Butschi

To be fair, successful business often depends on luck although afterwards people will say that it was planning, foresight, genius, hard work, sacrifice, a nose for money or any combination of those. Putin gambled and lost (game isn't over yet and although it doesn't look like he can win, still everyone can lose.)
Had he won, it would have been a good decision and all the positive things above would apply.

You and me both; it is a riddle that I cannot solve either.  I cannot see the crisis that forced the hand.  Russia under Putin had demonstrated deliberate actions and nuance in its strategies up until now, it is one of the major reasons they kept getting away with it.  We remained in a null decision space on Russia, it was undecidable.  In many circles people were openly talking about “simply accepting Crimea and moving on”.  Russia looked to be the masters of the chess game.  Subversive warfare, hybrid warfare and “grey zone” had led them to a string of strategic coups that we were all admiring and referring to as “Gerasimov Doctrine” and such.  Some forays into the near abroad that were pretty scary examples of reflexive control.  We scared ourselves with wargames that saw Russia tearing through the Baltics in hours.
And then a major conventional action against a sovereign nation that went pear shape in the first 72 hours…sure why not.  An invasion that looks like its primary fuel was hubris and progressive unreality - far too few forces, zero operational pre-conditions and an joint warfare cautionary tale that will be in the history books for at least a century.
Why?  Why now?  Why not stick with the A-game?  Why throw it all away on as poorly weighted dice throw as we have seen since Saddam’s Kuwait gambit?
Perhaps a historian will give us the answer one day, but until then this war will remain a mystery to me.

The interesting thing about Russia in the war is the ideological vacuum.  There are not great ideas here.  They definitely have nationalism and a weak tea “I will protect you from NATO” but lacks the power that communism or monarchy had back in 1917 by a wide margin.  Putin has worked hard for over 20 years to build a personal cult but he in nowhere near the level of the Kim King’s of NK.  Nor does Putin have a religion to hold everything together because it is the “will of God” such as they have in theocracies such as Iran.  Nor does Russia have democracy or an idea of liberal freedom.
So what ideology does Russia have beyond paranoia and a general zeitgeist of revelling in misery?  Maybe that will be enough but I think it is weak glue in the absence of an existential crisis.  Putin has, and will continue to make the argument that this is an existential crisis but it is a weak argument.  As the social lattice in Russia comes under increasing stress I have to wonder how long the social contract will hold.  Russians have proven they can take a lot, under the right circumstances; however, without a crystalline idea to hold them together outside the bonds of their intimate communities and micro-social spaces, I think they are in fact more vulnerable than many think.

Mafia state indeed and unfortunately that's not unique. Somewhere I feel there is a missed opportunity for the West/Nato as well, post USSR collapse.
But missed opportunities don't equal failed responsibilities, in my view there is no doubt who's to blame for (this) war of aggression.

That's the saddest thing in recent (European) history. Withe their resources, industry, people, Russia could be the most prosperous country in the world if managed sensibly, to everyone's benefit, but instead we are back to this neo-imperial BS

False analogy. DMS is a longtime member of this forum, respected for his contributions to our gaming community.
I don't personally find his whataboutism useful in this instance, as there is no moral equivalency to the war in the disputed Donetsk territory at all -- I think @The_Capt has the right of it here, this is just a murderous and stupid tantrum -- but I still want to hear his POV, and the rebuttals.

There is a lot wrong with the whole RU culture. But the thing is painting everything in black is not an accurate description. There is black (a lot of black actually), but there is also white and there are a lot more different shades of grey in between.
 
This thread is good. Like really good. I cannot vouch for the deep historical part but personally I agree with it.
That being said Galeev view is view of intellectual. As result in my personal opinion, he might overemphasize the significance of cultural wars. It is the low level thugs that do the killing, and they have little idea who Schevchenko was or what he wrote. But that's my personal opinion and I might be wrong. 

I'd like to point out that Austria DID fight in WW2. They even had their own leader...

