Cederic

Me, today: "They're taking Lyman? Wasn't that a bad thing?" So I figured I'd best go and check what people were saying about Lyman, as I recalled some discussion on that. Turns out it's taken Russia four weeks (even with the distraction of an expected breakthrough at Popsana) to even reach Lyman, something that offers them minimal to no material advantages. Ouch.

Thank you both. 100km range is significant - imagine an hour's drive to see where your shells landed!

Educate the ignorant if you could: can't both shoot at flat and high trajectories, thus negating the difference between a gun and a howitzer? Surely it's just a matter of how high you point it?

Big gun fans like big guns, let's not suggest they're compensating. The light gun is however half the weight of a 777 and its ammunition is smaller and lighter too. Lower range, lower hitting power. Far far easier to get it to where it's needed. It's all trade-offs, which is why the US have both.

That's a fantastic video, for very bad reasons. My brain started with 'looks like a bad movie', got distracted into 'is he obeying traffic laws? I guess nobody is going to pull him over right now', veered into 'Not sure what the artillery is even shooting at', briefly went down the 'wait, should he be driving that close to a previous strike' and then, only then, did it occur to me that this is in fact real life, he really is in mortal danger, this is what being a civilian in a warzone is like and thank **** it's not me.

Ah, my sort of person. I thought a T72 was a T72 but no, you're all on about BVs and Op16 and M2 and AV and.. I just want to play tank games :(

You mean the provision of Marder artillery tanks isn't true? :( (I foolishly read the referenced website)

A joke I saw a week ago elsewhere. Russian mother calls her son, finds out he's in Ukraine. "Why are you there?" she asks. "It's a special military operation." "A war? Will you be ok?" "No mother, a special military operation. It's a proxy war between Russia and NATO, not a real war." "Oh, that's good to hear," she says, "how's it going?" "Well," he replies, "so far we've had 20,000 casualties, lost 1200 tanks and several thousand other armoured and military vehicles, had a cruiser sank and lost most of our officers." "Oh," said his mother, "That doesn't sound too promising. How is NATO doing?" "They haven't turned up yet."

On 7th September 1940 the Luftwaffe attacked London with a force of over 950 aircraft. Scrambled to intercept the raid was 43 Squadron of the Royal Air Force. To quote Stephen Bungay from 'The Most Dangerous Enemy', "following past practice, three of them climbed in order to hold off the 600 fighters and the other six headed for the 350 bombers." (thank you for the highly informative post though, lots of interesting inputs from multiple sources)

Looked like he just dodged in time.. ..for the artillery to get him instead.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-europe-61461805 has a number of worrying elements in today's updates from Mariupol. Specifically the Russian court case to declare the Azov Battalion a terrorist organisation, the refusal to confirm that the people extracted to Russia will be treated as POWs and not war criminals, and "Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the Russian State Duma, said those evacuated should not be subject to exchange and should instead be brought to justice" I fear it's inevitable that the defenders of Azovstal are going to be tortured and likely murdered following show trials with predetermined outcomes :(

The problem is that the EU act too similarly to Russia and the Poles aren't going to accept that. For instance the EU's position on Northern Ireland was articulated today by European Commission Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič, a communist party member that was educated in Moscow. The suggestion that the Polish President was reluctant to accept Ukrainian refugees until public demand became apparent feels congruous with that. In my experience Poles are simple people (that's a compliment btw) who really focus on what matters. Self determination really matters to them. But back on topic, It's impressive, although I wouldn't want to assume without further evidence that the results are transferable - the level of information will vary across the oblasts, the villages, the battlefields, the forests. It may be that the Russian 1st GTA was fighting in an area with a lot of social media submissions, and that in other parts of Ukraine Oryx is capturing far fewer of the losses. The inverse is also very possible.

Not sure about pontoons, but submerged bridges were used by Soviet forces in WW2 - see https://www.lonesentry.com/articles/ttt07/submerged-bridge.html for a reference that includes how quickly they can be constructed. It may be even easier for the Donets, if it's shallow enough to just sink pre-fabricated sections to the river bed that provide enough clearance to keep vehicles from flooding and provide the firm base needed to avoid sticking in the river mud. I'll defer to former army engineers on whether intentionally flooding a pontoon section (or the whole bridge, after constructing it) would be a very quick and easy way to achieve that.

That wording is amusing. I'm not sure even Ukraine are demanding the surrender of Moscow. They'll settle for their own country, the return of forcibly transported citizens and agreement to hand over war crime suspects.

Guided rounds are something you'd use instead of such a 'bomber' drone. The guidance is the delivery platform, which takes the simple gravity bomb, uses its camera to aim and drops directly onto the target. Platform then returns home; switch batteries, add more bombs, back up and running. It's cheap, it's portable and it's highly effective. The only difficult thing involved is adjusting aim for wind, and if you're willing to use the first round as a sighter you don't even need to do that. As shown in the multiple videos from Ukraine. Guidance on each munition would be additional unnecessary weight. Better to use that payload for extra munitions or additional sensors - IR, thermal, etc.

