Billy Ringo

No offense mate, I live 40 kms from the border. Probably directly know more Belarussians than you do, and not only opposition ones. But of course you are entitled to your own opinion, which seems like traditionall mix of stereotypes, not adressing evidence contrary to your claims (election results, mass protests, low support for war, volunteers, pacification of society, heftly paid regime apparatus and bloody 40 k muscovite soldiers stationing in the country) + I'll of course soon hear next conspiration theory like the one with Russians supposedly "shooting down" PL presidential plane in 2010. With zero evidence to support it.
Of course you are right in a sense that large part of Belarussian population is indifferent, pre-political homo sovietici. Many are still enchanted by Luka propaganda, and he probably scores non-insignificant support just by playing protector against chaos raging around. Those stories of railway workers sabotaging Russian supplies lines seem also (largely) puffed with wishful thinking. But it s also a fact that active parts of society- quite unexpectedly even to themselves- did something to overthrow him, and almost succeeded. Lukashenka regime was saved mainly by Russian support and feeble reaction of the West/ China, which refused to heavily sanction Belarus as important transit country for their goods (again big thanks to Ms. Merkel and German business oligarchy- "the Spice must flow" like they say).
Just to compare- Maidan was also work of relatively narrow parts of society, and in 2014' Ukraine support for it was also by any means universal. So nobody force you to love Belarussians, especially considering harm done to Ukraine. However, turning the blind eye on all things put forward before is also not wise. All pro-demcratic changes must start somewhere, and Belarussian ones were not the worst, especially in comparision with Russians.

Yes, that's how it looks in western media. 10 mln of poor belarussians being oppressed by a single evil Lukashenko that has no popular support. It's a very cozy, comfortable worldview that so many had towards russians back in March but "sadly" was stripped away, isn't it?
It's also helped by the fact that in western world you don't have the "luxury" of talking to belarussians, who, after yet another attack on our people from THEIR territory, come to our groups and start condescendingly "supporting" us, telling us how they are sorry and how they are all victims of the occupation just like us. Oh yes getting paid for providing dentist services to those whole 9000 russian mobiks that your military buddy living across the street also trains for money - in a well lit, warm town is absolutely the same as dying to their bombs in Mariupol. Imagine the horror of getting paid by russians themselves to deliver looted washing machines back to Russia, how can anyone survive that?
Maybe I just don't get how anti-war they are because they aren't writing "we are victims just like you" on artillery shells they keep delivering to Russia.
So yeah keep living in your pretty fantasy world with evil dictators and poor oppressed population, I will just keep considering belorussians to be absolute effed up assholes they really are.

I think it is deeper than that.  They cannot lose to Ukraine - to do so would show all the cracks in the foundation of a nation that has been inherently unstable since the fall of the Czar.  So this war started as a demonstration of power intended to push NATO back and shore up an internal narrative - Putin has not been subtle in his speeches on this point.  To lose now would likely break them. This would be like the US invading Mexico and getting crushed, pretty damaging to the whole internal framework on a lotta levels.
So now they stuck their heads into a hornets nest and can’t get out.  If it wasn’t for the nuclear arsenal and all the death and destruction it would be hilarious.  What is bad is that I do not think Russia knows how to lose this war and suddenly the West has to figure it out for them so we don’t go down really bad paths.

Sadly, the Rat Czar will not yield.  This war has continued for 9 months for only one reason -- Putin's survival (save face, etc).  He is completely tied to this war and cannot back out.  Putin's propaganda presents this war as existential for RU -- which is actually true but in the opposite way these clowns mean.  RU survival depends on getting out, not staying in.  The effect on this insanity on 144M russians (and 44M UKR) is irrelevant.  Putin must die.  He will never leave UKR territory unless forced out, like w Kiev, Kharkiv, and Kherson.  My hope for the attacks on RU is that it finally causes some faction in RU to kill Putin.  

Two questions to ponder:
1. Is there any semi-significant positives for Russia continuing this war outside of ego and pride?  Any material/financial resource benefits have and continue to be stripped and the cost of recouping those potential benefits goes up every day.   Ego and pride--that's all I got.  Virtually every other outcome gets worse the longer this continues--including their prospects for whatever they may consider a "victory."
2. Prigozhin's motives and actions intrigue me.  Yes, power corrupts.  But maybe there's more to it.  Could his time in prison resulting in him, supposedly, being labeled a "cock" be driving his actions?  Some type of retribution and proving himself to those in that community?  If his motives are primarily emotional then his actions would be more difficult to decipher and predict.  Maybe he's just bat**** crazy--which makes him dangerous to both the Ukrainians AND to anyone in the Russian prison system.
 

