Heirloom_Tomato

Thats fundamentally ridiculous and completely off the rails, logic-wise.
To be clear, I'm from a country that was invaded and oppressed for about 800 years, suffering very intensive and determined cultural eradication efforts, many many deliberate massacres of civilians, brutal repression of rebellions, exploitations as serf-like domestic servants and military cannon fodder, colonisation and economic exploitation, deliberate official neglect during multiple famines, intolerance of religion, execution of POWs and supression/extinction of the native language.
In some ways I'm probably more aware of it than many of my compatriots as I'm a fluent Gaelic speaker, through primary school and secondary in Gaelic immersion, and so I'm more aware of what has been lost and destroyed. Its like with the dinosaur fossil record - what we find and see is but a tiny fraction of what actually existed. So with indigenous Irish culture, what's left, what's survived to here and now is very likely just a sad echo of what was and what could have been. That's one of the unending tragedies of every colonisation process, the denial of what-might-have-been, to the eternal loss of human culture in general.
For eight centuries.
So my bona fides, as far as I'm concerned, are unassailable.
But it would be stupid for me to equate a Staffordshire farmer, paying his taxes and trying to muddle through from one season to the next, with the relentlessly brutal and imperialistic policies of the regime of the time.
A British Army officer suppressing a rebellion with wholesale slaughter of rebel prisoners, yup, hang 'em high. They were directly and deliberately implementing the HMG policies/attitudes1.
But they're not the same person, the Farmer (and his family, by implication and actual effects) and the Officer,  and deserve very different fates. 
You're not a stupid person. You're very articulate, your English is excellent and you have very salient points which you're able to cogently argue through. You have enormous grounds for hate and anger and which, as I've stated before (and my paragraph above will help support), I fully agree with why you'd feel that. You have every right as a Ukrainian to hate Russians.
But this is frankly hate for hate's sake, and that just breeds more death. There's no thought in a sentence like the one quoted above, just emotion and ranting. And like I said, I get it. I've absorbed enough accounts and writings from history to feel the intense anger of my people through the hundreds of years of English/British rule. So I'm no stranger to your sentiments.
But the point stands and, for this leprechaun-sounding paddy, you're doing yourself a disservice and ruining your own arguments and credibility with this death spiral of useless, vacant vitriol.
This is not the place (you'll achieve nothing here) and your energy is far better spent helping your country or relating what's going on there than this cul-de-sac argument over how to properly punish "the Ivan".
I beg you to stop.
 
 
1 The rebel atrocities were just as heinous and damnable and, crucially, further solidified the "savage peasant"  image of the Irish. Later on, in the 19/20th centuries that helped make rebellion "uncool"  for many middle class Irish.  It took some blatant whitewashing and outright denial to help clean the idea of independence from the stain of Irish crimes against civilians. 

Hi everyone! I've put out a new video where I compare a combat mission scenario to both the historical events that are portrayed and the actual real-life location. I thought I'd post this on the General Discussion board as it's also kind of about Combat Mission scenario design and research in general.
As it's about a Market Garden scenario, I've slept a quite few hours less the past few nights in order to get this video done in time for Operation Market Garden's 78th anniversary on saturday the 17th of september. I hope you'll find it interesting; spending the day basicly giving myself a battlefield tour and filming the locations of the scenario that I just played was amazing. Geeky, for sure, but amazing 😁.
Props to @Pete Wenman who is the author of this scenario for his excellent research and scenario design.
 
 

this thread right now:
ukr.mp4    

So, again, do not get too focused on the tactical here.  The UA currently looks like it is balancing two simultaneous operations at either end of the front, one in Kharkiv and one at Kherson.  They are seeing gains in both and look like they are balancing resources to each of them...at the same time.  This is by no stretch "basic competence" for any military, to the point that  I highly doubt 3 out of the 5 EYES militaries could pull this off right now without a lot of prep time - and even the UK may be stretching it.
C4ISR, logistics - especially transport, force generation and projection and deep strike are all being coordinated at a high level between these two operations, and they look like they are doing very well.  No more "oh but the Russian's suck" on this one, what the UA is doing is on the upper end of difficult for any military, let alone one that has been in a meat grinder over the summer.  The last time the west did anything even remotely like this was Gulf War (Iraq 03 was a single axis), and we had air supremacy and it still took months to pull off, and we were not being attacked the whole time. 

UKR confirmed Ozerne is fully under UKR control

Usually I don't care for this sort of thing, but these are getting ridiculous 😂😂😂😂😂😂

Updated map

UKR published video from Stary karavan
 

 
I am to the fridge for my Victory schkalik. If you see later, I start mumbling some BS, you know what happened. 