Ok, time to swing back to this one.  This guy sounds like he knows what he is talking about to me.  A few points that I am not sure I am comfortable with:
- He does not really use "shaping" correctly, or at least in terms as we understand the term in the west.  Shaping operations are defined as "an operation that establishes condition for decisive operation through effects on the enemy, other actors, and terrain." (https://irp.fas.org/doddir/army/fm3-0.pdf)  What Russia did at the beginning of the Donbas phase does not really fit any of those criteria.  His description sounds more like positioning.
- Three guys walking down a road, somewhere, is not a rout.  The UA had weeks to decide to get out of "the cauldron" as the RA was moving by inches.  If units got caught or were sacrificed, that is one thing, but nothing in the RA rate of advance speaks to conditions for an uncontrolled withdrawal.  Nor have we seen any evidence on open source to back this up - large amounts of Russians with trophy equipment, or PoWs.  So I challenge that assumption right up front.  
- The defensive lines he draws pretty much match our own here, and make sense.  
- I am allergic to bold drawn arrows in this war; I have been let down too many times.  Neither side has been able to make large muscle movements since March (with the possible exception of Kharkiv), so the idea that "this is it, the Russians will now spring the trap!" is not credible until we see some actual success.
- Force ratios.  Seriously, what is wrong with the professional military community?  They keep turning to these quantitative-only force ratio assessments, even though they completely failed us in this war to-date.  And here on an analysis/assessment video on 08 Jul , I am still seeing "this many Bns vs this many BTGs" and we are supposed to take something from it.  What is the qualitative assessment?  I don't care if Russia has 4 times the numbers of troops, if those troops are all old men and scared kids with three weeks training, no radios, no cas evac, scrounging locally for food and unable to employ heavy weapons effectively; those are not troops, they are a uniformed mob waiting to die.  The good analyst here even points to the increasing "Russian forces vs dwindling Ukrainian ones" as a concern...but what are those increasing Russian forces made up of?
Other points:
- M777 losses are concerning as they are supposed to outrange Russian guns for the most part.  I have to wonder if there is a problem with positioning within the UA, or is this just the cost of doing business.  Russian c-battery seems to be pretty quick, which leaves me wondering why their offensive fires are so "not".  From what we have seen the Russians have basically gone WW1 on massed fires, while c-bty in seconds minutes takes pretty powerful ISR (detection and ranging) support; however, I would let the arty specialist weigh in on this one.  I also take UA messaging carefully, at the levels talking there is a strategic narrative to continue to push the west to strengthen support and provide help.  Problem is that if Ukraine cries for help too loudly, or amplifies things, the West will get nervous and wonder if we have backed the right horse...and we have a bad history with backing the wrong horses. 
-This video is from 08 Jul, so we now know that Russia has been in at least a week long operational pause.  We have yet to see Russia able to keep anything that resembles a threatening operational tempo, this is a very slow grind.  It works, but so slow and costly.
As to long war, short war.  Well at coming up to 5 months, this war is already longish by western standards when compared to its intensity.  The answer is that both are possible at this point but there are a lot of unknowns.  I would boil it down to Western Will vs Russian Will - and here I mean the will of actual Russians, not Putin and his cronies.  Western Will is fiscal, self-centered and frankly has the resolve of a skittish milk maid on a good day.  I have zero doubts about Ukraine, it has mobilized, to the point that killing Russians has taken on cultural significance - the Ukraine after this war will not be the same one that went in. 
The West, if it keeps pushing weapons, ISR and money, can keep this going forever...but, it may have to actually make some sacrifices to do so, and that does have me worried.  We are not really good at sacrifice on a large scale right now, and have not been since the 60s in reality.  We got burned, and lied to by leadership back then, and ever since we have a weird relationship with sacrifice.  "Sure I support Ukrainians...just don't ask me to do anything about it." is a disturbing trend.  This is not new, just look at GWOT and how the US had to tie itself in knots to avoid anything that hinted at conscription in Iraq and Afghanistan (e.g. stop-loss, etc).  At the beginning of this war the amount of unity was refreshing but whether we have the attention span and will to keep doing this is not a done deal.  I suspect we are in too deep to pull out now and every time the Russians are dumb enough to commit war crimes it helps us keep that unity; however, as the costs continue to rise, it is a concern moving forward.   That said, some things are already too big to back away from, such as the momentum NATO has right now.  So if asked I will always list Western Will as a concern but signs are pointing to us remaining unified and "all in", at least for now.
Russian Will is another beast altogether.  Putin and his gang are like the US back in '06, they are doing everything possible not to mobilize, while mobilizing.  They are doing so for a reason, and that reason is that Russian Will for this war is very likely not homogeneous, not solid across the entire federation.  Russia has almost adopted a Western proxy position by pushing as many LNR/DNR conscripts, and contractors into the fight as possible in order to minimize the effect on the Homefront.  But high intensity warfare is just to big to hide, the losses from this war already make it the most high intensity conflict of the 21st century, so how long is Russia willing to do this?  How long will they support Putin in doing this?  This is the calculus that is not on Putin's side.
So back to long vs short war.  My guess is that if this war does not slow down, it will likely still be short; either the West or Russia (likely Russia) will run out of runway on this thing at this rate of burn.  [Note the Ukrainians are not part of this calculus as far as I can tell, they are totally in it regardless...and who can blame them].  If this war slows its burn down, say to the sort of thing we saw in the Donbas before this whole thing, then long becomes a real possibility.  If the UA cannot solve for offence, that is a real possibility...but I am thinking that once the RA runs out of gas, or calls a political "win" the UA will then start going to work on them. 
Of course, back to a point we have made from way back...at this point when the war ends is really moot, which is sad really.  Russia has already lost any initial strategic objectives except regime survival, which is also a maybe.  In fact it has lost so much political strategic ground by this point that even if they somehow took all of Ukraine, this would still be a loss (see: loss of credible power, sanctions, isolation, Sweden and Finland/NATO, etc).  Which makes this whole fiasco so tragic as people keep dying, well past a rational point.

