LuckyDog

Nice little introduction to Swingfire, its development and capabilities, in this video from the Tank Museum:
 

Supposedly russia broke their record with confirmed vehicle losses in a single day. 

Talk to the @SFHand.

That's the thing about diseases and medicine in general.
Doctors are usually pretty good about telling whether you're alive or dead.  Usually.  In between is an extremely sliding scale, and if you can feed yourself and make to the bathroom on your own most of the time a lot of doctors will say you're fine.  Even if you won the a Nobel prize the previous week.  
And the problem with biological damage in general is that we have terrible resolution on a lot of things, and things at very tiny scales can matter a lot in how your body functions.  Other tiny things (like a virus) can do microscopic damage and then be cleared from your system so they're undetectable.  But you're still messed up because maybe a whole bunch of capillaries aren't acting the way they're supposed to.  Or your clotting system is doing weird intermittent things in your organs. Or some intermediate chemical process that people have mostly ignored, except for maybe one poorly paid graduate student, is completely broken and we won't learn that it matters for another decade.  But there's nothing chemically or macroscopically detectable (at least not without slicing you into thin sections, which would probably annoy you) because your body cleared out the actual virus a long time ago.  To get a sense of how tiny things can be and matter: at peak covid there was probably about 10 (or maybe a few tens) total kilograms of virus on the entire planet.  Biology is complicated stuff.

Here's my take from reading the thread and a bunch of OSINT:
This is one where I think it's meaningful to separate "Russia winning" from "Putin's regime winning". I'd suggest that on day 1 of the war, those two were in alignment: Russia wins by absorbing a large neighboring state into its sphere of influence with only targeted bloodshed (at the ruling elite). Putin's regime wins by propping up a vision of pan-Russian nationalism and empire building that cements Putin as Czar.
On day today of the war, those visions of victory are no longer in alignment. Russia has lost - they will not absorb Ukraine into their sphere of influence with only targeted bloodshed, and have actively reinforced the global ruleset by pushing Finland and Sweden into NATO and reawakening Europe to the necessity of self-defensive capability. They've also offered the west a huge opportunity to figure out what fighting a 21st century peer war looks like.
For Putin's regime, victory looks like staying in power. And he's been far more successful at that than we collectively predicted. Even Prigozhin's coup-like thing proved a manageable threat (for reasons that are unclear to me). Somehow recon-by-meat-assault isn't provoking civil unrest, &c. &c. So that one's not a loss for Putin yet. Economy still appears to be sort of functioning? Though it's hard to see how he can keep it that way indefinitely?
For Ukraine, the day 1 objective was "remain an independent and free society". That still appears to be their objective, and they're doing a yeoman's job of that. Jury's still out, though, on what the end state looks like.

BFC pays me by the word…food stamps mostly.  

In case someone didn't read it yet, worth to check newest well-documented investigation conclusions about so-called Havana syndrome. Guess who was behind it?

https://theins.press/en/politics/270425

Hey @sfhand this is how to post a counter-position.
2003…mistakes were definitely made.  I have to agree that 03 Iraq did far more damage than most understood.  It can be argued that it fractured the global order of the Post-Cold War for good.  Both Russia and China saw that war and voted with their feet on the new Global Order and there are coherent arguments that they had justification.
That said onto this war.  “Russia has convinced it people…” is likely what this war is really about.  There was no clear and present danger outside of Putin’s own head. Ukraine was not poised to join NATO, they had not even applied.  Neither were Sweden or Finland. The western troops in Ukraine were there because Russia took the Crimea and Donbas regions. Our greatest weakness is “The West has not convinced its people….”  This is how democracies die.  Rarely are democracies destroyed be external forces.  They are simply abandoned as a failed experiment.  So now we are being tested and our resolve is not great.
But to be brutally pragmatic…to the point I will apologize to our Ukrainian posters in advance…this war is likely not existential to the West.  It may have been had we completely sat back and did nothing.  But we did something, and even if we fail completely, that unity and small resolve cannot be undone easily.  If Ukraine completely folds up and Russia rolls to the Polish border.  Well “so what?”  Well we will create a new Iron Curtain by the next morning.  NATO will double down hard and we are essentially in Cold War 2. The West lost Ukraine, but we won Sweden and Finland.  Russian economic and diplomatic isolation will deepen to the point that we will likely cut them out completely.  So no more shopping trips or sidedoor deals. The West is a really sore loser and we will definitely show it.
Russia is broken militarily.  No modern military can take these levels of damage and not need a significant amount of recovery time.  Sure they can mobilize a million more men, but arming, training and equipping them to be able to be effective on the modern battlefield takes things Russia cannot easily replace - our unmannned systems will work just as well too.  The actual threat of Russian military action against an NATO member, even discounting the nuclear equation, is pretty low.  So we will live with the worst and keep going.  
The next problem will be China, but I for one, do not see this relationship through a Cold War lens, at least not yet. China is too big a customer to fail completely.  We do too much trade with them to easily fall into a similar situation with Russia (and, yes we did a lot of trade with Russia).  But we will have to renegotiate that relationship, which can definitely get bumpy.  The world will likely fall back into Us and Them and there are pitfalls there.
Finally, I really don’t think the West’s only play has, or will be “the Frontal”.  For every Iraq, there was an East Germany.  We can and have employed other strategies.  We can entice and cooperate.  We can incorporate - in fact most in the “this war was justified” camp cite Western encroachment on Russia as the primary reason.  The paradox of the West is that we are incredibly powerful, yet we are also incredibly lazy at the same time. The most important question is, as the former begins to wane, will we overcome the latter?