No significant updates yet. But there is interesting post
 
It describes possible UKR intent for the whole Izum offensive operation:

UKR capture/block Kupyanks UKR Advance from Dolyna area toward Oskil cutting several roads from Izum UKR destroy few bridges And the whole RU Izum grouping is in zh*pa.  

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  

Ref that YouTube "analysis".  That really feels like they're behind the learning curve of this war, by about 4 months. The idea of a fast crumpling and penetrationif of the RUS outer shell is a very classic, pre-war NATO mindset, formed and dominated by theory, think tanks and dry exercises. It doesn't match current reality and immediate history of this war or,  crucially, the observed UKR style, which seems a unique blend of operational carefullness and tactical hyper-brass-ballery. It's pretty obvious the current UGS has the measure both of the Ivan and their own forces, and these particular analysts absolutely do not.
Also, some of their thoughts are really not that thought out. 
Eg Ref the pipes, how do you cross a the river with these?  Lay above the water or below it. Ok, let's try above, so on the bridges or a pontoon. But,  HIMARS, so bridges are Nope and the pontoons are unfinished.  What about below the surface?
Well, anything on water requires significant (read, highly visible) engineering and support. Now triple that at least for under water,  because currents. River currents are the worst ex-partner ever, sucking up money and wasting time in a wildly uncaring and relentless manner. 
You don't just drop the pipes on the river bed and hope for the best, at the very least you need to dig a trench,  lay the pipe then cover it,  all the time fighting the current,  which can be significantly stronger at the bottom.
You could leave them naked on the bed -  but,  you're really,  really taking a chance with debris damage. No river bed is static because currents, plus river currents change drastically seasonally and even daily. A change in current carves a different shaped bed, brings debris and pressure from a different angle and unless you have a high grade, flexible  (read, high tech) pipe joint that can deal with that fundamental nature of riverine sub-marine engineering then you are SOOL.
Also,  to do anything significant on, in, or underwater you need divers.  Theyll have their own boat, they'll always be nearby,  tracking the construction  and will have a base onshore (even just some SUVs parked together, but if you know what to look for... ). They're not  usually more than a tiny footprint within the operation as a whole but they are absolutely necessary and can be easily visually identified. 
There's wayy more than this,  but I've got kids to feed and yell at. 
P. S. Finally,  the pipe has the to Enter/exit the water somewhere. That requires, no negotiation, a shore-side, long run submarine ramp to run the pipe up to and over/through the river bank without drastic kinks in angle. This ramp entrance/exit requires you to carve  a cutting in the river bank or break through existing riverine construction, so again, highly visible. 
How do I know this? Basic initial analysis on my part, background as an Architect,  Google plus a very high tech process of asking a marine engineer (my cousin in Australia) via text. Super difficult,  yup. 
---
These guys are B-grade. 
And I mean No offense to you, @Huba. You do great stuff here, I want to be clear. Big fan. 
Now,  I really gotta go yell at the brats. 

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".    

Movie from intense close (very close) combat from Pisky.
 

Girkin summary of Battle of Bridgeheads
 

Listening to MSNBC talking about nuclear power plant in Ukraine. It would have been better to have some kind of expert to talk to and not just a reporter and the host discussing it. Their general mood was, OMG they are distributing iodine tablets because a leak could occur at any time. Potassium iodide (KI) is what they are talking about. It's actually standard procedure that people living in the immediate area of a nuclear power plant have them on hand. When I lived in Niantic, CT we had them in our dresser drawer because the 3 unit Millstone power plant was across the bay in Waterford, CT. 
Potassium iodide when taken in the immediate aftermath of a radioactive release involving spent nuclear fuel will flood the thyroid gland with stable iodine, leaving any radioactive iodine-131 no place to attach too. The biological half life of iodine is pretty short, so it's quickly excreted from the body if it has no place to attach itself. This is also the reason that it must be taken immediately, 1) before the radioactive iodine can be ingested, and 2) any remaining excess iodine of any isotope is quickly eliminated.
Saying all this, it's a very good precaution to go around and make sure everyone has them. If they were ever issued, they may be misplaced, there may be refugees from other areas living there, etc. Or who knows, maybe they never had them. Thyroid cancers resulting from I-131 ingestion are the most common long term effect from exposure to radiation stemming from a spent fuel accident. "Fortunately," these days it's also one of the most treatable and survivable. Fortunately in quotes because cancer patients/survivors kind get peeved when you tell them how lucky they are that they have a "good" cancer. Cancer sucks, no matter which kind.
Most of the rest of the spot discussed Chernobyl and how it was run by the Russians and look what happened to it (paraphrasing). Yup. It was on Ukrainian soil and they suffered for it. A lot. Still do. Chernobyl was caused by a combination of poor reactor plant design and incompetence. This reactor design is more robust. Russian competence? There is obviously still a severe problem there, Russia wide - nuclear, military. Chernobyl would have been much more vulnerable to combat damage had there been combat around it as an operating power plant. They have no containment. At all. Russia claimed no containment was needed since their stringent operating procedures would assure safety. Then they violated about 6 of those stringent operating procedures, did not understand the problem they were having and made choices that aggravated the problem, leading to the almost simultaneous steam explosion followed by hydrogen detonation. (there was no nuclear explosion - that's physically impossible), and release of millions of curies of activity to Europe.

