casualty figures.  I mean we could always push more indirect fire and, of course ammo.  Of course if the sole driving logic is "kill more Russians!  Damn the consequences!!" A combination of chemical weapons and a deep biostrike would pay fantastic dividends in that department - a little bit 'o' sarin at the front door, a dash of anthrax in the back.  
Here is a crazy idea, modern militaries have forgotten more ways to blow off legs and kill people than you can imagine; however, at some point they become totally counter-productive - like getting into a barfight and pulling out the other guys eye and eating it, it sounds cool and definitely has an effect but your friends are not going to share a cab ride home with you.
My point on AP landmines is pretty simple: the political cost will not be offset by the battlefield gains.  If you find that frustrating, well try fighting an insurgency with a hand and three fingers tied behind you back and come back to me.

Maybe Russia can send its two working T-14s to train with China.
(On a serious note, given the culture, I would not want to be a woman in Russian armed forces).

More so compared to that orange f'n blathering, BS spitting pumpkin that wants to get back in again. Surely my friends down south of me are not that dumb again? Good God I hope they aren't.🥺
Sorry, back to what really matters in the thread, Ukraine.

I will point out withdrawal where you are effectively abandoning thousands of people, and millions overall, there is no solution that you can salvage out a controlled, planned withdrawal that isn't effectively reinvading Afghanistan. How are you supposed to bolster a government that was collapsing that quickly in order to maintain evacuation routes? (A deal signed by Trump mind you) You can't, so you need to send in a significant force to secure the capital, except what about the rest of the major cities, now you have what, several tens of thousands of U.S personnel reinvading the major cities of Afghanistan? 
And obviously, you need to expand logistical footprint to ensure those thousands of U.S personnel are effectively supplied....
Afghanistan is surrounded by Iran on one side, Pakistan on the other, the central asian republics to the north, none of them have U.S bases to set up the logistics needed for U.S maintenance of long term presence in Afghanistan and i severely doubt any of them would be willing to allow it. 
Part of the deal was the withdrawal of U.S personnel, if the deal was violated, sure the U.S could relaunch air operations to reinforce the country but how would the U.S overfly these units? Pakistan? Sure, where did the Taliban leadership operate from until Kabul fell? Quetta. 
We all stare at Russia defending the west bank of the Dnieper, meanwhile we were trying to prop up a government that was land locked and surrounded by countries that are hostile to the U.S and would happily let the U.S burn itself forever in Afghanistan. 
No, i seriously doubt the evacuation could have turned into something of a "clean withdrawal", had we decided to "properly plan" it, all that would have resulted would be flooding it with thousands of troops against a insurgency about to achieve victory, I'm totally sure they would have sat down and let us retake their gains in the urban regions without a single American death....
In 2018, 70% of the country was already controlled or had active Taliban presence. 2015, nearing the end of the drawdown to about 15k NATO forces, this NYT article states that the UN considered half of the country's districts to have high or extreme violence threat levels, High or Extreme levels mean usual UN presence or movement is curtailed, half the country was off limits for the UN in 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/12/world/asia/afghanistan-taliban-united-nations.html
Again, we absolutely tut tut at Russia thinking it could conquer a country of 44 million with only 200k troops, meanwhile you suggest keeping a country of 40 million under control with what? Only 10k-20k troops from collapse? Say only the urban areas, thats 10 million, not nearly enough either. 
Moving on from unrealistic notions, 
In a GUR controlled unit of the International Legion, serious allegations of abuse, violence, and failed leadership have arose, and this occurred despite higher levels of the Ukrainian government being informed. 
https://kyivindependent.com/investigations/suicide-missions-abuse-physical-threats-international-legion-fighters-speak-out-against-leaderships-misconduct
 

Uh yeah?
Sounds very much compos mentis to me? But hey, maybe the entire White House and political administration is in a conspiracy to hide that he has full-blown dementia and he's not really doing anything. Sure. And probably aliens are involved too.