Kinophile

Staging area in a wide open area, zero cover or visual obstructions?

Ref Leo 2 coalition, what can Scholz do to stymied it? I assume there are some export/sales restrictions? What are the penalties? Could the Leo coalition use legal slipperiness and beaurocratic maneuvering to reduce member exposure to penalties, for transferring Leo2's without permission? Eg by offloading/concentrating legal exposure on 1-2 members and pooling resources to cover the financial penalties occurred by them? While the transfer marches ahead... There's a point where Poland et al are just going to say "GTFOOTW, Scholz, there's a war on. " They'll start ignoring legal squawking and do what they need to do, no matter what the Germans say. Which gets quite tricky within a cooperative military alliance...

Good God. Actual human wave attempt.

Give us a song, Tom! -- 15 mins later - - Lovely, thanks Tom, very ni- -- 1 Hour Later - - ...aaaand Thank you, that was unique and extensive. 26 verses long, wow. Now, wher- -- 2 hours later -- Ok, Tom, that's very detailed, lots of interesting and extremely unusual words there, lots to a so, well we should be go- -- 3 hours Later - - Tom. TOM. TOM!! Stop, stop STOP!!!!! -- 5 hours later - - Gimme a knife, a spoon, quick Man, quick, anything! WTF do you mean, he's "immortal" !?? Why do this!? Who's bloody side is he on, anyway!?

Or why have Indiana Jones in... Indiana Jones & the Ark of the Covenant.

Yup, there is just that...

Very nicely put.

Yup; especially as almost all Belarussian artillery ammo is now in Russian hands...

Also, by March, supposedly Russia will be at/just about at peak shell-hunger.... Hah, and Kyrylo Budanov agrees.

Also, by March, supposedly Russia will be at/just about at peak shell-hunger....

Oryx certainly has a simple opinion:

Please do! You always have interesting stuff.

The KI and Ponomarenko in particular must be up for some sort of Journalist/Paper of the Year award. He's been really excellent (from an English speaker POV). Who do our UKR friends on here recommend?

I wonder... Does UKR intend to keep up the corrosive, tactical raiding/long range fires pressure on Russia, but no major offensive over Jan, Feb? There's certainly no signage. Kremina feels more like a steady push, but there seems to be sustained (and sustainable) Ivan resistance. Say UKR start ramping up in March as their US vacationing pilots and NATO trained ground pounders return and integrate, gain some experience and iron out logistical/technical kinks, then go for the jugular in April/May? That gives them 3 months of relative rest/refit of worn out units, keep torturing the Ivan's logistics into funny shapes and solidify their own AD defenses (incl. versus any Iranian SRBM crap). It plays to the UKR preference for corrosive shaping of Russian units and plans while they themselves gain in strength, then attack. It's what they've done each time and it's worked, solidly. There's no tech the Russians can get that will counter this basic approach. There's certainly nothing systemic they can do, or rather, succeed at that will stop this plan. Mobiks won't be in better shape after 3 months if winter exposure...

Do those "other aircraft" go- bbbBBBBRRRRRRRRRTTTTTTTttttttt!....

Wow very nice find @Huba. Link?

An economic, militarily enforced blockade on the largest country in the world? For how long? Sanctions already blockade by proxy, attempting to impose a cut-off at source, using domestic legal threats via cheap & infinite Lawyers rather than at the destination ports, via expensive and limited Warships. Sure, closely monitoring would work - if the Russians allow it, which they won't. If you begin stopping Russian trade ships with Western warships in the Black Sea, Baltic, Artic and, on the other side of the world, the northern Pacific (just to remind ourselves of the scale of the problem) then someone will press the wrong red button real quick, and then whole keyboards of red buttons will start getting mashed. The US and West are not at war. We're in a geopolitical struggle for influence and propaganda narratives, but last I saw on MSM there were no NATO tanks plinking Russian mobiks in Poland. Russia doesn't need a nuke to make a naval blockade rapidly unfeasible. It has an entire navy in the BSF, it has very long range Islanders etc. I'm not saying it would fight very well or effectively but it could easily make any Western naval force very uncomfortable for very little gain on our part.