Two questions to ponder:
1. Is there any semi-significant positives for Russia continuing this war outside of ego and pride?  Any material/financial resource benefits have and continue to be stripped and the cost of recouping those potential benefits goes up every day.   Ego and pride--that's all I got.  Virtually every other outcome gets worse the longer this continues--including their prospects for whatever they may consider a "victory."
2. Prigozhin's motives and actions intrigue me.  Yes, power corrupts.  But maybe there's more to it.  Could his time in prison resulting in him, supposedly, being labeled a "cock" be driving his actions?  Some type of retribution and proving himself to those in that community?  If his motives are primarily emotional then his actions would be more difficult to decipher and predict.  Maybe he's just bat**** crazy--which makes him dangerous to both the Ukrainians AND to anyone in the Russian prison system.
 

It is the wide structure of war, which we also evolved having started in much the same way as chimps, that creates evolutionary pressure.  In order to do this at scale a species needs to pull out a lot more energy out of its environment.  Chimps do it but we took it to a whole other level.
As to the Three Body Problem series - definitely older school sci-fi and his characters were damned thin.  His logic on the Dark Forest is interesting but taken to extremes.  The faultiest issue was with the assumption that higher life forms would collide over limited resources while expanding - default interaction = wars of extermination. The level of energy available in the galaxy is enormous - albeit finite - to the point that only a Type III civilization would see other higher life forms as a threat.  And of course a Type III civilization would have the level of sophistication to simply box up lower civilizations - pretty much like what happened in the books.  Once boxed up a Type III civilization is simply going to ignore lower civs as irrelevant.  Only two or more Type III civilizations would wage such a war over “limited resources”, but of course with the technology levels they have they could simply move to another galaxy.  Unless Type III civilization is so common that every galaxy has one - and this completely disregards time dilation of light speed travel required to be a Type III civ - then the Dark Forest falls apart.
Xixin had to effectively push the whole collision central to the plot when in reality two Type I civilizations have no fundamental resources based reasons to pre-emptively destroy each other and neither do higher level civilizations.
Read the fiction of your competition and future adversary and you will understand how they think better.  There are a lot of insights on how the Chinese see the rest of the world in those books and how they view warfare.  Cixin is only one man but there are definitely shades and undertones in his writing.

What?  Can you please point me in the direction of a significant contingent of "far right figures" who "openly state" this?  

“We are in a position to support Ukraine, but it’s more the mid and long term,” Bush said. “By creating this capacity ... if this war goes three or four years, we’ll be in a position to just vastly outproduce the Russians all by ourselves ― and if you combine that with our allies, then we’re just dwarfing their capability. They won’t be able to keep up.”
 

I'm sorry - "bias"? Seriously?
Folks from Russia are fighting in Ukrainian army too. So that means russians are against the war? Of course not. Same for belarussians.
Folks from Belarus are fighting in Ukrainian army. But have you ever wondered why are they here? You know - HERE. In Ukraine. Does it make any sense if you think about it? Shouldn't they be fighting their own government then? But they are not. Do you know why? Because they are outcasts, hated by their own population and considered traitors by the typical belarussian citizen.
As for "sabotaging rail network" - I'm sorry but putting two logs on top of a rail, making a few photos of it is not "sabotaging", especially while the rest of your population provides russian soldiers with: food, medical treatment, supplies incl. military like ammunition and weapons and accommodations. To this very day.
Oh and did belarussians sabotage much of the rail which belarussians in belarussian delivery services used to deliver looted washing machines and electric teapots to their new russian "owners"?
You see even if we do believe that "sabotage" wasn't just a staged discount attempt to pull Belarus from under incoming sanctions (and when they happened regardless - all "sabotaging" stopped) - you seem to think that if 10 or 20 people are doing something differently from the majority - it suddenly whitewashes the whole majority.
It does not.

One of my very respected colleagues in retail predictive analytics/AI when referring to predicting the potential impact of various promotions for a large drug chain once said in a demo:  "I don't have a crystal ball, we'll never be perfect.  We simply aim to be directionally correct."      And that, my friends, was enough to win the deal.
This logic would seem to be relevant to warfare----it will never tell us exactly how a battle will be won.  But it should be able to help determine what general direction, combination of forces and mass should be applied.  And, even more importantly,  where and how NOT to apply resources.
 

