Heirloom_Tomato

To me, someone who enjoys playing quick battles H2H or creating scenarios with unique forces, the vehicle pack has been great fun. If you find and download some of the community made content or modify some of the existing scenarios, you will have hours of fun and enjoyment. 
As for value, how much do you play CMBN? If you look at the price of the pack on a cost per hour of entertainment basis, the pack will cost you less than a movie ticket with a drink and popcorn. The movie is over in a couple of hours and you are probably going to be looking for another bite to eat. Whereas the vehicle pack will still be there ready to entertain hour after hour, week after week, month after month, year after year.

To me, someone who enjoys playing quick battles H2H or creating scenarios with unique forces, the vehicle pack has been great fun. If you find and download some of the community made content or modify some of the existing scenarios, you will have hours of fun and enjoyment. 
As for value, how much do you play CMBN? If you look at the price of the pack on a cost per hour of entertainment basis, the pack will cost you less than a movie ticket with a drink and popcorn. The movie is over in a couple of hours and you are probably going to be looking for another bite to eat. Whereas the vehicle pack will still be there ready to entertain hour after hour, week after week, month after month, year after year.

I will have to take a look and see if I still have them kicking around somewhere.

I'm 41 and I've got to say that at my age feeling young on what is technically a computer game forum feels positively weird.

The graphic file has a strip at the left side that doesn't fit- that's not a condition of the Editor. This area that should be cropped is also visible in the screen at the top of page 2, as well as in the Editor image. The Overlay file needs to be cropped of that strip to get rid of it (and probably resized/redone), and be sure that edge is depicted correctly if a historical area.
I do spend a good deal of time in Photoshop getting the edges set before the final crop. This is saying nothing about the amount of research to find a multiplicity of source material, of course.
I generally try to have several Overlays that I swap in and out:
-The "standard" Overlay, as depicted here. A period map, slightly rotated for road/rail networks if necessary for CM purposes (road angles!).
-Any/all aerial imagery from the period depicted, down to day of battle if possible (in Normandy, it sometimes is!).
-A file that has both of the above, together with both visible to varying degrees. Map may be 80% opacity, aerial image may be 20% (or some ratio where I can see an appropriate amount of both). This may get adjusted for visibility, so I keep an unflattened Photoshop file for this. It can become somewhat involved, but that part is up to the designer's amount of tolerance for this type of thing.
-A color-coded map of terrain, if complex (swamps, etc). This would be if water courses/forests/etc. were difficult to read in the above. I simply paint these color-field ares in over a topo map in the relevant areas.
There could be additional versions of the above. This could be represented by alternate maps, aerial recon runs from different days due to cloud cover, etc. I may be forgetting one, but that's the gist if you want to delve into the Overlay.
I also will use the Overlay for making AI plans, which is generally 2-3 files with times and unit positions. This helps to track the arc of everything.
The Overlay function is really useful. I think there are probably additional ways it could be mined, so be creative with it.
 

I really would not say this part in any bar back home…low blow. We did just win the juniors, so there is that.

Hey, if Canada took Ukraine in as a province or territory postwar, that would solve Ukraine's NATO problem, tout suite. 
Also, they're in NAFTA in the event the Eurocrats get too insufferable. (If I'm a factory owner, I'll take Ukrainian oligarchs over Mexican drug cartels in a heartbeat)
...It would also solve Canada's Olympic (men's) hockey drought in short order.
Come on (offit), what's so hard about this? Canada's seen it all before.
Recognition as 'distinct society', check! Cultural love for skidoos, jacuzzi built-ins and gas grills, check! 'Consensus government', check! (extreme localisation might actually suit Ukes kind of well, very Viking.... also doesn't threaten Grits' stranglehold in Ottawa) Rights to (almost but not quite) secede peacefully, check! Endless colourful folk costumes for Justin to prance around in, check! Yalta vastly more attractive summer beach destination than Port Colbourne, Sarnia, Yarmouth, Hanlans' Point or Wreck Beach (I must steadfastly deny any direct umm exposure to the last two, anyway it was decades ago) Solid majority of the Canadian electorate no longer suffers from a deep need to feel guiltier and more woke than the Americans, for at least another generation, check! Subsidised by Alberta and Ontario, check! Perhaps draw the line at trilingual education....
 
[PS please don't take this seriously]

@G. Smiley do you know which map this took place on?
Can you send me your save so I can try to replicate it?

