Hapless

BINGO!



I didn't see Gerasimov, but could easily be that I just didn't recognise him

BINGO!



I didn't see Gerasimov, but could easily be that I just didn't recognise him

BINGO!



I didn't see Gerasimov, but could easily be that I just didn't recognise him

BINGO!



I didn't see Gerasimov, but could easily be that I just didn't recognise him

BINGO!



I didn't see Gerasimov, but could easily be that I just didn't recognise him

BINGO!



I didn't see Gerasimov, but could easily be that I just didn't recognise him

BINGO!



I didn't see Gerasimov, but could easily be that I just didn't recognise him

BINGO!



I didn't see Gerasimov, but could easily be that I just didn't recognise him

BINGO!



I didn't see Gerasimov, but could easily be that I just didn't recognise him

On a lighter note...

Supposed to.  Of course the state of their logistics is also in serious question.  Oryx is showing they are coming up on 900 logistics vehicles gone.  A quick scan of re-fuelers takes me to 95, and that is not counting the 285 vehicles so badly damaged they cannot be confirmed as what they were when they walk among the living.
A BTG looks like it has 2-3 re-fuelers per:
At 95 confirmed losses, we are talking roughly 30 BTGs worth of re-fuelers, that is 1/3 of the overall initial invasion force.  But that is ok cause that invasion force lost most of its tanks anyway.
And then this, plus Donetsk half-manned BTGs, leads to the large, awkward question - and I am talking "night-after surprise cousins" awkward - "Why would anyone try an operational pincer with a broken shoulder?!"
Look, before anyone wonders, I want Russia to lose and lose so bad that they either remove Putin and try to re-normalize, or we just accept Cold War 2.0 and they can become a Chinese gas station.  My assessment is that Russia is losing, to the point that they have lost this war and just haven't decided "how bad".  No, my issue here is one of professional disgust at this freakin amateur hour job; it is the worst the military profession can be, getting a lot of people killed for nothing.  We have like one supreme rule in this gig - get the job done as quickly and cleanly as possible.  The second a military is not trying to do this, they do not deserve the honor of the name "military" as they are essentially a heavily armed mob.
Throw in what is looking more like a culture of war crimes, and the Russian's can mobilize every fighting age person they have and they will still only have an undisciplined mob, not a fighting force.  

On a lighter note...

Bayonet lug.

More seriously, the bit in the middle looks like a muzzle reference device. On tanks, it collects data about the gun barrel (like, how much it's bending due to heat expansion on the sunward side) to feed back to the fire control system to maintain accuracy, I'd imagine it's the same sort of thing.

Bayonet lug.

More seriously, the bit in the middle looks like a muzzle reference device. On tanks, it collects data about the gun barrel (like, how much it's bending due to heat expansion on the sunward side) to feed back to the fire control system to maintain accuracy, I'd imagine it's the same sort of thing.

On a lighter note...

Bayonet lug.

More seriously, the bit in the middle looks like a muzzle reference device. On tanks, it collects data about the gun barrel (like, how much it's bending due to heat expansion on the sunward side) to feed back to the fire control system to maintain accuracy, I'd imagine it's the same sort of thing.

Bayonet lug.

More seriously, the bit in the middle looks like a muzzle reference device. On tanks, it collects data about the gun barrel (like, how much it's bending due to heat expansion on the sunward side) to feed back to the fire control system to maintain accuracy, I'd imagine it's the same sort of thing.

Bayonet lug.

More seriously, the bit in the middle looks like a muzzle reference device. On tanks, it collects data about the gun barrel (like, how much it's bending due to heat expansion on the sunward side) to feed back to the fire control system to maintain accuracy, I'd imagine it's the same sort of thing.

Best to treat enemy held buildings like landmines:

If you can go round it, go round it.
If you can't go round it... blow it up before you go near it.
If you can't blow it up... shoot the crap out of it in the hope that you'll hit something important that stops it going off.

Clearing the building is the equivalent of stepping on the landmine- don't do it unless you literally have no other choice.

Zooming down from 30k feet to about ten feet: apparently CCTV footage of the attack on the Transnistrian Ministry of State Security building (or whatever it's called).

https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/uddy8q/the_footage_of_the_shelling_of_the_building_of/

Doesn't exactly look professional: maybe it's not supposed to, maybe whoever it is is just crap.

I for one can't help but hear Benny Hill music when I watch the first guy trying to dodge the other two backblasts... and failing.
 