One of my very respected colleagues in retail predictive analytics/AI when referring to predicting the potential impact of various promotions for a large drug chain once said in a demo:  "I don't have a crystal ball, we'll never be perfect.  We simply aim to be directionally correct."      And that, my friends, was enough to win the deal.
This logic would seem to be relevant to warfare----it will never tell us exactly how a battle will be won.  But it should be able to help determine what general direction, combination of forces and mass should be applied.  And, even more importantly,  where and how NOT to apply resources.
 

Definitely wanted to weigh in on this one.  So there was an earlier draft out of RUSI but this is likely one of the most comprehensive analysis/assessments of the first 6 months of the war - outside of our little forum here, of course.  There is nothing in the summaries and conclusions that does not match a lot of what we have been seeing and saying on this forum - at least in the main.  So if you are following this war with us here at BFC, I highly recommend downloading the document and giving it a good going over, you will walk away smarter and with what appears to my eyes a very objective and balanced narrative of the first two phases: Russian invasion & Battle for the Donbas, or perhaps it was really a single strategic phase - the Russian Offensive.
However, I would caution that this is a "Preliminary" analysis, it is in the title.  It is incomplete, and in at least one or two spots that incompleteness is leading to what I think are incomplete conclusions.  Even being likely the best professional analysis we have seen what struck me most about this document is "what it did not say" - there are a lot of gaps here in both scope and scale.  I do not think they are deliberate or a result of laziness at all.  The authors state up front in the introduction "This report is methodologically problematic" because they could only employ data that was provided to them by the UA General staff.  That is not small but that data was filtered - they note this as well - for OPSEC and political sensitivity reasons.  Further there is massive amounts of data missing that will be required for a more accurate picture.  Data from the other two parties in this war - Russia and The West.  A lot of deductions on Russian intent, capability and performance are made here without a lot from those other two data streams, so I am very cautious in accepting gospel at this point.  So that said up front I will dig into this with some initial takeaways/observations for any who are interested:
Pre-Invasion
So this pretty much confirms what we suspected from very early on - Russian had only planned for a 10 day "war".  Russia, like many in the west, way over-estimated the relative symmetry and competitive advantage at the outset of this war.  Russia, like many western analysts, were using outdated concepts and metrics with respect to mass while at the same time were way over-estimating their own capabilities and readiness.  Russian planners were experiencing what has been referred to a progressive unreality, which is a fancy way of saying they built a house of cards on a foundation of shifting sand.
Russian "shock and awe" through operational surprise was a flawed concept in the 21st century.  It appears the UA was initially somewhat dislocated, the authors even go so far to say that Russian operational surprise was achieved by convincing the UA that the main effort would be the Donbas:
"As it became apparent that the Gomel axis was the enemy’s main effort and that another group of forces would
strike through Chernihiv, a redeployment of Ukrainian forces was ordered approximately seven hours prior to the invasion. This took considerable time. The result was that many Ukrainian units were not at their assigned defensive positions when the invasion began and, especially on the northern axes, were not in prepared positions."
So this highlights a really important missing peice from this whole analysis - the role of western ISR.  I have no doubt the authors and UA General Staff scrubbed any mention of this from the data used for many very good reasons.  But given the massive pre-war ISR effort by the west and the open-door policy with respect to intel from the US - how on earth did the UA miss the indicators on the Gomel axis?  This one sounds very weird to my ears and there is definitely a story here that is going to need unpacking.  Was there a failure in western ISR?  Was there a breakdown in communications?  Did UA planners fall for progressive unreality of their own?
It appears that Russia bet the entire farm on "the mighty Russian bear" in a series of increasingly unrealistic assumptions, built upon unrealistic assumptions.  Here we hit the other missing peice - what was the actual Russian thinking?  We cannot know this from data given - although authors lean in pretty hard, and I am not sure we will ever get a full Russian internal picture.  
Initial Invasion
The big takeaway for me here was the serious disparity in RA C4ISR and catastrophic misalignment in the levels of warfare.  There were a lot of systemic targeting problems and the failure to establish operational pre-conditions in favor of operational surprise - destruction of transportation and communications infrastructure.  However the indicators of lack of targeting enterprise integration are pretty bold:
"A critical weakness of the Russian strike campaign was battle damage assessment. First, the Russian military appears to have presumed that if an action had been ordered and carried out then it had succeeded, unless there was direct evidence to the contrary."
This speaks to a fundamentally flawed Russian joint targeting enterprise.  Further confirmation bias is pure poison in warfighting.  It causes can be so deep that there are examples worse than what we saw in the first days of the war.  In Russia's case they seem to be a combination of deep cultural biases combined with a rigid military-political hierarchy where "push back" or critical thinking is simply not a thing.  There is a fear in every military that the worst thing that can happen is "the death of formation" - the military organization collapsing into an armed mob.  Russia demonstrated in the initial invasion of Ukraine that the only thing worse than taking a military mob to war is taking a military cult.  
