G.I. Joe

There are only a handful of countries who actually have Gripens. Of these, Brazil & Hungary won't deliver to Ukraine & the Czechs have theirs leased (from Sweden). That leaves only South Africa with 26 and Sweden with around 160 planes.
Technically, the Gripen might be the right plane, but that is asking for Sweden to be the sole supplier of western airplanes to Ukraine.
Are you trying to hurt Ukraine? These things need so much maintenance nowadays and still hardly fly. Not a good idea.
Not an issue, yet. Joining EU is the much more prominent news.
When this comes up, the peaceniks and russophiles will crawl out of their holes for a last stand, but not to much effect.

That is definitely the vibe in defence circles.  Fence sitting is no longer an option, neutrality is fine but you are out of the club.  For us it was the whole AUKUS thing and a real fear of being punted from 5EYES.  Suddenly we are buying F-35s and have an aggressive (for Canada) Indo-Pac strategy.  Basically Empire is calling in the chips, and frankly we do have debts to pay up on.

AP mines won’t work, you will never get the density to fully stop a mass of infantry.  You can canalized them.
Short answer is - same thing it was in WW1: wires, MGs and artillery.  Wires as in obstacles and communications to coordinate fires.  And the other two are pretty obvious but for artillery it needs to be back to front.  Deep strikes on logistics and any massed breakout troops, and then the AP stuff up front.
A problem I am seeing here is that we have dehumanized the Russians to the point that we are no longer considering the impact losing 1000 people a day is going to have on their home front.  I am not convinced in the least that Russia as a society is some sort of homogeneous zombie mass, even if their troops are starting to act like it.  Russia has a willpower breaking point and tactics like this are pushing towards it.  Disinformation will only go so far.  Everyone is talking about Ukrainian exhaustion but what about Russian exhaustion?
Unless Russia can actually turn these human wave assaults into a breakthrough, and then breakout which is a big ask given the ISR disparities, then this strategy only accelerates the negative internal pressure on the nation. 

From the full article is the information that Poland will deliver the promised tanks, but no spare parts and no training. If that is true and was their intent from the beginning - wow, that would be really cheap.
We are very used to the lenient use of Nazi symbols in other countries (cough...UK..cough). But I guess there will be a silent agreement between Ukraine and Germany to not let that happen.

Some interviews with helicopter pilots who made, among others, daring supply flights into Mariupol:
 

Interesting thread about corruption in the Russian army on example of one (ugly as hell...) tracked vehicle:
 

An anecdote from the shipping insurance business I heard recently: 
There is a non-government group in DC that normally works on Iran sanctions. In that realm they've become quite good at noticing what goes on bulk shippers. Friends in the shipping insurance business have started getting calls from them saying "Hey...just a tip, that particular bulk ship has what may be sanctioned Russian cargo. You might want to think about whether or not it's a good idea to insure that boat." If you are shipping insurer, what do you do that information? Well, you can't afford to mess with sanctions so you immediately send a quit notice and pull the ship's insurance. That sends the carrier into the secondary or tertiary...or god forbid...the Iranian/Russian insurance combine that's trying to get set up to secure insurance and if you don't, not port of any consequence will let you dock, fuel or unload. That's a huge pain in the ***, causes big delays and is very expensive. 
Now imagine that happening up and down the line at every stage of trade for Russia. I can easily see chips becoming 4 times as expensive. 

It's quite likely they simply have no idea how too shoot down something like that. The Canadians tried in 1998 on a much smaller balloon and failed:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2023/02/03/busting-that-chinese-balloon-is-harder-than-you-think/
You might still think that simply puncturing the balloon envelope would be enough. It might not pop like a toy balloon, but letting the gas out should be enough to bring the balloon down.
The problem though is one of scale. Stratospheric balloons are colossal. NASA’s standard balloons are 40 million cubic feet, a volume equivalent to more than 195 GoodyearGT -1.6% blimps: you could fit en entire football stadium inside one. The balloon envelope is made of plastic material no thicker than sandwich wrap, and the pressure difference between the inside and outside is small. Attempting to let the air out by punching a few holes is like expecting to ventilate an entire warehouse with fresh air by opening one small window.
We know that large balloons are hard to shoot down from previous experience. In 1998 a rogue Canadian weather balloon drifted towards Russian airspace. Fighter jets from Canada, Norway and Sweden attempted to bring it down without success. Two Canadian air force CF-18 fighters hit the balloon with more than 1,000 rounds of 20mm cannon fire off the coast of Newfoundland, riddling it with holes. This was not enough to let a significant amount of gas out, and the balloon continued drifting.
A volley of 2.75” rockets was equally ineffective, as the high-explosive rockets simply flew though the balloon without detonating. This may be the Air Force’s real concern with intercepting the Chinese balloon: any missile fired at it may be a much greater hazard to civilians below than the balloon itself, which is likely to descend slowly if at all. (The Canadian balloon drifted into Russian territory and is believed to have come down in the Arctic Sea).