Putin's invasion plans were formulated on Hunter Biden's laptop.  They were created while he and George Soros were vacationing at Jeffery Epstein's place at the same time that Hilary Clinton was discussing a marketing plan with Epstein to use a Pizza place as a front for child trafficking.  I seem to remember this was close to the same time Jewish Space lasers were lighting up California forests because we hadn't properly raked them like they do in Finland.  I remember all this because right about then I was sticking light bulbs up my anus to kill Covid.
See it all makes sense now right?

Have to second this, results have not yet been determined, but Syrsky is giving every possible indication that he has the right idea.
 
Alison's post above has helped me clarify the answer I was trying to write to JonS. The the reason that totalitarianism must be opposed even more resolutely, and even if means running risk of a wider war, is that totalitarians are getting better at being totalitarian. Technology has flipped from enabling internal opposition to making it possible to crush it utterly at a much lower cost. If Ukraine falls, it may two or three hundred years before it can break free again, if there is even anything left. Expecting these awful regimes to fail due to their internal contradictions may be more than we can hope for. The West's choice is to fight, or lose, I don't think trying to ignore the problem is going to work.

Syrsky continues saying the right things...
Reform is very much on his mind. He seems to have the combat vet's intolerance of REMFs, especially in an existential fight like this one. 
https://www.ukrinform.ua/rubric-ato/3845632-oleksandr-sirskij-golovnovnokomanduvac-zsu.html
Damn right too. 

Meanwhile in clown news, brought to you by our good friend David D aka Secret Squirrel.
I sense a new foreign policy doctrine in the making, lets ignore countries MTG can't find on a map.

True, if you're dismounting you're giving the American FO time to call in fire support.
Makes sense. I love the beginning of Mission 4. No artillery, just silence. Then you spot them, they've already moved up farther than you expected. Real spooky.
I don't get the obsession with the 1989 Cold War scenarios in so many books and games. It's like watching a sports movie with a professional team playing against the local high school team and you're expected to root for the professionals. Based on the scenarios in game it would be a bloodbath.
I guess I was comparing the dragon with the RPG because both are an independent anti tank system carried at the squad level, and reusable. It's interesting how they embody their factions doctrine. The RPG is meant for anti tank and anti personnel and Soviet tanks carry a ton of HE. the Dragon is only meant for tanks and M60's are terrible against infantry (relatively). Speaking of the BMP, any idea why the US didn't try to copy the BTR before the Stryker? Seems like an 8 wheeled APC is a no brainer in a world with developed roads.
On your last point. Everything seems to be more lethal in this game compared to other titles. Infantry doesn't have body armor but they sure have a ton of automatic firepower. Seems like firepower took a massive leap compared to defense.
Thank you for your response!

Jeepers, Thanksgiving at your place must be thoroughly unpleasant then.

OK, different Cockburn, but same ideology lol. Pretty sure Andrew's a tankie too....
In uni, we used to call these guys the 'Sandalistas'

Fingers crossed.

The beeb has done its verify thing on the narrative coming from the Kremlin: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68657383

It's because they are all familiar with the default Combat Mission UI and think that rifles should be green. They are probably wondering if it turns yellow when the owner is injured.

If the guys they are parading around with missing bits, broken bones, and worse are in fact the guys that did it? Then my only question what were they thinking letting themselves be taken alive? The scary thought is that the guys they are more or less publicly torturing to death are four random guys they grabbed off the streets who had the misfortune o resemble the guys in the video. That would be uhm...BAD.
That said the treatment these guys are getting in Russian detention is no different than what they have done to tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of of thousands of others in both Ukraine and Russia. They are just posting video of it in real time. That of course is the reason why Russia is going to get to pay a thousand casualties for every square kilometer of Ukraine they even temporarily occupy. Because the Russians have demonstrated beyond clearly that giving up is just not an option.
Edited: for clarity
 

Stumbled across these. Might bring you in the 1982 mood..
 

Just for reference, here's a map with Bryansk oblast outlines, and various routes - Red is quickest way out of Russia to Belarus, Blue is quickest way out o f Russia avoiding Belarus (i.e Ukraine), green is the route to Belarus via Bryansk.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/shooting-blast-reported-concert-hall-near-moscow-agencies-2024-03-22/

Quick tinfoil hat take:

Putin secures election 'legitimacy'
Peskov says it's no longer a Special Military Operation, it's a War
Terror attack in Moscow
...
Mobilisation

I would strongly suggest anyone who thinks this level of push/pull between the US and Ukrainian liaisons is excessively disfunctional should go back look at what it was like in the Allied high commands in WWI and WWII. Alliances are hard. Hard questions have to be asked and long term possibilities must be hashed out. Making the sausage always looks ugly and in war triply so. It's a sign of Ukrainian strength, not weakness, that the US clearly *isn't* calling the shots and a sign of US trust in the Ukrainian government that it isn't trying harder to do so.

Yup. I hope it's "not good" for you in the most totally "not good" way possible.