Based on what I can see the failure in the first three days was a combination of very poor planning and preparation, failure to establish operational pre-conditions and way under-estimating the complexity of the operation while at the same time way over-estimating the RA's capabilities.  In much more blunt terms, from a military operational point of view it was amateur hour.  Russia had not undertaken an offensive operation of this scope, size and scale since the Second World War, and they figured it would be "2014+ a little bit".  When the reality is that complexity and friction do not scale linearly - they do so exponentially; Ukraine 2022 was not 2x harder than 2014, it was 2 orders of magnitude (100x) more difficult and clearly the RA was not prepared for it.
Battle for Kyiv
To my mind this is the biggest blank spot in the document.  Even given the RA poor performance in the first 72 hours, they were able to achieve "12:1" force ratios on the Gomel axis towards Kyiv.  The authors appear to lay the majority blame for the RA stalling and eventual collapse largely on tactical "confusion".  They point out the BTG as a flawed concept - which frankly does not track as it mirrors western Battlegroup and TF constructs very closely.  Very few militaries have permanent combined arms units - they are largely modular by design.  So when the authors highlight:
"In addition to BTGs being units that had not trained together and lacking staff who knew one another, they were also non-uniform in their composition. These deviations did not appear to derive from the tasks they were assigned but instead arose from the equipment available from the units that generated them. Yet, to commanders at higher echelons, the Russian battle management appeared to treat all BTGs as comparable units of action with no tailoring of tasks to their respective capabilities. When military advances are used as a mere demonstration of force this would not have been critical. But once the force tried to transition to fighting, units were now assigned tasks for which they were poorly equipped.
As an example, consider the composition of two BTGs, which operated in almost the same area in the east of Ukraine at the end of April 2022. One of them was from the 228th Motor Rifle Regiment of the 90th Armoured Division of the Central Military District (Svatove district): 23 APCs; six tanks; a 122-mm selfpropelled artillery battery; three MLRS BM-21 ‘Grad’; up to 40 vehicles; and about 400 personnel. Another was from the composition of the 57th Motor Rifle Brigade of the 5th Army of the Eastern Military District (Rubizhne district): more than 30 infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs); 14 tanks; a 122-mm self-propelled artillery battery; a 152-mm self-propelled artillery battery; a MLRS BM-21 ‘Grad’ battery; up to 60 vehicles; and about 800 personnel."
So I find this confusing and lacking.  So how were the 228th MRR and 57th MRB BTG mis-employed?  It alludes to higher level RA commanders treating all BTGs as uniform and failure to "task tailor" and I really want to see the evidence of this.  The lack of uniformity is very common throughout modern militaries all over the place.  When I look at these two BTGs I see one "light" and one "heavy" - so what?  How was the 228th asked to do a job it was not capable of?
Again, what is really missing here is "what killed the RA north of Kyiv" because tactical confusion was very likely a contributing factor but the UA took on an opponent with a 12:1 force ration advantage and that opponent pulled out a month later in tatters.  A lot of themes here to unpack - zombie orders, complete lack of operational/tactical C2 integration, capability misalignment and logistical issues (only alluded to).  But while all of this definitely contributes to operational system strain - it does not blow up the amount of hardware we saw unfold on Oryx.  
From my read the UA held off a 12:1 force overmatch with a couple artillery brigades, SOF and ad hoc TD units - who "did not have enough ATGMs to really make a difference anyway?"  So the RA drove towards Kyiv - its main effort - in a confused and rambling fashion.  Sat on the roads in "tactical confusion" and lack of air superiority for a month while the UA killed them like freakin buffalo, largely with indirect fire from two formations?  Huh?
So here I think we need a lot more depth.  How many RA vehicles were killed by indirect fire and how much indirect fire?  How was that indirect fire targeted?  Where was the RA c-battery: did the RA really just sit there and let UA artillery hammer them without responsing?  How many vehicles were killed by those ATGMs?
[aside: I am pretty confused by the ATGM assessment to be honest.  The UA did not have enough ATGW to make a difference:
"The tactical employment of ATGWs by the UAF prior to the conflict was largely aimed at fixing or blunting enemy armoured manoeuvre and for use in raiding by light forces because of the speed with which units with these systems could displace. There were too few missiles, however, for these to be the primary means of attriting enemy forces."
Ok, well earlier they note that the UA had purchased close to 20,000 soviet-style and homemade ATGMs after 2014.  to which they received about 3000 Javelins and NLAWs.  So what did all that do to "attirting" enemy forces?  What was the effect of "raiding" on an already confused RA.  What was the role of integration of those light forces and indirect fires.?]
On the Battle of Kyiv I am left with far more questions than answers, and a whole lot here is still not adding up.  Again, missing is the role western ISR support played.  RA troops broad casting in "the clear" is not great but it cannot explain the level of precision lethality to effectively cold-stop a military system with the kind of over-match the RA had.  If western space-based ISR was fully engaged the fact that the RA used cellphones is not why they died - it was because they could be seen from space in real time.  While the RA clearly lacked the same.
