Maquisard manqué

Not really Drug Dealers. A primary purpose was deterring 'snitches' to the British forces.  I personally, deeply vividly remember as a kid watching a news story about a boy in the north, accused by the local IRA of snitching, who had been kneecapped. He was 12. I'll always remember my Dad say "If you think kneecapping children is a legitimate tactic then you have lost all legitimacy".  Which is one reason why the IRA and its spawn remains banned to this day in the Republic- no moral legitimacy.
 The whole drug dealers crap became hollow once it was revealed that the IRA itself had ties to cocaine gangs, and with the Good Friday agreement there was a definite influx of IRA into criminality - as is always with long civil wars, the demobbed fighters had a very specific, and limiting, set of skills. Witness Colombia also.
The longer a war goes on, the more criminality seeps in and starts to corrode the political aspects.

Most likely the prisoner abuse is real (who knows what situation these guys are returning from, and it seems to be too chaotic to be some planned out torture, rather than a spontaneous outburst), but I see a real trend spreading to highlight and “both sides” this rather minor and isolated possible war crime (way down the totem pole from raping, torturing and executing civilians).  Bit sickening when this is on CNN but not the 10 or so eyewitness accounts of abuse / killing of civilians I have heard today alone. Me thinks some in the West are seeking relief for their guilt and excuses to turn away and stop looking.  What better excuse to click on that Will Smith link instead.
I don’t see why it really matters since Ukraine already stated their clear policy and indicated reports of abuse would be investigated.  There is really nothing more you can do other than hope that cooler heads prevail in these situations.

Countermeasures will still be around and improving all the time, but maybe they won't be needed for tanks.
As I see it, the tank was originally a breakthrough weapon, designed to 
A) Get infantry and firepower into the enemy line while
( B ) being largely impervious to the infantry arms in that line.
As time went on from WWI, (A) evolved and mutated a lot, but the tank was still useful in all sorts of ways because (B) still held.
With this war being practically the coming of age of infantry portable long range AT weapons, the utility of the tank appears to be diminishing fast. 
(B) no longer holds and (A) can be achieved in all sorts of ways that weren't available when the tank was born.
Fire support for the infantry no longer needs a tank, you'd be better off with several small unmanned vehicles with something like a CROWS on top - drones don't have to be airborne, right ?
The means for any other specialist task that tanks were used for can these days be carried or easily brought up to the infantry requiring it.
The all important ATGM and drone countermeasures you save to protect your mobile artillery and EW assets.

Respected experts would be all over finding out why their assumptions that led to their conclusions turned out to be so far off base.  I don't see a lot of these YouTube types doing that but am happy to be surprised.
Next war I say we stand up a BFC/CM analysis channel and bury these guys....

This is wrong photo. If this not our PsyOps operation, Russian tank driver brought to us T-72A. Knowingly, Russians use robbed cell phoes, so our ELINT units of SBU or Intelligence Directorate are sending on this cell.numbers SMS with a terms of surrender. As if one Russian tank driver communicated with Ukraianian side and told he is ready to surrender with own tank. As if other two crewmens alredy deserted, their unit have lack of food, chaotic command&control etc. Their commander threat to all other to shot out if anybody else will deserted.
Our SOF gave to him a place of rendezvous and when the tank appeared, the drone was took off to make shure this is not ambush. The tanker was captured and brought to safe place. Russian trooper reportedly will be interned to the end of war in comfort room with bath and TV. After war will over, he will receive 10 000$ of award for tank and he can apply for Ukraianian citizenship. 
Here the photo of catpturing. 
 

This article on The Atlantic will sound familiar to readers of this thread
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/ukraine-is-winning-war-russia/627121/
 When I visited Iraq during the 2007 surge, I discovered that the conventional wisdom in Washington usually lagged the view from the field by two to four weeks. Something similar applies today. Analysts and commentators have grudgingly declared that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been blocked, and that the war is stalemated. The more likely truth is that the Ukrainians are winning.
So why can’t Western analysts admit as much? Most professional scholars of the Russian military first predicted a quick and decisive Russian victory; then argued that the Russians would pause, learn from their mistakes, and regroup; then concluded that the Russians would actually have performed much better if they had followed their doctrine; and now tend to mutter that everything can change, that the war is not over, and that the weight of numbers still favors Russia. Their analytic failure will be only one of the elements of this war worth studying in the future.

Among todays photos of destroyed vehciles almost nothing interesting, trucks, MTLBs, all like always. But, this is good one. Destroyed T-90A probably with IED or AT mine. Zaporizhzhia oblast

No, I can't find this information, but I'm recalling, he was either platoon or company commander. Commander of "Azov" mayor Denys Prokopenko ("Redis") and his deputy Sviatoslav Palamar ("Kalyna") both are ok. 

In Mariupol, the dogs eat people and the people eat dogs:
https://www.ft.com/content/af7996a9-8c16-4421-a5b3-390315d3c7dc

Hold on... you can't be saying that there are no "good Russians"?   That's rather extreme.

Here you can see that rare case, when Stugna-P fires the miisile not directly, but above LOS trajectory. Also you can see measured distanse on display - 5000 m. Such type of launch is possible only if the launcher equipped with special thermal sight, which measures a range and gives this data to guidance module.
The second launch on the video is at direct LOS
 
 

Abandoned T-90A with... hm...
 

Don't worry, spalling's a bitch and half of those guys are dead

I hope to witness the fall of Russia. That would make my life complete. Amen.

