Russia - threadbanned users in OP

Wars use up a lot of material? It's not the movies where the gun never needs to be reloaded or maintained.

One of the best things they could do at the moment is get "winter ready". Proper winter attire and boots. Mobile Heaters to make whatever refuge they take more comfortable. High quality rations. The Russians will have none of this and its going to be a long hard winter after spending months dodging artillery fire. To sit there wet, cold and starving will break most men.

The weapons are been delivered at a deliberate/managed pace. if too much is sent into the Ukraine at the same time, Russia will just send in an airstrike and blow it all up. It's hard to hide heavy weapons due to their size and the need to transport them by rail or road. Air superiority would be a mega bonus for Ukraine but they don't have that hence why the Ukraine badly wanted a no-fly zone at the start of the invasion. Those static howitzers are an easy target for counter-battery fire which is why so many of them are constantly in need of repair. Even an old-school RPG7 can knock out a big static gun. Mobile units like those supplied by Europe are much better as they can change location every 10- 15 minutes or so making them very hard for Russia to counter. I still feel it was a mistake for President Joe Biden to be so slow at supplying long-range weapons as now most of the est is certainly lost to Russia for the short term. How to retake it is a very big question. It would take an army of 300000 Ukraine soldiers and some very serious hardware support to drive out Russia. Toppling Putin and a regime change in Russia would be a better option as I cant see Russian power brokers continuing to tolerate all these sanctions long-term .

Very disturbing indeed. There must surely be someone in Moscow who is shaking their head as to what their president is doing.

An excellent point, and I agree. I fully expect all of this to last past the end of this year and possibly longer. The Russian forces could barely manage the basic field rations or gear for a spring / summer campaign, you can only imagine how they’ll cope without enough thermal layers or fortifying meals. If Ukraine can keep their lads warm and properly fed, they can outlast them while the unfortunate Russian lads conscripted into this as cannon fodder, will possibly freeze to death in their trenches.

How about a flotilla of tethered hydrogen filled balloons over important cities. Designed to explode if a missile either hits them or passes close by.

The idea being to either pre-detonate the incoming missiles or knock them off target.

Smaller ones could be employed over military positions.

Perhaps mix with helium or nitrogen if more cost-effective and still effective enough.

Could micro drones be used (too small to detect) to fly into artillery gun barrels and release a jamming substance?

Starting to look quite pessimistic for Ukrainian forces in the east now.

Unfortunately I dont see how Ukraine will ever be able to retake the eastern Donbas regions again, not unless western nations/ NATO decide to back Ukraine to the hilt and start sending far more advanced weaponry.

I think their probably was a lot of unfounded optimism here in regards to Ukraine winning and being able to push the Russians back, I was hoping this would be the case, but unfortunately the reality is looking different now.

As much as Zelensky, Ukraine and others say that Ukraine should never give up any of its territory to the Russians (And they are fully justified to feel this way IMO) , reality will dictate that they may not have any other option unfortunately. I just hope that if they come to some sort of peace agreement to this end that it comes with some sort of security guarantee with it, i'm just not sure how that could happen though.

So how are we all coping with the fall of Lisichansk and the entire Lugansk People's Republic?

I must admit, I was surprised at how easy Lisichansk was taken - I'm now expecting similar to occur in the cities of the Donetsk People's Republic in the coming weeks.

Stalingrad 1943

Depressing, but not surprising. Expect one of the slava Ukraine group here to say it's all part of the Ukraine strategy for imminent victory. More realistic, sadly, is the opinion of the ex-British army hief who's said that now that Russia has a large chunk of the east under its control the stage could be set for negotiations for a settlement, which presumably means: Ukraine gives up the east of the country for security guarantees for the rest of the country. A horrible compromise but probably as good as is realistic right now.

Helped defeat Nazism of course which is hugely to their credit, but by summer 1945 it was still evident to anyone that it was a horrible oppressive dictatorship. East Germany and subsequently the Berlin Wall should never happened and their occupation or 'control' over Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Baltics etc for four decades were mostly completely illegal.

I would assume weaponry would need to be replaced anyway on a periodic basis and disposal of old weaponry is very expensive. Depleting stocks by handing it over to Ukraine may not be economically bad, depending on how long they plan to replace these stocks.