"All of Vlad's forces and all of Vlad's men, are out to put Humpty together again." (4 Viewers)

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buffnut453 said:
Interesting insights into the ongoing pain of Ukrainians, even in the liberated areas around Kyiv. I suspect we may never find out what happened to many of the "disappeared":

www.bbc.com

In Ukrainian villages, a desperate wait for news of the missing

Stop in a village in the region west of Kyiv, and you will hear a story of someone who vanished.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com
Click to expand...
Many may still be counted as missing due to the confusion of fleeing the area and going to neighboring areas or to Moldova, Romania or Poland, etc.

It may take quite a while to get an accurate headcount of those that either perished and have yet to be recovered from ruins or truly disappeared :(
 
Admiral Beez said:
I remain surprised that Russia has not yet destroyed the rail network linking Poland to eastern Ukraine. That should have been a target on day one, but even now Ukrainian trains are bringing tanks, artillery, APCs, etc.
Click to expand...

One of the initial thrusts should have been due south from Belorus in order to cut the road and rail communications between Lviv and Kyiv. Lacking that (or the manpower to do that, more accurately) they should have applied much more airpower to bridges and railyards.
 
DerAdlerIstGelandet said:
www.yahoo.com

Russian troops stole $5M worth of farm vehicles from a John Deere dealership, which remotely locked the thieves out of the equipment

"When the invaders drove the stolen harvesters to Chechnya, they realized that they could not even turn them on, because the harvesters were locked remotely," a source told CNN.
www.yahoo.com www.yahoo.com
Click to expand...
John Deere can remotely brick those.

www.theregister.com

Ukrainian John Deere tractors stolen by Russia 'bricked'

If true, a good use for DRM?
www.theregister.com www.theregister.com
 
Jagdflieger said:
From your posted article:
Ironically, back in 2017, American farmers were importing cracked John Deere software from Ukraine to hack their US-based tractors to repair and modify them.;)
Click to expand...
Yeah I saw that too. I suppose the Russians can also crack them. But at about $500k a pop, US$5 million in new JD harvesters isn't many vehicles, maybe a dozen.
 
Thumpalumpacus said:
One of the initial thrusts should have been due south from Belorus in order to cut the road and rail communications between Lviv and Kyiv. Lacking that (or the manpower to do that, more accurately) they should have applied much more airpower to bridges and railyards.
Click to expand...
www.nytimes.com

Russia’s War Has Been Brutal, but Putin Has Shown Some Restraint. Why? (Published 2022)

Western officials are debating the Kremlin’s calculations in not trying harder to halt weapons shipments in Ukraine. Analysts wonder whether a bigger mobilization by Moscow is on the horizon.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
 
Admiral Beez said:
www.nytimes.com

Russia’s War Has Been Brutal, but Putin Has Shown Some Restraint. Why? (Published 2022)

Western officials are debating the Kremlin’s calculations in not trying harder to halt weapons shipments in Ukraine. Analysts wonder whether a bigger mobilization by Moscow is on the horizon.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
Click to expand...
More proof that the Times is long past it's relevancy. Yo, Grey Lady? There is a huge difference between not doing something and NOT BEING ABLE to do something no matter what your both sides writers want to claim.
 
Thumpalumpacus said:
I can't read that, might you summarize or is there another source I can look up?
Click to expand...

Russia's War Has Been Brutal, but Putin Has Shown Some Restraint. Why?

Western officials are debating the Kremlin's calculations in not trying harder to halt weapons shipments in Ukraine. Analysts wonder whether a bigger mobilization by Moscow is on the horizon.

Russia's war against Ukraine has leveled cities, killed tens of thousands of people and forced millions of others from their homes. But quietly, some military analysts and Western officials are asking why the onslaught has not been even worse. Russia could be going after Ukrainian railways, roads and bridges more aggressively to try to stanch the flow of Western weapons to the front line. It could have bombed more of the infrastructure around the capital, Kyiv, to make it harder for Western leaders to visit President Volodymyr Zelensky in shows of unity and resolve. And it could be doing far more to inflict pain on the West, whether by cyberattack, sabotage or more cutoffs of energy exports to Europe.

