The number of destroyed artillery systems is very good.

I think it is quickly putting Russia into a strategically existential situation. It might be that like much of the western military industrial world they actually convinced themselves cannon artillery was obsolete, or maybe it is that Ukrainian forces focused on sophisticated counterbattery sensors and doctrine and Russia just can’t stop the bleeding because not firing the cannons at intense flashpoints is clearly not an option either…

North Korean Koksans are a definite help to Russia… but it looks a little desperate to me tbh.

Those are T-90M tanks, they aren’t T-80s or T-14s.

I mean, they are still tanks but…

this reddit comment is interesting

It’s an issue with how compact the transmission and final drives are. In order to get better reverse performance, they need a new transmission and power pack, outside of increasing the vehicle width.

Starting with the T-64, the Soviets/Russians instead of one gearbox unit and two final drives (one per side) as used on T-55 or T-62, they are using a system that has dual planetary gearboxes and integrated final drives connected by a driveshaft which transmits power from the engine via the intermediate power transfer gearbox with no main clutch.

This system offers two gearboxes per side almost directly. The advantage of such configuration is that it’s simpler, lighter and more compact, saving space inside the tank, while being very reliable and durable.

Compared to the T-55, the side gearboxes only occupy approximately the same space as the epicyclic steering units in a T-55 and the gearbox connecting the two steering units in a T-55 are absent in a T-64, so the difference in the occupied volume is tremendous.

The disadvantage of this system is that it’s indeed compact. During the design phase, a design trade-off was made; only one reverse gear was put in place because the transmission and hull width could not accommodate a larger transmission. It was very tightly designed per original Army requirements, which dictated the maximum width of a tank. They simply could not add another gear without making the tank wider using this transmission and final drive setup.

The T-80 has a slightly different transmission setup to go along with the turbine engine (dual planetary gearboxes with dual final drives with five forward gears and one reverse); however this wasn’t as successful due to reliability and fuel consumption issues, so the Soviets/Russians never really carried the design forward. Furthermore, the T-80 simply has way more power and torque available, which permits a higher reverse speed despite having one reverse gear.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TankPorn/comments/1i2xwhp/your_nonpolitical_opinion_about_the_t90m/

lol I feel like somebody is trolling me hard right now.

At a broad level it is called Ulysses, another name for the Odyssey, and the Odyssey is a perfect metaphor for the Ukraine war itself. Not the war, but the journey of the Odyssey…

It wasn’t supposed to take very long was it?

The Ulysses is a subversion of the hero’s journey though, DON’T get lost in the joseph campbell direction. Yes, it is a hero’s journey but the point much like the point of moby dick is that life isn’t about the quest (it isn’t about the damn white whale ok, it is about how people in power get obsessed with white whales and miss life going on around them and then die). Ulysses sees the hero’s journey everywhere in a sort of hyperparanoid state where everything becomes an extension of one monomaniacal belief or explanation.

Writers since have missed the nuance here that Ulysses was designed to disarm the monomania of the hero’s journey not elevate it to a position of infinite supremacy as the core of what stories are. Ulysses has much more in common with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain than the Odyssey itself. Yes, aesthetically and structurally there are a lifetime of parallels to be mapped between the Odyssey and James Joyce’s Ulysses, what I am saying is the humanist soul of Ulysses is no different than The Magic Mountain, neither are books about warriors at least in any traditional sense of the word… and yet they are…

In the metaphor here, both the western industrial complex that has refused to fully help Ukraine and Russia both fold into the role of England as an overbearing imperial power. In many ways it can be argued that Ireland was a prototype for modern western capitalism and imperialism.

