Machor

FWIW Ukrainian Navy TB2s have cool paintjobs:

Well the answer is in the word Russians.
It was just an early foretaste of things to come, really. BFC should really have sat up and taken note, tut tut. 
See, they're the ones you should be beating on, tsk.
 

Looking at the uniforms of the interviewed soldiers...Anyone know what's up with what looks like an SS Totenkopf patch at 4:10? His friend's "Thor Mit Uns" patch is a bit more amusing.....
 

Recenty known photo of Russian tank in the river, but here the new photo of the bridge. Russian driver thought his tank would pass such tiny bridge... Locals say whole crew is still in the tank. This is Plishyvets village, Poltava oblast and the small bridge through Psel river.

 
 
 

The subject on this show seems to be evolving, at least no mentions of nuking everyone looking at Russia in 'unfriendly' way lol

This makes more sense based on the visual evidence than Tochka-U or MLRS:
 

UKR MLRS strike of the forest north of Kyiv, where Russians hide. Bright dots are probably bonfires near which Russian soldiers are warming themselves
 
 
 

@Machor
I really missed that. This video has nothing to do with this war. This is 2016 or 2017 year, Donetsk oblast. Activists was blocking the shadow trade between Ukraine and LDPR,.which brought black cash income to influence politics and oligarchs. Naturally, authorities tried to remove this blockade. There were many conflicts with special police. 

Machor,

For sure, I screwed up what I wrote the first time, but am so mentally fuzzy right now that, even after checking, am sure I got the TBs on the wrong side, but also a) which conflict is the right one, and b) whether the video creator got something crossed up. Regardless, apologies for the resulting confusion, but. the core point remains: Unless the reports are completely false, the Karushka-4 is either temporarily or permanently damaging or destroying mission-critical electronics on the Bayraktar TB2s, downing those targeted.

As it happens, I have some experience with such things as HPMs (High Power Microwave) DEWs (Directed Energy Weapons) from my Rockwell days. Indeed, was a co-founder of the DEWWG (Direct Energy Weapon Working Group). Such energies can do all sorts of unpleasant things: including fricasseeing missiles on aircraft carrier flight decks because of the energy from a plethora of radar and other transmitters gets inside via a tiny crack and fries otherwise protected microelectronics, detonate fuel and ordnance, burn out radar and ESM receivers, etc. What will jam a radar at long range can damage or destroy all manner of sensitive gear at lesser ranges. Recall, too, this is a weapon good vs ground, air and space targets. A Swiss Army Knife EW system, if you will.

The traditional Soviet approach was to field a jammer to defeat each active surveillance or bomb/nav system the opposition (led by the US) deployed, such as SLAR, JSTARS, TFR. By those standards, Karushka-4 is not evolutionary but revolutionary, because it combines so many capabilities into one devastating system. The transliterated Russian acronym for what we in the west call EW is REC, RadioElectronic Combat, and now the Russians have not just a jammer but damage inflicter, even a target killer. This is precisely why there is such urgency to get that van back to the US and begin meticulous technical exploitation to see what this immensely potent weapon system can do. Even lacking the combined intercept and jamming hardware, about which a great deal can be learned from the imagery, knowing power supplies and so on, the real secrets of Karuska-4 lie in the computers of the command van, for that is where we will learn the Russian understanding of our various targeted systems and what the strike against them looks like, in terms of frequencies, waveform, signal strength, pulse repetition interval, ERP (Effective Radiated Power) and more.

Regards,

John Kettler

Good article to put faces on your Ukrainian pixeltruppen:
"Defiant Ukrainian troops tell Russians: 'Go home while you're still alive'"
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60860548
From the article: Ukrainian troops' daily ration:

"There were 17 different things inside: wheat porridge with beef; rice and meat soup; beef stew; chicken with vegetables; pork and vegetables; crackers; biscuits; tea bags; coffee; blackcurrant drink; honey; sugar; black pepper; chewing gum; bar of dark chocolate; plastic spoons; moist wipes."
And a look into a captured Russian field kitchen:
 

i almost hope he gets off the ventilator alive just so he find out how well it worked out, ALMOST.

