Hister

Erm, Russia is No.1 corrupt state in Europe, followed by Ukraine. While there has been strong civil anticoruption movement in Ulraine, the corruption in Russia is strong as ever.  You might want to check data facts before undergoing Russian propaganda lines.
 
Edit: I am all in for more tank and other vehicle variety in CMBS, I just made a snark remark.

Why? They are all crap and burn the same.

Oh yes, I started doing much better as the Soviets/Russians after watching Freewhisky's collabs with Domfluff (and fully reading FM100-2-1 for myself).
Haven't played against a human in CMBS yet. But I started doing a lot better as the Russians vs US AI after studying Soviet doctrine. The key is to not use Russian forces the same way you would use US forces. Prep the way with forward echelons (recon, feint (only works against a human obviously, so I haven't put this into practice yet), pin down part of the enemy force), choose an unexpected avenue of approach for your main attack, then fully commit everything at once to the main attack when (not before) it's ready to go in. It's a firepower based army, so I make very liberal use of firepower when it's time for the main attack to go in. I'll generally have all of my artillery expending all of its ammunition on anything I think might pose a threat to my main advance. I'll aim to have my tanks and IFVs arrive on the objective while the barrage is still falling, with main guns and autocannons blasting all suspected enemy positions without waiting for spots (to get a vehicle to engage multiple targets in a turn I'll use a target briefly command with a 15 second pause, then a movement order to get them to the next target briefly command), with infantry aiming to arrive on the positions they are trying to storm seconds after the supporting vehicle's 'target briefly' command runs out.
Even with all this though, you can still very much feel the superiority of the US forces. The short artillery call-in times for the Americans practically force you to be aggressive, since if you ever stop moving you will become pinned down. And frontal engagements against American tanks are a complete no-go.
Basically I think it's possible for Russians to do well against the US in CMBS (haven't proven that it's possible to do well against a human US opponent yet, so maybe I need to hop into CMBS and see if I can find an opponent). Though it's certainly harder than the US against the Soviets in CMCW. Probably not possible for the Syrians to do much against the US in CMSF2 though (maybe if you do everything perfectly you could inflict a few more casualties while losing).

I'll take your word for it that you're not pro-Russian. But you are clearly getting your information from Russian propaganda. It has been obvious since last April that Russia is going to lose this war. That comes with the caveat that victory conditions are asymmetric. Russian defeat does not automatically mean Ukrainian victory. Russia has already lost this war, and there is absolutely nothing that can change that now. Ukrainian victory has not yet been assured, though it is very likely. In fact the only way that Ukraine could lose at this point is if western support evaporates. So long as western support remains strong, Ukraine cannot lose.
Yes, Ukraine is still struggling with corruption. They are not more corrupt than Russia (they aren't even as corrupt as Russia (even in 2014 Ukraine was still only the 2nd most corrupt country in Europe after Russia)). They are struggling with the same corruption that all former-Soviet/Warsaw Pact and Russia-aligned states struggle with. Notably, all former Soviet/Warsaw Pact states which realigned away from Russia have drastically reduced corruption and increased economic prosperity compared to when they were aligned with/part of the Soviet Union/Russia. We are seeing signs of the same trends in Ukraine. A single decade is far too little time to eliminate all of the corruption that comes with formerly being aligned with Russia, but they are making impressive progress.
There is zero chance of this becoming WW3. Even if war broke out between Russia and NATO (which is basically impossible, considering that Russia has no available forces to attack NATO with (they are all in Ukraine), and in order for NATO to attack Russia all members would need to unanimously agree on something), Russia just isn't a world war-class threat (modern day Russia is not the Soviet Union, and it is not modern day China). It would be a big war, but not a world war (by any reasonable standard).
Stopping the war would overwhelmingly benefit Russia and hurt Ukraine. It would give Russia a chance to rebuild their forces, absorb lessons, and retrain under peacetime conditions. It would undo so much of the progress that has been made towards defeating them. And remember that Russians do not keep to their agreements. Any agreement that is made with Russia will be broken by Russia. Peace now along the current borders will result in Russia invading again in a few years. They will have a better starting position, they will have produced more modern equipment, and they will not underestimate the Ukrainians next time. If we stop the war now then far more people will be killed in the inevitable next war than if we see the current war through. Seeing the current war through will make it possible to more completely defeat the Russian army, allow the Ukrainian army to reestablish itself along more defensible borders, and make it easier to accept Ukraine as a full NATO member, all of which will drastically reduce the threat of future Russian invasions. 
Another reason not to stop the war right now is the importance of deterring future wars started by other would-be invaders. Allowing Russia to keep any part of Ukrainian territory sends the message that land grabs work. Part of the modern rules-based order is that invading your neighbor is no longer a legitimate way of settling territorial disputes (Russia is allowed to claim that Ukraine is a historical part of Russia all they want, but they are not allowed to settle that claim with force). We must send the message that as long as the current world order lasts, land grabs will always fail.

