Calamine Waffles

Also have to ask yourself what can the M110 do that the MLRS or M109 cannot do just as well or better.

He is okay for like the broad military picture and getting a sense for what things are like in Ukraine, but he lacks the detailed technical/military knowledge, so generally don't rely on him for like opinions on hardware etc.

There have been a few Bulat pictures (at least 3 captured/destroyed in this war), but this is the first video I've seen of the newest BM2, which was only first shown in the 2021 Independence Day Parade.

Interesting, probably the first T-64BM2 I've seen in this war so far. It's the latest and most advanced BM Bulat model (has 1,000 hp 6TD engine, thermal gunner optics, and additional ERA on the side to cover the autoloader more completely). Also, interesting video from the Austrian Bundesheer about Ukrainian artillery with GIS Arta and Starlink (use auto translate for English subtitles)

Well, most of the people there were naval personnel, and they either fled or defected. The highest ranking Ukrainian officer there was Rear-Admiral Denis Berezovsky, and he defected to the Russians. https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2014/03/24/Ukraine-negotiating-troop-withdrawal-from-Crimea/5181395677491/ Okay, so it wasn't most of them, but half is still a huge chunk.

There were relatively few Ukrainian ground forces in Crimea though: From Osprey Elite 228: Armies of Russia's War in Ukraine

Crimea was effectively unopposed. The Ukrainian forces there defected en masse to the Russians, including almost all of the Ukrainian Navy. If you are surprised by the brutality of the Russian soldiers in this war, you probably have not been paying too much attention to what they did in Syria (where they would intentionally target hospitals to the point where MSF refused to share the coordinates of their hospitals) and Chechnya (where they have been reenacting Grozny in Mariupol). Putin's words at the beginning of the war have made it very clear he wants nothing less than the complete destruction of the Ukrainian state and identity. And he is far from the only Russian who wants this. That's what "denazification" actually means. These are OF-37 offensive hand grenades. By design they have a smaller kill radius because they rely on blast instead of fragmentation, unlike the M67, which is also 25% heavier and about 30 years more recent.

They did several interventions (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, Syria 2016) and fought some small wars (Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia), but they never fought anything close to what they are facing now in Ukraine since 1945. It is likely their original plan for Ukraine was something like Operation Danube (the invasion of Czechoslovakia), but we know how that went.

I don't know him enough to have an opinion of him as a person. But I do know he was a professor of psychology at the university where I studied (Toronto), hence I am somewhat unsure of how reliable he is as a political commentator. Let's leave it at that.

I don't know, I think he was pretty questionable choice for that (and I don't just mean from his lack of credentials).

I strongly suspect the Ukrainian Southern command messed up big time and/or was internally compromised. But specifically for Mariupol, this situation was apparently wargamed a lot and it was pretty much inevitable that Mariupol would be encircled. At this point, though, Mariupol has held out longer than the "hero city" Brest did in June 1941.

Well, this Oesterreichs Bundesheer Col. explains fairly well what the Russians have been trying to do in Donbas (basically what the Germans tried at Kursk). (Video has English subs) The problem for the Russians is that the Ukrainians have had 8 years to prepare the defences in the JFO, as opposed to the 1-2 months the Soviets had at Kursk.

Most likely they are trying to bypass Sievierodonetsk and go for Lysychansk in order to encircle Sievierodonetsk. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FSn7myIaMAI6CI8?format=jpg&name=large Whether they have enough forces to do so is another story.

With the failure of the Kharkiv offensive and the attack from Izyum now under threat, the only area where they are having reasonable success is near Siverodonetsk. If they can take that and Lysychansk, they will have mostly pushed out the Ukrainian army from Luhansk oblast, which would allow them to claim *some* success.

The thing about the Russian military is that they've never been very good at taking in feedback from the lower levels and then disseminating that and preserving it as institutional knowledge. It's a byproduct of their very hierarchical, top-down military structure.

This has been known since the Chechen Wars. Once they removed spare ammunition, the survivability significantly improved. T-64s and T-80s also have very few rounds stowed in the turret crew compartment.

Moskva is interesting because she and the rest of the Slava class were all built at what is today Mykolayiv in Ukraine. The same for all the Soviet aircraft carriers, including Kuznetsov. "Well" is a relative term, I guess... That is correct, but I still want to know if there is any preliminary feedback on whether the troops see them as a big improvement over the old tanks.

Peter Zeihan generally explains pretty well what Russian geopolitical goals in Europe are, and it's basically to secure its "borderlands". In particularly they want to control those red lines

I think vanilla BV retains Luna while BV 2017 no longer has it because thermal optics make it unnecessary?

If the sanctions remain in place? Never. They basically will become a Chinese vassal state and resource extraction source.

Oh, no, I know those things, what I'm more interested in is their combat performance in this war so far, i.e., how well are they doing compared to the normal T-64BVs and unmodernised tanks. There has been very little info about this (are they taking less losses, are they performing better at accomplishing objectives? etc.) So far I've only seen two BV 2017s lost that are easily identifiable. There's only one video where I've seen them in action, briefly. https://imgur.com/VDvWMdK The same can be said for the BM2, which we know the 92OMBr (currently engaged near Kharkiv) has, but has not been seen.

Actually @Haiduk, I'm not sure if you'd have any information on this (at least that you could share), but do you have any idea of how well the modernised T-64BV 2017s and any of the refurbished Bulats (BM and BM2) are doing? I'm currently writing a paper comparing the BV 2017 with the T-72B3 2016 as modernisation programmes. Sure, MLRS/MARS are very accurate, but their design philosophy is pretty fundamentally different to that of Uragan/Smerch.

Yeah, it would massively outgun VDV artillery units as well who only have D-30s and Nonas at best. I meant the PzH 2000, yes. But also, rocket artillery is not a complete substitute for tube artillery, and 2S7 is generally rated as a lot more accurate.

Yeah, but Ukraine doesn't have them yet, and both sides use the Pion/Malka. Anyway it's not that surprising that a system that's 30 years newer beats a Cold War legacy system.

Well, Pion/Malka's advantage is longer range + greater effect on hardened targets. So its primary use is counterbattery and destruction of hardened targets.