Dave 

Route so far is unlikely. Here is next map: Tomarion is located near the area where they kept reserves. To drive to the front line from Tomarino you have to go back in direction of Beryslav. For locals that will look like you are running away. But most probably they are committing reserves.

Discussion:
RU leaving Tomarin is most likely - reserves are moving to the front line at Davydiv Brid Apart from Bridgehead and Visokpillya UKR are probing frontline at other places for weaknesses but looks like no major push yet. As far as remember Kherson is cut except pontoon or barge crossings. No way 3 AK can get there in time.

No worries - new Grigb map to the rescue!

Discussion of what we know so far: 
We have two local pushes - at Inhulets bridgehead and in the area of Visokopilly + massed HIMARS strike at Chernobaivka (looks like this time the target is not airport but RU positions at settlement itself) It seems UKR were waiting for RU to commit 3 AK. Once they detected it was committed at Donetsk (see my earlier map) they started their push in Kherson. 

I think it's time for all the folks who have been focused on land war to read some naval history! In particular, Ian Toll's The Conquering Tide offers an example of exactly the sort of friction projection leading to collapse that you're describing at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. It also details how we build a military that was built around anti-friction capabilities.
At the tactical level: The friction of having to fly their Zeroes down the slot to engage Henderson field meant that a huge fraction of Japanese aviation losses were operational as opposed to combat for the duration of the Solomons campaign. Weather was the real killer. We projected more of that friction on them by degrading airfields further down the slot so that the Japanese would have to engage at long range. We built a system robust against that sort friction by incorporating self-sealing fuel tanks and by aggressively using PBY Catalinas and submarines to rescue downed airmen and return them to flying units.
At the operational level: we ran two offensive operations - the push in the southwest pacific under MacArthur towards Hollandia and Rabaul and the central pacific under Nimitz towards Saipan. This tick-tock operational cadence forced null decisions on the Japanese: the couldn't decide which offensives to mass against and consequently kept their battle fleet in being. That null decision also meant that the Japanese moved their ships around frequently without committing them to battle. More operational losses (and submarines!) and wasted fuel, which they had little of.
At the strategic level: our undersea blockade imposed enormous friction on the whole Japanese war industry - it's better to sink oilers than capital ships because without fuel, capital ships are lovely hotels. The Japanese navy bemoaned this, calling it the Hotel Yamato, because it would be too expensive to have it sortie regularly. Once the 3rd/5th fleet got up and running, that undersea blockade became something like modern deep strike. We could hit anywhere in the Japanese Empire with little warning, and we chose to disrupt their plane production and staging infrastructure regularly. That forced the Japanese to concede lots of territory without fighting for it, and to fight ineffectively and without reinforcement where they did decide to fight.
The whole Pacific Campaign was cumulativist friction projection onto the Japanese until their war machine collapsed into an armed mob. Of course, we could do that because our industrial might allowed us to put together the 3rd/5th fleet, essentially producing two whole additional US Navies during the war.
Here are some stay thoughts:
1. If your strategy is negative-decision focused, how do you maintain home-front morale without decisive battles? Abstract friction is great if you understand it. How do you sell that to people?
2. In WW1, the negative-decision strategy was one of exhaustion. Is there a negative-decision strategy that can win without that? We ultimately did engage in annihilational battles against the Japanese because we badly overmatched them by '44, and it still took a pair of nuclear weapons. Can you win without exhausting your enemy of without the shock and awe of some sort of annihilational capability?
3. What does a modern anti-friction capability look like in a military? What's the equivalent of self-sealing tanks and PBY Catalinas?