Definitely wanted to weigh in on this one.  So there was an earlier draft out of RUSI but this is likely one of the most comprehensive analysis/assessments of the first 6 months of the war - outside of our little forum here, of course.  There is nothing in the summaries and conclusions that does not match a lot of what we have been seeing and saying on this forum - at least in the main.  So if you are following this war with us here at BFC, I highly recommend downloading the document and giving it a good going over, you will walk away smarter and with what appears to my eyes a very objective and balanced narrative of the first two phases: Russian invasion & Battle for the Donbas, or perhaps it was really a single strategic phase - the Russian Offensive.
However, I would caution that this is a "Preliminary" analysis, it is in the title.  It is incomplete, and in at least one or two spots that incompleteness is leading to what I think are incomplete conclusions.  Even being likely the best professional analysis we have seen what struck me most about this document is "what it did not say" - there are a lot of gaps here in both scope and scale.  I do not think they are deliberate or a result of laziness at all.  The authors state up front in the introduction "This report is methodologically problematic" because they could only employ data that was provided to them by the UA General staff.  That is not small but that data was filtered - they note this as well - for OPSEC and political sensitivity reasons.  Further there is massive amounts of data missing that will be required for a more accurate picture.  Data from the other two parties in this war - Russia and The West.  A lot of deductions on Russian intent, capability and performance are made here without a lot from those other two data streams, so I am very cautious in accepting gospel at this point.  So that said up front I will dig into this with some initial takeaways/observations for any who are interested:
Pre-Invasion
So this pretty much confirms what we suspected from very early on - Russian had only planned for a 10 day "war".  Russia, like many in the west, way over-estimated the relative symmetry and competitive advantage at the outset of this war.  Russia, like many western analysts, were using outdated concepts and metrics with respect to mass while at the same time were way over-estimating their own capabilities and readiness.  Russian planners were experiencing what has been referred to a progressive unreality, which is a fancy way of saying they built a house of cards on a foundation of shifting sand.
Russian "shock and awe" through operational surprise was a flawed concept in the 21st century.  It appears the UA was initially somewhat dislocated, the authors even go so far to say that Russian operational surprise was achieved by convincing the UA that the main effort would be the Donbas:
"As it became apparent that the Gomel axis was the enemy’s main effort and that another group of forces would
strike through Chernihiv, a redeployment of Ukrainian forces was ordered approximately seven hours prior to the invasion. This took considerable time. The result was that many Ukrainian units were not at their assigned defensive positions when the invasion began and, especially on the northern axes, were not in prepared positions."
So this highlights a really important missing peice from this whole analysis - the role of western ISR.  I have no doubt the authors and UA General Staff scrubbed any mention of this from the data used for many very good reasons.  But given the massive pre-war ISR effort by the west and the open-door policy with respect to intel from the US - how on earth did the UA miss the indicators on the Gomel axis?  This one sounds very weird to my ears and there is definitely a story here that is going to need unpacking.  Was there a failure in western ISR?  Was there a breakdown in communications?  Did UA planners fall for progressive unreality of their own?
It appears that Russia bet the entire farm on "the mighty Russian bear" in a series of increasingly unrealistic assumptions, built upon unrealistic assumptions.  Here we hit the other missing peice - what was the actual Russian thinking?  We cannot know this from data given - although authors lean in pretty hard, and I am not sure we will ever get a full Russian internal picture.  
Initial Invasion
The big takeaway for me here was the serious disparity in RA C4ISR and catastrophic misalignment in the levels of warfare.  There were a lot of systemic targeting problems and the failure to establish operational pre-conditions in favor of operational surprise - destruction of transportation and communications infrastructure.  However the indicators of lack of targeting enterprise integration are pretty bold:
"A critical weakness of the Russian strike campaign was battle damage assessment. First, the Russian military appears to have presumed that if an action had been ordered and carried out then it had succeeded, unless there was direct evidence to the contrary."
This speaks to a fundamentally flawed Russian joint targeting enterprise.  Further confirmation bias is pure poison in warfighting.  It causes can be so deep that there are examples worse than what we saw in the first days of the war.  In Russia's case they seem to be a combination of deep cultural biases combined with a rigid military-political hierarchy where "push back" or critical thinking is simply not a thing.  There is a fear in every military that the worst thing that can happen is "the death of formation" - the military organization collapsing into an armed mob.  Russia demonstrated in the initial invasion of Ukraine that the only thing worse than taking a military mob to war is taking a military cult.  