Part of the reason appears to be sheer incompetence: The opening weeks of the war demonstrated vividly that Russia's military was far less capable than believed before the invasion. But American and European officials also say that President Vladimir V. Putin's tactics in recent weeks have appeared to be remarkably cautious, marked by a slow-moving offensive in eastern Ukraine, a restrained approach to taking out Ukrainian infrastructure and an avoidance of actions that could escalate the conflict with NATO.
The apparent restraint on the ground stands in contrast to the bombast on Russian state television, where Moscow is described as being locked in an existential fight against the West and where the use of nuclear weapons is openly discussed. The issue is whether, as the war grinds on, Mr. Putin will change tack and intensify the war.

That is a particularly urgent question ahead of the Victory Day holiday in Russia next Monday, when Mr. Putin traditionally presides over a grandiose parade marking the Soviet triumph over Nazi Germany and gives a militaristic speech. Ben Wallace, the British defense secretary, predicted last week that Mr. Putin would use the speech for an official declaration of war and a mass mobilization of the Russian people.

American and European officials say that they have not seen any on-the-ground movements that would show any much larger push with additional troops beginning on May 9 or soon after. Those officials now expect a slower, grinding campaign inside Ukraine. But they do not disagree that Mr. Putin could use the speech to declare a wider war and a deeper national effort to fight it.

For the moment, Mr. Putin appears to be in a military holding pattern, one that is allowing Ukraine to regroup and stock up on Western weaponry. On Monday, a senior Pentagon official called Russia's latest offensive in eastern Ukraine "very cautious, very tepid." In Russia, there is grumbling that the military is fighting with one hand tied behind its back, with the strategy and aims not understood by the public.

"This is a strange, special kind of war," Dmitri Trenin, until recently the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank, said in a phone interview from outside Moscow. "Russia has set some rather strict limits for itself, and this is not being explained in any way — which raises a lot of questions, first of all, among Russian citizens."

Mr. Trenin is one of the few analysts from his think tank, shuttered last month by the Russian government, who chose to stay in Russia after the war began. He said that he was struggling to explain why the Kremlin was fighting at "less than half strength."

Why isn't Russia bombing more bridges and railway networks, he asked, when they are allowing Ukraine's military to receive more of the West's increasingly lethal weapons deliveries with every passing day? Why are Western leaders — like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday — still able to visit Kyiv safely?
"I find this strange, and I can't explain it," Mr. Trenin said.

To be sure, Russian missile strikes have targeted infrastructure across Ukraine, including an important bridge in the country's southwest on Monday and the runway of the Odesa airport on Saturday. But across the Atlantic, officials and analysts are asking themselves similar questions as Mr. Trenin.

For weeks, officials in Washington have discussed why the Russian military has not been more aggressive in trying to destroy the supply lines that send Western arms shipments into Ukraine. Part of the answer, officials say, is that Ukrainian air defense continues to threaten Russian aircraft, and the deeper Russian planes go into
Ukraine the greater the chance they are going to be shot down.
Russia has also struggled with its precision munitions — missiles or rockets with guidance systems. Many of those weapons have failed to work properly, and Russian supplies of the weapons are limited. Strikes on rail lines or moving convoys must be very precise to be effective.

Other officials have argued that Moscow is eager to avoid destroying Ukraine's infrastructure too severely, in the possibly misguided hope that it can still take control of the country. Russia would be stuck with a huge rebuilding job if it took over cities devastated by its own bombing.

A senior American defense official said that Mr. Putin may have avoided destroying Ukraine's rail network because he did not want to hurt his own ability to move equipment and troops around the country. The Russians have been more focused on destroying weapon storage areas than the rail network.

American officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private military and intelligence assessments.
Then there is the question of why Russia hasn't hit back harder against the West. The Kremlin narrative is of an existential war with NATO being fought on Ukrainian soil, but Russia is the one taking military losses while the West keeps a safe distance and supplies weapons that kill Russian soldiers.

"A lot of people in this town are asking why they haven't retaliated yet," said Samuel Charap, a former U.S. State Department official in Washington and a Russia analyst with the RAND Corporation. "It seems low probability that the U.S. and its allies will experience no blowback from having put this many Russian soldiers in their graves."

Russia has the tools to do widespread damage to the West. The gas shortages caused by the cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline last year showed the disruption that Russian hacking can inflict on American infrastructure. Berlin has warned that a cutoff of Russian gas could throw the German economy into a recession.
And then there is Moscow's world-leading nuclear arsenal, with an estimated 5,977 warheads: Their catastrophic capability is being hyped in ever-shriller terms in the Russian media.
"You thought you could destroy us with other people's hands and observe from the sidelines from a safe distance?" Sergei Mironov, an outspoken hawk in Russia's Parliament, said on Saturday, claiming that his country's new intercontinental ballistic missilecould destroy Britain in a single strike. "It won't work, gentlemen — you'll have to pay for it all in full!" he added.

