BletchleyGeek

This is very interesting.  The Ukrainian defence at the beginning of this war did not look like a traditional conventional defensive, and it worked brilliantly.  This sounds a lot like they have solved for offensive as well, but it also will not be traditional or conventional.
Could just be disinformation to keep the RA guessing, or maybe the UA is going to do something to melt our doctrine.  Many have long suspected that something was up - a lot of ideas back and forth.  The UA feels like it is building towards something.

If this really is mortar crew running around behind the lines I'm going drink myself unconscious.

All war is sacrifice.  It is a bad thing if people forget that sacrifice for a greater good is an ongoing requirement in order to sustain their way of life.  
Or they could use a “great peace” to completely forget that, get rich off human insecurities and raise generations of “me-centric” entitlement (i.e. “sacrifice is for others) who believe that their last selfie is a great work of art and they should get a participant medal for everything.
Now I know this is a gross oversimplification, plenty of the last generations are doing great things.  However, after watching democracy wither largely because people don’t bother to show up, and now an egregious embolden act of war against the west by Russia that is becoming “boring”; I am concerned to say the least.
I too hope for a Rousseau-like state and an end to war but until that day comes we all need to be ready to pay the bill when it comes due.

The Pickle is OVER it.
 

Which is 30 minutes longer than you last in Sudan.  It is not easy by any stretch, that’s why they are called “special”.

There are good historical (and affects-the-future) reasons for the Estonian exclusions. During The Soviet a lot of Russians were moved to the Baltic States for military, science, political, economic, etc reasons. Funnily enough, during The Soviet the Baltics were actually a pretty great place to be posted. Better food, slightly free-er, better value for money, nice people, good beaches, etc. So a lot of them stayed, or went back later. A LOT of them. So many that they /still/ make up a quarter of Latvia's population.
Then the singing revolution came, at a time when the Kremlin was a bit busy with other things. Things like a concurrent coup in Moscow and multiple other SSRs collectively going "screw this, we are OUT". So the revolution was a success, and hey presto; three new countries. Congratulations! 
All that was left was the minor problem of what to do with all the Russians. Lithuania went hard-core, and just expelled them all - helped by the lack of a common land border (ignoring Kalingrad), which meant there wasn't really much Russia could do about it.
Estonian looked across their border and noticed that Leningrad was RIGHT THERE, so took a more live and let live approach.
Latvia was literally and figuratively in the middle. The Russians were 'encouraged' to go home ... but for many of them by now Latvia WAS home, they had no other.
This has left rather large expat Russian communities in both places, which are in an awkward position. Russia doesn't really want the back, but neither do their host countries, and many many of them are functionally stateless because due to official policy and personal choice they don't have Latvian citizenship (including descendants born since 1991) and Russia won't give them citizenship. It's tricky, yo.
The exclusions should be seen in that light - despite legal technicalities, a lot of these 'Russians' are for all practical purposes Estonian or Latvian. Restricting their movement would create a whole lot of really unnecessary anger amongst these expat communities, for absolutely no benefit to the Latvian state.
Keep the Russian citizens out? Sure!
Restrict the movement of your own people? ... ahhh, no. Dumb idea.

I (too) can see Ukraine choosing not to attack in strength anywhere as long as Russia has sufficient assets to throw against such an attack - and turn it into a bloody grind. Why would they? Lot's of things been doing 'splodey stuff in Russia's rear lately, making Russians die for their country without Ukrainians joining them. 

Like you say, if you can take out the enemy in a piecemeal fashion why force a decisive engagement?. Especially when the enemy seems to be looking for the latter. Reminds me of 'emptiness and fullness' written by some old Chinese man which features here on a somewhat regular basis ;-).
Of course ending the war sooner has merits of its own, but given the context I'd say 'more haste less speed' applies.

It's interesting - it seems, on the evidence available, that one of the 'tricks' Putler has been using to keep his forces at the front 'manned' (for some limited values of 'manned') is to commit some or all of the 'Third Battalions' ... the unit training Battalions which actually do the training of new conscripts and enlistees. This is, historically, a desperation move (as if it hasn't been obvious that Putler has been operating in desperation mode since the first week or so) -- it's what the Germans did in early 1945, they converted all of the Training units in each Wehrkreis (the ones that did all the primary training) into combat units ... it gave a momentary manpower boost but meant no more units could be generated.
Reports of extremely abbreviated 'training' periods even for Russian (as opposed to treasonous Ukrainian LDNR/DPR) troops of a few days to a week or two would tend to indicate there aren't many trainers left. So even if Putler decided to mobilise and introduce more widespread conscription ... who would train the new recruits to be more than the worst sort of cannon fodder?
Anbd it would be pretty obvious to said recruits that that's what they were ... which would do wonders for their morale!