So this was from this board on 26 Feb:
"Overall Summary:  As of the first 72 hours of the war, it appears that the Russian military has overestimated its own capabilities and/or the capabilities of Ukrainian resistance and has not likely met the timelines it had set during pre-war planning.  The assessment is that the next 24-48 hours will be critical in the outcome of this war and if Russian forces are not about to take Kyiv and inflict some serious damage to the Ukrainian people's will, their own strategic center of gravity will become more vulnerable. "
That was 2 days into the entire thing.
Since then we have heard a lot of pundits and retired military folks try and wrestle with this whole thing.  I am not surprised formal DOD, MOD assessments are showing what they are to be honest because pretty much from the start of the this war just about everyone has been using macro-quantitative calculus to try and predict/model what has been going on. 
On a CNN video just a few days ago Gen Petraeus was describing the situation in Mariupol and why it matters.   He did a pretty good job describing the drive for a "land-bridge" between Crimea and the Donbas and why the Russians are trying so hard in this area.  Then he slipped right into the old macro-quantitative thinking.  He outlined how once Mariupol was taken it would free up Russian forces to advance north and cut off great swaths of Ukrainian in the East.  I have seen various predictions of Russian "pincer moves" and the like.  This all makes perfect sense if one is applying conventional warfare metrics, all largely based on macro-quantitative calculus of force sizes/ratios and combat power.
What they are missing, and frankly it is not surprising to see it emerge on a wargaming board, is a view through a lens of micro-qualitative calculus; playing CM, in all its versions, has changed the way we see warfare.   All CM veterans see the signs of something different at a micro-level: abandoned vehicles, loss of high value assets, loss of high level commanders, videos of embarrassing Russian cluster-f#cks and evidence of UA successes just about everywhere.  A lot of these metrics are qualitative and when combined with the macro-quantitative they create a very different picture. 
Social media has allowed us to see a macro - micro-qualitative view as well; we can basically upscale our micro-view through very wide sampling.  By doing this, a lot of us have noted that the texture of this war is looking very different.  It is one, for the Russians, of extreme friction caused by the UA approach.  The Russians are fighting in an operational tar pit, the entire battlespace is sticky for them.  Some of this is by their own shortfalls, while in many places it is by design by the defending forces. I do not know who the military master-mind is on the Ukrainian side but he has clearly been reading about Finland, Giap and the Comanches.  The UA has not only stopped the Russian military, they changed the fabric of the battlespace for them.
This thing is not over yet and will likely continue to evolve.  I am not entirely onboard with the Russian collapse scenario, but we are literally a couple key indicators away.

They tell about artillery strike, but this is Russains soldiers, not Ukrainain. They also say the tank crews abandoned own vehciles during the shelling, so "alas", no casualties. 

I thinks this is captured stuff of our Territorial defense. And this is M1910/30 model )

Machor,

Gave up too soon on my checking, I see. Concur that this version has a thermal sight (but apparently lacks an oh so helpful LRF to complement it), but the question I have ref Tunguska in the game is which version is being represented, and would the one you show have been reasonably available in the game's 2017 timeframe? ResearchGate shows Tunguska-M as entering service in 1990, but as we've seen in the current war, it's not necessarily rational to expect the latest war toys to be available, not with some version of the ZSU-23/4 now in action! Had no idea there was a likes limit, but am glad you enjoyed my analysis of the immense value the TB2 missile sponges really represent.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/294263909_Tunguska_M1_operational_with_Russian_Army

Regards,

John Kettler

I dont know Ukrainian but the first tank doesn't seem to have been penetrated from the front/side, though its very hard to tell. The second obviously had a catastropic explosion.
One candidate could be a Ka-52 firing ATGMs from the rear perhaps, but that would suppose some kind of air power that we haven't seen since the first days of the war.
A different perspective might suppose that they are both pointed to the left and hull down behind the roadway and another road to the further left at a higher elevation (a poor defensive position for them I guess) so some kind of fire from the trees on their left or right.

Machor,

The  missile sponge aspect is the least of the impacts. For starters, RuAF pilots get very little flying time, and their know-how toolkit is extremely limited in terms of what they can do. Free hunt is by far their worst historically in terms of fighter ops. It is, after all, the antithesis of rigid GCI (and these says, maybe MAINSTAY AWACS) control. Consequently, this requires the best and most experienced crews to fly the missions. These, of course, are the senior officers. Noticed how many of these guys are on the running dead and captured list? Not an accident!  These guys are already run ragged and now have a whole new unforeseen problem and a very angry customer screaming for relief from it. And. when people are tired and stressed, the already fundamentally dangerous act of flying a high performance aircraft becomes far more that way. This leads to crashes on the one hand and avoidable downings on the other.

Today's SAMs are not the SA-2s of yore and demand more more in terms of reaction time, proper CM selection and radical evasive maneuvers. Thus, the planes being flown by the best RuAF has in any unit fighting the TBs are not well postured to deal with UKR SAMs or even AAA, given how low the TB2s fly. 

But there's much more to cover.The Su-35 is, by Russian standards, an extremely sophisticated and complex bird, on par, say, with the US F-14A, at best, the F-14D. This is based on F-14 type (stolen) TWS radar, long range AAMs, etc. As of the late 1970s, the readiness rate of the F-14A was a mere 60%, a situation so dire that, in order to conduct strike ops, the US Navy had to rotate assignments between two carriers in the same battle group, with one doing nothing but strike, the other strike escorts and various CAPs. Yes, it was that bad! 

