Ukraine: Are ya winning yet.

[Wade1865]

It’s fine. Everything’s fine.

[kiko]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

The US has over 2 million cluster munition shells and missiles it can release to Ukraine, although it's getting some pushback from allies who have signed the cluster munition ban treaty.

I guess it should be okay to use cluster munition on your own soil. You are the one dealing with the consequence.

[Maithanet]

13 minutes ago, kiko said:

I guess it should be okay to use cluster munition on your own soil. You are the one dealing with the consequence.

I see what you're saying, but I'm not sure I agree with that particular logical carveout.  Anyone can claim that the area is their own soil (Russia already does in this case), and then you are having a semantic argument about whether or not you agree on boundaries. 

[kiko]

7 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

I see what you're saying, but I'm not sure I agree with that particular logical carveout.  Anyone can claim that the area is their own soil (Russia already does in this case), and then you are having a semantic argument about whether or not you agree on boundaries. 

I can totally see your argument, but I believe my relativism beats your relativism 

[Erik of Hazelfield]

47 minutes ago, kiko said:

I guess it should be okay to use cluster munition on your own soil. You are the one dealing with the consequence.

This is equivalent to saying torture is OK as long as you only do it to your own people.

There’s a reason for the ban on cluster weapons. Unexploded bomblets can stay in the ground for decades after a conflict ends and kill civilians, animals and children playing. It’s not a small problem either. In Laos, according to a now-dead Wikipedia link, roughly 100 people died as late as in 2009 while the bombing campaign in which the bombshells were dropped ended in 1973.

[Wilbur]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

...interesting stuff last week (I think linked a few pages back) on Ukrainian general IT literacy being much higher than Russian. In Russia they have some excellent IT personnel but they are a very, very small number. In Ukraine it's much more widespread...

Anecdotally, one of the reasons why there are relatively small numbers of IT personnel in Russia is because during the 1990s US corporations went to Russia looking to do business.  I was a Motorolan at the time, and we wanted to participate in the Russian markets for NRE, factory automation, semiconductor chips, radio systems, communication base stations, hospital control systems, push-to-talk communications, consumer electronics, etc.  But we found that usually the Russian corporations our sales executives met with that needed our goods or services had nothing worthwhile to sell, trade or barter.  Absolutely nothing we wanted or could turn into something we wanted.

But the personnel in Russia in the 1990s were highly educated and skilled, and the higher their knowledge, skills and experience, the more they wanted out.  So in some cases we entered into service agreements where we purchased the services of certain technical skills, such as PhD researchers doing basic research work in physical science research labs.

But in the main, the exposures between Motorola executives and sales staff and Russian employees would turn into the Russian workers with high KSE levels leaving Russia and coming to the West to work as our employees.  Not always to the States, sometimes just to EMEA, but still, leaving Russia.  Same thing with Romanians and to a lesser extent Hungarians as well.  And it wasn't just Motorola, but the same process occurred at GE and Sun Micro and General Instruments and Allied Signal and Honeywell and Applied Materials and Tyco, and suddenly the core directory at each of these companies had a big influx of Slavic names up through 2001.  Only 9-11 put the brakes on that process, and by then the Russian brain drain had hit maximum velocity.

I don't know the official numbers, but I think that the 1990s saw the intelligentsia and skilled labor sector of the Russian economy hollowed out in such a way that is still being felt there today.  If there is one practical reason why Russia will ultimately lose this conflict, it is because their population bell curve is missing all that intellectual firepower that left twenty years ago or so.

[mormont]

Of course Russia has sensibly avoided doing anything that might cause talented young people with a bright future to leave ever since.

[kiko]

39 minutes ago, Erik of Hazelfield said:

This is equivalent to saying torture is OK as long as you only do it to your own people.

There’s a reason for the ban on cluster weapons. Unexploded bomblets can stay in the ground for decades after a conflict ends and kill civilians, animals and children playing. It’s not a small problem either. In Laos, according to a now-dead Wikipedia link, roughly 100 people died as late as in 2009 while the bombing campaign in which the bombshells were dropped ended in 1973.

That's the point, isn't it? It's basically a rapid uncontrolled mine laying operation. While I absolutely approve of a ban - can we really stop a country doing that for defense purposes in their own internationally recognised jurisdiction?

Depends on how the international contracts are formulated of course, but it's not as if they endanger any other country with that action.

Eta my thoughts about comparing it with torturing your own people. I don't really see that. Ukraine would know where they throw the cluster bombs and could ensure that this area is controlled until the danger is removed. They even could compensate the residents. It's not as if Ukraine is the biggest mine field in the world right now anyway. They will have to find a way to deal with that with our support.