Mr. Putin has also warned of retaliation, but he values ambiguity, too. Last year, he said that those crossing a "red line" would face an "asymmetric, fast and tough" response — an indication that the response would come at a time and place of Moscow's choosing.

"Nobody really knows where the red line is," Mr. Charap, the analyst, said. "I don't even think the Russians know, because we are in such uncharted waters."

American and allied officials have debated why Mr. Putin hasn't tried widespread or more damaging cyberstrikes. Some say that Mr. Putin has been effectively deterred. The Russian military, struggling to make gains in Ukraine, cannot handle a wider war with NATO and does not want to give the alliance any excuse to enter the war more directly.

Others argue that a cyberstrike on a NATO country is one of the few cards Mr. Putin can play and that he may be waiting for a later stage in his campaign to do that. While Mr. Putin has been unafraid of escalating the rhetoric, his actions have suggested he does not want to do anything that could prompt a wider war.
"The general sense is that he wants to snatch some sort of victory out of this debacle of his," said the American defense official, suggesting that Mr. Putin was not interested in "borrowing more trouble."
Before the invasion on Feb. 24, Mr. Trenin, of the Carnegie center, predicted that the Ukrainian military would put up a fierce resistance and that Mr. Putin would discover a lack of political support for Russia in Ukraine. On that, Mr. Trenin turned out to be right.

What he was wrong about, Mr. Trenin said, was the information that aides and commanders would provide to Mr. Putin about Russia's capabilities, which turned out to be flawed. Mr. Trenin says he still sees Mr. Putin as fundamentally rational, rather than someone willing to engage in a nuclear war, with a "maniacal determination to destroy mankind.""That would not be a mistake — that would be a total departure from rationality," Mr. Trenin said. "I hope that now I am not wrong."
 
Ukrainian and Western sources reporting an increasing likelihood that full declaration of war will happen on May 9th.

Major result would be to give Russia more freedom around mobilisation of troops and resources, particular conscripts and men with recent military experience. If it happens, it's likely that more of the October (2021) conscript intake will be put into service in Ukraine, as could some of the initial April conscript intake - at least those that have completed basic training. Some sources have estimated this will add 75,000 to 130,000 fresh bodies to Russia's manpower pool.

On the ground, the Russians paused most operations in the east for the first few days of May (likely still dealing with logistics issues). Progress has been "slow and incremental" to quote the UK MoD, mostly limited tactical gains in the advance from Izyum. Ukranian claims about Russian armour losses have slowed noticeably in the last few days, suggesting a much reduced operational tempo.

Ukrainians have counter-attacked east of Kharkiv, enlarging the penetration they established in mid April. Reports are they've driven northwards about 20-30 km along a front anchored by the Siverski Donestk River to the east. Some penetrations are estimated to have gone another 10-15 km deeper into Russian held territory.

If they can continue to drive north, Russian troops in Ukraine west of the Siverski Donestk River risk being cut off from their supporting forces. Potentially, one of the two major road supply routes to Russia's southward/westward drive out of Izyum becomes threatened or cut off.

On the resupply front - Western heave equipment has started to arrive in numbers. US DoD confirmed 70 of 90 M777 howitzers due to be supplied to Ukraine have already arrived. Germany also reportedly agreed to supply some 155mm artillery.
 
Admiral Beez said:

Russia's War Has Been Brutal, but Putin Has Shown Some Restraint. Why?

Western officials are debating the Kremlin's calculations in not trying harder to halt weapons shipments in Ukraine. Analysts wonder whether a bigger mobilization by Moscow is on the horizon.

Russia's war against Ukraine has leveled cities, killed tens of thousands of people and forced millions of others from their homes. But quietly, some military analysts and Western officials are asking why the onslaught has not been even worse. Russia could be going after Ukrainian railways, roads and bridges more aggressively to try to stanch the flow of Western weapons to the front line. It could have bombed more of the infrastructure around the capital, Kyiv, to make it harder for Western leaders to visit President Volodymyr Zelensky in shows of unity and resolve. And it could be doing far more to inflict pain on the West, whether by cyberattack, sabotage or more cutoffs of energy exports to Europe.