Zooming down from 30k feet to about ten feet: apparently CCTV footage of the attack on the Transnistrian Ministry of State Security building (or whatever it's called).

https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/uddy8q/the_footage_of_the_shelling_of_the_building_of/

Doesn't exactly look professional: maybe it's not supposed to, maybe whoever it is is just crap.

I for one can't help but hear Benny Hill music when I watch the first guy trying to dodge the other two backblasts... and failing.
 

Well, that is now that they are in wartime. In an hypotethical negotiated peace the Russians will have to eventually allow free movement for the merchants, otherwise they would be enacting a blockade, so an act of war. If those territories are controlled by Rusia when the dust settles then Ukraine would lose a long term economic asset, which they hope would bring (rather force) Ukraine closer to Russia (or atleast cripple it for when Round 2 cames along), without having to mantain such blockade. Also, it will allow them to start meddling into Moldava.
Nevertheless, I still think that the plan is to take Ukraine in its entirety eventually, and from there keep on putting pressure into eastern europe (remember all those ultimatums against NATO back in January). This declarations are most likely just meant as internal propaganda, as Odessa is considered by Russians as theirs, and supposedly one of the main cities that had to be liberated. Like I said early, wether they go now against Ukraine or they decide to bite the bullet and wait for another time will most likely be known as Russia mobilizes this May or doesnt. I would be surprised if they intend to keep the war going for longer, but they atleast dont partially mobilize.

Depends on how you view the Russian enclave in Moldova. If your goal is to unite all German Russian speaking peoples on your borders, Moldova could be an important goal for Putin. A direct land bridge would set Russia up for a replay of this crisis in the few years in Moldova. Plus it turns Ukraine into a totally landlocked country, strangling it economically (hopefully). 

So this is a very common misconception.  A ground force is like a ship, simply having in the field erodes it over time, simple interaction with the environment causes wear and tear.  Troops get sick and hurt.  Morale wanes over time as living in a hole like an animal sucks.  Equipment also needs constant maintenance and spare parts, it also gets damaged in accidents etc. 
So yes, simply taking an unit out into the wild and parking it will begin a process of slow attrition over time.  Attrition that will need resupply, refit and rotation.  Add in actual combat and that process speeds up dramatically.
So basically any army in the field is like a bag of water with a hole in it.  How big that hole is depends on all sorts of factors, including combat.  At the top of the bag is how quickly one can pour resources back into the bag. [aside: for those paying attention, yes, all military forces are living examples of the Theseus paradox].
So the question of "how long" is actually a combination of the front end and back end.  Right now that hole is pretty big and the water coming in is not matching, I am not sure if Russia can get a matching back-end to be honest as these are not simple things to replace.  However, this is also tied up with complicated concepts of power I outlined in that other post. 

Good find man, this is really interesting!

Haven't gotten all the way through yet, but when he starts talking about what they did when they reached Hostomel, it's so fascinating to listen to someone describing the blunt end of a battle drill army.

"We came off the helicopter so we made a horseshoe formation- because that's the drill."
"The commander told us to hold a position, so we dug in- because that's the drill."

Drills are not tactics, but they're easier to teach and judge. To train a platoon attack, go through the checklist from the manual, tick the boxes, training complete, well done, schedule again the next time the qualification comes up.

Free play exercises- where you *use* drills to practice tactics- aren't just harder to pull off effectively, but harder to justify in a budget because you can't be certain of the result. When you've got 3 platoons to qualify and a limited time to do it in, it's difficult to explain how you spent x hours on an exercise where all one of those platoons does is sit there, or where another one gets wiped out and the other is the only one that passed.

I don't think I've ever seen anything from the RU side approaching a free-play kind of exercise. Things like Zapad are most operational/strategic and the filmed chunks are clearly just highly scripted demonstrations. Certainly nothing like the NTC.

I don't mean to imply that drills are useless- everyone learns drills and they *should* learn drills, but when you can't use the building-blocks to make a coherent effort, or your drills fall apart because war is a kaleidoscope of chaos, confusion, uncertainty and stress in a way that exercises aren't then you sit on an airfield for a week getting pulverised by air and artillery.

I'm over-exaggerating a little, but I do think there is a drills vs tactics tension we're seeing play out at the tactical level.

Or, you know,... seeing a battle drill army that has been ticking off that it's been doing it's drills properly for the last 20 years and selling off the ammo allocation for vodka...