Hi, I am back. I was helping my friend. He was trying to access the men who supposed to deal with RU Nats. You know it is difficult to sit idle in a chair when people are dying. Also, I am of the opinion that things will get worse and better to start defending Europe now. It took significant efforts and time, so I had to go offline for some time. Unfortunately, my friend was not successful. Well, he will try to figure out some other ways to contact the men.
Back to Dugin daughter assassination:
Clearly, it is FSB false flag operation. FSB false flag ops are very easy to recognize - they are useless for other side yet aimed at generating some shock value at RU population. That is exactly what happened. UKR would use Switchblade. Full stop. From details of assassination, you can see strange occurrences. Dugin miraculously escaped it - at the last moment he decided to go to a different car and assassins did not detect it. IED was under driver seat which given age of Dugin was unlikely to be occupied by Dugin. The explosion miraculously happened not when a lot of RU Nats were around the car - a bit of more explosives and lot of RU Nats would go to Stalin. Strange target for assassination is not that strange - they do not want to generate excessive shock, so Dugin as useless but infamous target is good (general public does not care about him to uncontrolably freak out) . Also, FSB likes to test public reaction first, so killing Dugin daughter is even a better way to see how general public reacts. So, they selected Dugin but decided to kill his daughter first as a test. Actually, there is whole RU narrative behind the attack - unofficial RU propaganda claim that because UKR is losing (according to RU propaganda) Zelinsky planning to wage terror campaign in mainland RU in late August-early September. So, this is supposed to be the first terror attack of the campaign. RU Nats are grieving but subjectively I do not feel as much shock as in the case of Saki strike. That strike left them speechless. This one left them grieving. Let see how it will develop. On the separate note they call for terror strikes against UKR and Europe. Most likely Putin
having exhausted RU military options (Donbass offensive is stalled and they have severe manpower crisis blocking them from launching any big offensive elsewhere) is planning to wage non-military terror campaign himself. First in RU to influence RU population to support the war and give him more cannon fodder. Then in UKR and possibly in Europe to increase support of peace deal. They literally do not have anything left. 

Reduce power levels to very low level, disconnect from the grid, shutdown the plants, either leave them in hot standby for restart or cool them down to cold shutdown.  Done.  20% of UKR electricity cut off.
There is no danger to the plant, or to the environment to do that. None at all. Nuclear plants, and for that matter ANY electrical generation plant, do that ALL THE TIME. There's absolutely no reason to cut the plant off from the electric grid to stop it from operating and providing electricity. I would think by cutting it off they mean cut off IT from supplying electricity to the grid. It can still draw from the grid for it's own power loads. But if they did do that (cut off completely), there are backup diesel generators to supply power for cooling, unless of course someone blows those up. Fukushima was a problem because the DGs and their fuel were located above the design basis tsunami water level. They had what they call a "beyond design basis" accident. 


Dave

I would exercise a lot of caution here:
-Someone says they are SOF - it is the internet buyer beware
-A SOF operator has expertise but does not have all the expertise.  In the west we have elevated these guys well beyond their actual jobs and skill sets.  The internet is filled with “bros” with SF tabs spewing a lot of garbage but because they have “SOF Combat Veteran” in the splash title page so they “must know all about logistics”.  
-BDA is a multidisciplinary activity, the US military has an actual trade occupation of “targeting”.  I would put far more stock in a targeteer assessment than a door-kicker.
- The fact that this was not a Direct Action (DA) mission was obvious from the start.  The idea that the UA sent in a 30 pers ground team that deep behind enemy lines, well out of range of support, in broad daylight is nonsense.  Further, the idea that they humped 1000-1500 lbs of HE is insane.  However, none of this eliminates the use of SOF in this, or any other attack.
- If this was SOF (and I say if, I do not know one way or the other, but I have a suspicion), it was likely a black bag sabotage job, or a complex attack.  If it were sabotage then they would have infiltrated the airfield, could have been local workers or even RA.  They would have placed and wired the charges onto large warheads - this is technical btw- and then either had a timer or an LOS controlled detonator.  The initial warheads hit very likely had enough NEQ to do the craters, and then set off the secondaries.  Again, IF, very hard to tell from Sat photos posted on twitter.
-This could have very well been ATACMS, a SOF/partisan loitering munition or combination of all that, without detailed assessment of the crater this is impossible to rule out.
- The lack of missile or drones on video streams for any of these weird “cigarette missions” is telling;however, also not definitive.  All we really know is that some very high value targets are being prosecuted beyond what we - and more importantly the Russians - thought was the maximum range of UA capability…and that is all good no matter how it happened.
 

