Livdoc44

The kind of thing you'd see in a US made eastern European road-trip comedy of the 80s.
Parody is dead.

A bit of statistics about this thread.
First post 11.2.2022.
Page 1000 on 7.7.2022, 2000 on 3.2.2023 and 3000 on 6.11.2023.
It took 146 days for the first 1000. Then 211 for the next and another 276 for the last. So we are slowing down.
With a bit of extrapolation, it will take 318 days for the next 1000 - that would be September 19, 2024. Let's hope we are discussion the end of the war by then.
 

Having been born in Moscow and raised in the culture, this is where my message is coming from; we on this forum have been taking a very logical and almost mathematical approach to calculating Russia's damage and preconcluding it's fate. We need to understand that, while certainly not limitless nor supernatural, there is a certain character of stubborn will and seemingly senseless perseverance in the face of opposition that can be conjured in the collective "Russian" when the circumstances are right. We've talked about it here before. As the war has continued Putin and the state are doing a fair job of galvanizing the public to rally around their identity, but its not all "master strategist Putin" pulling the strings. Microeconomies are popping up, local Russians are manufacturing their own cheese to replace imports, companies are cleverly outmaneuvering sanctions, entrepreneurs are exploiting openings, industries are slowly, painfully adapting and gaining confidence. And as all that goes on the average Russian begins to settle into the "us against them" mentality of besiegement. Early in the war western media called this "Putin's war" and blamed the Russian government. Slowly the messaging has changed, and now we believe every Russian to be responsible for what is happening. While I agree that this is true in a spiritual and philosophical sense, it also drives Russians deeper inward, hardening their resolve and pushing people to close ranks. Unfortunately the more defensive ordinary Russians feel, the more difficult it will be for them to mentally separate the state from the greater identity.
Young people are not excluded from this phenomena, including the bright minds. I can imagine some of the brights coming back home to Russia after living in an undignified mode of "otherness" and "humiliation" in places like Georgia, Armenia, Germany, Turkey, Kazakhstan etc. Having heard the call to return to family and rodina, sprung by the excitement of building something new at home while affirming their identities and standing up with dignity against their opponents.
Your reply to my points on Russian economic recovery make sense, though it's worth pointing out that macroeconomics is one of the lesser precise "sciences". I leave room for fated chance, unintended consequences and human ingenuity to change what looks like a logical outcome to us at the moment.
Of course we've discussed Russia being a pressure cooker and how everything can come crashing quite dramatically, but that's not the feeling in the air that I'm catching at this moment. Excuse me for this post that was less factual and more like pseudo-shamanic reading of my own tea leaves.
Slava Ukraini
 

For folks freakin out about the expenditure from the west, it might be good to have perspective,
In Afghanistan the US alone spent some 2 TRILLION dollars.  The gov't sitting in Kabul right now is the umm err Taliban.  As of July we had spent about 76 billion in Ukraine.....  For the return on investment, it is hard to say the West hasn't got a financial windfall in kneecapping the Russian military.

And this is how we snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory.  Ukraine will fight as long as it can and we should support them until that end.  Here we are discussing one possible end - I am not sure we are even at probable but we need to be ready for it.  Conversations well above my pay grade will land on how things finally resolve with respect to the war.  
After the war we need a modern day Marshall Plan.  One for the history books.  We turn Ukraine into South Korea in a month.  Even if EU and NATO somehow remain off the table there are plenty of other ways to secure that nation.  Not least of which would be stationing western troops on their soil a la the US 8th Army.  We need to follow through or we risk blowing the whole thing.  All the money spent to date will be lost if we leave Ukraine hanging during reconstruction.  If we double down on this and turn Ukraine into a regional economic powerhouse…a friendly democratic regional economic powerhouse, that is how we cement this as a major strategic victory.

More Avdiivka insanity (Oct. 10):
 

Mass.is.broken.