James Joyce was good friends with Hemingway who fought in the Spanish Civil War and was a proud anti-fascist.

https://www.openculture.com/2024/06/james-joyce-picked-drunken-fights-then-hid-behind-hemingway.html

In James Joyce’s later work Finnegans Wake the duality of two brothers is a central motif, Shem the penman/the writer and Shaun the brawn and raw masculine strength to do. It is an obvious interpretation of James Joyce’s duality here as between James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway who were drinking friends. James Joyce admired that Hemingway was not only an artist but could fight, but Hemingway admired that Joyce was a writer who simply did not care what the world was ready for and wasn’t.

Like the Ukraine war, Ulysses was not supposed to win, the publication battle that went on just to physically print Ulysses is absolutely bonkers and if you ever doubted women were capable of being terrifying soldiers just read this book and you won’t lol.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/04/most-dangerous-james-joyces-ulysees-kevin-birmingham-review

Ulysses was written mostly in Trieste, in exile from Dublin, that is the MOST important thing to understand about the novel. It is easy to flippantly ask why on earth someone would commit such endless page upon page of innane detail as if that could be art, but if you look up from the book at Palestine or the war torn parts of Ukraine… suddenly you understand how deeply Ulysses is an act of resistance on every level imaginable. James Joyce sought to transmute some essential element of his home (as problematic of a place as it was for him) into a landscape that could not be bombed, stolen by landlords, corrupted or flattened by bulldozers… and that he could visit again.

While Italo Calvino crafted a masterpiece in Invisible Cities, James Joyce airlifted a ghost simulcrum of Dublin as it was in a moment into the air forever in all its imperfection reflected through his life experienece there in a way that centers the city as the nexus of literature in the English language whether the aloof academic english literature world has fully admitted it yet or not. Appreciate how hilarious it is then that the book was also a purposeful middle finger to the conservatism of the Catholic church strangling Ireland, and thus the book is literally set on the day that James Joyce’s actual wife Nora Barnacle went on a first date with James Joyce and gave him a handy J at Howth Castle.

yes

I would love to add a bunch to this, but yeah… I mean this is almost like too big of a question for me to answer in one go…

To other curious readers I would highly suggest the audibook version that is on the Internet Archive for free (free as in you can download the audio files directly). It is a full radioplay with casted voice actors and everything, it is superb and I think really helps gives you a context for how radically different of a work Ulysses is, even today it still will shock you with the way it simply isn’t what you expected it to be.

https://archive.org/details/Ulysses-Audiobook-Merged/

https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/ireland-rejected-james-joyce-did

For Joyce, the fragments are always Irish, always from Dublin, but arranged in a Homeric pattern. This European complexity is what makes the question of Joyce and Ireland so fraught. What has been admired about Joyce’s style and art is precisely what complicates his position as an Irish writer. Famously, when asked late in life if he would ever return to Ireland he replied, “Have I ever left?”. From Trieste, he often wrote home asking for gossip and local newspapers. But it was once wisely said that “Ulysses is no more about Ireland than Moby Dick is about a whale—although no less”. Moby Dick very much is about a whale, but it is also about everything else, and to see Joyce as primarily a writer about Ireland and her politics is to mistake his fundamental aim. He wanted to reform his country, but he was loyal to art first.

…

James Joyce was complicated—Odyssean, a man, as Edna O’Brien said, of blatant inconsistencies. “Joyce’s chaos is our chaos, his barbaric desires are ours too, and his genius is that he made such breathless transcendations out of such torrid stuff.” Ulysses is as Irish as a novel can be, but it is also personal, universal, chaotic, and confounding. Joyce was deeply shaped by Ireland, both his love and his hatred of it, and his work emerges primarily from his paradoxical personality, his ambivalent relationship to his homeland.

Ulysses can not be seen as a call to nationalism, even in defense of one’s country. Do not mistake it for a simple pacifist novel however, rather Ulysses is an embodiment of anarchism as individual freedom, as a vehicle towards actualizing who we want to be without letting authoritarian powers control us with violence. One could say this paradoxically makes Ulysses also a weapon of war, but understand who it is intended for, this is not a book to inspire the masses to exchange one nationalism for another.