Strange nobody posted this:
She knew it 40 years ago!

Whole thing has a Dr Strangelove feel to it.  If it was a Chinese ISR asset then this is a major blunder on their part.  If shot down, and US-Canada have every right to do that, we are talking captured equipment, attribution and a whole host of diplomatic bum-pain.  Compared to the WW3 brinksmanship going on in Eastern Europe this is actually kinda cute and a pleasant distraction.  Now if there are any weapons on the balloon, this is going to get pulling-a-gun-in-a-bar-trivia-contest unfunny really quick.

Think it depends on setting, because on mine you did it.  Typical, upper management comes in just in time to cut the ribbon....

That's not politically incorrect, it's pure unadulterated anti-Semitism. 

Was withdrawing from Mariupol even an option?
I wasn't paying a great deal of attention at the time (we had our own issues - I was dealing with that daily, and saw and smelt the smoke when the whole thing went tits up) but I gained the impression that Mariupol was cutoff and surrounded pretty quickly. After than it was either "hands up boys, it's over", or try and resist the boa constrictor as long as possible. They chose option 2, and did it well, but there was no Option 3: Run away discretely.

It's an ugly war, Russia has shot up half the country. It's to be expected that Ukraine will also take gruesome losses. That's the cost of war. Obviously some units in some places will not be glad about high command. There will be places where the situation is SNAFUBAR. Expecting anything else is naïve.
Ukraine high command is controlling the information on this subject, which is probably wise. They also employ propaganda to control the group psychology, also wise. They are trying to win this war and it seems that the majority of the population is in it for the run. 
I think I've read or saw here, a Brit who'd imagined how orderly Britain would be defending itself when it had just been invaded by Russia. Bloody chaotic was what he was thinking. Ukraine needs to learn on the spot, so far they have shown to be rather good and creative students. Steadfast as well. That doesn't mean they are supermen that can't die.
Sometimes I think or am reminded of fellow countrymen / western people probably living lives in such 'soft conditions' that they are more scared of Ukrainian losses compared to Ukrainians themselves. 'They'd better not fight too hard or their country will get destroyed and a lot will die'. That maybe so, but that's their own choice. 
I feel the same about speculating how sustainable the casualties Ukraine is taking are. Their country is getting destroyed, of course that's not 'sustainable indefinitely'. However they have a large population, plenty of men of service age. 
Speculating about when exactly the will to fight or pool of soldiers will dry up, while we don't have any real info about it, is pointless.
Major defeats on the operational battlefield would be an indication of problems, but I haven't seen those.

Bad analysis and more than borderline to places you do not want to go. Israel has interests in Syria and elsewhere that are vital to it where Russia can make things quite difficult for the Israeli armed forces. Leave the essentializing out please.
PS: https://www.thedefensepost.com/2023/02/01/netanyahu-military-aid-ukraine/

So now we are talking about the harsh calculus of the game.  From all accounts it looks like the UA has lost about 1/3 to 1/2 of what the RA has lost.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War#:~:text=Excluding the Russian and Ukrainian,of the foreign fighter casualties.  I kind of trust the Ukrainian Government numbers, they are not likely exact but Ukraine is still a pretty open society - and currently has a lot of foreign contractors and observers on the ground - trying to hide losses well above those they are publicly declaring is going to be much harder than in Russia.
As to "why doesn't the UA pull back?"  Well I given what happened at Severodonetsk last summer, I do not think this is "not one step back mentality".  I think it is pulling the RA in close and trading attrition towards an advantage.  It is brutal calculus but if the UA can kill 6 Russians for every loss in a local area, it sets them up for follow on offensive operations later, while straining the RA logistical system as it tries to keep up with the losses.  This is what we think we saw at Kharkiv, and Kherson to some extent.
So Bakhmut and its locals look like an attrition strategy in motion.  Now whether or not it can be turned into an offensive strategy is a really excellent question.  I think a really big problem a lot of westerners are having is that the UA is employing an attritional strategy - we have largely abandoned them in our doctrines.  But we could very well be totally wrong-headed here and attritional warfare is back with a vengeance in the 21st century, for a lot of the reasons we have discussed here (e.g. death of mass).
Whatever the UA is doing, it has worked very well so far by any measures.  The question, which we cannot answer, is who breaks first?  Given the shoring of western support and the signals coming out of the political level in Ukraine, my money is still on them.