The best ones really are.  Sure we can get into force ratios, attrition vs force generation.  Opportunity costs.  Risk vs Reward.   Systems versus platforms.
But in the end you will end up right back to the dilemma.  AirLand Battle was a simple dilemma as well...concentrate mass, get killed by the air.  Distribute to avoid airpower, get killed in isolation by land power. 
The central dilemma facing modern warfare revolve around the same themes - concentration of mass, signature/profile, distribution and support.  We cannot realistically clear the skies below 2000 feet.  You cannot fire enough dumb or smart ammo into it and we do not have the technology (yet) to do C-UAS with other UAS.  Even if you could fire enough bullets into the sky, the noise you would make would immediately draw Deep Fires on these AD platforms and systems.  If we do not sweep the skies or establish air superiority below 2000 feet those system can see and hunt making concentration of mass impossible. 
The dilemma is in cost.  Platforms that can fire a lot of accurate bullets or munitions into the sky are going to be expensive.  We are talking about detecting, tracking and hitting something the size of a bird, with better maneuverability,  kms out.  Both what they are shooting at, and what is shooting at them are much cheaper.  A PGM munition and/or drone is a fraction of the cost of a mobile AA or SAM platform able to do C-UAS (we just spent pages on this).  In an attritional exchange the sky cleaner is going to lose, badly.
So we are back to deadlock.  Until someone can design and deliver a technology or process that breaks it.  A cheap and effective way to do C-UAS and C-ISR.   

That was a colonial war. 
While Religion was a demographic identifier, to clearly separate Them from Us, the war wasn't over religious definitions,  protocols,  iconography or anything else. It was fundamentally about a foreign invader oppressing a native population.
The imposed existence of a regime-friendly settler population using a different religion was a sociopolitical characterization, not a religious one. 
In many respects,  Northern Ireland shared strong similarities with the Algerian war against France. The settler population there was less embedded and had been there for less time but that was very clearly a war against a colonial power. 
Where NI differs (as I currently understand it) is that many Protestant /Unionist self identify as both Irish and British. Republicans consider the two as oil and water. I don't think any French Settlers referred to themselves as Algerian and French. 
There are corollaries with Ukraine, but there the classic identifier is language. A Ukrainian can speak Russian fluently and only passablr Ukrainian,  yet identify as Ukrainian. The opposite is(was?) true in the Donbass,  I believe? 
It's easy to look at a conflict,  hear the base identifiers of either community and think,  oh that's what it is. But the real truth is often a bit deeper,  much older and more basic, essential to human nature. With Northern Ireland and any other colonial war it's fundamentally about freedom from someone else in another culture deciding the status,  state and fate of your culture. 
Which, exactly,  is the nature of Ukrainian resistance against Russia. 

Elimination of Russian assault group somewhere on Bakhmut direction. Video of National Police assault brigade "Liut' " (eng. Rage) 
Reportedly Russians now move additional reinfrcements there and again activated own counter-attacks. 
Russian milblogger сomplains, most of these attacks now conduct by Shtorm/Shtorm Z units, but without proper artillery support, so often these groups even can't approach to UKR positions for skirmish fight. He told the level of irrecoverable losses in Shtorm Z companies can be 40-70 % after each attack. Main reason - poor training and total dominance of UKR artilelry and mortars, which don't allow to evacuate wounded, which raise number of KIA. By the same reason more equipped and motivated "Shtorm" units also didn't have success. 
I can add, in last time not only convicts go to Shtorm Z. Many Russian soldiers reject to go in fight and as a punishment commanders transfer them to Shtorm Z units, which more and more turn similar to penalty units of Red Army of WWII. Main reason of refusals is moral exhausting of soldiers, who several months live in dirty trenches with short-time rest in close rear without vacations to home. Many of them hadn't vacations through 9 months. Russian milblogger told one of reason of Avdiivka fail is moral exhausting of infantry - many of them had a hope about vacations, but instead got an order to prepare for assaults. This heavily struck their moral, so there were episodes, when in first days of offensive some units just rejected to go forward despite UKR positions were destroyed by artillery and bombs and it's left onlly seize them almost withoit fight.    

I was going for a more mocking angle to be honest.  Since the dawn of time people - usually old people - have somehow hooked whatever social ills they see onto a crisis.  “Moral decline”, “Hippies”, “Homosexuality”, “Women who can vote”!
Human social systems are naturally a mix of progressiveness and conservatism.  And rarely, if ever, does a war start based solely on whatever social issue means most to you.  We did not start wars because “the church” since the Crusades, possibly the Middle Ages - and even then there was a whole lotta money and power at play.  We sure as hell have never started a war over any of the rest of “damn kids these days” stuff.
The West is not going to fall over the obsolescence of religion or LGBTQ issues, or whatever you are worried about.  Why?  Because it didn’t last time with “women voting”, “civil rights” and “rock and/or roll”.  In fact since those End Times, the West has continued it rise in power and wealth.  
If anything does destroy the West it will be power hungry egomaniacs that leverage all that social angst into something really dangerous.  They aren’t doing it because they really care about our church/mosque/raccoon ratios - they are doing it to take more power.  The dismantling of democracy, social divisions that turn cancerous, deep corruption and greed- this is how empires die.  Not because we decide to stop going to freakin church and start this strange new thing called “meditation”.  