Based on what I can see the failure in the first three days was a combination of very poor planning and preparation, failure to establish operational pre-conditions and way under-estimating the complexity of the operation while at the same time way over-estimating the RA's capabilities.  In much more blunt terms, from a military operational point of view it was amateur hour.  Russia had not undertaken an offensive operation of this scope, size and scale since the Second World War, and they figured it would be "2014+ a little bit".  When the reality is that complexity and friction do not scale linearly - they do so exponentially; Ukraine 2022 was not 2x harder than 2014, it was 2 orders of magnitude (100x) more difficult and clearly the RA was not prepared for it.
Battle for Kyiv
To my mind this is the biggest blank spot in the document.  Even given the RA poor performance in the first 72 hours, they were able to achieve "12:1" force ratios on the Gomel axis towards Kyiv.  The authors appear to lay the majority blame for the RA stalling and eventual collapse largely on tactical "confusion".  They point out the BTG as a flawed concept - which frankly does not track as it mirrors western Battlegroup and TF constructs very closely.  Very few militaries have permanent combined arms units - they are largely modular by design.  So when the authors highlight:
"In addition to BTGs being units that had not trained together and lacking staff who knew one another, they were also non-uniform in their composition. These deviations did not appear to derive from the tasks they were assigned but instead arose from the equipment available from the units that generated them. Yet, to commanders at higher echelons, the Russian battle management appeared to treat all BTGs as comparable units of action with no tailoring of tasks to their respective capabilities. When military advances are used as a mere demonstration of force this would not have been critical. But once the force tried to transition to fighting, units were now assigned tasks for which they were poorly equipped.
As an example, consider the composition of two BTGs, which operated in almost the same area in the east of Ukraine at the end of April 2022. One of them was from the 228th Motor Rifle Regiment of the 90th Armoured Division of the Central Military District (Svatove district): 23 APCs; six tanks; a 122-mm selfpropelled artillery battery; three MLRS BM-21 ‘Grad’; up to 40 vehicles; and about 400 personnel. Another was from the composition of the 57th Motor Rifle Brigade of the 5th Army of the Eastern Military District (Rubizhne district): more than 30 infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs); 14 tanks; a 122-mm self-propelled artillery battery; a 152-mm self-propelled artillery battery; a MLRS BM-21 ‘Grad’ battery; up to 60 vehicles; and about 800 personnel."
So I find this confusing and lacking.  So how were the 228th MRR and 57th MRB BTG mis-employed?  It alludes to higher level RA commanders treating all BTGs as uniform and failure to "task tailor" and I really want to see the evidence of this.  The lack of uniformity is very common throughout modern militaries all over the place.  When I look at these two BTGs I see one "light" and one "heavy" - so what?  How was the 228th asked to do a job it was not capable of?
Again, what is really missing here is "what killed the RA north of Kyiv" because tactical confusion was very likely a contributing factor but the UA took on an opponent with a 12:1 force ration advantage and that opponent pulled out a month later in tatters.  A lot of themes here to unpack - zombie orders, complete lack of operational/tactical C2 integration, capability misalignment and logistical issues (only alluded to).  But while all of this definitely contributes to operational system strain - it does not blow up the amount of hardware we saw unfold on Oryx.  
From my read the UA held off a 12:1 force overmatch with a couple artillery brigades, SOF and ad hoc TD units - who "did not have enough ATGMs to really make a difference anyway?"  So the RA drove towards Kyiv - its main effort - in a confused and rambling fashion.  Sat on the roads in "tactical confusion" and lack of air superiority for a month while the UA killed them like freakin buffalo, largely with indirect fire from two formations?  Huh?
So here I think we need a lot more depth.  How many RA vehicles were killed by indirect fire and how much indirect fire?  How was that indirect fire targeted?  Where was the RA c-battery: did the RA really just sit there and let UA artillery hammer them without responsing?  How many vehicles were killed by those ATGMs?
[aside: I am pretty confused by the ATGM assessment to be honest.  The UA did not have enough ATGW to make a difference:
"The tactical employment of ATGWs by the UAF prior to the conflict was largely aimed at fixing or blunting enemy armoured manoeuvre and for use in raiding by light forces because of the speed with which units with these systems could displace. There were too few missiles, however, for these to be the primary means of attriting enemy forces."
Ok, well earlier they note that the UA had purchased close to 20,000 soviet-style and homemade ATGMs after 2014.  to which they received about 3000 Javelins and NLAWs.  So what did all that do to "attirting" enemy forces?  What was the effect of "raiding" on an already confused RA.  What was the role of integration of those light forces and indirect fires.?]
On the Battle of Kyiv I am left with far more questions than answers, and a whole lot here is still not adding up.  Again, missing is the role western ISR support played.  RA troops broad casting in "the clear" is not great but it cannot explain the level of precision lethality to effectively cold-stop a military system with the kind of over-match the RA had.  If western space-based ISR was fully engaged the fact that the RA used cellphones is not why they died - it was because they could be seen from space in real time.  While the RA clearly lacked the same.