But remember, the RuAF squadron is 12 planes, not the 24 in the US Navy and Air Force, so there's far less resilience to any number of problems, including possibilities of cannibalization to keep planes flying. In turn, an entire aviation regiment of this type is 24 planes, one US squadron equivalent. The maintenance specialists are at regiment, not squadron level. And if an all-out effort to find and kill TB2s is the regimental combat assignment, that's where all the scarce resources and skilled people will be focused, sidelining most of the regiment as a result. In some ways, the Su-35 is even more complicated than even the F-14D, because it has thrust vectoring nozzles. All in all, the logistics and maintenance situation for an Su-35 unit is super demanding in peacetime and perdition defined in war. High tech is simply not the Russian strong suit, and there's much competition for technically qualified staff to keep high complexity, high leverage equipment operational. Those TOPOL-M COs, for. example.

Do you believe the RuAF is immune to the same systemic influences that have tires failing wholesale in the ground units? Do you believe that the Russian spare part situation is better than what the US has? Do you believe their supply chain is more efficient than ours? What is the RuAF fuel situation and near term forecast? How deep is the RuAF Su-35 level flight crew bench? What are the MTBFs for their FCS, engines, fly-by-wire, other avionics, etc.? 

All in all, it seems to me that Ukraine should do anything and everything to flood the sky with drones of every sort and cause the best RuAF units to wear themselves right out of the sky--in combat, in crashes by mechanical or electronic failures, exhaustion of flight crews, landing and takeoff accidents, not to cumulative wear and tear on systems and subsystems with far shorter service lives than, say, US aircraft of the same type. How well do unexpended missiles handle repeated takeoff and landing cycles? Crew burnout requires weeks of rest, might I add, to fix. The Soviets learned this the hard way in North Korea. But it's not just the aircrews that get exhausted, but the crew chiefs, techs, planners, tower personnel and more, with the resulting loss of efficiency, attention to detail, decision making and. more. The best pilots in the world can't fly if their crew chiefs and underlings can't function.

Regards,

John Kettler


 

"'I'm alive': Former Canadian Forces sniper debunks rumours of his death in Ukraine
"I'm pretty much the last person to know about my death" — former CAF sniper 'Wali'"
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/wali-alive-despite-russian-disinformation-1.6393191
""I'm a good sniper," said Wali. "Nothing less, nothing more ... I didn't kill any Russians yet. I help doing so because the sniper is doing a lot of observation, reporting.""
"Ukraine's President Volodymr Zelensky put out a worldwide call for volunteers to join his country's defence — but foreign fighters who don't sign three-year contracts with Ukraine's military aren't protected by international law in the event of capture.
Russia has said that it will treat foreign fighters as mercenaries."

On a lighter note... Can we have tankriders in CMBS? Oh wait! 😀
 

Maxim MG, the system 100+ years in servise!  
These MG use fire support companies of motorized infantry battalions and territorial defense battalions
 

And all began from TikTok video, uploaded as far as 24th Feb, when one guy filmed our vehciles around the mall. Maybe he wasn't Russian informator, just useful idiot, but who knows, maybe Russians payed attantion and sent UAVs to track our forces there. As I told, in previous days several missiles were intercepted in this district. 
Here that video
 And here that guy, which uploaded a video in TikTok, detained today by SBU. He is apologizing, but his likes under the video now can turn to 5-10 years of prison. 
 

Russian drone videos of strike at Kyiv mall:
 

That's scary...

UKR soldiers destroyed Russian command center and seized situation maps for 10th of March in Kherson - Mykolaiv direction. Probably this happened around this data and was allowed to issue just now.


 
From the map Russian OOB here is next:
- 49 CAA (Southern Miliatary district, Stavropol)
---- 2 x BTG of 205th motor-rifle brigade
--- 2 x BTG of 34th motor-rifle brigade (mouyntain)
--- 2 x BTG of 108th air-assault regiment
--- 10th Spetsnaz brigade
--- 1st missile brigade
--- 90th SAM brigade
--- 227th artillery brigade
--- 66th control brigade
--- 32nd engineer-sapper regiment
--- 17th NBC-protection regiment
--- 512th separeate EW battalion
 
- 22nd Army Corps (Crimea)
--- 126th Coastal defense brigade (with 8th artillery regiment, 1096th SAM regiment)
--- 20th motor-rifle division (33th, 255th motor-rifle regiments, 944 SP-artillery regiment, 358th SAM regiment )
--- 127th separate recon brigade (recon batatlion + ELINT/EW battalion)
--- 11th air-assault brigade
--- 25th Spetsnaz regiment
--- 291st artillery brigade
--- 439th reactive artilelry brigade
--- 20th SAM regiment
--- 11th engineer brigade
--- 4th NBC-protection regiment
 
VDV forces of 7th air-assault division (mountain)
--- 2 x BTG of 56th air-assaulr regiment
--- 2 x BTG of 247th air-assault regiment
--- 1141st artilelry regiment
 
 

The partially detached Sport Life gym created an overhang parking / loading area, and it looks like this building was targeted directly. Probably some equipment was parked there (as pictured at some point previously) so it couldn’t be observed from overhead (although there are no doubt eyes on the ground in Kyiv doing targeting work for Russia).