Russian tank gets SMArted:
 

Yeah, I'm very aware of that, and I suppose that's a cue for getting a little into why we don't have anti-drone drones.
There are two parts to the anti-drone drone: detection and attack.  The detection is the hard part.  Destruction is easy - we already have no end of systems that can very accurately destroy anything that you give them coordinates of.  We can accurately fire projectiles, exploding projectiles, exploding projectiles full of razor sharp hoops, high energy beams of photons, rings with chains on them, rings with strings on them, giant wads of gooey stuff, or anything you want to take out a drone.  But you have to detect it.
For an anti-drone drone, there are sort of two categories of drone you're targeting: open loop (no comm back to the sender) and closed loop (some comm back to the sender, whether full two-way control, occasional updates, or whatever).  
Detection of the first type (no comm), which includes Shaheds, is tricky - unlike the F-35, these *start* with the radar cross section of a goose* and then you can make that even smaller.  These things are all small on visual and radar cross sections because you can paint them and they don't have a lot of metal.  You're going to track them with frustrating "visual" algorithms, where "visual" can mean different things in the optical vs. radar wavelengths, but you're still trying to pick out changes in the scene to decide where the thing is.  I'm not going to spend much time on it, other than to say that unless you have really high signal to noise and high resolution (both of which the target is trying to reduce), it's a lot harder than you think, and in general you're not going to get there with simple image differencing.  And this problem exists for commless drones whether you're using another drone, a gun, or a death ray to take them down.  Shaheds at least have a very characteristic sound that you can probably use for detection and targeting once they're within audible range.
Detection of the second type (active comm) is easy.  It's transmitting, and transmitting enough to get clear signal back to its operator, who is farther away than you are if it's attacking you.  Triangulation is old technology.  Piece of cake: you lock onto the frequency, have some kind of sensor so you know your own orientation relative to the sensor, and just maneuver in a way to make the signal from the drone stronger until you hit it and destroy it with whatever mechanism you prefer.  Or have a few sensors that are networked to give you the position (helloooo MLAT) and shoot it with your favorite method of action-at-a-distance.
Except for one problem: whose drone did you just destroy?
In the Ukraine environment, IFF is the hard part of doing radio based anti-drone systems.  There are tons of things flying around, as evidenced by the daily releases of yet another view of every bit of ground combat we ever see.  It's not quite Diamond Age concentrations of them, but they're working on it.  And they're all sorts of random drones, including commercial drones, custom drones made with commercial off the shelf parts, custom drones with a mix of commercial and special mil parts, totally custom mil drones, and who knows what else. And they're all using similar frequencies, because the combination of physics and the atmosphere force you to the same frequencies if you want a particular range and data rate at powers that you can reasonably supply to both the ground operator and drone with batteries.  If you don't sort out the IFF thing and you set an autonomous anti-radiation based anti-drone system loose, it's just as likely to attack its allied drones as the enemy drones, because it has no way to tell them apart.  That means you have to have your complete drone ecosystem integrated (ring that cash register over at Lockheed/Northrop Grumman/Raytheon!!) or you're just going to be attacking your own stuff.  
And part of why we aren't seeing even rudimentary versions of it in Ukraine is that it's not a function that people were already spending much effort on for commercial/hobbyist drones. You can't just pop over to Robotshop.com or Alibaba and order tunable RF sensor kits (or a few thousand of them) the way you can other types of sensor, or actuators for operating your 3D printed grenade dropper.  It's possible to get relatively inexpensive software-defined radio modules that are small (that's what feeds ADSBExchange so you can see who's flying around Ukraine), but the environment is so variable, along with the need to confirm what drone you're attacking, that at least for now you're going to need a human in the loop, even if you can semi-automate your remote control drone sensor.  And even with a human in the loop, nobody is painting national flags on their drones, so unless you know "this is one that our side makes" after you get up close to it (assuming you're doing that, rather than sending a death ray at it from 5 km), you really don't know who you're shooting down.  So the basic tech isn't all that hard, but because it's not just point and shoot or point and drop, it's a lot more dependent on integration of the whole system to be usable.
*geese, like all waterfowl, are incredibly mean and probably deserve to die. That's why there's a book entitled "Ducks and how to make them pay".  If we can do an autonomous system for drones, it should probably be immediately applied to geese and ducks.