Tanks?  Critical and the UA had lots...but mostly for indirect fire....WTF?!  There are so many weird sounds with respect to military mass coming out of all this it is starting to sound like a piano being fed into a woodchipper to me.
EW and UAS - wow.  Ok, so clearly this is what the environment looks like with UAS being very effectively countered.  This is not open skies, the RA has been knocking these things down like crazy and yet it has not really helped them as UA unmanned is still being used to great effect.  And again, EW is going to do nothing against higher altitude and space-based systems. 
Battle for the Donbas
Really no surprises here - we did see a lot of this here on the forum.  The political spin on why the UA did not simply pull out and stayed and fought was very interesting - i.e. war crimes in occupied areas effect.   The density of RA fires and essentially human wave attacks really highlight something else with respect to mass - the unbearable weight requirement.  So in order for the RA to achieve enough overmatch they had to concentrate so much that mobility was basically sacrificed.  They appear the limiting factor on the rates of advance in the Donbas because moving all those guns with their ammo could not be done quickly.  This appears to be what "dumb mass" risks on the modern battlefield.
I am stumped however, on why the RA never achieved breakthrough.  The massive sacrifices of the UA cannot be understated here but was that the thin blue and yellow line that held off all that weight?  Or was there something else going on to explain why after literally annihilating ground with HE, the RA was never able to breakthrough and manoeuvre?  What was the comparative UA density in these areas?
After this I am getting the sense that the Donbas was a modern day version of Verdun as the RA broke itself further for very little gain.  The damage to the UA and how much it was able to push-back is incomplete, so the nature of how this contest unfolded is unclear.  What we do know is that the RA lost the offensive after Donbas, and the UA picked it up. 
Conclusions
Despite leaning in hard and taking risks in some parts of this assessment - e.g the inner working of the RA.  The authors are actually pretty cautious their conclusions.  These are all sound but my take away is, again, something happened to military mass in this war.  "No Sanctuary" and "Disperse or Die" are basically the same point - the traditional use of mass is beyond challenged, it has proven fatal to the RA. I am very interested on how the UA employed dispersion throughout this war, particularly on the offensive.  "Fighting for the Right to Precision" is very interesting, and I think hints at the "cloud-based warfare" we have been tossing around: however, it also lacks the effects of western space based ISR.  I am convinced that fighting for the right of precision will extend into space and cyber (which gets mentioned exactly twice in the entire document).  Further as unmanned systems get smarter I am more convinced that "Fighting through Precision" is the emerging theme.
For example I have used the term "anti-mass" a few times.  This appears to be a combination of speed and precision combined to create a pressure wave of smart-attrition to systematically deconstruct an opponents operational system.  Further precision is becoming a key component in survivability.  The document alludes to this:
"Precision is not only vastly more efficient in the effects it delivers but also allows the force to reduce its logistics tail and thereby makes it more survivable. Precision weapons, however, are scarce and can be defeated by EW ."
I am left wondering what happens when precision weapons are no longer scarce and ISR clouds that go from sub-surface to space are created that cannot be defeated by EW?
Finally the "significant slack capacity" point is at odds with precision, or perhaps they are mutually supporting in reality.  Precision really means very high efficiency combined with effectiveness.  So one does not need massive amounts of dumb war stocks, but one may need massive amounts of smart-war stocks because they are now on the critical path.  I do not think either side in this war has fully expressed what mass-precision looks like but the UA is coming damned close.
The_Capt's axiom update:
Mass beats isolation, connected precision beat mass, integrated massed precision beats everything.
Re-thinking War
I am coming to a growing sense that warfare is in need of a serious rethink.  We have principles and foundations that remain unchanged - e.g. selection and maint of the aim, morale, attrition.  But we have others that are looking more and more as though they are in the wind - surprise, manoeuvre, concentration of mass.  I think we need to start looking through different lens's and frameworks, as many of our old ones are challenged.  Our planning processes and how we make assumptions, how we define "decision" and "victory".  How we think about the translation of military power - to capability - to effect - to decisions and outcomes.  How we think about capability itself.  To my mind this is a good thing, if we do it ahead of evolution.  Whether or not we are in a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is an entirely different question.  Many thought we were in the 90s and early 00's but it kind of petered out.  I suspect RMAs take longer than a couple decades to culminate so we could very well be in the middle of one; however, it is very hard to say without more evidence. 
I can only say the best course is to keep watching carefully, critically and continuously as you can.  For me the progress of this war has been both terrible, wasteful and simply tragic.  It has also been professionally mesmerizing - the entire point of mastery of warfare is so you do not have to fight one, or if you do it is short and sharp as possible.  The lessons from this war all point to reinforcing the primacy of this idea. 
   