Somewhat off-topic, but then, a lot of things on this thread are ...

Several newspapers reported on recent wargames conducted by CSIS in Washington D.C. on what might happen in an invasion of Taiwan by China.  Below is a link to one of the articles that is not behind a pay wall:

What-if war game maps huge toll of a future US-China war over Taiwan
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2022/08/11/2003783337

https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2022/08/china-taiwan-tensions-flare-us-faces-shrinking-window-deter-conflict/375514/

https://breakingdefense.com/2022/08/a-bloody-mess-with-terrible-loss-of-life-how-a-china-us-conflict-over-taiwan-could-play-out/

Further analysis of the Amnesty International debacle:
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/adam-zivo-amnesty-international-ignores-reality-to-manufacture-ukrainian-war-crimes
"...Rovera arrived in eastern Ukraine not to investigate facts on the ground, but rather to bend them to a preordained conclusion."
At university, when AI was fully and laser-focused on prisoners of conscience, I volunteered and handed out pamphlets.  In the last roughly ten years AI has strayed and adopted an anti-Western bias, now, or again, shown to be simple prejudice.  If anything good comes from this it will be their collapse as a publicly credible organization.
 

While I do like to bash Germans while driving German car to a German pub for German beer with German sausages, I do believe we must not rush to conclusions and blame Germans engineering. This war is not like NATO led war. UKR are using arty much harder to compensate disparity in numbers and save lives. Obviously, things are going to break. They are going to break whether they are German, French, Polish or US made.
But what is important is the NATO long range artillery is doing good work. RU does not distinguish between types now. They say just NATO long range artillery for CAESAR, Crab, Pz2000 or M777 and you can see the pain on their faces (I watch videos) when they talk about that arty. The usual RU derision of NATO arty disappeared completely.  Everybody is doing excellent work.

I am checking RU reporter video about Pisky and It is getting extremely hilarious. 

So, I've been reading Ian Toll's Pacific Trilogy, and in "Twilight of the Gods", he writes this:
By contrast, according to Wylie, a cumulative operational strategy does not involve territorial offensives and pitched battles, but a "less perceptible minute accumulation of little items piling one on top of the other, until at some unknown point, the mass of calculated actions may be large enough to be critical". It weaponizes the logic of "death by a thousand cuts." In the Pacific, cumulative strategies chipped away at the economic and political foundations of Japan's imperial empire. It struck me that the Russians appear to have adopted what Toll calls a "sequentialist" strategy: "we will march to Kiev 100 yards of dirt at a time", while the Ukranians appear to have adopted a cumulativist strategy: "we will degrade the Russian ability to make war until it collapses".
I think that analysis broadly harmonizes with The_Capt's description of warfare as decision space shaping. A sequentialist attack changes the decision space (the US capture of Saipan, for example, or the Japanese capture of Borneo), but cumulativist strategies (building a metric crapton of escort carriers; destroying the Japanese merchant marine) lead to breakthroughs and shorten the overall war by undeciding things and forcing bad decisions on the part of the adversary.
In many ways it feels like the Russians are duplicating Japan's WWII playbook while the Ukrainians are duplicating that of the Allies.

About Saki Airfield ... I had a rummage around the place on Google Earth just to confirm the annotations of fuel and ammunition storage on other imagery that have been doing the rounds.  I agree with those assessments.  What I did find was something else ...
There is an area at the north of the facility which is not shown on the other annotated imagery that was taken hours before the strike that has been posted widely.  The attached .kmz file will take you to the point I have annotated as Grid 36T WQ 46855 94846.  I have put imagery from April and June 2021 side by side because some features are more obvious in one image than they are in the other.
 
Points to note are:
That the vehicle entrance facing north has a tarmac roadway which leads to the compound gate and; therefore, is truly a vehicle entrance and exit.  The vehicle entrance facing west does not have a tarmac roadway.  Cycling back through historical imagery shows that vehicles come out of the underground facility using that entrance and park up adjacent to it. The personnel entrance I am fairly sure is part of this facility and is possibly an emergency escape route as it lies outside the perimeter of the underground facility.  It certainly is not part of the aircraft revetment which is the bunded feature immediately to the right of it as none of the other revetments on this airfield, or quite a few others that I have looked at in this part of the world, have them. The facility is clearly of some importance as it sits fully enclosed in its own compound and is underground. What it is though, I have no idea.  Despite it being of some importance, it is right next to the airfield's perimeter fence.  By the looks of reporting on the Ukrainian strike, it appears either to have been not important enough to target or judged to be too hardened to destroy with the means available to the Ukrainians.  It is certainly not a 'special weapons' facility as these are generally double fenced. 
Anyway - if anybody's got any informed ideas I'd be grateful to hear them, otherwise, I just found it interesting.
36T WQ 46855 94846.kmz

I am moving slowly but surely. Here is a map for Maryinka battle. Maryinka settlement is located on another end of RU offensive. You undoubtedly heard many claims about it like 2/3 are captured or almost captured and so on. Well, let's look closer. This time I will use Google Earth. It is less pleasing for my eyes, but it does show terrain and in the case of Maryinka it is important.

