A thermobaric weapons systems stuck in the mud today.
I don’t think armoured vehicles are going to be driving anywhere off-road under current conditions.
No lessons learned by the Russians from WWII, apparently.
With total air superiority achieved, to be sure but without that…
Tanks and AFV’s are notoriously fickle things. They break down, they get stuck in the mud. They get abandoned. And then they get recovered. They are not sedans or SUV’s that you can push them away.
Armies have whole battalions of Armoured Recovery Vehicles, whose only job is to recover damaged bd abandoned vehicles.
So, are these Russian tanks and AFV still there out of commission or did 30 minutes after the picture an ARV. came and took it back to the rear?
Or did Ukrainians either take it themselves or render it useless?
I thought it might be something like that. News reports keep showing aerial photos of vehicles pretty much nose-to-tail. If they were spaced at 40-foot intervals as all those photos seem to imply, that would be an implausible 5,280 vehicles.
Here’s hoping…
I’ve gotten a CAT dozer stuck in the mud. This is NOT something you want to do and will ruin your day or weekend for sure.
Sure! They just left them completely unguarded because everything is so quiet and peaceful.
If they were smart they would have drained all the diesel fuel in the Ukraine so the country can’t be used as a fuel stop for tanks. that makes any fuel trucks coming into the country the primary target. And they burn nicely when hit with small explosives. No need to waste valuable tank missiles on them.
Lol 
Ideally pile some large trucks and tractors on the highway, put a tanker truck in there with them and set the whole pile on fire.
Sure it can be cleared. One of these burning piles every 5 km or so would slow them down considerably though.
I’m wondering if the Ukrainians have anybody trained up on how to operate the TOS-1A. Seems to me that if they have one, the Russians can’t be too far away. Do a number on them with their own weapons.
Waste of fuel.
Use some ordnance to create big craters in. the road and off it. Make them detour.
Indeed, as you say, there have been ruthless murderous thugs in charge of nation-states for centuries. But much less so in modern times, as concepts of democracy, civilization, and human rights have expanded throughout the world’s more civilized countries. I mean, the Romans used to nail people they didn’t like to crosses with iron spikes and throw Christians to the lions as a form of entertainment. Today, most civilized countries have entirely abolished the death penalty. You don’t see that as a sea change in the nature of civilization?
It’s true that we have had terrible atrocities in modern times, such as the Nazi genocide, but it was that very contrast between modern values and Nazi atrocities that prompted Churchill to warn that if the Nazis were not defeated, the world would “sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”
Today the only major industrialized countries that can be regarded as major powers and yet routinely violate human rights are China and Russia. Even so, I’m amazed at the sheer brutal ruthlessness of Putin’s completely unprovoked attack on an innocent nation and many of its civilians, including children. These are outright war crimes. That’s all I’m saying.
Lukashenko just publicly unveiled a battle map of Eastern Europe in which Russian forces move from Odesa (in Ukraine) to Transnistria.
Transnistria (the breakaway part of Moldova) is already occupied by Russian forces.
So some in the press are wondering: are they going to attack Moldova?
I do, but I think that has less to do with attitudes about democracy, civilization, and human rights than it does with everybody carrying a video camera in their pocket essentially connected to a billion other devices.
Well, right up until maybe 3 days before he invaded, most of the talking heads were saying the same thing: Vlad will grab the two western provinces and we’ll all be fine.
Yeah. But the thing with talking heads and actual heads of state are…talking heads can talk all they like, as if they are wrong they just kind of shrug and move on, but if you are a head of state or the military advisors to a nation you need to at least plan for contingencies. I mean, after all, the Russias were actually there. They were actually in their jump-off positions. They had actually bothered to build up their logistics. None of this came out of the blue. My own thoughts were that the Ukrainians were just saying everything was fine but planning for the worst case. That doesn’t seem to have been the case, unfortunately.
Gift link, if it works:
Some bits, in case it doesn’t:
Along a highway flowing north from the capital, lined by businesses and tall apartment buildings, the Ukrainian fighters were taking no chances. The Russians were less than an hour’s drive up the road.
By Monday evening, the Ukrainians — a mix of soldiers and volunteers — had dug deep trenches and erected barricades of giant truck tires topped with sand. At one wide intersection, they positioned multiple machine guns including a Soviet-era Dushka heavy gun, shoulder-held antitank rockets and an antiaircraft gun with its barrels pointed at the sky, among other weaponry. [ . . . ]
Ukrainian fighters were blocking parts of the highway with large blocks of cement. Bulldozers were gouging more trenches into the ground.
Most places stopped torturing people to death in the public square for entertainment long before the appearance of smart phones.
And it’s because of the change in attitudes that the phones are (mostly) being used to discourage such behavior, not to encourage it.
It’s a strange war maneuver to release your plan publicly.
I think it makes sense to be skeptical of this video, including whether it’s from Belarus.
Exactly. If the ancient Romans had had smart phones, they’d have used them to record crucifixions and lions eating Christians for their future entertainment.
The progress of rationality in shaping the mores of civilized society has been ongoing for hundreds of years. Improved communication was indeed probably a factor, but it wasn’t the smart phone that started that, it was the Gutenberg printing press. More recently, after World War II, Britain went through the so-called post-war consensus that involved the large-scale socialization of a welfare state, including the establishment of the National Health Service. Germany imposed a “never again” attitude to the Nazi doctrine. In later years, we’ve seen the normalization of gay rights and SSM. None of that has anything to do with cell phones or the internet. Those things have just helped to hold accountable those who violate laws and well-established societal norms.