The russians have proven to be very good at turning their own equipment into scrap.

Sounds like you have that backwards my friend. Tanks have not had as much effect on the battlefield as many expected mostly due to the simple and plentiful man portable AT systems. That has effected both sides - this is why we didn't see tanks roll into Kyiv and why we don't see tanks rolling over the RA defensive lines now. The tanks being blasted from C4ISR is a contributing reason but not the major factor. On that front it's the AFU that has the upper hand. They have excellent C4ISR and precision munitions are are very capable of using it. The RA has much weaker ISR and much less capable precision munitions.
The balance of C4ISR and raining precision strikes on the enemy is heavily, heavily in the AFU's favour.
Ukraine is far from doomed.

Why? They are all crap and burn the same.

Why? They are all crap and burn the same.

Why? They are all crap and burn the same.

I seem to agree with virtually every word of this.
I really like this bit. ☝️
And this one.
I agree with so much of it there must be some terrible flaw...😅

My initial thought is “wow, this scenario is high risk”.  A bunch of armed troops are hard enough to control at the best of times.  In the middle of a coup/whatever where friend and foe get blurry really fast things can get completely out of control extremely easily.  What was weird about this one as it was unfolding was how little shooting was going on, maybe that was a hint that this was largely a show.  However, if some third party faction/dark lord is in the background pulling all the strings this stunt was really high risk.  To my mind there has to be easier ways to ease Putin out while trying to keep one’s head down.
It may be some time before we get enough information to understand what just happened - let alone who was behind it.  All we do know right now is that an enormous amount of uncertainty has just been injected into the entire Russian enterprise.  Even the sudden ending of this thing created more uncertainty.  Recall that uncertainty is toxic and induces a human reaction, normally driven by fear.  What we do not know is who is fully benefiting from this uncertainty.  But what we do know is that we just witnessed a major fissure widen to a chasm within the Russian macro-social framework.  We have been talking about Russian instability and wear and tear for some time, this has to be a major milestone on the path to system failure.
At a minimum, I do not think the myth of endless Russian iron resolve survived the weekend.  And for those fighting Russia, for those fighting for Russia, the full impacts are yet to be seen.  My sense is that we will need to stop seeing Prig and Wagner as a cause of Russian uncertainty but instead a symptom of a deeper uncertainty that really has the potential to fly out of control at a moments notice.  Russia came within inches of a full blown civil war in the last 72 hours.  They somehow crazy glued a patch to hold it together, for now.  But we and they cannot unsee what just happened.

A wee something I put together.
This video showcases content from the Combat Mission Red Thunder Battlepack 1 released by Battlefront.com.
It's a brief overview of each scenario, what it's about and the main intent; it also covers the campaigns (including a brief summary of the main campaign branches).
There are NO spoilers in the video chapters.
https://youtu.be/wyrRX4bP2mM
 

I tell my students exactly this - what has really changed and what is an anomaly?  That is the key question of this war.
I definitely have seen the power of diverse collective analysis on this forum.  In many ways the analysis here has been ahead of the professional military one, even though we have access to less information (but probably not as “less” as people think).