The red line is the approximate border before the war. Yellow dashed line is the contested area where major fighting is happening. As far as I understand assault groups of both sides infiltrate contested area and engage each other often with arty. But to define what is generally happening we can use several notable features.
On the right just in front of the border line there is farm fully under RU control from 6-Aug. There are just several hundred meters between the farm and RU forward positions and 10 days between start of offensive and statement of full control. The dominant feature that controls the eastern part of the village is the landfill of the former Shchurovo Mine.
According to RU sources the landfill was always in UKR hands. So, nobody really knows how RU almost captured Maryinka without capturing the landfill. Well, possibly they infiltrated several assault groups in to several places in contested area, declared Maryinka is almost captured and then got killed (see insert from sample video).
However, we have an interesting development. Yesterday, two weeks after start of the offensive RU stated they captured position at the landfill and were moving toward the center. But I need a definite statement that the landfill is captured because I know how RU propaganda works. Let's wait and see.
Last is checkpoint Maryinka. There is no any information about it. So, we can assume RU did not reach it at all.  This should give you an idea how RU is progressing at both ends of the offensive. 

“I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.”

It was moi, we were discussing it with Steve who was opposed to the idea. DefMon also tweeted it at one point. 
TBH at this point I think UA will still be stalling and won't commit fully for a bit, instead continuing shaping operations and doing opportunistic advances wherever possible. 
And then reversed The Battle of The Sudden Flame will happen, UA will unleash ATACMS, F-16s and NASAMS, drive the orcs back and besiege Sevastopol

Gents Steve might be asleep but he did give folk a warning a few pages back. 😉 

"Ukrainian MLRS “Verba” fires towards Russian positions on the front line in the Kharkiv region, Ukraine, Tuesday, August 2, 2022. EVGENIY MALOLETKA / AP"
* A mix of KrAZ-6322 and BM-21 Grad

For the life of me, I cannot see what that would look like.  If they wanted to try and take Zaporizhya why are they still hammering in the Donetsk?  They have a 200km frontage down in the south so a left flanking north would make sense…a few months ago.  So why do all that hemorrhaging in the Donbas as a breakout N of Mariupol could also flank E and take the ground they are doing frontals on?
More simply put - a push around Zapoizhya would have been done by now if it was an option, so what changed?
An RA offensive out of Kherson is insane (which means they may try it) because all of the LOCs have been cut or threatened.  And that goes for the 200+ kms of massive river between Kherson and Zaporizhya as well.
So to summarize, the Russians are going to do one last big push in an area they would have, if they could have for months.  Or a suicidal attempt on the far side of a river while your opponent owns all the ISR and precision deep strike capability?  All the while that logistics have been getting mauled?  Am I missing something?

Time to talk about what has happened in Pisky aka Pisky crisis. This is my personal opinion of what has happened there in the last few days.
General crisis of UKR Artillery
As we all know UKR artillery suffers from lack of soviet caliber ammo and tubes. However, it appears the problem has become worse recently (end of July), and RU started to notice it in different parts of the front. The situation could be especially hard at Donetsk direction due to alleged RU strikes of UKR warehouses a s@Haiduk told us. 
As I understand UKR Command tries to mitigate it by creating NATO caliber arty groups (Girkin talked about them few times). There are not a lot of them (maybe even 1). When this group is present UKR have either relative parity with RU offensive arty group or some superiority over RU defensive arty group.
Probably this is the reason we do not see serious UKR pushes and collapses of RU defenses so far. UKR arty group can suppress RU local defending arty, but it cannot CB large amount of arty RU can concentrate in one place. So, if there is major UKR push RU concentrate arty there and effectively stops everything.
Cause of the crisis in Pisky.
According to RU discussions UKR Command removed the arty group from Pisky around week ago. As I see it was calculated risk - they do not have enough groups, and this is supposedly the most heavily fortified portion of front (I have not seen fortifications/defense myself, cannot comment). RU banged their head at UKR defense here like 6 days and still did not penetrate it completely.
RU on other hand had a real crisis - the progress was negligible. Despite local penetration somewhere else they were stalled by critical Avdiyvka defenses and the only way to deal with them is to encircle Avdiyvka through Pisky and Vodiane (North of Pisky). The inaccurate and inflexible but heavy RU artillery hammer was dropping on Pisky.
As per previous experience UKR defenses could withstand significant RU battering and continue to fight. However, for this offensive RU had little know but very influential trump card - more widely available drone teams prepared by RU volunteer groups in previous months. They started to feed observation videos directly to arty observers allowing RU arty to discover and hammer even pinpoint UKR targets. The RU hammer became significantly more accurate (judging by RU standarts). 
Initial disposition
Let's look at what we know about initial disposition. 