Ulysses was the central part of a war fought in the US, and the fact that Ulysses somehow won and a period of relative cultural liberalism followed in the US was no guarantee, freedom never is, and it is a story almost entirely forgotten in the US. We forget the story of how Ulysses won a supreme court case in the US at our peril, if that needs to even be said at this point…

https://globalvoices.org/2025/07/06/the-magic-of-travel-three-ukrainian-women-writers-of-the-1930s/

oooh check this out!

With the literary tradition [Daria Vikonska] inherited from her family, her good education, and her erudition, Vikonska dedicated herself to intellectual pursuits. She was probably the first person in Ukraine to talk about James Joyce, writing a study in 1934 called “James Joyce: The Secret of His Artistic Face.”

…

Her fate was tragic. After the first Soviet occupation, the family’s estates were confiscated. In 1939, when the USSR finally seized these territories, her husband was sent to the camps as an “exploiter” and died. During World War II, she went to Vienna, where on October 25, 1945, people from SMERSH, the Soviet counterintelligence unit that carried out repressions against real and potential enemies of the Soviet government, came to arrest her. Vikonska jumped out of the window to escape them and died.

https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=443867

On the steps of the Paris stock exchange the goldskinned men quoting prices on their gemmed fingers. Gabble of geese. They swarmed loud, uncouth about the temple, their heads thickplotting under maladroit silk hats. Not theirs: these clothes, this speech, these gestures. Their full slow eyes belied the words, the gestures eager and unoffending, but knew the rancours massed about them and knew their zeal was vain. Vain patience to heap and hoard. Time surely would scatter all. A hoard heaped by the roadside: plundered and passing on. Their eyes knew their years of wandering and, patient, knew the dishonours of their flesh.

— Who has not? Stephen said.

— What do you mean? Mr Deasy asked.

He came forward a pace and stood by the table. His underjaw fell sideways open uncertainly. Is this old wisdom? He waits to hear from me.

— History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?

— The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.

Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:

— That is God.

Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!

— What? Mr Deasy asked.

— A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.

The words of a resistance fighter if there ever has been.

The campaign was a strategic Soviet success. For the first time, a major German offensive had been stopped before achieving a breakthrough, the maximum depth of the German advance was 8–12 kilometres (5.0–7.5 mi) in the north and 35 kilometres (22 mi) in the south. The Germans, despite using more technologically advanced armour than in previous years, were unable to break through the deep Soviet defences and were caught off guard by the significant operational reserves of the Red Army. This result changed the pattern of operations on the Eastern Front, with the Soviet Union gaining the operational initiative. The Soviet victory was costly, with the Red Army losing considerably more men and materiel than the German Army. The Soviet Union’s larger industrial potential and pool of manpower allowed them to absorb and replace its losses. Guderian wrote:

With the failure of Zitadelle we have suffered a decisive defeat. The armoured formations, reformed and re-equipped with so much effort, had lost heavily in both men and equipment and would now be unemployable for a long time to come. It was problematical whether they could be rehabilitated in time to defend the Eastern Front … Needless to say the [Soviets] exploited their victory to the full. There were to be no more periods of quiet on the Eastern Front. From now on, the enemy was in undisputed possession of the initiative.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kursk

Now imagine the offensive being fought in this terrain is being fought by the Russians, but they can’t protect their artillery enough to aggressively threaten with it (even worse Russia is running out of artillery pieces that work in the first place) and all of their mechanization, armor and veterans that knew how to blitz with them are blown up and dead.

This isn’t an offensive, it is just marching the young of your country off to death. Yes, Russia is undeniably setting up the conditions for a decisive counter offensive. The best they can hope for is to tempt Ukraine into overcommitting too fast and sloppily in the counter offensive, which has admittedly worked very well in the past for Russia, but Ukrainian forces have decent combined arms capacity and training so that is a precarious hope for Russia to rely on.