Oh well that is a relief and here I thought we had challenges.
https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2023/04/04/the-de-dollarization-of-world-economy-xi-putin-agreement-saudi-arabias-shift-to-yuan/
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-brics-expansion-membership/
And dependencies:
https://www.china-briefing.com/news/us-china-trade-in-goods-hits-new-record-in-2022-what-does-it-mean-for-bilateral-ties/
And really glad to hear India is going  no where:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampesek/2023/04/20/china-vs-india-worlds-greatest-gdp-race-heats-up/?sh=3ef6b0ec4411
Militarily everything is also just fine:
https://www.rand.org/blog/2021/11/taiwan-is-safe-until-at-least-2027-but-with-one-big.html
And China has no friends:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_relations_of_China
I guess the big reason they have reason to band together is because they are on the outside and the rules do not work for them.  It is a crazy idea but human being do not just sit around and accept their lots in life and leave top dogs in place because reasons or a sky god says so.  They challenge and compete.
Oh and let’s not get started on the rot in our own houses - we are so “bored” that we are tearing each other apart.  In fact this entire war in the Ukraine is a major wake up call on just how distracted we got and how long the wheel was left unattended.  We may wake up in time, or we can go back to all those nice safe assumptions and reality tv.

Draftee trooper 
No training
Sent to front
Unit (sounded like 12-30 people) basically wiped out, trooper captured and let go.

Anyone play any of the Witcher games? Looks a lot like the coat of arms of the Kingdom of Redania.

20 minutes of  footage from recent advance around Bahkmut - reporting, interviews and some go-pro (no sub's unfortunately). Most of the go-pro starts around the 11min mark.  Looks like a dismounted UKR vehicle crew falling back at around 13:30?  RU POW at 16min.
 
 

According to reports the body was found in a state of decay. There were more close photos, but I don't wan't post it here. The depth of reservoir in deepest part is about 12-15 meters, so temprerature likely not enough warm that the body decomposed completely for 1,5 year

This is abandoned Soviet-time water reservoirs for watering of fields. Despite many small rivers and creeks around, Donbas is enough hot and dry place in summer, so in USSR times large "kolhozes" (state agricultural enterprises - usually they were in each village or on the base of several small villages) accumulating a water in these reservoires for the case of drought. But with collapsing of USSR and "kolhozes" infrastructure of such reservoirs declined. I think it could be filled with pumps and hoses system, connecting to closest source of water. And in the same way with pump and hoses the water then feed watering systems, placed on the fields. 

On the one hand, this isn't super surprising. The US spends an arm and a leg maintaining up to date maps, and even then infrequently used ones can go a long time between refreshes. I once worked on a map update project where the most recent ones were from the 1960s. It's faster and easier now that there's abundant good open source mapping, but still time consuming and expensive.
That said, we did that map refresh because we thought we might have to intervene in a year or two in a particular country. The idea that you'd intentionally invade a country with thirty year old maps reveals a focus (like the IJN) on the cult of the shiny object, and not on the boring but essential things that make an army work.

