BletchleyGeek

There is also a shock effect on western sensibilities.  We have not seen a war like this, even from afar, in some time (or at least not one we pay attention to - sorry Yemen).   We are invested in the war, but it does not look like any war we have been in since Vietnam or Korea.  For example, attacking a peer force that is dug in, 5:1 casualties is not crazy at the tactical level in an attack, they are trading lives for results and that is an equation we have simply forgotten.  None of our recent wars, and we had days on them trust me, are anywhere close to this.  In fact if we had an entire platoon wiped out in Iraq of Afghanistan it would have had major political results.  We make the mistake of applying our old metrics to this fight and they do not add up because this is a very different fight.

And I am back for a couple of minutes.
RU soldier reports at 21:16
UKR tactics are smart They avoid urban battles and just move on with their BTGrs Following groups surround RU troops left behind RU troops left behind have no heavy weapons so cannot do anything against UKR RU threw some troops to hold Shevchenko but UKR bypassed it through outskirts leaving some troops as blocking force  UKR are moving towad Kupyansk Serious UKR column of foreign AFVs/vehicles is moving toward Kupyansk (as of 20:00) RU troops mostly stopped resisting [at this direction]. They are abandoning positions that are not fortified and retreating  

The Kharkiv attack is not just a diversion or opportunistic attack, these are some of the best equipped and most prestigious units in the ZSU
 
 

Im so glad that this thread has been such a boon to battlefront!
 
over a year since the last release!
 
also the Battle for normandy release on steam has missed its release window 2 years in a row.

....in extreme case, to pull back to the Dnieper and strike the enemy's major cities with nuclear tactical bombs. In a more democratic version, use heavy bombers, Caliber missiles, [at] all those targets that I listed above
Hmm, to borrow from Douglas Adams, this seems to be some strange *new* definition of the word 'sober' of which I was previously unaware.

1. Great 'CM Level 5' overview of hasty Russian field fortifications (Snihurivka). No bang bangs, just recce, good quality video, few jump cuts. Scenario design material. 
2. Also, great source material for a future CMBS 'squalor' mod.  If only I had the time, sigh.... 
3. In occupied Ukraine, mine step on YOU! 
4. And at the far opposite end of situational awareness: a Level Zero (Russian) grunt's eye view -- the awful isolation of the battlefield, can't see the enemy, only your squadmates dead and dying....
 
 

Hybrid warfare!

"Ukrainian soldiers fire at the front line in the Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine, Saturday, September 3, 2022. KOSTIANTYN LIBEROV / AP"

Theres a recent movie on Netflix about that raid: 'the bombardment.' It's rather good.

FWIW, a lot of int collection works in more or less the same way. The Other Guy(tm) doesn't want to be seen, so makes efforts to hide. But you can't hide all the things all the time, so eventually capability is revealed. A pipe, as in this example, can indeed be very hard to find, but an unused pipe is useless. Using the pipe requires a bunch of noticeable activity that is much harder to hide.
Or, consider a rifle platoon. A well dug in platoon can be very hard to find if you didn't notice them arrive. And if the guys all stay in their holes they will continue to be hard to find. But in practical terms they can't stay in their holes, and even if they could other people will need to bring them things on a regular basis - food, at least. And you can't just keep pooing in the hole you're living in.
And, even if TOG(tm) does manage to conceal all that - probably by not moving and not being resupplied - well, congratulations. That platoon has taken /itself/ out of the fight. Job done.

I'm late to the party due to a business trip, but to comment on the Prague protests.
The political parties organizing it were 1) SPD ("common man" far right party, claiming to be direct democracy party - basically nazis) 2) Tricolor ("intellectual" far right party, basically nazis in suits) and 3) Communists (actual Stalinists who renamed themselves after the revolution, sadly never got banned). None of these parties had any success in last elections, by the way, and all are basically known to be getting Kremlin money.
They were protesting for 1) leaving the EU 2) leaving the NATO 3) leaving the WHO (... wtf) 4) "not diluting Czech nation with Ukrainian refugees" 5) removing sanctions and buying Russian gas 6) some other nonsense like people being give 3 MWh of electricity every year or something.
So yeah - nazis, antivaxxers, commies, traitors and idiots.
Some of us have already made arrangements to run a counter-protest in case they do this again - it is true that we got bit blindsided by there being so many of these scum.

He is in team Steve, nothing matters but inflicting Russian casualties.

Been tracking this guy since the beginning and he is a stain on our profession at this point.  According to him the entire UA was wiped out in Mar.  Of course how a "destroyed force" managed to force generate 3 fighting brigades able to go on an offensive in 3-4 months kinda slips out of the narrative. (and I seriously doubt that was the actual number - although if 12000 troops are doing this much damage to approx twice that number of RA then they UA clearly still has 'game'.).
The guy is out now and can say whatever he wants, but it is pretty clear which side he is on in this thing - I use him as a inverted truth barometer though.  

Excellent article and a good reminder on how to interpret maps. Thanks for posting it here.