Who's "we" in this particular reality? How do you enforce a Naval blockade in the Black Sea? How do you slip through the Montreux Convention? Whose ships do the stopping and boarding? Who thinks the Black Sea Fleet will agree for one hot second to allow NATO vessels to stop them, to fire shots across Russian bows? Do you really think a Russian frigate is not going to fire back? What about the BSF submarines, their naval ace-in-the-hole via a vis any potential adversary? How do you blockade them? So who's ship's will do the sinking, and be sunk? The US? So, War then. Britain? War. EU? War. Turkey? ROFL. All it would do is play exactly and perfectly in Putin's bull**** about "fighting NATO, not Ukraine". He'd have a supposedly existental external threat, that was real this time and I'm pretty sure would gather far more active national support than his nasty little jaunt into Ukraine. No more molotovs at recruitment centers, for one thing. And bye-bye any chance of this war ending in 2023. Yer 'avin a laff, guv' nor!

Ah yes, thank you

Was that hit due to "loose lips" on the UKR side, though? IIRC it was more that they were observed going into position (pretty hard to miss them) but then, as you note, not emplacing, spreading out or anything to minimize damage from potential fires. So was it more tactical opportunism by Russia, than in-battle EMS surveillance with stand-by, on-call fire support? I think it was later, with the proper invasion by Russian forces with EMS supporting units that lead to hits on undisciplined UKR units? I read that too. Makes sense, esp as the Foreign volunteers seemed to get the C-string leadership at the start (naturally - why send your best & second-best command to the rear during an invasion?). Plus, it proves the point - the UKR regular forces had learned and enacted the lesson: GTFO your phone when on or near the line. Also, as we all saw, the TD forces were initially more lax with their digital discipline at the start of the 2023 invasion. Thankfully that seems to have tightened up.

I believe they did during 2014, there's several accounts of RUS arty hitting UKR units based off cellular use. The difference of course is that UKR learned from their mistakes, making cellular use and social media foot-printing deeply anathema in the defense forces. By contrast the Ivan assumed in arrogance that the same danger would never affect them, didn't absorb the reverse lesson for far too long when it did start hitting them and lacked the lower-rank discipline to maintain control. And then they added 200,000 mobiks with even worse discipline, motivation and NCO quality. Expect repeats, I'd say.

Yup, put hundreds of ill-disciplined conscripts in one place and at least tens of them are going to have active phones. Any EMS surveillance unit will immediately spot the concentration and relay it. The beauty of HIMARS is that they can swiftly change intended targets and react to the opportunity.

The defence forces might have felt it was chaotic but it was lead by someone, some small tight group of people. Even if your forces are inexperienced, so long as theyre in the right place at the right time then you maximise their effectiveness (true with regular troops of course). Without western ISR but very detailed and timely local ISR the coordinating group was able to receive, digest and prioritize locations at speed, making them able to be where they should be and to shift away when needed. They also struck back and hit the weakest link of the Ivan, the fuel trucks. Very smart work, for a "civilian" force. But that HQ group must have had people with experience from 2014 onwards, no? Maybe not the top leaders but you could not mount an effective defense (with counter attacks) without some military/battle knowledge in the group. If so, then it underscores that additional data point against the success of the invasion - while Russians were doing stupid scripted "maneuvers" for show, a percentage of the Ukrainian population was getting shelled, shot at and veteranized on the Donbass front. Not a large percentage but time and again a margin that existed and was often enough and, crucially, was spread throughout the entire population and by inference its geographic extant. So wherever the Feb 24th invasion force struck there were bound to be people with battle experience, motivation and discipline to organize, resist and fight back. By contrast the D/LNR veterans were concentrated in the Donbass and stayed there - their experience was thus not disseminated throughout the Russian forces. The RUS MoD doesn't seem to have been remotely interested in any lessons learned and, post-ceasefire, seems to have deliberately kept its personnel back from the front lines. The rebel forces were structured similarly but kept separate and not properly integrated into the AFRF until the invasion started, and then just as cannon fodder. Their knowledge of drones and how to use them was ignored for at least two months. I think It was May that we heard of DLNR instructors training Russian forces on the use of Mavics? @Zeleban or @Haiduk do you know more of this episode? Do we know who lead the fight and where they are now?

Happy New Year, Ukraine. Keep kicking the **** out of the Ivan. Kick 'em good.

Oh man I lol'd, out loud and proper.