Ukraine has the best most experienced UAV artillery spotters in the world hands down, and now they actually have the artillery to spot for. This will be the end result for Russians.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bBM6gcQh_NU

It is a generally stated figure that most western m109 derived 155mm artillery systems can put a shell within 3m/10ft of a target under optimal conditions (ok so never optimal conditions in war but still these are very accurate tools). Notice that 3m is a joke compared to the effective anti-light/medium armor and infantry kill radius evident in this video. The fact that these shells are landing literally right on top of these targets is a cheeky flex and demonstrates how much more advanced these technologies are then they even need to be. These shells look like they were precisely dropped from a tower in range testing to film shell impacts… but no these were FIRED from a cannon aiming at that spot… and the gunners are still placing them RIGHT on top of tiny targets.

It is also observed that the high percentage errors in drift for short range firings is due to the comparison of small values resulting in high percentage errors. For example, for a short range firing with a muzzle velocity of 337m/s, the actual value of drift from FT 155-AM-02 for this case was 1.6 mils, whereas the IFDAP trajectory model calculated 1.69 mils. At a firing range of 2000 m, this difference is approximately only 0.18m, but 5.76 percent. Higher values of drift errors of up to 8 percent are also observed at the final 1000 m of the maximum range for each charge. However, for most real world applications, a firing charge that would barely reach the desired range would not be chosen because of higher variability in the behavior of the projectile. For typical values of ranges and muzzle velocities, represented by values corresponding to medium range, the drift errors are kept to within 4 percent.

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/html/tr/AD1029824/index.html

…ok let us extrapolate into the medium term future, so the Russians are likely emplacing themselves as we speak in all the new territory they have gained… and you can absolutely build a trench that will protect you from 155mm artillery fire… but when the enemies 155mm artillery shells can be dialed in to ~3m or so now you are talking about them being able to send a 155mm artillery shell into that same trench you are hiding in that you spent so much time on digging out so 155m shells exploding nearby didn’t hurt you. Do you reallyyy want to keep occupying that forward defensive position?

Against a weapon like that… with thorough Ukrainian UAV spotting support over your head constantly… can your position even be considered defensive or emplaced or are you just a sitting duck?

A lot of western media will hyperfocus on advanced 155mm artillery shells like BONUS anti-heavy armor rounds, or worse hyperfocus on the necessity of GPS guided shells functioning in order for the artillery to be effective, but even a basic run-of-the-mill non-GPS guided HE 155mm shell is absolutely devastating and these systems like the Bohdana can place them with terrifying accuracy and consistency given the world ending power they create when they explode next to you.

The Russians can jam every damn GPS guided 155mm shell, go ahead sure, the old-ass WW2 vanilla style shells will still obliterate them all the same, the artillery will just have to move to a more advantageous position before it does where it can place fire more consistently. The difference to Russians is only that it means they have a little bit more time before they get blown up shrugs. Time to do what…?

…call in a localized counter attack with friendly armor to strike out and catch the enemy off guard in the process of sieging your position? Oh wait, I forgot, Russia didn’t even have enough unarmored vehicles to get those soldiers to the front in an expedient manner in the first place, the idea of them launching an attack like that is a joke even if the armor on the vast majority of Russian armored vehicles could even remotely withstand 155mm artillery fire.

Yes foreign countries like North Korea and China can resupply Russia and make up for these holes, but the thing about high intensity armored warfare is that by definition it is not something a nation can simply endure while it accomplishes an objective, no, the very nature of the beast is that an armored counter offensive will devastate the Russian military and absolutely, unquestionably force them to begin responding to what Ukraine does not the other way around.

This is how war has always worked, since even before tanks and armor were invented.

None of this is new, what is new are two things, 1.) the way the media is consciously and subconsciously spinning this to give Russia’s dominance an air of inveitability that is a mirage 2.) the ways in which Ukraine’s UAV artillery spotters are innovating will be studied for decades.

