• Air strikes and short-range ballistic missiles take out a few key AA emplacements.
  
• Helicopters transport Spetsnaz units to the airport.
  

• Prevent Ukrainian leaders from escaping.
  
• Prevent Western aid from landing. (Perhaps unnecessarily - it looks like various aircraft were exiting Ukraine's airspace very quickly.)
  
• Deny an airfield to the Ukrainian air force.
  
• Force Ukraine's military to react to a force behind their lines. This takes soldiers, time, and--especially important early in an attack--decision cycles.
  

• Draw Ukrainian forces east. This was largely successful, and was done before the full invasion.
  
• Cut off those eastern forces along the Kharkiv-Dneiper line. Push from the south to establish a land route to Crimea, but leave Ukrainian forces in a pocket. The southern push seems to be going okay. Some reports are that the Russians got onto the western shore of the Dneiper and then pushed back, but that's okay. Holding the east bank meets most of their objectives just fine.
  
• Seize Kiev as quickly as possible, mostly to decapitate the government.
  
• If Kharkiv and Kiev are both invested, that makes it much harder for Ukraine to fully mobilize.
  

• The inside of tanks are very tight, and Russian tanks far more so than their Western counterparts. Lots of history as to "why", but the tl;dr is that for a bunch of historical reasons Western tanks tend to be larger and have larger turrets. Even then, armored vehicles can look like travel wagons in a hurry.
  
• Adding metal grills to the outside of armored vehicles can help against certain types of anti-armor weapons. Wikipedia actually has a decent article describing how non-kinetic anti-armor munitions work, and it's these munitions such countermeasures are intended to affect. The problem is that everyone has been using multi-layer armor for decades at this point; reactive-explosive armor is the "heavier" version of adding metal grills. So, most modern, man-portable anti-armor systems have multiple, sequential warheads (called "tandem warheads"). The metal grills could cause the first warhead to detonate, but the second one goes right through. Basically, they could help against older, simpler devices like the venerable RPG-7, but are very unlikely to help against Javelins, TOWs, etc. Fun fact: there are rumors that upcoming missiles will have three tandem warheads. It will be like modern shaving razors over time.
  

• Focused electronic warfare systems to block military radio frequencies for those tank battalions.
  
• Waited for the tankers to use their cell phones to start calling each other.
  
• Used GPS coordinates from the cellphones to know where the vehicles are.
  
• Fired GPS-guided long-range artillery rounds from a couple artillery battalions, simultaneously.
  

• If Russia has truly lost 3,500 killed, that's...a lot. Typically you wound more soldiers than you kill, and body armor and modern trauma care have increased this ratio in recent decades (selection bias: events that would have killed you in 1990 just wound you now). That said, I don't know how good Russian battlefield trauma care is. The number may be an exaggeration, or it may not. Either way 3,500 dead is plausible.
  
• If Ukraine can keep the bulk of Russian forces out of Kiev for a week, things get much harder for Russia. Russian supply lines are short, but getting fuel, ammunition, spare parts, etc. to tens of thousands of soldiers in a fairly concentrated area is hard. The great left hook of Desert Storm didn't work due to tactical brilliance: it worked due to logistics. (Well, that and GPS.)
  
• Russia is largely ignoring Ukraine west of Kiev. This might be a mistake, though potentially one driven by the fact that even very large militaries don't have infinite resources. Lviv is a very large city--and thus a source for soldiers--and if other countries are serious about providing significant military aid, Ukraine could conceivably raise, arm, and train a very large force in a few weeks or months if they can hold out that long.
  
• NATO is almost certainly feeding intelligence to Ukraine. This is good and we should keep doing so.
  
• I've been wondering how Ukraine has managed to retain decent command and control, continue having its national leadership communicate, etc. Russia should have been able to dramatically degrade these capabilities. It's possible they just whiffed, but I wonder if NATO is also providing communications capabilities (encrypted frequency-hopping satellite comms, that sort of thing).
  
• As well as things are going tactically and operationally for Ukraine right now--and they are probably going better than anyone had any right to believe, at least based on OSINT--after a time numbers do matter. Kiev and other Ukrainian cities in the east are likely to fall, at least in conventional terms.
  
• So far Ukraine seems to be a decent case study in the value in electing good people, rather than technocrats, in democracies. At least, doing so when faced with existential threats. There's very little policy that can help Ukraine at the moment, but the positive example of literal city mayors fighting in the streets for their cities is astonishing.
  
• Young Freud made a great insight: operationally this does seem very similar to the Russian invasion of Georgia.
  
• Putin may need to actively purge some in his leadership. It's the traditional way autocrats maintain power after large, public failures. Even military victory in Ukraine may not be enough to avoid that label.
  
• NATO will start re-arming for realsies. I'm not sure the US needs to, but even if the NATO countries started meeting their military spending obligations under the treaty it would significantly improve NATO's defensive posture. Of some note, one of the biggest lacks is around logistics. One of the former US EUCOM commanders noted that he didn't need more German tanks; he needed more German railcars.
  
• If Finland and/or Sweden want into NATO, now's the time.
  
• Re: Tanks running out of petrol: tanks don't typically have a 700km range. Even if they did, they consume an awful lot of fuel just idling. The US Abrams takes 10 gallons (37 liters) just to start the engine (or did, many years ago - it may have improved very slightly). Also, one reason to idle the engine? It typically runs the heater, and it's still cold in Ukraine, especially in a large metal box. So running out of fuel is definitely a possibility if you've been maneuvering hard trying to get around Ukrainian Javelin throwers.
  
• If Ukraine is managing to keep its mechanized forces relatively intact (urban environments are great for hiding armored vehicles, btw.) that gives them a much better fighting chance. I hope they're doing so, but as they lose the ability to contest the air (and they almost certainly will), those mechanized forces will be destroyed in detail if they're in the open.
  
• The TOS-1A's short range is perfectly adequate in urban terrain, alas.
  
• It is extremely unsettling for me to be reading Marco Rubio tweets and thinking to myself, "He's playing a good and useful part in the counter-intel game." Like, the guy is actually doing his loving job as a Senator of the United States.
  
• Ukraine smiley should be a great big pair of balls. In blue and yellow, perhaps.
  

• Trump was impeached the first time for witholding military aid to Ukraine.
  
• "It is important to remember that the nazis werent beaten by dialogue or nonviolent resistance. They were shot in the head, and the rest were hanged." --Keisari (too good to not re-quote).
  
• #fuckputin
  

Ynglaur fucked around with this message at 04:39 on Feb 27, 2022

• Intercepted by the West (and probably forwarded to Ukraine)
  
• Illegal under the Geneva Convention
  

• Dig in, and fight regional fights. Count on the territorial defense forces to win in Kiev.
  
• Once the ratputitsa ends, attempt to break out to the west, possibly relieving Kharkiv or Kiev.