The Russians are installing Pantsir-S air defense systems on roofs of the Defense Ministry and other buildings in Moscow. This is, apparently, in case some drone makes it that far; for anything serious, there’s the heavy anti-ballistic defense of Moscow.

The Russians are performing offensive ground actions along the Zaporozhye front, which means they managed to stretch the Ukrops very thin along the whole length of the front because they pulled everything into Bakhmut. The Russians, on the other hand, had serious reinforcements along the entire line. If the Ukrops try moving the troops from Bakhmut now, it will instantly fall and they will all be killed, as there is constant pressure from Wagner there. They will probably pull everything they have from the defense of Kiev and the Belorussian border to try to patch up the Donetsk front, and if they do, my high-probability projection is that the joint Russian-Belarussian army will go in from the North and Kiev will fall. If they keep the army in the North, however, the Russians will wipe out their entire Donetsk line. Since the ground is hardened almost everywhere, I would expect them to perform probing attacks in Donetsk first, where the Ukrops are being actively compromised, and then I guess keep striking the unbalanced enemy.

There is also a high probability of desperate moves from Ukraine and America, since they don’t think they have anything to lose at this point.

“Vladimir Putin submitted to the State Duma a bill on the termination of international treaties of the Council of Europe with respect to the Russian Federation.”

(source: Telegram)

My interpretation: this is the point where Russia is starting to formalize the parting of ways with the West, and ceasing to see the future of Russia as part of the wider European community. Also, it might be that a problem arose when DPR and LPR joined the Russian Federation, and some foreign mercenaries that were sentenced to death according to the local laws can now no longer be executed, because Russia doesn’t have the death penalty because it signed treaties with Europe. There was internal pressure to remove such restrictions for several years already.

The Russians have elevated the command over the Ukraine operation to the level of Gerasimov, who is the chief military commander of the Russian Federation (above him are only the defense minister Shoigu and President Putin), which means that, for all intents and purposes, this is elevated to full strategic level and the entire might of the Russian army is behind it now.

The warships and submarines departed from Novorossiysk, which probably indicates something significant.

There is a cold spell in Ukraine and the ground is frozen everywhere except on the Black Sea shore.

The Ukrainian equivalent of the Maginot line in Soledar and Bakhmut is broken. The last 500 Ukrainians who failed to evacuate from Soledar were killed by Wagner. I don’t know what’s the exact situation in Bakhmut, but the last I’ve heard sounded like complete disarray and its fall is imminent.

If I were commanding the Russian forces, I would use the momentum to completely demoralize and crush the Ukrainians, because this kind of a thing is contagious and you need to press the advantage once you achieve such a breakthrough. I expect they will use a synergy of energy denial, winter, demoralization and overwhelming force. I don’t know about the timing, but I would say that the breakthrough in the Bakhmut area looks like something that has been intentionally delayed in order to coordinate it with “something”, and too many preparations have been going on for that “something” to be anything less than a decisive blow.

I recently heard something I need to correct.

An American military analyst said that high precision weapons eliminate the need for nuclear weapons, because the nukes would be used to spread the circle of destruction and thus increase the probability of the target being destroyed, and the high-precision weapons make it possible to hit bullseye each time and thus destroy the target in one hit.

While this may be true for some types of targets, it is far from being universally true. Yes, the yield of nukes was reduced as precision was increased, so there obviously is some truth to it, but let’s say you want to destroy a big target – an enemy base that spreads across several square kilometers. Let’s say you want to hit it at long distance, even inter-continental. You need very sophisticated, expensive rockets, and if you give each under a ton of conventional explosives, you basically need dozens, if not hundreds of very expensive rockets, to destroy non-pinpoint targets, such as an airfield with assets dispersed over a large area. Also, if you want to sink an aircraft carrier, the best way to do it is to strike it under the water line with a several kiloton yield nuke, or strike it directly from above with a hypersonic missile with a kiloton-range nuke that detonates inside. Also, if you have enemies in WW1-style trenches, striking them with precision weapons would take an immense number of precision weapons to eliminate individual small-value targets, which is extremely expensive and a good way to bankrupt your side. Honestly, once you are in the situation where warfare is massive enough, the precision attacks at pinpoint targets no longer serve any military or political purpose. You need weapons of mass destruction, in order to cover a wide area of enemy’s deployment. Building very expensive carrier missiles that carried a ton of explosive each was how Hitler accelerated his defeat, because the Germans poured enormous resources into weapons that basically killed more Polish prisoners of war during their construction, than they killed the British at the receiving end. You absolutely need extreme destructive power of the nuclear weapons in order to produce effects with modern weapons, because otherwise you end up with the equivalent of paving roads with iPads instead of asphalt.

Of course, the argument against that is that any use of nukes releases the genie from the bottle, and makes total nuclear exchange almost certain. My counter-argument is that when you come to the point in war where you need to destroy cities in order to eradicate stubborn enemy resistance, and the enemy is a client state of a nuclear superpower, you are basically at the point where not using nukes encourages your geostrategic enemy to push you further, because you’re obviously not willing to draw a line. Also, when you come to that point, reducing your methods of warfare to conventional weapons makes you less effective than the WW2 air raids, because modern sophisticated weapon systems are designed to deliver less explosive to the target because post-WW2 warfare was seen in terms of either solving small regional conflicts, or going all-out with nukes. Destroying big enemies with conventional weapons is something modern armies are not designed to do, and, if attempted, it would be so expensive it would bankrupt the side that does it.

So, using Tu-160 “White Swans” to carry conventional bombs produces almost negligible effect at the target, and using them to fire those precious cruise missiles to carry a ton of TNT is like hammering nails with graphics cards. If you need to actually destroy something big, you need to arm those precious, super accurate cruise missiles with something that actually makes a big enough boom at the target to make it worth while.