  

@Letter from Prague

This is a unique video for me. At 10.21 minutes of the video, I see people with whom I took refuge in the basement of the clinic after my apartment was left without windows. Later, I corresponded with a guy who is standing with a child in his arms, he said that they were evacuated on March 08. I offered them to go out with me on March 05, When the hospital staff decided it was time to evacuate but they refused and spent three days in the basement without electricity and water.
The video shows moments a few days after the start of active fighting for Irpin. By that time, evacuation corridors had already been organized. People knew in advance when and from what place the evacuation would be organized. I left Irpen on the fifth of February. Then there was no organized evacuation, no one understood exactly where the enemy was, where the safe route was. Everyone went to the bridge in the way that he considered correct. And some paid for their mistake with their lives. I went to the bridge alone on foot and I think I was lucky.
War brings people together. In the face of danger, everyone strives to do something to help others. Pharmacies distributed medicines to everyone for free, shops distributed food, a lot of volunteers appeared ready to help others. From the second day of the war, I was constantly in the local clinic. We unloaded humanitarian aid and food, carried the wounded (a point was set up at the polyclinic to stabilize the wounded before sending them to a military hospital). The victims, whom the doctors could not save, had to be buried right in the courtyard of the clinic, as the road to the cemetery was shot through.
 
Most of the wounded were civilians. I remember two cases in particular. In one, a man and a woman brought a dead child of 5 years old with a gunshot wound to the hospital. They tried to leave Bucha to the west, their car was fired upon by Russian soldiers. In the second case, a pregnant girl with a damaged spine was brought to the hospital. She and her husband were in their apartment when the shell hit their home. The husband died on the spot. she got a spinal injury. Unfortunately, as a result of this injury, her child also died. She lost her most loved people in one day.
 

I found an interesting post about Russian aviation:
Over the past week, the Russians lost two new combat aircraft in a "non-combat" situation: October 17 - Su-34 near Yeysk, which fell into a residential building, and from today, 23 Su-30SM in Irkutsk. - How severe is the loss of 2 new combat aircraft, show the such numbers. In 2021, the Russian military-industrial complex produced a total of 21 combat aircraft for the army of the Russian Federation - 6 Su-34 aircraft, 5 Su-35S aircraft, 4 Su-30SM2 aircraft, 2 Su-57 type aircraft, 2 MiG-35 fighters and 2 training-combat aircraft Yak -130.
 
But for 9 months of 2022, the Russian aviation industry delivered only 7 combat aircraft - 4 Su-34M and 3 Su-35S, and this was the "tail" of deliveries that were to be made back in 2021. (Well, and for the sake of justice, the Aviastar plant in Ulyanovsk handed over 3 Il-76MD-90A transport aircraft, which were supposed to be delivered to the Russian army last year). And that's all.
At this pace, the Russians will have at least 20 years to restore the losses of their Luftwaffe received over the last 8 months of the war against Ukraine. Against such a background, even 2 combat aircraft for rashists are literally worth their weight in gold. Therefore, let them continue to “destroy” their aircraft at the same pace in a non-combat situation.
The Russians do not yet have their own mobilization "analogue" of the T-62 in aviation. Therefore, they will have to use ersatz.
For example, in early October, the enemy removed up to 30 MiG-29 and MiG-29SMT aircraft from mothballing, but this is only enough for an air regiment. Before the war, the Russians had about a hundred combat training Yak-130s, and perhaps this “palliative” of the Russian army will have to be put into battle.
At the beginning of April 2022, Belarus had in storage up to 20 Su-27 and Su-24 units, decommissioned back in 2012. And there is every reason to believe that soon these planes will also become the property of the Russians.
The Russians can literally squeeze all the juice out of themselves in order to return to service the maximum possible number of reactivated aircraft. But they have nowhere to squeeze out the qualifications of pilots.
 