A New Dig Has Revealed Bodies From a WWII Massacre in Ukraine
New Lines Magazine

Reconciliation of old wounds in an honest and open manner is vital in progress to true friendship. It sounds pat, but it's true.
I say this as an Irish boy who grew up in the shadow of a vicious sectarian war to the North. I remember vividly when someone explained "kneecapping" to me - and why the IRA had been done it to a boy of 15, the same age as me. Later as a young adult I observed the slow, tortuous and seemingly intractable process towards peace. For the longest time it was deemed impossible by a huge majority and yet here we are - the IRA functionally dead, the British Army gone and an actual democratic system in place (however dysfunctional it can become).
Shifting eastwards and backwards in time and place, I learned about the end of WW2 in eastern Europe, a shadowy and unspoken coda of horror that echoed the greater horror in a fractal manner - smaller but perfectly replicated in its violence and vileness.
One thing that always struck me was how Soviet Russia made a point of turning Polish & Ukrainians violently against each other, fanning the flames of ethnic hatred in an utterly cynical and brutal manner. My Ukrainian-born mother-in-law (although she now identifies as equally Polish) has told me of what her father went through, how the Russians stood aside or stepped in as it suited them to the murderous detriment of families on both sides of the "border".
The key take-away from this article is in the fourth paragraph: 
And the last few:
Russia loves when its victims fight each other. Denying that is an act of power.

Yes, but at the moment I am guided by the 0.7 liters of Madeira I drank. Rain outside the window, live concert of Depeche Mode 1993. And the lack of obvious successes of the Ukrainian armed forces. 
Many of my childhood friends are afraid of this call. But I think. that this is the duty of everyone who lived carefree in the 90s

We will try and negotiate with it.  The threads of this negotiation are already there.  The narratives of “Silly Ukrainians, Silly Russians” are all basically saying “well sure, in Ukraine…but we would do it better”.  This sort of collective denial will be subtle and deep, at a cultural level.
Then as evidence mounts we will try and take these new technologies and bolt them onto our existing systems and doctrine.  In the west, our military tactics and units have not really changed that much since WW2.  The TF/BG concept has had all new tech bolted onto it and Unmanned will be as well.  We will spend billions on counters to try and protect that old concept.  But as you note we won’t be able to, the shifts are too big.
Next, we will get all “out of the box” and create experimental units and doctrine that looks good on the surface but in reality is designed to fail.  This will validate that the old orgs and doctrine were right all along.  We normally do this by half-measures - we do not build a complete coherent experimental system.  We just take away the old stuff.
Then we will hit a forcing function.  A real world disaster that we cannot negotiate with or ignore.  It will cost a bunch of teenagers their lives.  Then we will scramble to try and realign.  It will be expensive and brutal.  After that, well the whole thing becomes a dice roll.  It didn’t have to be, but this is where sunk cost fallacies get you.
Air-Land warfare has changed.  More, it is continuing to change.  It isn’t just the pace, it is the depth.  Fundamentals and foundational principles are challenged (eg Surprise, Concentration, Mission Command).  This is not simply “a better tank killer”, this is stuff that breaks force ratios, tempo, and basic utility of what we thought was combined arms.  The death of how we used to do minefield breaching ops is just the latest in a very long line of doctrine that look more and more obsolete.  I strongly suspect that joint warfare as a whole is shifting under our feet.  RMA has finally landed with a big enough bang to get our attention.
What will follow the Russo-Ukraine war will be a decade long argument.  But in the end, everyone in charge will have come up in the old system.  Further, we do not really promote radical Tesla-type disruptors to be GOs in modern militaries.  So we are looking at a pretty conservative bunch steeped in a conservative military culture and doctrine.  Oh, and with a trillion dollar defence industry tooled for stuff we had for the last 80 years.
Not a good start.

