And let’s not forget that if all that blood and treasure hadn’t been spent at Bakhmut, it would have been spent elsewhere in Ukraine. Bottling up so much Russian effort in one small area for so long is definitely a good thing, even if Ukraine eventually loses the town.
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fairly good analysis in the first forbes article: here a snipplet:
Vuhledar is further evidence of the downward spiral in Russian military effectiveness. Armies that lack robust recruitment, training and industrial bases tend to become steadily less effective as losses deepen.
Desperate to maintain the pace of operations, the army replaces any well-trained, well-equipped troops who’ve been hurt or killed with an equal number of new recruits—but without taking the time, or expending the resources, to train and equip those new troops to the previous standard.
So the army gets less and less competent even as it inducts more and more new personnel. Incompetence leads to even greater losses, which prompts the army to double down: draft more green troops, train them even less and hurry them to the front even faster than it did the previous recruits.
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seems like a good description of what is going on on the RU side - esp. the abysmal performance of an attack of elite troops in Vuhledar… and also the (relative) benefits of the UKR being way more level-headed and light-handed with the use of their resources
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my guess is you’d best pull a 180° (on a tracked veh. not too hard, nor are you exposing yourself too much to mines) … and then follow your breadcrumbs
- but then again, I shudder at the thought of the sensorial impact (sound, light, vibrations, shock…) of you or the “truck” next to you hitting a mine … that adrenalin rush must be quite something - and not in a good way! … and then add, that you are looking out of e letter-box slot and see prob. only 5% of your surroundings … that is food for my personal nightmares
No kidding. These poor (cannon fodder) souls are sitting in metal boxes that offer little to no protection and they are likely to be shredded at any minute. I can’t imagine that kind of torture.
Of course they do. They successfully detected every one of those mines.
not only did they detect them, they simultaneously defused them - that is no small feat, taking into account that they received very little training
… but yes … it is sad and tragic in a WW1-western front kind of sense
Their new T-14 tanks have cameras for increased visibility. Is there any chance they modified their older tanks?
Likely not, based on this paragraph in a CNN article:
Moscow Calling [Russian milblogger] asserted that older T-72 tanks deployed in Vuhledar lack upgrades that would improve the driver’s breadth of vision. That may help explain several instances in which Russian tanks seemed to get entangled or reverse blindly.
If only there was some historical figure that Putin could learn from – for example, somebody like Pyrrhus.
Ukraine, your parcel has arrived at the Bremerhaven sorting facility:
I hope they sent some paint along with those Bradleys.
Who knows, maybe they’re slated to take part in an offensive around the Oleshky Sands region of Ukraine 
They’re giving away where their next offensive’s going to be! Or maybe it’s a ruse to make the Russians think that.
Pretty sure the Russians have claimed all of those as destroyed.
That is damned efficient.
I somehow doubt that Russia’s economy will be able to keep up with NATO in terms of producing military weapons of many different kinds.
Russia GDP = 1.8 trillion (probably less now)
NATO GDP - 46 trillion.
Russia’s economic output is less than Italy’s.
The US is currently ramping up production as the stockpiles are being transferred to Ukraine.
this could be potentially significant:
… a few sentences from the FT article:
US defence secretary Lloyd Austin highlighted the threat of Russia’s significant remaining air force.
“The Russian land forces are pretty depleted so it’s the best indication that they will turn this into an air fight. If the Ukrainians are going to survive . . . they need to have as many air defence capabilities and as much ammunition . . . as possible,” the official added.
*“We do know Russia has substantial aircraft . . . and a lot of capability left,” Austin said. *
… intelligence assessments indicate that Russia’s air force is “actually quite preserved”, a senior Nato diplomat said.
It’s good if that motivates more military assistance, but I don’t buy that Russia is holding any significant conventional forces back. They’re losing and losing and losing, occasional meaningless villages notwithstanding, and Putin’s been revealed to be an uninformed buffoon rather than some sort of military chessmaster. If he has tons of aircraft sitting and not fighting, it’s because he doesn’t have the pilots, doesn’t have the supplies and ammunition, or the aircraft aren’t working.
“Quite preserved” probably just means that they have a lot of hardware sitting around intact. Says nothing about their airworthiness or availability of pilots to utilize it effectively. Russia does not have air superiority in the Ukraine. If they did, they would have been taking advantage of it all this time.
And it seems foolish to me to “amass” aircraft near the combat zone, over a period of time, before using them. The whole point of aircraft is that they can move quickly. Many of them, you can fly from remote bases, hit the target, and fly back home (some of the US planes that fought in Iraq flew from the US and back for each mission). And if you need to stop closer to the front to refuel, you land for just long enough to do that, and then take off again and carry out your mission.