Your military is kicking their a55.  Agreeing to a ceasefire, and Russian withdrawal and all Russia gets is you don't join NATO is a humiliating defeat for them.  Putin can spin it however he wants but Russia won't be invading anyone for a while.  If anything Russia may have difficulty maintaining its current borders.  Russia is done, period.  No one is looking at them as a heavy weight anymore, especially their partner China.
Suppose they do negotiate a ceasefire and withdrawal.  Then May Day rolls around.  Ukraine will have already held its victory parade and have begun rebuilding.  Meanwhile Moscow has a May Day parade with their armored vehicles towed by tractors borrowed from Ukraine as they don't have the financial resources to restore their military.  No access to western technology or markets - Nationalizing western companies is a long term bad move for Russia that means likely at least a decade before western companies even consider investing again regardless of sanctions.
The cost of this war for Russia is going to be years calculating.  I think your experience so far is leaving you unprepared for the new reality.  The balance of power has shifted.  If Russia can't totally defeat Ukraine (and it clearly can't) then Russia has no ability to threaten Ukraine anymore.  Russia has been reduced to a meme.
Don't sacrifice your future for fear of an enemy who is fading from the world stage.
 

I'm actually Chinese, and my observation of Chinese netizens' reaction is actually very much the opposite.  The great majority of ordinary Chinese citizens seem to buy into Russia's propaganda (b/c that's what they are fed on Chinese media) and many are very pro-Putin.  They lay the blame at Ukraine and the West's doorstep, and feel that Russia is helping China by checking the West's expansionism and disrupting their containment of China's own rise.  The strong nationalist sentiment that Xi Jinping has been cultivating through propaganda and autocratic leadership is very worrying...

With regard to the MiG 29 discussion and the related debate re blocking their transfer to UKR: I was pondering much earlier in this thread why the US did this, given that NATO have armed UKR in other respects, and the clear combat multiplier they would offer to a UKR counter offensive (which could be so significant as to completely roll over the Russians), as well as what I thought previously are perfectly feasibly solutions to circumvent the thorny issue of NATO "directly supplying them". So here's a hypothesis I've been mulling over that might explain the US inaction on this:

Firstly let's assume (and I think most of us would agree) that NATO MUST steer a path through this conflict that strikes a balance between NATO fighting proxy (by assisting UKR) but not going as far as escalating the conflict (because no one knows where that ends).

But secondly it's NATO's single strategic objective that the result of this conflict MUST result in an outright Russian failure to annex Ukraine, install a puppet Govt or be in any position to seek any sort of favourable terms (IOW it's put in a weak negotiation position). 

So I reason that both of these aims can be served by NATO carefully just doing enough in its military assistance to ensure that Russia is defeated in its aims, but stopping short of assisting UKR so much that it is seen to have smashed the Russians (due only to the help of NATO). The latter might be shaped for Russian public opinion by the Kremlin as not the "defensive NATO" it purports to be, but the former is perceived across the world as failure due to Russian military ineptitude. This result achieves the same end for the Ukraine conflict (militarily) but it mitigates to the maximum the possibility of further escalation between Russia and NATO. In addition, politically and diplomatically, it provides an excuse for the Chinese to bat off any of Putin's requests to back Russia up in any way, other than offer its sympathies.      

In conclusion then; given that its now not unreasonable to think that the Russians are slowly falling apart, and NATO intelligence must have been monitoring this development for a while, I wonder if senior NATO commanders knew already that those MiGs were simply not going to be required. "So that's a no go" as long as the war is projected to remain on course to a Russian defeat, a defeat for which, they will only have themselves to blame.          
 

I have been reading this topic everyday for the last two weeks and signed up to thank you guys.
This topic is the most informative source that I have seen on the internet for understanding the realities of the war in Ukraine.
 
Keep up the good work guys.

I have to say up front that I’m not a pacifist or and apologist. “ I don’t “turn the other cheek.” I will make sure they never do it again. I simply try to use an appropriate method to knock out their teeth. What I’m saying is that the response to this atrocity must be considered and calculated, and not based on “vengeance.” I’m very happy to say that I believe the leaders in the West, and the Ukraine have the responsibility to assess those punishments, and I pray they are considered and measured based on possible effects down the line, and not on vengeance.

And this is a prime example of “if we fail to learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it.” We learned a lesson from the WWI vengeance reparations, and not only didn’t impose massive reparations on Germany after WWII, as far as I know, but we implemented the “Marshal Plan” to help rebuild BOTH Germany and Japan. Seems to me that those policies had MUCH better results than “vengeance based reparations.” Vengeance is also what has continued the millennium long blood feuds that still exist in many countries.

Maybe they have decided it is finally free of Nazis...

No, not really. Plausible, that is. Which is, inherently the single most unreal root of Russia's "fear" of NATO. Doesn't matter what NATO's intentions are, or might become, the capacity simply doesn't exist to prosecute an offensive war to the heart of Russia, even from the Federation borders as they currently are. And that's without the prospect of a Russia facing an existential threat bringing out the Nukes, be they battlefield or city-buster.
 

I would hope that happens as well, but I no idea of how it could realistically come about.

Yes, the de-nazification of Germany could only happen because 1) Germany was utterly defeated all the way to Berlin, and 2) Germany was occupied by troops that literally could force locals out to take a look at the camps.
Neither of these things are set to happen in the current war.
I'm worried that this war might end more like WW1.. an economically devastated and empoverished nation free to brew up new "stab in the back" legends and elect even worse leaders than before.

I didn't want to interrupt your speeches (I liked story about Muslim Muscovites most of all). But, damn, you use Soviet AKs, T-64s, any weapon in VSU is Soviet with exception to some new ATGMs. Ukraine energy system is supplied by Soviet built nuclear stations invented by "incapable serfs" (thanks to moksha-yakut mudblood Kurchatov). How can you live with such contradictions in your head?