Yeah, command is hard.
In peacetime - and wartime to a degree - a lot of armies alternate their officers between so called 'command' appointments (platoon commander, company commander, battalion commander ... army commander) and 'staff' appointments (x1, ... x9 in operational units, or really in-the-rear-with-the-gear at a camp or higher HQ). Partly that's to provide well rounded leaders who've had first-hand experience at different aspects of the big green machine, but also to provide mental and emotional relief between command appointments. Oh, and there's also coursing which will routinely take an officer out of the mill for a few weeks or months every year, and by the time you get up to staff college it's a full year. Intellectually hard, to be sure, but you aren't constantly having to deal with Private Ballbags getting drunk every pay and beating up his wife, or Cpl Snooks forgetting to order ammo for range week again.
As you note, there's plenty of examples - there is a fairly robust theory that after Normandy Montgomery was done. He'd been in command on active operations since September 1942 (in addition to his not insignificant involvement in France 1940), so the better part of 2 years, all of it at the forefront of Britain's most significant operations. He'd personally planned and directed ... what ... at least three amphibious invasions, fought Rommel to a standstill then back across about 2000km of dust, then Sicily, and Italy, as well as directing the ground campaign in Normandy. And, of course, his abrasive personality ensured that he was fighting with his own side as much as with the Germans. Anyway, by the end of 1944 he must have been exhausted emotionally and mentally, and I think it shows in the lead up to Market Garden and the drifting operations that followed until the Battle of the Bulge started.
Allenbrook, too, in his diaries talks about the stress of managing Britain's military effort and campaigns, compounded by the additional stress of managing Churchill's whims on a daily basis. He needed to take breaks occasionally and just go off bird watching or fly fishing for a few weeks.
At the other end of the spectrum, Sydney Jary's '18 Platoon' is a good read. To briefly recap: his first posting was to a battalion in Normandy in July as a battle-casualty replacement platoon commander. He held that position - in the same platoon - until about March '45 I think, at which point he was sent off to a staff appointment. Someone (Monty? It's been a while since I read it ... I need to fix that) realised he'd been in that position too long, and had earned/deserved/needed a break.
And that highlights a rather harsh reality of mass-war: combat leaders tend not to last very long - weeks, or maybe months if they're lucky, before they're either killed or wounded - so the mental and emotional exhaustion tends not to become a problem. The conflicts over the last several decades have either been short overall (Gulf 1, Falklands^, Panama, etc) or covered by regular troop rotations, in part to manage this exhaustion. I believe the UN's recommended tour length is no more than 6 months, but that often isn't practical and some militaries opt for 12 month rotations, or longer, and deal with (or ignore) the trauma later back home.
Sooo ... Ukraine. And Russia. I don't know what they're doing. I suspect that casualties and promotion of the survivors, and unit rotations, means that combat commanders aren't having to command combat operations for months at a time. Russia is, of course, regularly scapegoating their own senior commanders, which ... might be good for them from a mental health perspective? The senior commanders of the Ukraine armed forces (and Zelenskyy) will be drawing deep on their reserves of resilience though, even though the war isn't yet a year old.
 
^ curiously, the battalions sent to the Falklands each only conducted one deliberate battle - mostly the attacks into the hills around Port Stanley. The exception was 2Para, who got to play down at Goose Green as well as at Stanley. It was noted at the time that they were the first British battalion in decades to have to conduct a deliberate battle while still dealing with the aftermath of a previous one.