"Again"? The competition voting's never been anything else. They didn't choose the "best" song, or any of the stronger entries. The (still political) jury votes had Ukraine well down, it was the public sympathy votes that won it for them - 439 out of a maximum 480 points, where the winner would normally get well under 300. What that does do though is send a very strong message of support for Ukraine. Governments across Europe now know that the people in their country (that are stupid enough to vote in Eurovision) will support further measures to help Ukraine. It also gives the media a happy 'united Europe' message which keeps the conflict in the news.

Stupid question time: Are there any photographs since that confirm those tanks bogged down? How do we know the image getting all the analysis wasn't taken while they were crossing, and that they didn't complete that crossing? (It's possible one's already been posted here, and that I've missed it - I fear I'm joining the left flank in river fatigue)

Russia has the capability and capacity to be self-sufficient in food and energy, and that generates the funds needed to acquire everything else. Look how well Iran copes with sanctions. They develop their own weapon systems and fund a wide network of agitators that require a lot of expensive counter-insurgency and anti-terror capability across many countries. If Russia really switched focus and invested in those directions the savings from protecting against its conventional threats (which wouldn't be that great, as the same funding goes towards retaining capability to act in Asia) will easily be lost in protecting against asymmetric attacks. It's one reason I think that the moment Russia withdraws from Ukraine (almost certainly due to a change in leadership) sanctions will need to be relaxed and diplomatic relations rapidly rebuilt. That may well upset Ukraine but it's going to be key to a continued (well, return to) approximate world peace. (re: UK taxes - it is all one general taxation pool, not ringfenced)

The latest narrative (which I'm mentioning as I've seen in two places now today, both UK centric sites) is that Oryx is wrong. The claims articulated are general naysaying about the site, a suggestion that photographs are used multiple times as evidence for multiple vehicles, a lack of verification/rigour and "you can see it's Ukrainian camo". What I didn't get from either detractor were links to any evidence to support the claims, so (since Oryx links all the photographs, making his counts transparent and open to challenge) I'm going to continue to treat the Oryx site as a useful and reliable source. It does make me wonder if Russia's started to get worried about the visible and available evidence of the losses they're trying to hide from their own people.

Drone swarms vs automatic weapons firing AA proximity flak? Yeah, that's another CM game I'll buy

I disagree. The future is swarms: overwhelm defences through sheer numbers. Manufacturing output and logistics won World War 2 and is defining this war. The country that can get more airborne (semi)autonomous weapons to the front line will win every battle. Modern manpads reach 23,000 feet? Optical and thermal imaging on a few dozen lightweight drones at 30,000 feet directing the swarm of small drones onto enemy drones, onto infantry, identifying the targets for the larger seeker drones that can top-attack armour.. Sure, defenders can hide in a bunker. But you can't take and hold territory with drones, merely deny it, and if the defenders can't halt your advance, you have control and initiative. Less effective against heavily civilian areas and against asymmetric insurgency but tanks and SP guns aren't your primary options there either. (If all this sounds sci-fi, so did switchblade drones a decade ago)

This is the space for loitering munitions. Even if a truck full of Switchblades doesn't replace an artillery battery (and it offers mobility, manpower and as a result logistic advantages over one) it fills that gap for beyond visual range precision attack on mobile targets.

This is frankly a worrying development. Are Ukraine running out of tractors? All this artillery and talk of ATGMs and SAMs and not a single NATO power's done a thing to replenish supplies of the real strategic game changer :( However, speaking of equipment shortages.. no commentary here about the massive lack of smoke from Russian tanks. Even in Syria, they take incoming fire, they immediately pop smoke; in Ukraine? None. Not a single video. I appreciate a lot of tanks are being destroyed by the opening missile of an ambush and smoke has limited effectiveness against artillery but isn't smoke a core part of Russian tank defensive doctrine? Did someone forget to order supplies?

It's interesting to see the discussion on traitors from someone whose country was founded by traitors. Tea party anybody? But for clarity I was referring to war memorials and war graves (the Soviet one in Tiergarten is both) and not monuments. As a reminder, Ukrainian soldiers fought for the Soviets in World War 2 and are almost certainly also buried in Tiergarten. That means that they share culpability for the crimes of the Soviet armies. I find it prejudiced and dehumanising to try and label an entire people though for the acts of a few. Whatever the war crimes - rape, pillage, torture, shooting POWs in the leg - I fully support prosecuting all of them, whoever committed them, but prosecute the individuals, don't go blaming the innocent people near them. As Ukraine regains Donbas that's going to be important. Western support will vanish rapidly if Ukrainians embark on a spree of revenge instead of adopting an evidence based approach to actual justice.

No. That is a disgrace. I've been to that war memorial - back when it was in East Berlin, and since reunification. I've also lived by a German war cemetery on the Siegfried Line, seen countless British war cemeteries, visited Verdun and seen war memorials from all sides from literally dozens of wars on several continents. Do not ****ing disrespect war memorials.