Tanks?  Critical and the UA had lots...but mostly for indirect fire....WTF?!  There are so many weird sounds with respect to military mass coming out of all this it is starting to sound like a piano being fed into a woodchipper to me.
EW and UAS - wow.  Ok, so clearly this is what the environment looks like with UAS being very effectively countered.  This is not open skies, the RA has been knocking these things down like crazy and yet it has not really helped them as UA unmanned is still being used to great effect.  And again, EW is going to do nothing against higher altitude and space-based systems. 
Battle for the Donbas
Really no surprises here - we did see a lot of this here on the forum.  The political spin on why the UA did not simply pull out and stayed and fought was very interesting - i.e. war crimes in occupied areas effect.   The density of RA fires and essentially human wave attacks really highlight something else with respect to mass - the unbearable weight requirement.  So in order for the RA to achieve enough overmatch they had to concentrate so much that mobility was basically sacrificed.  They appear the limiting factor on the rates of advance in the Donbas because moving all those guns with their ammo could not be done quickly.  This appears to be what "dumb mass" risks on the modern battlefield.
I am stumped however, on why the RA never achieved breakthrough.  The massive sacrifices of the UA cannot be understated here but was that the thin blue and yellow line that held off all that weight?  Or was there something else going on to explain why after literally annihilating ground with HE, the RA was never able to breakthrough and manoeuvre?  What was the comparative UA density in these areas?
After this I am getting the sense that the Donbas was a modern day version of Verdun as the RA broke itself further for very little gain.  The damage to the UA and how much it was able to push-back is incomplete, so the nature of how this contest unfolded is unclear.  What we do know is that the RA lost the offensive after Donbas, and the UA picked it up. 
Conclusions
Despite leaning in hard and taking risks in some parts of this assessment - e.g the inner working of the RA.  The authors are actually pretty cautious their conclusions.  These are all sound but my take away is, again, something happened to military mass in this war.  "No Sanctuary" and "Disperse or Die" are basically the same point - the traditional use of mass is beyond challenged, it has proven fatal to the RA. I am very interested on how the UA employed dispersion throughout this war, particularly on the offensive.  "Fighting for the Right to Precision" is very interesting, and I think hints at the "cloud-based warfare" we have been tossing around: however, it also lacks the effects of western space based ISR.  I am convinced that fighting for the right of precision will extend into space and cyber (which gets mentioned exactly twice in the entire document).  Further as unmanned systems get smarter I am more convinced that "Fighting through Precision" is the emerging theme.
For example I have used the term "anti-mass" a few times.  This appears to be a combination of speed and precision combined to create a pressure wave of smart-attrition to systematically deconstruct an opponents operational system.  Further precision is becoming a key component in survivability.  The document alludes to this:
"Precision is not only vastly more efficient in the effects it delivers but also allows the force to reduce its logistics tail and thereby makes it more survivable. Precision weapons, however, are scarce and can be defeated by EW ."
I am left wondering what happens when precision weapons are no longer scarce and ISR clouds that go from sub-surface to space are created that cannot be defeated by EW?
Finally the "significant slack capacity" point is at odds with precision, or perhaps they are mutually supporting in reality.  Precision really means very high efficiency combined with effectiveness.  So one does not need massive amounts of dumb war stocks, but one may need massive amounts of smart-war stocks because they are now on the critical path.  I do not think either side in this war has fully expressed what mass-precision looks like but the UA is coming damned close.
The_Capt's axiom update:
Mass beats isolation, connected precision beat mass, integrated massed precision beats everything.
Re-thinking War
I am coming to a growing sense that warfare is in need of a serious rethink.  We have principles and foundations that remain unchanged - e.g. selection and maint of the aim, morale, attrition.  But we have others that are looking more and more as though they are in the wind - surprise, manoeuvre, concentration of mass.  I think we need to start looking through different lens's and frameworks, as many of our old ones are challenged.  Our planning processes and how we make assumptions, how we define "decision" and "victory".  How we think about the translation of military power - to capability - to effect - to decisions and outcomes.  How we think about capability itself.  To my mind this is a good thing, if we do it ahead of evolution.  Whether or not we are in a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is an entirely different question.  Many thought we were in the 90s and early 00's but it kind of petered out.  I suspect RMAs take longer than a couple decades to culminate so we could very well be in the middle of one; however, it is very hard to say without more evidence. 
I can only say the best course is to keep watching carefully, critically and continuously as you can.  For me the progress of this war has been both terrible, wasteful and simply tragic.  It has also been professionally mesmerizing - the entire point of mastery of warfare is so you do not have to fight one, or if you do it is short and sharp as possible.  The lessons from this war all point to reinforcing the primacy of this idea. 
   