Having seen some regular posters step away from this thread for mental health reasons (including myself), it makes me wonder about the supports allowed and/or provided for the leaders of Ukraines armed forces. How their outlook and perspective on their situation might shift or be skewed by stress and sleeplessness / weight of responsibility etc. 
I recall reading more than a few examples in history books (eg., Eisenhower’s biography on WWII, or No Holding Back, operation Totalize, etc) of leaders being consumed by the never ending pressures of command, etc. ending in a tailspin that typically led to a horrible miscalculation of some kind.
how do modern western armies mitigate those conditions within a command, and do we know if Ukraine might benefit from something similar? Or is it naive to think there would even be time or luxury to consider that kind protection afforded decision makers in a fight for survival?

But that's just it...US interests in Ukraine are entirely tangible. There's no "Mission Accomplished" banner and a slightly embarrassed backing away from carrying this war forward. If America does not, it and its NATO allies...and Taiwan, Japan, etc...will suffer accordingly in terms of security costs, trade, etc. Anyone smart enough in American politics to look a couple years into the future knows it...which is why our GOP friends in the Senate are completely on board as well.
Also, I had that damn game. Amazing but impossible to find anyone to play against.

Wow, dark.  I mean sure, technically could happen.  I mean the West would have to entirely abandon Ukraine in order for them to be pulled back into Russian orbit at this point.  And if that happens, well we may as well all start learning Mandrin because we are doomed for the next real fight.
The Donbas was not an "industrial heartland": https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10663-021-09521-w  In fact Russia walked away from the actual industrial centers of Ukraine around Kyiv.
Ukraine doesn't enter NATO and EU, well ok, not a great idea on our part but not a deal breaker.  Nor does this preclude bilateral agreements, which is what has gotten them to this point anyway.  Nor does this preclude western investment or reconstruction, particularly in the center and west of Ukraine.  Lord knows we would never pour trillions into a nation still in a state of conflict - The_Capt says sarcastically eyeing Iraq and Afghanistan, and unlike those two gong shows Ukraine is far more internally cohesive and actually bordered by NATO nations.
Of course heading into Western elections in '24, the big one being US, having Ukraine burning, abandoned and drifting towards Russia after spending billions is not a really good thing.
So sure, this darkest timeline is out there but lets call it the "natural 1" and realize that a whole lot has to go wrong before we get there.  Did you guys think war was without risk?  That we are in one we can actually lose?  Maybe that is the issue because all the rest were "over there" and of course we couldn't lose.  
Of course we can lose.  You may have noticed that we are about one bad day away from a nuclear exchange between great powers.  I mean it would have to be a really bad and unlucky day but that damned midnight clock isn't joking. https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/
But just because we can lose does not mean we will.  Particularly if we hold it together and stop jumping at every setback like it was the end of days.
 

For the record, the Doomsday Clock was several minutes farther from midnight while Able Archer was putting us one slight miss step from Armageddon in 1983. It's made by scientists but it ain't science. 