Hi All,
Sorry for yet another thread sidetrack but to update re @Haiduk's laptop etc:
It's arrived here in Canada at long last. I'll post photos when my phone recharges.
The funds raised came to about $1700 so we've gotten a Laptop for Haiduk's wife and major pc part upgrades for his own PC. Those I will be buying today/tomorrow.
I'll be sending everything to Przemsyl in Poland, with a reliable family member who lives there, on this Monday coming, Aug 22nd.
They'll hand off to someone Haiduk sends to pick up during that week.
If the UKR Law is relaxed a bit then maybe he can pick it up in person, we'll see.
 
POSTSCRIPT
This process has been badly delayed on my end, due to a heavy couple of months for me, personally and work-wise. Especially the personal side. It's been...difficult...to focus outside the household for a while. But things have finally stabilised, the laptop is here beside me and the pc parts are a short walk away to buy, once Haiduk confirms his choices. Everything is moving forward again.
 

Like do what about it? I don't have carrier battle group I could park in Black Sea. Nor do I have magical ninja assassins I could sent after Putin or space marines I could deploy from orbit to lay siege to Kremlin.
The US knew, and they did a lot about it. Eastern Europe had other trouble - they were at that time thinking whether NATO will hold or whether the Western Nations will Munich them off to Putin once Ukraine is done. The behavior of France and Germany in the pre- and beginning stages of the war did not inspire confidence in NATO and while it is unthinkable for Biden's US to betray its allies, Trump's / someone like Trump's US is a much less safe bet.
If the Russian plan of saying "do not help Ukraine or we'll nuke you" and West saying "oh well I guess we won't help then, we don't want to risk nuclear war after all" worked, it would very obviously turned into "do not help Baltics or we'll nuke you" and "do not help everything east of Germany or we'll nuke you".
Not sure where you're from, but the beginning stages of war looked very bleak in places that were invaded and occupied by Russia relatively recently (they left here in 1992), probably in comparison to places a continent away or parts of Europe where people never had to live with that horror.
This might be my social bubble, but even around here - where Russia would have to go through at least Ukraine and Slovakia and likely Poland to get here - people somewhat calmly accepted we are next and the West likely won't help and started making preparations. The "active reserves" system of our Army basically collapsed because of too many volunteers. I myself tried to apply for a job in our intelligence because that's where I thought I'd be most useful as a person good at working with large amounts of data (but I gave up when they asked for perfect eyesight and drug-free past).
Eventually it turned out that NATO holds, Ukraine is heroically and effectively defending, Russia sucks at war because they learned nothing since WW2 but new ways of corruption, barbarity and evil, and so on. The world is somewhat normal around here. But that was not always the case.
EDIT: this was possibly too emotional reply, sorry about that, I'll stop posting until I sober up.

Some clarifications about todays "cottons" in Crimea.
1. Ammunition depots were struck not in the center of Mayske village (16 km SE from Dzhankoy) but on the village outskirts, were ammo dump was established on the territory of abandoned cow sheds. Locals, which were evacuated from Mayske and Azovske told after detonations began, "soldiers ran away on tanks". So, part of vehicles near railroad had time to escape. But anyway, part of them were destroyed/damaged, because ralway was damaged.
Here the first satellite photos of this place before and after attack


Almost simultainously with this attack a transformator blew up in Dzhankoy town. Maybe diversion too, maybe accident.
2. Attack on Gvardeyskoye airfield 20 km NW from Simferopol (also you can meet the name Sarabuz - this is old Tatarian name of this settlement, when after deportation in 1944, all Tatarian names in Crimea were substituted on Russian names andSarabuz became Gvardeyskoye). 37th mixed avaition regiment of Black Sea Fleet deployed there with 12 Su-24M and 12 Su-25SM. Information is veru contraversal. Locals wrote they heard loud explosion at 6:35 and then several minor detonations. Some locals wrote the didn't hear anything. Some wrote airfield AD shot down kamikadze drone. Some wrote there were two drones - one was shot down, other hit target and  set on fire something (a jet, a truck, a roof in barrack - different versions). After explosion helicopters took off from airfield.
Here the single photo with smoke in direction of airfield. No fireballs and huge detonations. But looks like locals can't write what exactly happened.

I more and more think this is work of SOF teams with Phoenix Ghost loitering munitions and probably dierct diversions

How Hot is Crimea Gonna Get?