You are baiting me, right?  “Why they fail” is because this guy has zero idea what he is talking about.  Maybe less than zero.  As in, people lose knowledge just by watching his video.
Starting with the flail is the first hint.  A flail is for admin and rear area clearances.  I know some militaries still have them on assault vehicles but everyone in the business agrees they are dumb.  On the modern battlefield the flail is suicide anywhere but clearing parking lots for Bde HQ.  
Minebots - IED work, not for combat clearing.  At least not yet.
Rollers.  Ok, these are not designed to work in isolation.  In fact it is his entire problem.  Minefield clearing is a team sport.  This guy is pointing to player positions and trying to figure out which one is best at “playing football”.  Plough and rollers are the primary breaching systems.  Rollers are designed to 1) detect a minefield, normally through a strike, and 2) prove a minefield after a plough tank has done a breach.  
Every plough tank can only clear a safe lane “that every one must follow”.  Sorry bald YouTube guy we have yet to invent an area clearance plough.  Ploughs are at the center of mechanical breaching.  But they are also tricky and terrain dependent.  Ploughs and rollers are designed to work together in a team.  With their friends, explosive breaching and engineering vehicles.
So opposed minefield breaching is one of the hardest operations to pull off.  Right next to amphib on the difficulty scale.  You normally have multiple breach lane attempts that use the mechanical and explosive systems. Explosive systems still need to be proven after the breach, normally by rollers.  And engineer vehicles for complex obstacles like AT ditches or dragons teeth in the middle of a minefield.  Adding more systems ups the complexity a lot requiring a lot of training and skill to pull off in the time windows needed to be successful.
Breaches fail when the breaching teams fail.  However that is why multiple breaches are done…we expect half to fail from the outset.  Further based on density and cover, one has to scale the number of breaches to try and get a single success.  In Ukraine the densities are so high we are likely talking double NATO doctrine: so Cbt Teams are likely shooting for 4 lane attempts instead of 2.  
Of course this violates concentration of mass restrictions we are seeing on the modern battlefield.  So one either goes small platoon bites and infantry infiltration.  Or establish conditions for a major breaching op, and risk most of one’s breaching assets.  Establishing those conditions has proven to be the hard part.
Minefield breaching operations as we define them in NATO are failing because the battle space is denied to concentration of mass.  RA ISR can even pick up large concentrations of forces and pick out the breaching vehicles.  We have not created the defensive bubble to fix that.  So minefield breaching is not failing because of individual systems.  It is failing because land warfare as we know it is kinda broken right now.  Until we either fix it, or figure out a new way to do these things…we are kinda stuck.

This is a primer on how to defeat us.  We are going to be limited to the wars where we can establish air superiority…and that is damned hard wrt UAS.  
It wasn’t the artillery in that video that was the central problem.  It was the video itself.  That entire RA armoured attack was butt naked to the sky and detected probably a zip code away.  Dropping the sky on it from a bunch of different systems was just the finish.  
I am not sure how to build a bubble around that assault in the modern era.  Even if, especially if, it was one of ours.  

Ukrainian version:
Russian version:
 

Another interesting one:
Raises some questions to me:
Have people started painting the top side of drones yet? That Zala was ridiculously easy to spot and would have been less so even if the topside was just matt green or something. Are drones so expendable it's not worth it? Is the EW capability there to allow the use of friendly drones but jam the enemy? Does the profusion of COTS drones on both sides prohibit that because they all share similar frequencies? How easy are drones to operate? How easy should drones be to operate? Assuming the operator/team was destroyed in that shack, how easy are they to replace? Are they specialists that need specific training, or can you grab anyone who played a modern games console? Or... does someone in the Russian army consider a drone, operator and team eating a precision munition an attritional win for them? Either way... someone should probably explain that counterbattery rules apply to them too. I can remember plenty of videos of Ukrainian drone operators being very careful about retrieving their drones. It would be interesting to find out how the Ukrainian drone was in the right place at the right time to pick them up. It could be sheer chance, but did they chase the Zala? Intercept it after getting information it was heading in x direction? Were they lurking in anticpation based on SIGINT?

Replace the pole with a tree and in CM it would hit every time! lol

Now this is a solid demonstrator for the advantages of cluster munitions over conventional.
 

Guys, gotta get out of your own heads. 
Russian strategic aims:
- Full subjugation of Ukraine, pulling it in as a puppet state a la Belarus. 
- Division and weakening of NATO in order to give breathing room within Russia sphere
- A united greater Russia under a new Czar
I don't care if Poppy Orange gets in and cuts off the taps - that up there is not going to happen without the entire world abandoning Ukraine, and whole lot more to be honest.  Could we snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?  Sure, but it is a reach to see things failing that badly.  Even if we do abandon Ukraine, it is a country of 44 million and really...really...p$ssed off right now.  They will dig in and fight like badgers because they have seen what the alternative looks like. 
After Bucha et al, Ukraine is never going to embrace Russia.  NATO has secured unity and defence spending for at least a couple decades because now there is a threat that isn't a few idiots in white Toyotas in countries we didn't even know existed.  And Russia is a mess, and will likely remain one.  There will be no western normalization with Russia after this, or if there is, shame on us.
US Pol is not the driving factor in Russia achieving its strategic objectives (stated or unstated) in this war.  It is a driving factor in how badly they lose it.

