Maciej Zwolinski

He would be Legolas if he used an ordinary dumb round. With SMArt it is more like a mage taking down two opponents with Melf Rancid Arrows or somesuch

But if someone copied it to the Minecraft server, at least one of the first Discord group members was a Minecraft player, right?

This was a Minecraft server. The game 5-year olds play.

He was also a proconsul of the border provinciae, and therefore the commander of the legions located in them. Since the Republic at that time tended to distribute the legions around its borders, in that indirect (but very transparent to everyone) way Augustus controlled the army.

While that is a very beautiful name, having deep cultural connotations with Polish history and culture, I cannot help but wonder how it sounds to English ears.

This is an excuse which is given much too much traction in the West. Along with the alleged Russian trauma from World War 2, which is a variant of this argument. In fact, in order to feel safe from conventional invasion by the countries of the West it is sufficient that Russia takes stock of the poor conventional military capability of its neighbours, as well as their size. Against whom Russia needs that strategic depth in Belarus? Against Lithuanians, Poles, Danes maybe? Poland is in the middle of crazy military procurement drive, but 1) it is going to have effects, if any, years in the future; 2) it would not have happened at all unless Putin attacked the Ukraine. So it hardly could have been Putin's motive to start that attack in the first place. Actually, Russia wants to control Ukraine and Belarus because it wants to have an imperium capable of bullying its neighbours politically, and it needs assets and bodies of those two countries to grow its imperial project. Putin is an autocrat who "owns" the country so for him, the physical enlargement of the state is like growing his own personal wealth. Also, this is a genuinely popular thing among his subjects, Russians like to feel stronger than their neighbours, but not to feel safe (the greatest threats to Russians are generally alcohol and other Russians), but to feel better than them and enjoy symbolically bullying them through various ritual acts of humiliation. Taking the disingenuous RUS narrative about security concerns at face value is just self-deception.

Sure. But if they did that in a court or before an arbitration panel, they would get a default judgement against them which could be enforced against various Russian assets worldwide. Obviously, for trolling purposes mostly.

Actually, in the place of the US I would think about suing Russians for the 30 mio in damages. Russians do not consider themselves at war and the US would not a belligerent anyway, so the loss should be actionable pursuant to the general rules of civil liability. Surely there must be an international convention regulating flight accidents on the high seas.

I imagined Shoigu getting a serious visit from some mafiosi unhappy about the fate of their drone. "Mr Shoigu, you have a nice tank army there....it would be a pity if it burned down"

There is also Bonaparte's razor" Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity". Russian pilot could have been trying to disrupt the flight of the drone by his crazy Ivan maneuvres but did not pull out on time. As the common wisdom indicates, not pulling out on time has very serious consequences.

The huge Iranian transport with ammo would be better

Muzyka should have picked it up, as it is the same this side of the border. We bitch all the time, if anything UKR seem more relaxed. Maybe his Slavic spider sense was muted out by those crazy Westerners travelling with him.

Or blast with high calibre artillery building after building, Berlin-style or Grozny-style or Mariupol-style and move forward only in the smoke of collapsing builidings. Then bring in the guns forward and start again. That kind of combat is extremely material intensive and agonisingly slow, but it does protect lives. I remember the iconic pictures of 203 mm M 1931 howitzers firing over open sights into buildings on RUS WW2 and I am sure they remember it too. Now its probably ATGMs fired at buildings and thermobarics, TOS-1s, and Russian equivalent of MCLICs shot at buildings not minefields (saw that on a film from Mariupol at least once; it cracked open a big building) In any event, AFAIK the real danger was not even this, but RUS cutting off the supply lines and just exchanging out RUS casualties on the frontline with mortared up UKR logistic assets, as well as turkey shoot when in such situation the cut off UKR units inevitably try to withdraw

Germans did that in WW2 and the Russians answer was infiltration through a denuded front by recon troops, then a mechanised assault. That is probably why Russians have to this day a ****ton of various razviedchiki. With drones in the air that obviously would have to somehow deal with the eyes in the sky .

Well, there was talk of entire brigades being chewed up (46th) in Soledar in mid January. Not to nothing, but at the level of 30% casualties for the engaged battalions. Then there was a flood of very negative reports from the front in Bachmut before the rotation in last days of February (e.g. Magyar), similar in scale to what we had been hearing at the time of Soledar assault. So it is not inconceivable that roughly a brigade a month is beaten up to the extent it has to be reconstituted in the rear.