Part of the reason appears to be sheer incompetence: The opening weeks of the war demonstrated vividly that Russia's military was far less capable than believed before the invasion. But American and European officials also say that President Vladimir V. Putin's tactics in recent weeks have appeared to be remarkably cautious, marked by a slow-moving offensive in eastern Ukraine, a restrained approach to taking out Ukrainian infrastructure and an avoidance of actions that could escalate the conflict with NATO.
The apparent restraint on the ground stands in contrast to the bombast on Russian state television, where Moscow is described as being locked in an existential fight against the West and where the use of nuclear weapons is openly discussed. The issue is whether, as the war grinds on, Mr. Putin will change tack and intensify the war.

That is a particularly urgent question ahead of the Victory Day holiday in Russia next Monday, when Mr. Putin traditionally presides over a grandiose parade marking the Soviet triumph over Nazi Germany and gives a militaristic speech. Ben Wallace, the British defense secretary, predicted last week that Mr. Putin would use the speech for an official declaration of war and a mass mobilization of the Russian people.

American and European officials say that they have not seen any on-the-ground movements that would show any much larger push with additional troops beginning on May 9 or soon after. Those officials now expect a slower, grinding campaign inside Ukraine. But they do not disagree that Mr. Putin could use the speech to declare a wider war and a deeper national effort to fight it.

For the moment, Mr. Putin appears to be in a military holding pattern, one that is allowing Ukraine to regroup and stock up on Western weaponry. On Monday, a senior Pentagon official called Russia's latest offensive in eastern Ukraine "very cautious, very tepid." In Russia, there is grumbling that the military is fighting with one hand tied behind its back, with the strategy and aims not understood by the public.

"This is a strange, special kind of war," Dmitri Trenin, until recently the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank, said in a phone interview from outside Moscow. "Russia has set some rather strict limits for itself, and this is not being explained in any way — which raises a lot of questions, first of all, among Russian citizens."

Mr. Trenin is one of the few analysts from his think tank, shuttered last month by the Russian government, who chose to stay in Russia after the war began. He said that he was struggling to explain why the Kremlin was fighting at "less than half strength."

Why isn't Russia bombing more bridges and railway networks, he asked, when they are allowing Ukraine's military to receive more of the West's increasingly lethal weapons deliveries with every passing day? Why are Western leaders — like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday — still able to visit Kyiv safely?
"I find this strange, and I can't explain it," Mr. Trenin said.

To be sure, Russian missile strikes have targeted infrastructure across Ukraine, including an important bridge in the country's southwest on Monday and the runway of the Odesa airport on Saturday. But across the Atlantic, officials and analysts are asking themselves similar questions as Mr. Trenin.

For weeks, officials in Washington have discussed why the Russian military has not been more aggressive in trying to destroy the supply lines that send Western arms shipments into Ukraine. Part of the answer, officials say, is that Ukrainian air defense continues to threaten Russian aircraft, and the deeper Russian planes go into
Ukraine the greater the chance they are going to be shot down.
Russia has also struggled with its precision munitions — missiles or rockets with guidance systems. Many of those weapons have failed to work properly, and Russian supplies of the weapons are limited. Strikes on rail lines or moving convoys must be very precise to be effective.

Other officials have argued that Moscow is eager to avoid destroying Ukraine's infrastructure too severely, in the possibly misguided hope that it can still take control of the country. Russia would be stuck with a huge rebuilding job if it took over cities devastated by its own bombing.

A senior American defense official said that Mr. Putin may have avoided destroying Ukraine's rail network because he did not want to hurt his own ability to move equipment and troops around the country. The Russians have been more focused on destroying weapon storage areas than the rail network.

American officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private military and intelligence assessments.
Then there is the question of why Russia hasn't hit back harder against the West. The Kremlin narrative is of an existential war with NATO being fought on Ukrainian soil, but Russia is the one taking military losses while the West keeps a safe distance and supplies weapons that kill Russian soldiers.

"A lot of people in this town are asking why they haven't retaliated yet," said Samuel Charap, a former U.S. State Department official in Washington and a Russia analyst with the RAND Corporation. "It seems low probability that the U.S. and its allies will experience no blowback from having put this many Russian soldiers in their graves."