Edit Yes of course the ~3m 155mm artillery accruacy figure I am citing is under optimal conditions, on the battlefield I am sure the effective accuracy with non-GPS guided shells at typical standoff ranges is much less, probably a multiple of that. However 1.) so are all of the enemy weapon systems being used back at Ukrainians by the Russians, in particular I think mathematically to keep up similar artillery fire rates as earlier in the war, Russia has to be using a smaller number of still working artillery much more unsustainably. This is a war deep into multiple dimensions of attrition on both sides but the enormity of this stark artillery reality for Russia is undeniable even from my far removed standpoint. It is a simple equation, how many guns are available to fire the necessary shells required, the less guns the more of a losing proposition it is. 2.) Just because most of the time you never move your 155mm artillery close to the front line for precision artillery fire because of the extreme risk doesn’t mean you couldn’t if you needed to during a highly organized offensive…

They factually are advancing though. 0.7% is that. It may be gradual, but it’s something.

It is worse than nothing the longer Russia does it the more they open themselves up to brutal counterattacks.

A single well timed and planned devastating armored combined arms counterattack could retake all that ground gained in an instant and you can imagine how badly that will look for the Russian war machine with piles of dead Russians with promising futures as carpenters, steel workers, farmers and teachers lying on the side of the road dead for a tiny amount of ground gained over an excruciating grind… that was all catastrophically lost anyways.

No, this is Putin/Russia continuing an offensive they cannot afford, this will not work out for them militarily and smacks of someone trying to cheat their way into keeping the territory they gained in a war when they have no capacity to fight an effective defense of that territory and thus cannot end the war. If Ukraine decides to accept whatever exit conditions Putin defines that is a political choice, but the military reality is Russia is getting it’s assed kicked as Ukraine engages in delaying action after delaying action. The Russian military should know better than anyone else why this is a losing position to be in, Russia has used this strategy defensively countless times throughout Russia’s history to devastating success.

Remember the 2023 Ukrainian offensive western media decided was an inconclusive failure? (it wasn’t).

Ukraine didn’t have enough of these or ammunition for them during that time, that is no longer true depending on where you are on the front.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2S22_Bohdana

You do not want to attempt a disorganized infantry-only offensive into territory defended by these, the number of scared idiots with ak47s you have charging across open ground is of no concern to the 155mm shells they distribute onto the ground your infantry dies en masse on.

Why do reporters keep writing that the Russia is advancing when it factually doesn’t?

You are correct to point this out, it has to be purposeful spin. Russia is condemning a terrible number of soldiers to death for little to nothing, the ground lost by Ukraine is irrelevant at this rate.

Even worse for Russia, there is no armored blitz they can make to suddenly make rapid progress, since they don’t even have enough unarmored vehicles let alone armored personnel carriers.

I think probably because people are exhausted and scared and I guess when I stop and think about it I can understand that even as I am frustrated that I am being misunderstood.

People did not choose to be too exhausted and scared to genuinely listen to me, that was something done unto them by their environment and that is the thing that is the root driver of this, not people misunderstanding me in the moment. Every Russian bot troll spouting stupid hate reduces people’s capacity to engage with someone like me who at first might trigger a kneejerk categorization as one of those things. The conversation has been degraded on purpose.

…and so I will be patient and explain myself

Russia doesn’t have any significant reserves of armored vehicles with which to continue creating offensives, that is the hard truth for Russia. It does not mean Ukraine is not under serious threat, it means Russia cannot continue to push large offensives without utterly crashing out their economy and fighting force.

All of this hype about drones and motorbikes making tanks and armored vehicles obsolete is part of the lie trying to be sold to cover for the fact that Russia is trying to fight offensives without armored vehicles and they just can’t. It never works, it isn’t working and it won’t work drones don’t change that especially when the other side is better at drone tactics AND has armored fighting vehicles. Russia is condemning countless Russians and North Koreans to pointless brutal deaths at the hands of superior Ukranian tactics, and the PR coming out of it looks horrible for Russia most especially from an arms sales standpoint, which is a major driver of Russia’s political power along with their oil obviously.