A "race to parapet". Not at all out of place at Somme or Passchendaele. The will probably discover sapping towards the enemy trenches next and will try to recreate the Brusilov's offensive or Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu.

Surely it should be called Up Uranus then

Possibly waiting for the mud to dry up. If they make the mistake of attacking uphill in the mud in the teeth of artillery barrage we may see a 1:7 casualty ratios in the other direction.

It has been the hottest topic on the Polish military twitter. It probably follows from two sources, an increased number of UKR videos and tweets critical of the decisions concerning Bachmut and of the UKR command in general, as well as a research trip a few weeks ago by Franz-Stefan Gady, Konrad Muzyka, Rob Lee and yes, the bogeyman Kofman himself. This is extensively discussed in a podcast from last Friday in the "War of the Rocks" series, in the paywalled section (I reluctantly started to pay for this stuff). They all seem in agreement that the level of casualties in Bachmut is high, Russians there are figthing well and Vuhledar is something completely else than is happening in Bachmut, whereas e.g. Kreminna is something else alltogether. The Polish angle in this is Muzyka, who specifically came forward with the 1:1 ratio on Polish twitter. The podcast also provides some details of the trip which to me are sufficient to disprove the angle, that this was just a publicity trip. E.g. the main source of their information is not visual inspection of the frontline, but meeting with their contacts and getting them to talk in a more extended and frank way, that is the case over the telephone or Signal. Gady and Muzyka did not even go to Bachmut itself, but elected to visit a replacement depot behind the lines. It is of course just my impression, but looking at what kind of arguments are put forward in favour and against, by whom and on what basis I find that the claim of 1:1 attrition ratio - specifically in the context of e.g. past two or three weeks, on the frontline between Krasnopopivka in the North to Krasne in the South - to be fully believable. To the contrary, the arguments referring to those huge 1:7 or 1:5 ratios seem to be just weaker, as they tend to be based on just "because Vuhledar, because zek rush and because Russian Orc stupid" general sentiment, or averaging out the casualty ratios in Bachmut area over a period of several months. Both are excessive generalisations, the first one obviously so, but the second is a fallacy as well. If the question is "whether to defend Bachmut now tenaciously or withdraw" the sunk costs and realised gains in the previous months do not matter. Just the prediction of the casualties going forward. Now, the answer to the above question most recently presented by the Ukrainians is no longer attritional, but positional. UKR defends Bachmut because otherwise, the Russians will attack upwards and eliminate the salient from the north of Soledar to Kreminna. E.g. that is what Mashovets said the previous Monday on his Kanal5 programme. I am not sure about this one - if the RUS want to attack to the North, why do they need to take Bakhmut to the South? They took Soledar, which was closer to Bachmut than Krasnopopivka or Siversk.

A Go-Pro camera with a selfie stick will probably be cheaper to source nowadays. On the other hand, remaking a Krummlauf adapter could be a good idea

Done and gone, like a doner kebab. Now that's a way to dispose of a body!

I do not know about the quality, but a quick Google has netted this one: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Henryk_Sienkiewicz_-_Potop_-_The_Deluge_(1898_translation_by_Jeremiah_Curtin)_-_Vol_1.djvu/31 This is my favourite of the XIX century classics, set out against the backdrop of the Northern Wars vs Swedes. The translation is contemporary, so it is fully in the public domain. There was a good film adaptation of it as well, also called the Deluge, made in the 1970s. It was an Oscar nominee even. Unless it got screwed up in translation, it should read like "The Three Musketeers". The same times, similar ideas, similar style.

Not for lack of trying on the Polish side. Maybe a quarter of historical fiction books ever written in Polish would be about that era, including the 3 most popular ones. Cultural barrier does not let them permeate to the West, though, whereas the choice of bad guys limits the sales to the East. Maybe those about fighting Turks or Swedes could get exported.

It was more than that. Ukrainian nobles (plus those of the Grand Duchy) dominated the top elite of the PLC because they had bigger landholdings than those in the core Polish lands. The only (well, almost) nobles allowed the title of prince in PLC were from the Russian kniaz families descending from Rorik. And Michał Wiśniowiecki became the king, the first one elected from the local nobles

Good choice of patron!