Ok, so I guess it is time for another talk on this.  The main reason there has not been a lot of discussion on the progress of the war itself is because not a lot is happening - or wait, is it?  And being human means we simply cannot accept reality for what it is, we need to start reading meaning and implications at every shadow in the dark.
Nothing is happening because the UA has run out of steam.
Nothing is happening because the RA has rebuilt itself into a lurking monster that can freeze this conflict in place.
Nothing is happening because it is all a [insert boogie-man of you choice] - Belarusian Front re-opening is popular.
Or here is a crazy idea, maybe nothing is really happening because it is the middle of a wet muddy winter.  Or wait a minute, maybe something is happening - https://www.forbes.com/sites/katyasoldak/2023/01/23/monday-january-23-russias-war-on-ukraine-daily-news-and-information-from-ukraine/?sh=72a88a92ba69  but because of unrealistic expectations we think nothing is happening.  
In fact we have become so fixated on questionable criteria of success that the fact that the RA is bleeding out appears to be getting lost in the noise.  https://www.newsweek.com/nearly-5500-russians-killed-last-week-war-defense-ministry-1777316 (that is 1/3 of what they lost in Afghanistan in ten years).
Oh but we all know the mighty Russian bear can generate millions of troops - which it has not - and come crawling out of the snow to retake all of Ukraine and usher in a new era of Russian dominance. 
And then pundits - seriously who are these guys? Say things like "Ukraine can only make progress with a deliberate offensive."  Well no sh#t Sherlock, it is what they have been doing since last Sep.  In fact the only successful defence-only operation was arguably in Phase I when the RA over-reached and collapsed out of the North.  Every major UA success to date has been a period of heavy RA attrition/manipulation followed by deliberate offensive pressure - fast in Kharkiv, slow in Kherson - outcomes the same.
"Oh dear, oh dear, Russia is going to win the war."  Well Piglet, no Russia has already lost this one - we are only negotiating what that looks like here. (The_Capt's all war is negotiation has clearly fallen on deaf ears.) 
"But, but, Russia wins unless we take back every square inch of Ukraine in the next week."  Well, ok by that metric then I guess we have lost this one but that is a terrible metric.  "Russia wins if Ukrainians keep dying" - another bad metric because last I checked this is a war and people are going to die from it for decades - see UXOs and landmines.  "Russia wins if Russia is not a smoking collapsed ruin with Putin hanging upside down from a telephone pole" - ok, seriously?
The worst case right now is that the front does not move an inch.  The conflict is frozen in place, locked in Korean style.  The specter of Russia somehow turning those buckets of Chinese chips into a C4ISR enterprise that can achieve: information superiority; wage a SEAD campaign for the ages and somehow regain air superiority - and invent a CAS/AirLand doctrine while they are at it; then establish the operational pre-conditions they needed on 24 Feb - make Ukraine go dark - literally and information-wise, cripple transportation infra-structure, and paralyze political/military strategic decision making - is f*cking laughable.   I mean if the RA still has those rabbits in its hat I will be absolutely shocked and of course ask the obvious question - "what the hell were they waiting for to pull them out?"
So conflict frozen.  So What?  Russia has already failed on both its made up and real strategic objectives for this war.  The real ones are stuff like:
- Take full control of Ukraine, install puppet government and run the nation like Belarus.
- Shatter the western world through a display of Russian Imperial might and re-assert Russian hegemony.
- Render NATO irrelevant and neutered.  With no doubt a longer term campaign to push them out of the Baltics through subversive means.
- Simply wait for a few months before weak-kneed European resolve collapses and they all start to buy Russian gas again - renormalization, Russian supremacy in its neighborhood, western "rules-based-order" a burning wreck, and sit back and let the autocrat club rule the roost.
Ya so not only did none of that happen, in many instances the exact opposite happened.  So for all you students of history I think I am on pretty safe ground when I declare that this is what losing looks like.  If on the weigh scales of history Russia gets "blasted and shattered Donbas, complete with reconstruction bill", and "Cut off and highly vulnerable Crimea", and "Strategic land bridge to nowhere", I think we can bloody well live with it.  If we cannot and that is what breaks us, then we never deserved to be in charge in the first place.
Russia just burned down its own storefront.  It has isolated itself from it best customers.  Its reputation on the global stage is in shambles, re-normalization is a very far off dream.  It has been militarily crushed - I mean this is 1991 where Saddam drove the coalition into the sea type of thing - by all old metrics of warfare Ukraine should be in an occupied insurgency right now, the reality we are in should not have happened. Russian hard power credibility is a joke.  And it is extremely vulnerable to really weak negotiating conditions. 
Further NATO has not been this unified since the Cold War.  Western defence spending has been re-energized for a decade at least - I mean seriously Vlad, read the f#cking room, we were half-way to debilitating defence cuts in the post-pandemic economy but then you made your "genius" chess move.  Europe is actually agreeing with itself.   The US has finally found something they can agree on, mostly.  And most importantly, I think the West finally woke up from its "New World Order" hangover and realized that one has to actually keep fighting to stay on top.
And finally here is the thing....this entire affair is not over by a long shot.  We have not seen anything that suggests the UA has run out of gas.  We are pushing more and more offensive equipment at the UA, which suggests that they are lining up for another operational offensive.  The RA is still flopping around with leg-humping in the Donbas.  Spending thousands of lives for inches, just like they did last summer.  So before we declare this thing "over" why don't we just buckle in and show something that most people do not get in the least about warfare...steady patience.  Games and movies are terrible at teaching this because they are entertainment.  War is more often a slow and steady grinding business, until it is not.   

So, are we still in favour of the international rules based order, or are we against it now?
 
Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no-one is watching.