re: Latest Updates: Russia-Ukraine Conflict

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You can take the boy outta Moscow but you can take the Moscow out of his accent.

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Even more astounding this intel would ever be in the hands, physical or electronic, of a National guardsman. The level of stupidity that this leaked at all, muchless this was is astounding. The risk to harm keeps increasing.

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BAKHMUT, Ukraine — Months after dire warnings from Washington that Ukraine would not be able to hold Bakhmut against an onslaught of Russian mercenaries, Ukrainian forces still cling to the city’s western edge in what has stretched into the longest and most deadly fight of the war.

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Inside the city, the basement of an apartment block serves as a small command center. Maps on the walls show the main front line along train tracks less than a mile to the west, as well as Russian advances from the north and south toward Ukrainian supply lines. The main road used to ferry munitions in and the wounded out is now within a few hundred meters of Russian positions.

“There is this fluid motion going on,” said a Ukrainian first lieutenant who asked to be identified by his call sign Tatarin, in keeping with military protocol. Russian attacks along the front allow their forces to advance a few hundred meters before being pushed back hours later. “It’s hard to distinguish exactly where the front line is because it moves like Jell-O,” he said.

“The situation on the road is constantly moving,” Tatarin said, describing how positions shift throughout the day along Ukraine’s main supply road in and out of Bakhmut. “In the morning we can control it, and then we can lose it and take it back. But most of the time Ukrainian forces still control the road.”

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Outside Bakhmut, Ukrainian soldier Yan Melnikav commanded a battalion that has been defending Bakhmut’s edge since November, falling back to the northwest of the city as Russian troops advanced. He said Ukraine was able to extend the fight because its commanders on the ground were allowed to operate with greater autonomy than the Russians. When listening to intercepted communications, he said he often heard Russian commanders request permission from higher-ups to make small operational adjustments, which slowed their movements.

“We can cooperate directly with different units and when we are in a bad situation we can call on different units to help us out,” he said.

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“If you look at it in a strategic way, Ukrainian forces are holding a lot of enemy troops inside the city; it prevents them from going to different parts of the front line,” Tatarin said. “That’s why we’re holding on to the city, to eliminate as many enemy forces as possible.”

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Palisa said ammunition shortages have repeatedly forced his troops inside Bakhmut to withdraw from their positions. “We don’t have enough rounds to engage them,” he said, “and I recognize we are paying with the lives of our soldiers.”

“I can give an assessment of the success of the mission only after everything is finished,” he said, dodging a question about whether the fight has been worth the lives lost and materiel spent. “Every soldier understands that when we are holding the city, when we are inside Bakhmut, we are giving time to our newly created units to train and prepare for future actions,” he said.

Russia has claimed that it was on the verge of capturing Bakhmut, which Russians call by its Soviet-Russian name, Artyomovsk, since September. But its gains have come in tiny increments at the expense of thousands of lives.

Ukraine’s determination to hold Bakhmut has also come at a high cost; the city is largely in ruins.

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These reports have been confirmed by the Russian MoD.

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I saw one picture where it blew a car onto the roof of a building upside down.

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BRUSSELS — Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the costliest conflict in Europe since World War II, has propelled the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into a full-throttled effort to make itself again into the capable, war-fighting alliance it had been during the Cold War.

The shift is transformative for an alliance characterized for decades by hibernation and self-doubt. After the recent embrace of long-neutral Finland by the alliance, it also amounts to another significant unintended consequence for Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, of his war.

NATO is rapidly moving from what the military calls deterrence by retaliation to deterrence by denial. In the past, the theory was that if the Russians invaded, member states would try to hold on until allied forces, mainly American and based at home, could come to their aid and retaliate against the Russians to try to push them back.

But after the Russian atrocities in areas it occupied in Ukraine, from Bucha and Irpin to Mariupol and Kherson, frontier states like Poland and the Baltic countries no longer want to risk any period of Russian occupation. They note that in the first days of the Ukrainian invasion, Russian troops took land larger than some Baltic nations.

To prevent that, to deter by denial, means a revolution in practical terms: more troops based permanently along the Russian border, more integration of American and allied war plans, more military spending and more detailed requirements for allies to have specific kinds of forces and equipment to fight, if necessary, in pre-assigned places.

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The alliance will put more troops under the direct control of NATO’s top military officer, the supreme allied commander Europe, Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli, who also commands American forces in Europe.

Under a new rubric of “deter and defend,” General Cavoli is for the first time since the Cold War integrating American and allied war-fighting plans, a senior NATO official said, speaking anonymously because of the topic’s sensitivity. Americans are back at the heart of Europe’s defense, he said, deciding with NATO precisely how America will defend Europe.

For the first time since the Cold War, the official said, East European countries will know exactly what NATO intends to do to defend them — what each country should be able to do for itself and how other countries will be tasked to help. And Western countries in the alliance will know where their forces need to go, with what and how to get there.

NATO is also aligning its longer-term demands from allies with its current operational needs. If in the past NATO countries might be asked to send some lightly armed expeditionary forces with helicopters to Afghanistan, for instance, now they will be tasked to defend particular parts of NATO territory itself.

For Britain, just one example, that will mean that it provide more heavy armor to defend NATO’s eastern flank, even if the British government would prefer to continue to field a lighter, more expeditionary army, requiring less money, fewer people and less expensive heavy equipment.

The planning in NATO is already intrusive but will become more demanding and specific. Countries answer questionnaires about their capacities and equipment; NATO planners tell them what’s missing or could be cut or thinned.

In one case, said Robert G. Bell, defense adviser to the American mission at NATO until 2017, Denmark was told to stop wasting money building submarines. Canada was told it must provide air-refueling planes.

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The change at NATO began slowly in 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea, igniting insurrection in the eastern Donbas. At their summit that year in Wales, NATO allies agreed on a goal for military spending of 2 percent of gross domestic product by 2024. At the moment, only eight of 31 countries, including new member Finland, met that goal, but military spending has increased significantly, up $350 billion since 2014.

At the next NATO summit this July, a new spending plan will be agreed upon, with 2 percent of G.D.P. regarded as a minimum. Given Russia’s difficulties in Ukraine, if major countries spend between 2.5 percent and 3 percent of G.D.P. on the military over the next decade, that should be sufficient, the senior NATO official said.

After 2014, NATO also agreed to put four small battalion-sized forces in the Baltic States and Poland. The idea was to engage invaders and hope to get reinforcements in place a week or two after an invasion.

After Russia’s invasion last year, NATO added four more forward-based battalions, to make eight such forces along NATO’s eastern edge, now including Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria. But the total troop number for all eight battle groups is only 10,232, NATO says.

NATO now is planning how to scale up to brigade-sized forces, meaning putting about 4,000 to 5,000 troops in each country to make NATO’s enhanced deterrence “a more robust tripwire,” Mr. Bell said.

That will also mean improving NATO’s air defenses — a major shortcoming from the shrinking militaries of the last 30 years, when few imagined Russian missiles raining down on Europe — and more numerous and elaborate troop exercises, visible to Moscow.

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This one is up there with the very dumbest comments in this thread.

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