  

One of my few claims to fame is that of having seen Tom Waits live...three times. I'll show myself out.

Whereas most of the western world is focused on developing, evolving and deploying cleaner and more efficient energy sources, Russia is off in their own little world blasting destructively away at anything seemingly normal and sane.   Completely alienating and distancing themselves from virtually everyone else and oblivious to their own demise---while blindly thinking they are the enlightened chosen ones.
I could be wrong on this one--but self-awareness doesn't seem to be one of Russia's strong points. 
Or, maybe they are starting to get it:
 
 

Please not here.

Whereas most of the western world is focused on developing, evolving and deploying cleaner and more efficient energy sources, Russia is off in their own little world blasting destructively away at anything seemingly normal and sane.   Completely alienating and distancing themselves from virtually everyone else and oblivious to their own demise---while blindly thinking they are the enlightened chosen ones.
I could be wrong on this one--but self-awareness doesn't seem to be one of Russia's strong points. 
Or, maybe they are starting to get it:
 
 

Whereas most of the western world is focused on developing, evolving and deploying cleaner and more efficient energy sources, Russia is off in their own little world blasting destructively away at anything seemingly normal and sane.   Completely alienating and distancing themselves from virtually everyone else and oblivious to their own demise---while blindly thinking they are the enlightened chosen ones.
I could be wrong on this one--but self-awareness doesn't seem to be one of Russia's strong points. 
Or, maybe they are starting to get it:
 
 

Whereas most of the western world is focused on developing, evolving and deploying cleaner and more efficient energy sources, Russia is off in their own little world blasting destructively away at anything seemingly normal and sane.   Completely alienating and distancing themselves from virtually everyone else and oblivious to their own demise---while blindly thinking they are the enlightened chosen ones.
I could be wrong on this one--but self-awareness doesn't seem to be one of Russia's strong points. 
Or, maybe they are starting to get it:
 
 

Whereas most of the western world is focused on developing, evolving and deploying cleaner and more efficient energy sources, Russia is off in their own little world blasting destructively away at anything seemingly normal and sane.   Completely alienating and distancing themselves from virtually everyone else and oblivious to their own demise---while blindly thinking they are the enlightened chosen ones.
I could be wrong on this one--but self-awareness doesn't seem to be one of Russia's strong points. 
Or, maybe they are starting to get it:
 
 