Russia can’t keep slamming the few remaining armored vehicles they have into overwhelming defensive Ukranian positions and expect to continue to function as a country, it just won’t happen. They will have to find ways to terrorize Ukraine that involve acts of terrorism rather than outright mechanized manuever warfare, and they are and it must be very scary for Ukraine.

That doesn’t change the fact though that Russia is not in the strong position that the western media seems to think it is, independent of how Ukraine is doing.

I did not mean to portray this as an easy time for Ukraine, or that Russia doesn’t still pose a serious existential threat longer term to Ukraine… my point is that the western media is bought by rich people and Putin has those rich people for the most part on his side including my orange shit stain of a president, or at least putin has bought them off from directly attacking him too harshly… which has resulted in a picture being sold to people everyday in my country that Ukraine is about to collapse when Russia just blew through the vast majority of their armor reserves and are now trying to launch an offensive with no significant mechanized troops/armor to support it.

Russia also has lost a huge amount of artillery systems and Ukraine now has a domestic steady production of them.

Russia is far weaker than it looks here, which isn’t to say this isn’t a desperate junction for the lives of people living in Ukraine, this is a war, I understand that. Wars don’t pause for nice days and happy news…

You misunderstand me, I support Ukraine, I just grew up in Iraq War era US and I know what happens to a culture when it sees the future mostly in terms of weapon systems and their capacity. It means I support Ukraine but I also understand how this system tends to evolve and that changes how I relate to it.

edit my point is that this is a quiet indicator that Ukraine is in a stronger position than the media usually portrays it in the western world, at least in my bubble. I believe Russia is foolish to continue the war because while Ukraine is suffering immensely it is also evolving while Russia is not and that will cost Russia dearly. Good.

Is this what it looks like when a country is losing a war? The moment before utter collapse looks like the nation’s defense industry maturing international partnerships and production lines in conjunction with other powerful countries on a mutually beneficial basis while being the focus of an arms development expo?

Damn, Ukraine I would surrender now if I were you.

/s

Also while I think Ukraine deserves to become a much larger focus for global military industrial arms development, also… this shit is a bad drug. It will kill you even as it makes you more powerful… but at this point I see this as a bigger threat to Ukraine than Russia decisively winning. This is just getting absurd how hard US mainstream media is trying to sell the idea that Ukraine is losing. I am not saying the outlook or current situation are great in the near term for Ukraine, but again I don’t think Ukraine would be developing mature arms production relationships specifically to share their expertise learned on the battlefield if Ukraine was losing the way the news always is trying to convince me it is…

They simply wouldn’t have the time, because war famously isn’t great about giving you spare time to pursue opportunities elsewhere in the world. If Russia was winning the way it needs to all aid flowing into Ukraine would just basically be flowing inwards, a one way street of more powerful, rested, experts providing materials and knowledge to an exhausted fighting force that doesn’t have the time to pursue new developments rather than keep hammering on the ones that are working at the frontline… this isn’t that relationship though, this is clearly a two way conversation which demonstrates a different power balance, one where Ukraine is much more powerful than the media keeps trying to portray it as. I am not saying Ukranians aren’t exhausted, I am saying they are exhausted AND.

If you don’t understand why I am proposing this other hypothetical possibility for Ukraine, understand I elucidate it because I believe it is the position that the US military industrial complex wanted Ukraine to be in, but Ukraine fought so hard despite being supported by shitty allies that weren’t actually real allies that it didn’t happen. The U.S. military industrial complex doesn’t want domestic arms productions in other countries with homegrown experts there who understand war without needing consultation and direct arms sales from US companies that have a monopoly in material and knowledge about how to produce the means for countries to effectively defend themselves.

Wait I thought stock buybacks and hollowing out all our dedicated talent didn’t have consequences?

Looks like Chicken Of The Pond to me.