4355

At least in the beginning Russians were more careful than in other countries. Today they’ve started artillery barrages in residential areas in Kharkiv - the most Russian city of Ukraine, by the way. Seems they really need a victory today.

4356

In practical terms, it sure seems that way, but I’m sure you know better than me.

4357

Shades of 1968, “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.”

4358

In addition to repairing airstrips, Ukraine has stretches of highway in remote areas that are long, straight, wide, with no side barriers. Ironically, they were specifically built by the USSR to be used as emergency airstrips in the event of a NATO invasion. I don’t actually know if these are being used but I believe some models of Migs can accomodate highway landings.

4359

With apologies for speculation in the main fact thread, I wonder if occasional Ukrainian drone strikes give plausible deniability to the US slamming some similar munition into Russian armour, artillery or rocket clusters.

4360

There, ftfy. As well as those beautiful big birds, the Su-27s. The bayraktar drones (the little Turkish ones that wtfpwned in Abchazia some time ago, and are now fucking the Russians up) don’t need big airfields either.

Soviet aircraft aren’t very finely built. If you meet a MiG-29 up close, it looks and feels positively agricultural, quite unlike the very finely built western jets. And even those were expected to operate off of highways if the balloon went up.

4361

Tweeter is MSNBC Producer. Zelenskyy (or his speechwriter) sure knows how to turn a good phrase:

4362

Yesterday Lukashenko spend an hour talking to Macron. If he can find a benefit from ditching Putin he will do it. Not likely though.

4363

I think the one reason is that they are trying to pull this off as a caper, not an invasion. It seems silly now four days later, but the idea was to rush a bunch of troops in while Ukraine slept, grab the government, kill Zelensky, and be sitting on the throne by afternoon Friday. And it could have worked, indeed it did work for their last few adventures. Ukraine was having none of it, though, but they still seem to be operating under a sneaky doctrine rather than an all-out conventional war doctrine.

Considering they have 10x of everything compared to Ukraine, the right way would be to broadcast a stay-at-home order for appearance sake, dominate the sky war while the ground units moved in supported by helicopters killing everything with an engine and everyone outdoors in their way, and then start sweeping the city. But that would be thousands and thousands of civilian casualties, and they seem to still be concerned about optics.

4364

I would think this extremely unlikely. Very high risk and very low reward. Far better to get weapons into the hands of Ukrainians and let them use them.

4365

Tweeter is Reuters Correspondant

4366

The problem is we really have no idea what’s happening on the ground. It’s almost certain that the Ukrainians are fighting better and harder than the Russians expected, and that the Russians are underperforming, but as far as I can tell, we don’t have a clear picture of how big these Russian attacks are, or what the casualties look like.

The fact that the Russians have called up Chechnyans and Belarussians would seem to indicate that they are in a jam, but who knows?

Not every attack is all in, sometimes you’re using advance units, or special forces, or regular units in feints to get an idea of what’s in front of you. Sometimes they won’t be pushing into the Ukrainian lines, maybe they just want a certain area on the outskirts to set them up for the night ahead. All of this affects the severity of the fighting and the potential losses.

The Russians have apparently tried some pretty ballsy air assaults, and it seems they’ve also had special forces and sniper units inside Kyiv, who have been engaged in heavy fighting, which is extremely similar to what we did in Iraq, minus the fact that the Russian teams are being discovered and wiped out.

It’s also extremely hard to tell from a video what’s going on. A destroyed column with no bodies laying around could mean that the Ukrainians have cleaned it up, or that there were enough Russians left alive to bug out, and take their injured and dead with them.

Likewise, trying to identify munitions by their explosions is really difficult, and when everyone has guns that can shoot a thousand bullets per minute, firefights can seem far bigger than they truly are. It’s very hard to tell if it’s a company engaging a battalion, or a smaller group of special forces. One guy with an assault rifle can make a ton of noise, and call a ton of fire down upon himself, and from afar that may sound like a much bigger battle.

The only people who have a real sense of it is probably the Americans with their fancy space gadgets and spy doohickeys, and they’re probably getting better reports from the Ukrainians, than whats in the press or on social media, none of which they’ll share with us plebs, because knowledge is power.

4367

These people seem happy in their work.

Tweeter is NYT Moscow bureau chief.

4368

That 3 mile long armor column is the end game. Now that it’s on the way to Kyiv, it’s only matter of time. UKR will do some air strikes, maybe some hidden AT attacks, and do some damage along the way, but not nearly enough.

The only hope is that once it reaches the tall, compact areas of Kiev it will get bogged down in city fighting. If UKR can stop that 3 mile column Russia is done.

4369

I mean, yeah, Russia has so many troops to throw into this meat grinder it is stupid.

4370

I don’t have anything useful to add, but I wanted to thank you for adding this context into all of the tweets you are posting.

4371

This thread moves really fast, but I was hoping for suggestions about things we could individually do to support Ukrainians, so I made another thread here: Things you can do for Ukraine. (Mods, feel free to move/delete if this is inappropriate.)

4372

I gotta say as someone who spent a decade of their life in the army wargaming scenarios and doing analysis on imagery of Soviet military exercises, that it’s super weird to see the Russian military stumbling around for so long on this invasion. They’re acting like an unorganized mess instead of the boogeymen we trained to expect in the Fulda Gap.

It’s an odd feeling.

4373

Mærsk are looking at suspending shipping to Russia.

4374

The quoted numbers are a little beside the point as it seems to assume Russia can’t increase the number of troops and hit that force ratio in time; it absolutely can with a military of 825,000 not including reserves.

The more relevant question is: why invade so early, if Russia didn’t have enough troops mobilized yet?

Perhaps Putin assumed Ukraine would just surrender immediately. But even if that had happened, invading with such a small force still doesn’t make sense. Putin’s stated aims seem to include occupying the entire country, which again they simply do not have enough boots on the ground to do. So … what exactly are they doing there?

(If the goal was just to fill the " breakaway republics" and Belarus with Russian troops, then they would have declared mission accomplished already.)