A few random comments from the bleachers:
1. In a non-military industry, I've worked with some of the best AI gurus in my business who have been trying to apply and leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence for years.   MASSIVE amounts of data. It's not easy and not nearly as productive as many selling the technology proclaim.  Like--"don't believe 90% of the BS because it's all wishful for thinking for most of them."   There is gold in AI---but be careful about who proclaims they've found it and when they will be able to truly deliver.
2. The daily Russian kill/destroy numbers over the past few weeks are significantly and fairly consistently high on casualties, low on weapons destruction.  Is this because of the weather? A pause in combat operations? Russia running out of military hardware?  Mobilized forces being thrown into the meat grinder?  Something else?  Or "D", all of the above?
3. I'm still of the strong opinion that there will not be a tangible decrease in Republican/Conservative support of Ukraine.  Yes, there are rumblings and some outliers--but when all is said and done the support will remain.    My reasoning and to reiterate--just my humble opinion:
The conservative voices questioning support of Ukraine are being magnified beyond their actual political power and influence.  Certainly wouldn't be the first time the media or some self-interest group tried to sow division where it may not be and push their own agenda. Conservative support for Ukraine is still strong and most Republican politicians know and understand that.  I was raised and live in the South---Ukrainian support is flat out solid in my little sphere of the world.  I work and talk with people all over North America--I don't here any rumblings of dissatisfaction.  And to the very esteemed posters who have mentioned this topic over the past 24 hours--the locations are California, Seattle, Oregon, etc.  Just like my residence in Tennessee is not indicative of the opinions of the rest of the country--those views may not be reflective of the flyover states.  Where we live influences our perspective whether we like it or not. Rand Paul is not as crazy or Putin loving as some may believe.  I grew up in Western Kentucky and have friends that know him.  He is outspoken and takes a different approach than many, but underneath he's fairly reasonable and his verbal positioning is to frequently just challenge the traditional group think of his own party.  Accountability is important to him, so it's no surprise he questions spending---but his desire to cut funding to Ukraine may be less than it appears. Peace and thanks to everyone on this forum for their brilliant and informative comments.

The idea that Congress won’t feed the MIC is frankly laughable.   
Such funding will have plenty of Democrat votes, so the fringe GOP members are not really an issue for passage, just good for ratings as mentioned.  
 

Still don't think the Republicans will reduce Ukrainian support and have already provided my reasoning.  I'll either be proven correct or die on that hill.   Such as it may be....
(FWIW--hit the post button on this before seeing the previous post.  So I'll just stick around on my little hill quietly for a bit longer and see what happens!)

I would bet his neighbour would agree with you! 😉

A few random comments from the bleachers:
1. In a non-military industry, I've worked with some of the best AI gurus in my business who have been trying to apply and leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence for years.   MASSIVE amounts of data. It's not easy and not nearly as productive as many selling the technology proclaim.  Like--"don't believe 90% of the BS because it's all wishful for thinking for most of them."   There is gold in AI---but be careful about who proclaims they've found it and when they will be able to truly deliver.
2. The daily Russian kill/destroy numbers over the past few weeks are significantly and fairly consistently high on casualties, low on weapons destruction.  Is this because of the weather? A pause in combat operations? Russia running out of military hardware?  Mobilized forces being thrown into the meat grinder?  Something else?  Or "D", all of the above?
3. I'm still of the strong opinion that there will not be a tangible decrease in Republican/Conservative support of Ukraine.  Yes, there are rumblings and some outliers--but when all is said and done the support will remain.    My reasoning and to reiterate--just my humble opinion:
The conservative voices questioning support of Ukraine are being magnified beyond their actual political power and influence.  Certainly wouldn't be the first time the media or some self-interest group tried to sow division where it may not be and push their own agenda. Conservative support for Ukraine is still strong and most Republican politicians know and understand that.  I was raised and live in the South---Ukrainian support is flat out solid in my little sphere of the world.  I work and talk with people all over North America--I don't here any rumblings of dissatisfaction.  And to the very esteemed posters who have mentioned this topic over the past 24 hours--the locations are California, Seattle, Oregon, etc.  Just like my residence in Tennessee is not indicative of the opinions of the rest of the country--those views may not be reflective of the flyover states.  Where we live influences our perspective whether we like it or not. Rand Paul is not as crazy or Putin loving as some may believe.  I grew up in Western Kentucky and have friends that know him.  He is outspoken and takes a different approach than many, but underneath he's fairly reasonable and his verbal positioning is to frequently just challenge the traditional group think of his own party.  Accountability is important to him, so it's no surprise he questions spending---but his desire to cut funding to Ukraine may be less than it appears. Peace and thanks to everyone on this forum for their brilliant and informative comments.