Russia already did this from 2014-2022 and the sky did not fall.  They are very likely to be complete a@@holes no matter how this thing goes.  What I disagree with is the idea that Russia is somehow going to be willing to sustain complete Western isolation and grinding losses for the next century.  There is a lot of "Forever Russian Bear" myths floating around and this just feeds into them and gives Russia far too much credit and stamina.  It also runs paradoxical to other narratives of "backward Russians who wont do anything so long as they are fed vodka and propaganda", because decades of a slow burning war is a lot of "something".
"It's up to the loser to decide when a war ends"...nonsense.  Gulf War One, Korea, WW1, all of these were ended when both sides decided to quit, not the "loser".  Gulf War, US coalition decided to stop at Iraqi border.  Korea, both sides decided to sign the cease-fire.  WWI, Allies did not invade into Germany for a full occupation driven victory.  The loser decides when to stop resisting and the winner has to decide when to stop winning.   The history of warfare is full of examples where the winner went "good enough" and tied the thing off.  And plenty where the loser refused to quit and slowly petered out until they wasted away and were unable to continue - like the entirety of indigenous resistance in NA.
What Russia doesn't have to do is normalize with the West, this is not the same as negotiation.  We will very likely arm the ever living daylights out of Ukraine after this war and invest very heavily in its reconstruction.  One thing that has stuck in my throat since this whole thing began is a myth that the West is somehow weak and barely holding on against the might of an unassailable Russia.  "Russia will win this in a matter of weeks" (they did not), "Russian mass will eventually wear Ukraine out" (it did not), "Russia has escalation dominance" (they did not, we did), "Russia will decide when this war is over." no they won't all sides will have to decide that.  We could be fighting a containment and compression war against Russia for years and based on how the last one of those went I would be very concerned to be Russian right now. 

You really can if one is trying to negotiate towards a workable victory.  I think what a lot of pundits are missing is that the West (US in particular) need Russia to lose - just enough.  This drives an incremental approach of slow eroding pressure as opposed to a coherent campaign plan that sees Russia tossed back over the border completely by X date.
As of today and the pending Ukrainian offensive the risk from a western perspective is not Ukraine doing enough, it is doing too much or going too far.  I disagree with the idea that Russia can sustain a 5 year war.  It ignores the main principle of corrosive warfare which is eroding an opponents operational system faster and better than they can repair it.  Russian forces would need a serious inject of external support to shore up its failing system.  So unless China steps in and gets really serious about reestablishing a level of symmetry, Russian is on the wrong end of a devolution curve.  
In the 21st century one cannot simply stuff ill-trained and I’ll-supported troops in holes and hold ground.  Not if your LOCs remain in clear view and actionable ranges.  Your armor is blunted, your AirPower denied and your guns are wearing out.  We are about to see how well a conventional defence hold up under these conditions and my bet is “not well”.
The risk of Ukraine over-reach is not small.  It could create shock and panic at political levels in Russia, and those conditions are when major mistakes start being made. This entire thing has hallmarks of threading a pretty tricky strategic needle.  It may feel good to see ATACMS hammering everything in depth but it could lead to an uncontrollable Russian collapse, which we have discussed at length, and clearly regardless of our opinions this is a serious concern to those in political leadership in the West.
To summarize - slow motion collapse with off-ramps = good.  Uncontrolled collapse in a suicidal game of chicken = bad.  The strategy we are seeing is aligned with the first one.
The_Capt’s second axiom - “strategy must not only encompass a theory of one’s own victory, it must also encompass a theory of an opponents defeat.”

Personally, I think that all the talk of the probable limited success of the coming offensive is just a mind game. Lowering the expectations will make any success look the bigger. May also let the Russians feel a wrong sense of security.
My guess is we will see Ukrainian soldiers skinny-dipping in the Azov sea this year.

You know the more I think about this the angrier I get.  This is an egregious double standard against Ukraine coming from the “experts”.
The course of this war for Russia - 
I will invade and crush you…fail
Ok, now I will create 20 sieges and crush you…fail.
Ok, getting serious now.  I will WW1 blast you in the South - we really only wanted that anyway, create cauldrons and crush you…fail.
Ok, ok, you asked for this, I will create multiple Stalingrads on defence and you will die trying to take your country back…fail.
Alright you have really ticked me off now, prepare for human waves and a winter offensive…fail.
That is it!  I am all out of patience and now you are in for it.  Prepare to die on the Putin Line!  (And western pundits are buying into it)
Meanwhile “Ukraine is barely hanging on and maybe we should rethink about support because they have not driven the RA into the sea yet.”  I mean c’mon, with friends like these…