Yes, Russia near the front line has "on paper" 800 aircraft and helicopters of all types and purposes - combat, transport, auxiliary and others. But in fact, this is 80% of all military aviation that the Russians have, the remaining 20% are “smeared” over other territory.
 
The maximum that managed to show the Russian aviation grouping on the borders with Ukraine is about 290 demonstration sorties per day on August 24, 2022, and even then without entering the zone of our air defense. And so that it’s not a day - it’s a downed rashist. So it goes.

Killcullen is an expert on COIN (or at least as far as we got one in the last round) and was trying to translate that cache into Grey Zone and now modern conventional war.  Biggest problem is that none of the theories translate well between those arenas.  This is odd given that he wrote about complex warfare in the early days (wiki says he was sole author but in uniform things really do not work that way).
He is another really smart, highly educated and experienced expert who got this war wrong, largely because they have been in a war like the in Ukraine about as many times as the rest of us….never.  They employed old metrics of success/failure to make their judgements and were way off.  I suspect most will be big enough to admit it and the really good ones will spend a lot of time figuring out why they were so off the mark - expect a LOT of post-Ukraine war books.
Personally, I would write about this thread itself and how stuff like this was happening everywhere.  Open source analysis was all over the place but in some places they got a lot more right than wrong and that is worth following up on why.  Was it micro-perspective based on wargaming?  Was it the mix of expertise and backgrounds?  Was it having the right people like Haiduk on the ground pulling in stuff?  I am not sure but even with our recent “Russia sux” leanings this thread was very accurate and often contrary to the experts getting paid to dot his out there.

Well, 28 drones on Kyiv in two waves. 1 or 2 broke through in first wave at 7:00 anf 5 could break through in second wave about two hours later. One of them was shot down with rifles by police, but four fell on streets. Like Kraze already said they tried to hit old thermal elctric plant near Kyiv railway station. Looks like obly one drone hit the target, one more fell on the street nearby, third hit wasteland near railway station and fourth ruined half of old residential building. At this moment became knowingly about 3 dead and 3 injuried (all from ruined building), among them - pregnant woman. 
Approx hour ago or more three cruise missiles were approaching to Kyiv from NE (my familiar wrote in FB that a missile passed on the low altitude over their house in Chernihiv oblast toward Kyiv). Reportedly all missiles were shot down by fighter jets
First wave:
One shot down
Strike across the street from thermal electric plant. On first cadres of video Kyiv railway station building is seen
Old house before and after being hit
 

Old woman, rescued from ruined house. 18 people more were resqued from there.

Next one incoming
It is claimed as police shot down the drone, but as for me the drone just missed and fell on wasteland near thermal plant and railway station
 
 

Disagree.  I also get his impulse, we have all had it. However, his "only good Russian, is a dead Russian" rhetoric is:
- Promoting hatred and violence of an entire society - he has never discriminated for or against non-combatants in this conflict, in fact in his last post he has basically openly declared that there are no non-combatants.
- Rarely if ever providing any new facts - it is just a steady stream of the same hatred note that has frankly gone on far too long in my opinion.
- His attitude is apparently pulling in other like minded folks, which risks us sliding into polarized discussion forum - the hints of which we have already seen.
- His narrative actually will erode support to Ukraine from the audience, largely western, by representing his nation this way - the less informed may believe that all Ukrainians are thinking like him.  This will have the exact opposite effect he appears to be looking for as we begin to wonder if all Ukrainians are genocidal - which they clearly are not.
- To the point, Russian counter-IO would be employing exactly these sort of over the top narratives using false identities to try and sour western support: "See Ukrainians are really all a bunch of extremist Nazis!!!" - an attempt to re-shift the narrative, something the Russians are very adept at.
I am not saying that this individual is actually working for the Russians; however, his narrative is.  

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