Just to get a feel here is an old RU video of shootouts at Volvo center and Pisky. RU forward position with sniper and spotter looks like from trench in front of Volvo center and they shoot toward Cowshed.
And here is photo of Volvo-center from RU Drone operator/propagandists Tatarsky (who fought there in 2014-2015 and now again) on 3 of August.

 
And here is link to the video of him at Cowshed.
https://t.me/vladlentatarsky/15302
He says nothing important, just celebrating that the best Warrior Nation in the World managed to walk less than 700 meters in 8 years, 5 months and 6 days of new offensive against pig Untermensch. 
And this is the biggest issue of RU - despite all efforts RU could not capture and clear forward UKR position until the Crisis happened on 2 of August.
Pisky Crisis 1-2 August
For several days RU kept drones above Pisky and relentlessly hammered any movement on UKR positions. For the feel here is the sample video of that work. UKR Squad commander Sergey Gnezdilov commented that Pisky was receiving 6500 rounds per day from RU. UKR arty fire was weak. No CB. And only 120mm and 82mm tried to answer occasionally.  The only local UKR command could do was to hold the line patching it with fresh reinforcements.
On the 1-Aug while artillery kept UKR defenders in cover first RU assault groups managed to reach the outskirts of Pisky from the Airport direction. They overran a small UKR outpost taking half-dozen of UKR POW. Yet, it seems RU assault group was weak and preferred not to push forward into small arms fight with UKR defenders relying instead on artillery fire.  UKR defenders on other hand became too weak to dislodge it. UKR defense started to crack but still was holding.

Until 2-Aug. On 2-Aug probably after RU arty caught fresh UKR reinforcement and from 15 hloptcev 14 became casualties, morale cracked and UKR command started to lose control over forward positions.
We do not know what happened there (push from RU assault groups or too eager withdrawal). What we do know though is that UKR forces pulled back from Cowshed and the eastern part toward western part. RU immediately followed UKR on both sides of ponds.
However even this modest effort was too much for RU forces. Seems to be exhausted and weak after the previous 5 months fighting RU decided not to pursue UKR into UKR rear defensive zone and to dig in at the area reached by nightfall - Dam.  
The sudden loss of control caused Sergey Gnezdilov to write an emotional Facebook post describing difficult situation and heavy losses. Shock waves amplified by UKR volunteers reposts reach both UKR public and RU Nats. Word of imminent UKR defense collapse and RU breakthrough caused quite a stir everywhere. Yet, there was neither UKR collapse no RU breakthrough. 
Quiet Endgame 3-Aug
Unlike stormy UKR social networks situation in Pisky was relatively calm. RU was probing and hitting anything suspicious very hard at western part.  UKR side on other hand seems decided to withdraw toward Donetsk Ring Road and Bridge Republic positions. Also, according to Sergey Gnezdilov vague new post UKR command decided to return the arty group and RU became uninterested in further major pushes. 
It was all back to the old arty Ping Pong game. 
P.S. 4-Aug
According to latest RU Nats posts they moved on from Pisky toward new and exciting topics - China-US scandal, RU shelling Donetsks and murdering civilians while pretending UKR did it, and Glorious advance RU troops are making in the whole Donbass area. Fighting in Pisky became just another topic hinting that RU either took a pause or they are returning back to crawling pace.
We will know when the time comes.

Nice work. You've managed to combine a straw man with a false dilemma. Although a common double fallacy, this one is well executed. The judges have scored you a 3.5

One does wonder how well some of these commentators would have handled 1940, 1941 or 1942...

Right?!  Gawd help us if we in the west ever get into a real war.  After the first setback we will be ready to wave white flags if this proxy war is any indication.  I am losing count of how many times the Russians take a small berg somewhere after weeks of trying and people freak out - “aaah, see the Russians are winning!  Abandon ship!!”  
Meanwhile the Ukrainians are basically spelling on bridges with arty shells and crippling Russian logistics, after collapsing a Russian front in the north, pushing them off Kharkiv, stalling then Donbas assault, and now this thing in Kherson.  But those are just flukes as the “Russians bide their time” and wait for their moment…while bleeding all over everything.