Oh my someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed today.  I was more playfully talking about the pearl clutching and hand wringing "the half empty glass is breaking!!" sentiment, which appears to be spreading.  Long list of posts with that tone have your name at the top going way back, hence why I "pulled you in"...and you never disappoint!
So we have moved from the monolithic invincible Russia specter, to "how long can Ukraine possibly hold out?!"
As long as they want/need/have/can?  I sense you, and many others, are really struggling with the unknowns in all this.  Welcome to war.  It is a collision of certainties that create massive uncertainty.  The RA is a "shattered shell" of what we feared on 21 Feb 23 - you can debate that one all day but it is done.  It will take a decade or more to rebuild what they were shooting for back in the 10s.  They broke it all over Ukraine last year; talk about bad decisions.  But they can Defend - as the old Prussian also said, that part is easier, but it does not get the business done.
So how long can Ukraine "last" really depends on what they are doing.  Can they freeze this conflict in place - yeuup, the RA suicide-fest last winter proved that one.  Can they re-take all of former Ukraine...well, jury is still out.  Can, as a nation, they sustain a war longer than Russia?  Well we will see.  Are we talking low-intensity "we are all dug in and raiding now and again"?  Sure.  Are we talking insanely high intensity combat - well probably not, no one really can.
My main point is that just because you can't get answers you want does not automatically mean the worst is happening.  Based on what I can see (not imagine I am seeing, like fully functioning Russian rail systems pouring thousands of tons of supplies onto fat happy Russian defenders), the West is committed through the Winter at least.  If Ukraine can pull off a breakthrough and regain some momentum, they have a good chance at some serious gains- as we have seen in this war, no one cracks like the RA.
If no breakthroughs happen and all we get is very expensive leg humping, then I expect some difficult political conversations are on the table late-Winter, early-Spring.  Maybe we call it where it stands and everyone wins/loses.  Putin can claim the "greatest Russian victory since Bagration" as he retains an extra 6% of now-blasted and mined wasteland, that cost them 100k lives.  Russia can go back and lick its wounds while trying to figure out who to fend off NATO, who scored Finland and Sweden out of this deal - Russia got a pretty weak China...and the big stuffy animal filled with asbestos that is Iran.  Oh and lets not forget the BFF of North Korea - like being best friends with that weird kid who tortures bugs at recess while touching himself, and everyone tries not to notice.
Ukraine gets to stay Ukraine, starts laying mines - hey look they can do it too! And we wind up with a Korean solution.  Maybe Ukraine does not even get to enter into NATO or EU, but money and alliances will be created because containing Russia matters now - South Korea made it work pretty well and their capital is under gun range of one of the craziest MFs since his Dad.       
https://datacommons.org/place/country/KOR/?utm_medium=explore&mprop=amount&popt=EconomicActivity&cpv=activitySource,GrossDomesticProduction&hl=en
To my mind, that is about as bad it will get, at least as things stand right now.  If the West - especially Europe, cuts Ukraine lose entirely, then this whole show was a complete waste of time as Ukraine will not be able to survive for long without a massive reconstruction/investment effort - we let that happen, well we deserve what happens next. 
I know this is not the war you ordered, sir, but it is the one we got.

Russia really has been playing both sides down there.  They were pretty “ok” with Israel too, a lot of people with Russian family roots in Israel - ironic, they left because life was so crappy in Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel–Russia_relations
There is also the whole “anti-Nazi” thing.  But at the same time Russia has sided with al-Assad in Syria and played footsie with Hamas and others aligned with Iran.  It seems pretty complicated.
I honestly think there is daylight between these two wars on the Russian side of the equation.  It will likely have an impact on the Westerd side but I am betting it was a surprise to Russia and they are basically going to try and stay neutral.  Hamas is a tiny militant group by conventional warfare standards - something like 40,000 at the upper end.  Their capabilities are not zero but no AirPower or Seapower.  They are very likely to loom at the lessons of Denial in Ukraine and types to apply them but it is a very different dynamic.  
I mean the world is a crazy place so if hard evidence linking this latest Hamas action directly comes it will be surprising - given Russian history of strategy-stupid.  But I really do not expect it.  Iran, definitely.  That is the shoe to drop on this one.  Gaza is screwed.  Ground invasion and house cleaning is almost guaranteed.  Hell, Israel might go so far as forced deportation but then Egypt gets weird.  But if Israel decides to make an a example with Iran we could see a repeat of something like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera
Gonna need a bigger forum if that happens.