Come on, we already had this a few times. Whether by coincidence or an agreement between NATO countries, no western MBT or IFVs are delivered to Ukraine. None from the US nor from the UK, France, etc. I don't know the exact reasons but that's how it is. Poland and others have sent their Soviet-era equipment. Is it convenient that we don't have much of that to give? Sure. Could we deliver more other heavy weapons? Maybe. You can condemn this as much as you like and probably be right. There has been a lot of waffling on our side. But w.r.t. MBTs/IFVs it is a bit too convenient to single out Germany for bashing.

Come on, we already had this a few times. Whether by coincidence or an agreement between NATO countries, no western MBT or IFVs are delivered to Ukraine. None from the US nor from the UK, France, etc. I don't know the exact reasons but that's how it is. Poland and others have sent their Soviet-era equipment. Is it convenient that we don't have much of that to give? Sure. Could we deliver more other heavy weapons? Maybe. You can condemn this as much as you like and probably be right. There has been a lot of waffling on our side. But w.r.t. MBTs/IFVs it is a bit too convenient to single out Germany for bashing.

Well we have had Nuclear disasters  in other places besides the ex Soviet Union ...

If I'm not mistaken the EU is financing all arms deliveries by member states to Ukraine. This means that for example Poland gets financial compensation for the mainly outdated Russian weapons it sends to Ukraine. I don't doubt Polish dedication to the Ukrainian cause, but in the end it's paid for by Brussels and the Poles get better equipment for their armed forces. Now that's what I call a win-win situation. Add to that the fact that Poland is one of the EU countries that cash much more money from the EU than they have to pay and the fact that countries like Germany and the Netherlands contribute the most to our great European dream and the whole picture of Poland 'doing the heavy lifting' looks a lot different...
INCOMING!!! 

Come on, we already had this a few times. Whether by coincidence or an agreement between NATO countries, no western MBT or IFVs are delivered to Ukraine. None from the US nor from the UK, France, etc. I don't know the exact reasons but that's how it is. Poland and others have sent their Soviet-era equipment. Is it convenient that we don't have much of that to give? Sure. Could we deliver more other heavy weapons? Maybe. You can condemn this as much as you like and probably be right. There has been a lot of waffling on our side. But w.r.t. MBTs/IFVs it is a bit too convenient to single out Germany for bashing.

I think we had that discussion and shouldn't rekindle it. Let me just say this: Please accept that some of us are, I think, more concerned with the current real war than with a computer wargame. If BFC is ok with us discussing this here, then why shouldn't we and its not like this was a forum for licorice lovers or something. For me it's a natural place for this topic and the thread greatly helps me in understanding what is going on - and frankly also to cope with the situation. Btw. it also improves my broader understanding of CM.

OK, thanks, that's in line with what I know of the situation. Often when talking about energy, there's some confusion about what it is about precisely.
I looked up the numbers regarding gas a while ago, and it turns out that less than 50% of German gas comes from RU, rest is NL or NO. In 2021, buildings (residential, services, and agriculture) accounted for 44% of the gas consumption; this is trailed by the industrial (30%) and power sectors (21%)(link). What it means that with some help you should have just enough for heating and power generation ( buying electricity from French nukes + restarting coal plants helps), but the industry is really effed. I read recently that many of the industries cannot do with limited supplies at all, cause some processes are continuous (like smelting) and cannot be scaled down - it's either all the way or full stop. And there's A LOT of industries dependent on the chemical industry (car makers included), that cannot easily source the materials elsewhere. That sucks and there's hardly anything that can be done to avoid a temporary plunge I'm afraid 😕 

First of all: when I speak of gas, I mean the gas that is gaseous. Not the gas that is fluid and usually put in cars. Whoever named that...
Fuel is not a problem in Germany, you can buy oil from many places. But there is one refinery (of two) in former East-Germany that is literally connected to a Russian pipeline ('Drushba' IIRC). This refinery has only one other supply line, which is too small to run the refinery at capacity. This creates a logistical problem but nothing else.
Gas (natural gas) is a completely different thing. 50% of households use it for heating, and it is used in the industry all over the place. There is not enough non-Russian pipeline capacity available, and we don't have our own LNG terminals. Even if we had, there is not enough LNG on the market. We buy what's available, but that's not exactly cheap. Even worse, we take away the LNG from other countries who need it, too.
Hence, the understandable criticism of the global south that they have to suffer because of a war and sanctions they have nothing to do with.
Ironically, we have a new government since late last year where one parties main goal is to get rid of fossil fuels. But you cannot reverse in half a year what has been the status quo for decades.

