Cederic

Agreed, the constant propaganda, misreporting and outright lies in the media destabilised the whole country and led to the current weak US leadership that emboldened the attack on Ukraine. It's less about how Russia felt about being constantly blamed for things like the Clinton campaign manufactured collusion hoax (now being prosecuted by Special Counsel Durham) and Hunter Biden's laptop (now admitted by the NY times to be real) and more about the damage to social cohesion in the US that led to someone in the White House that Putin has no reason to even try and respect.

They tried to keep time in the trenches measured in days, not even weeks - https://www.longlongtrail.co.uk/soldiers/a-soldiers-life-1914-1918/life-in-the-trenches-of-the-first-world-war/ suggests only 4 days in a 12 day rotation, which broadly corresponds to another source I've read. I think those learnings remain very applicable to the Ukrainian forces that have been under constant artillery barrage and threat of assault (not to mention actual attacks) for literally weeks. Rotating them out much earlier would've been far better, had that been an option.

City AM's target market is workers in 'the City', i.e. the heart of the London financial markets. So a lot of well informed intelligent readers with the ability to spot and reject made-up nonsense. That's reflected in the specific article cited. It's very clearly reporting on speculation and rumours being shared elsewhere without pretending that there's any solid evidence or that readers should believe the rumours. If you're trading on international markets, managing funds, providing financial advice and guidance to multinational businesses, you want to know about those rumours - true or not they represent a source of risk that needs to be considered, priced into deals, mitigated and managed as part of business. So I think the story is a good one, but primarily it's drawing attention to the potential for a coup in Russia to people that lack the off-mainstream information sources providing so much value in this thread.

For me it comes down to whether Ukraine wants to fight for Crimea or not. If that's the plan, they're actually better returning the Donbas to January frontlines and not trying to push further to fully reclaim the whole territory. That frees resources for an assault on Crimea but also demonstrates to Europe and the US that the fight outside of Crimea has not yet finished, so of course they need to continue. If they retake Donetsk et al and just have Crimea under Russian control they're in a politically more fraught position.

See also: https://www.forces.net/services/tri-service/battle-speech-defined-war

Estonia has Challenger 2 tanks parked on its Russian border right now. Not much of a buffer there, rather closer to Moscow, and without kickstarting a Challenger 2 vs M1 religious war I think it's reasonable to suggest that they present an upgraded threat to Russian tanks when compared to Ukraine's current inventory.