[Werthead]

I get the impression the cluster munitions thing is going to come down to need: if Ukraine gets into a bad way, the US can say fuck it and give them to them, if it doesn't need them fair enough. From a cynical POV, the US can save a lot of money and time (the same thing, of course) on disposing them (it's taken them a decade to dispose of 3 of the 5 million munitions they had in storage when they decided to start phasing them out, despite not signing the ban treaty) by sending them to Ukraine instead, and Ukraine can worry about the consequences.

But it's not a good look if you start indiscriminately spreading bombs around an area civilians - either the enemy's or your own - are going to be walking around. There's been a few occasions that Ukraine has possibly hit civilian targets (especially in LPR and DPR) and they've generally been taken at their word they're not deliberately targeting Russian or LPR/DPR civilian targets and it's the unavoidable fog of war, but hurling cluster bombs into targeted areas makes it a lot harder to control that.

[Erik of Hazelfield]

6 hours ago, kiko said:

That's the point, isn't it? It's basically a rapid uncontrolled mine laying operation.

Usually not. The point of cluster munitions is to cause explosive damage over a larger area at the time you drop it. The fact that duds and unexploded munitions get scattered all over the place is an unwanted side effect that has been hard to overcome - the dud rate is around 10% for Gulf-war era cluster munitions. But it’s not by design.

(There seem to be cluster munitions designed to work as land mines, but they are designed to self-destruct and I don’t think that’s what’s being discussed here.)

[Alarich II]

9 hours ago, kiko said:

It's basically a rapid uncontrolled mine laying operation.

It's not, the main feature of mines is that they reliably explode when triggered and with equal reliability don't explode when not triggered.  The duds from unexploded cluster ammo do not work like mines, they may explode on their own or not at all, they are are not very effective against armoured troops and the actual dud-rate is too low.

Rapidly laying minefields in an ongoing battle is usually a combined arms operation where usually a pioneer company of some sorts lays out a minefield (sometimes using mine launchers like the Skorpion) which is then usually guarded by mechanized infantry. The point is that you do not want to lay minefields where you cannot observe them, because in mechanized warfare (at least under the doctrine when I was a conscript) minefiels deny, delay or funnel enemy movement. Especially on the retreat they are used to create favourable spots for delaying action where you can engange a superior enemy, delay their movement, retreat ot positions from where to counterattack. And it is therefore of vital importance to know exactly where you put your mines because you do not want your counterattack running into your own minefields.

[kiko]

Okay this should teach me to formulate better. I knew that it's not the active process and the goal of laying mines. That's what mines are for. The side effect is like laying mines just uncontrolled and uncharted. And also they shouldn't be used, but I think Ukraine may have the right to use them, if they didn't ratify anything to the contrary. Sorry, I will try write more clear  next time 

[JGP]

 

[Corvinus85]

3 minutes ago, JGP said:

 

Expecting Tchaikovsky's Overture of 1812 to be transposed on this video soon.

[Zorral]

11 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

Expecting Tchaikovsky's Overture of 1812 to be transposed on this video soon.

Most excellent!  U winz today's innertubz!

[Jace, Extat]

12 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

Expecting Tchaikovsky's Overture of 1812 to be transposed on this video soon.

Through some... contacts... I have accrued over the years in the Russian State Department (lol, do they even HAVE one of those!?!) I have come into possession of never-before-seen footage of the beginning-stages of the attack from the RU side of the line: 

 

 

[The Wondering Wolf]

Prigoschin claims that Soledar has fallen to Russian forces. 

[Derfel Cadarn]

1 minute ago, The Wondering Wolf said:

Prigoschin claims that Soledar has fallen to Russian forces. 

Sky News have sort of suggested as much

https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-war-latest-ukraine-forces-to-leave-battlefield-to-head-to-us-dramatic-video-blogs-reveal-mission-of-missing-briton-12541713

[Werthead]

Apparently Britain is considering sending Challenger 2 tanks to Ukraine. That's quite an impressive bit of kit, and I believe the first western main tank to be considered for deployment to Ukraine.

We don't have a lot of them to send, though. I wonder if this is more another turning up of the heat so when the US decides to send several hundred Abrams, it's not quite as much of an escalation.

Current analysis seems to suggest that the shortening of lines following the Kherson withdrawal has allowed Russia to reinforce previous weak areas which Ukraine could have exploited, creating more of a stalemate along the line. They are areas where Ukraine remains on the offensive and is making very slow progress, particularly NW of the twin cities, but the Russians do seem to have consolidated previous shaky lines through the southern Donbas. There are still question marks about the area around Melitopol, though, where partisan activity still seems to be ongoing.

Apparently the success of the Kharkiv front operation in September has re-convinced some western partners of the value of tanks, hence the UK focus on the Challenger and increased discussions about the Abrams. The analysis at the moment is that Ukraine needs several cohorts of tanks to mount armoured attacks, the first of around 300. It's unclear if they have that many in reserve. In theory they should have between native forces, donated forces and captured forces.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Is Pirhgozhin getting ready to make a play for the Kremlin?