It is ridiculous that anyone would prioritize a PC wargame over the events we are seeing unfold on the ground in Ukraine.  These events have global impact - we have seen this already, and it is just the start, and merit staying informed about as much as possible.  Why?  Because if you live in a democracy in the western world, at some point you will be asked to use the phenomenal power of your vote to influence this war and it is your responsibility to understand what that means...or at least it should be.
The lack of sacrifice I am referring to is on anyone who is not willing to put aside hobbies and free time and actually devote that time to staying informed about this war as much as they are able.  Everyone on this thread is willing to put that work in, and yes, sacrifice time, in many cases money, and it at least one case volunteer for military service. These are very small sacrifices compared to what the average Ukrainian is going through (Haiduk's dedication and ability to keep us informed while his country is being torn apart is frankly humbling) but everyone here is at least willing to do that much, along with personal donations etc.  
Based on your posts, you are not even willing to sacrifice a distraction from a wargaming hobby.  Now, I do not know your personal circumstances - perhaps you are a humanitarian aid worker who has to deal with the cost of this war on a daily basis, and just want to come here to get away from it all.  I get that, but for the rest of us here this is where we go to put the time in and do our small part.
I appreciate the shout out for CMCW, we had a lot of fun doing that title and have future plans - trust me.  However, right now I would prefer you respect what is going on here as something more than a bunch of "war-porn voyeurism"; it is a communities' efforts to understand what is going on and support each other while it happens.  We did the same after 9/11, and Iraq '03, and Afghanistan, and the Crimea...and now the Russo Ukrainian War.  CM will be there after this war is over, it has survived a lot in the last 20 years, but for now this is bigger than my hobby.  If it is not based on your personal circumstances, hey we get that, however, there is no need to come here and make trouble for those that are just trying to sort through the mountains of information (good, bad, and ugly) and make sense of it.

And we appreciate it, a LOT!

I think we had that discussion and shouldn't rekindle it. Let me just say this: Please accept that some of us are, I think, more concerned with the current real war than with a computer wargame. If BFC is ok with us discussing this here, then why shouldn't we and its not like this was a forum for licorice lovers or something. For me it's a natural place for this topic and the thread greatly helps me in understanding what is going on - and frankly also to cope with the situation. Btw. it also improves my broader understanding of CM.

And to add to that, this thread actually made at least a few people (me included) take interest in the game and purchase it. I promise to b***h about the bugs on the forum when I find time to play it some more, promise
And back to the topic, reportedly North Korea recognized DPR as a sovereign state. That's one great alliance Putin is building...
 

I think we had that discussion and shouldn't rekindle it. Let me just say this: Please accept that some of us are, I think, more concerned with the current real war than with a computer wargame. If BFC is ok with us discussing this here, then why shouldn't we and its not like this was a forum for licorice lovers or something. For me it's a natural place for this topic and the thread greatly helps me in understanding what is going on - and frankly also to cope with the situation. Btw. it also improves my broader understanding of CM.

I think we had that discussion and shouldn't rekindle it. Let me just say this: Please accept that some of us are, I think, more concerned with the current real war than with a computer wargame. If BFC is ok with us discussing this here, then why shouldn't we and its not like this was a forum for licorice lovers or something. For me it's a natural place for this topic and the thread greatly helps me in understanding what is going on - and frankly also to cope with the situation. Btw. it also improves my broader understanding of CM.

I think we had that discussion and shouldn't rekindle it. Let me just say this: Please accept that some of us are, I think, more concerned with the current real war than with a computer wargame. If BFC is ok with us discussing this here, then why shouldn't we and its not like this was a forum for licorice lovers or something. For me it's a natural place for this topic and the thread greatly helps me in understanding what is going on - and frankly also to cope with the situation. Btw. it also improves my broader understanding of CM.

I think we had that discussion and shouldn't rekindle it. Let me just say this: Please accept that some of us are, I think, more concerned with the current real war than with a computer wargame. If BFC is ok with us discussing this here, then why shouldn't we and its not like this was a forum for licorice lovers or something. For me it's a natural place for this topic and the thread greatly helps me in understanding what is going on - and frankly also to cope with the situation. Btw. it also improves my broader understanding of CM.