Russia has the tools to do widespread damage to the West. The gas shortages caused by the cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline last year showed the disruption that Russian hacking can inflict on American infrastructure. Berlin has warned that a cutoff of Russian gas could throw the German economy into a recession.
And then there is Moscow's world-leading nuclear arsenal, with an estimated 5,977 warheads: Their catastrophic capability is being hyped in ever-shriller terms in the Russian media.
"You thought you could destroy us with other people's hands and observe from the sidelines from a safe distance?" Sergei Mironov, an outspoken hawk in Russia's Parliament, said on Saturday, claiming that his country's new intercontinental ballistic missilecould destroy Britain in a single strike. "It won't work, gentlemen — you'll have to pay for it all in full!" he added.

Mr. Putin has also warned of retaliation, but he values ambiguity, too. Last year, he said that those crossing a "red line" would face an "asymmetric, fast and tough" response — an indication that the response would come at a time and place of Moscow's choosing.

"Nobody really knows where the red line is," Mr. Charap, the analyst, said. "I don't even think the Russians know, because we are in such uncharted waters."

American and allied officials have debated why Mr. Putin hasn't tried widespread or more damaging cyberstrikes. Some say that Mr. Putin has been effectively deterred. The Russian military, struggling to make gains in Ukraine, cannot handle a wider war with NATO and does not want to give the alliance any excuse to enter the war more directly.

Others argue that a cyberstrike on a NATO country is one of the few cards Mr. Putin can play and that he may be waiting for a later stage in his campaign to do that. While Mr. Putin has been unafraid of escalating the rhetoric, his actions have suggested he does not want to do anything that could prompt a wider war.
"The general sense is that he wants to snatch some sort of victory out of this debacle of his," said the American defense official, suggesting that Mr. Putin was not interested in "borrowing more trouble."
Before the invasion on Feb. 24, Mr. Trenin, of the Carnegie center, predicted that the Ukrainian military would put up a fierce resistance and that Mr. Putin would discover a lack of political support for Russia in Ukraine. On that, Mr. Trenin turned out to be right.

What he was wrong about, Mr. Trenin said, was the information that aides and commanders would provide to Mr. Putin about Russia's capabilities, which turned out to be flawed. Mr. Trenin says he still sees Mr. Putin as fundamentally rational, rather than someone willing to engage in a nuclear war, with a "maniacal determination to destroy mankind.""That would not be a mistake — that would be a total departure from rationality," Mr. Trenin said. "I hope that now I am not wrong."
Click to expand...

Thanks reposting in full, it's very much appreciated.

To answer what I think are key points, all drawn from the article:

1) "[...] President Vladimir V. Putin's [...]"

I'm grateful they put the middle initial in there, lest I confuse this guy with another Vladimir Putin, Villain, Esq. :)

2) "That is a particularly urgent question ahead of the Victory Day holiday in Russia next Monday, when Mr. Putin traditionally presides over a grandiose parade marking the Soviet triumph over Nazi Germany and gives a militaristic speech. Ben Wallace, the British defense secretary, predicted last week that Mr. Putin would use the speech for an official declaration of war and a mass mobilization of the Russian people.

American and European officials say that they have not seen any on-the-ground movements that would show any much larger push with additional troops beginning on May 9 or soon after. Those officials now expect a slower, grinding campaign inside Ukraine."

a) I wonder how much they can afford to put on a "grandiose parade" when they've got troops fighting and dying in the Donbas.

b) What I've read indicates that the redirected offensive is itself bogging down, supporting the slower, grinding reports from Western intel.

3) "Why isn't Russia bombing more bridges and railway networks, he asked, when they are allowing Ukraine's military to receive more of the West's increasingly lethal weapons deliveries with every passing day?"

It's either a lack of ability, a lack of operational art, or Ukrainian defenses working. I'm inclined towards the first, namely that running low on PGMs, the Russians have expended much of this capability on cities rather than key nodes.

4) "Others argue that a cyberstrike on a NATO country is one of the few cards Mr. Putin can play and that he may be waiting for a later stage in his campaign to do that. While Mr. Putin has been unafraid of escalating the rhetoric, his actions have suggested he does not want to do anything that could prompt a wider war.
"The general sense is that he wants to snatch some sort of victory out of this debacle of his," said the American defense official, suggesting that Mr. Putin was not interested in "borrowing more trouble.""

This may well be the case, but it makes me wonder why Russia didn't launch cyberwarfare not only against Ukraine but against the US given their doctrine of hybrid warfare.

At this point, it's too late -- such digital attacks will surely be seen as attacks anyway.
 
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