I'm curious what's after  Kherson... I'm leery of saying something like Zaporizhia,  Iziyum, etc as those are territorial acquisitions,  where as UKR instead seems very focused on force attrition, as highlighted by Steve et al.
If we can solve/identify what follows  Kherson we'll probably have a better forwards read of the current operation. 
Kherson is a "perfect" target in that it provides both force attrition of a very large but isolated enemy force and politically significant territorial acquisition. Its also nicely sized and positioned to suit the UA -  a large but very do-able offensive, short GLOCs, rear areas fully within HIMARS range, and is logistically at the end of the RUS line (Kherson <-> Kharkov).
It's an unusual and somewhat unique situation, and very unlikely to be repeated elsewhere - unless you look at Crimea...
---
If UA can take Kherson, and let's assume also cross the Dnipr,  then Crimea is very much on the menu. 
Operationally:
- Situated at the far end of the RUS "line". 
- Isolate-able (drop the Kerch,  target ferry terminals and local ports on Crimea proper, A2AD the Crimean air space, intensive and widespread SOF campaign). 
- UKR has a direct, wide overland line of attack, but RUS defense is dependent on a single bridge and ferries, while the Dnior/Azov corridor is/would be fully within HIMARS range. 
- Crimea can be reduced/attrited in stages as UA advances south towards the isthmus, a controlled and careful advance that Serbs to suit UA mindset and forces. 
- UA left flank from Dnipr to Azov coast is short-ish in distance, albeit with flat-ish open terrain. But that flat land cuts both ways and I'm pretty confident of UKR ISR advantages. 
- A Crimea campaign absolutely guarantees a RUS military response, without fighting inside major cities, and let's UKR be offensive operationally while playing defensive/positional warfare, grinding through RUS force structures and operational reserves. 
-The attrition phase can grind through the winter,  constantly degrading RUS forces (Air, Land and Naval) and using weather to add extra friction to their logistical burden. 
- It can happen at UKRs pace, leading steadily to sense of inevitability,  UT without the dramatic, emotional moments that might spur a nuclear response. 
- UKR s GLOCs are extended,  to a degree, but only from Kherson. This would not be a  Mykolaiv based op. 
Strategically:
- Ukraine will never be safe while Russia holds Sebastapol. 
- Taking Kherson and Crimea is a death blow to any Russian Invasion 2.0,  as Crimea would require an amphibious/air assault, with a non-existent fleet against a very determined, NATO level defense. 
- Ukraine southern coast will be finally safe and the Ukrainian Black Sea Fleet can be rebuilt. 
- The Donbass is irrelevant, strategically and operationally managable. 
- Control of Ukraines southern coast is a vital, nation state existence level,  geopolitical necessity. 
---
So, to this uneducated, non-veteran layman, the Kherson Offensive is itself a precursor operation for the true objective -  Crimea. 

About a week ago, there was video of Excalibur rounds hitting soft skin vehicles and a dugout.  Those are clearly airburst rounds... the signature explosion is unmistakable.
Edit:  I was an artillery officer for 17 years and a forward observer for most of that time.  Airburst rounds go off at a optimal 7 meters for variable time (VT) fuzes.  Depending with distance and angle of view, that is low enough that an airburst can be mistaken for a normal point detonation fuze burst.  So chances are good that airburst fuzes are being more commonly used...but we are not clearly seeing it in videos...because the 7 metre height and seeing if from a drone video (mainly overhead angle) from hundreds of metres distance makes the airburst look like a ground graze burst.

I will leave these tweets here and note it is in Russia's interest to lay full claim to the Russian language and ethnicity.
Here is a article where Russians in Latvia are shifting to support Ukraine.
https://www.bbc.com/russian/features-62527789
 
 

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…
 

Good example of RU fake reality. It literally says that AFU [soldiers] are waving white flag to save their lifes.  

Except it is UKR drone filming RU soldiers near RU held Pravdine - the original was posted here recently.

As a wargaming aside, very few games capture this well.  The one thing John Tiller's Panzer Campaigns does best - with its 2 hour per turn - is to capture this... the challenge is go through the ~36 turns of grim slogging out until, as you say, we're off to the races (or one gives up). Flashpoint Campaigns is also quite good (and covering a modern era conflict with ATGMs, high lethality counterbattery artillery fires, etc.).

As a wargaming aside, very few games capture this well.  The one thing John Tiller's Panzer Campaigns does best - with its 2 hour per turn - is to capture this... the challenge is go through the ~36 turns of grim slogging out until, as you say, we're off to the races (or one gives up). Flashpoint Campaigns is also quite good (and covering a modern era conflict with ATGMs, high lethality counterbattery artillery fires, etc.).

You have summoned me once again, this thread is no place for the bearer of the jeweled crown of Aquilonia!

As a wargaming aside, very few games capture this well.  The one thing John Tiller's Panzer Campaigns does best - with its 2 hour per turn - is to capture this... the challenge is go through the ~36 turns of grim slogging out until, as you say, we're off to the races (or one gives up). Flashpoint Campaigns is also quite good (and covering a modern era conflict with ATGMs, high lethality counterbattery artillery fires, etc.).