Comments by "Black Cat Dungeon Master\x27s Familiar" (@blackcatdungeonmastersfami5311) on "Military Summary" channel.

  1. Make peace now while there's still something left to save of Ukraine
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  2. Potentially you could pack five tons of HE into the end of a tunnel, you couldn't really get the same blast from a guide bomb. Yes some WWII bombs were huge but they weren't glide bombs and it's too dangerous to fly a heavy bomber over the combat line.
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  3.  @yarpenzirgin1826  Britain fought and won on the sea, bombed Germany from 1939 all the way through to 1945 and fought Italy and Germany together in North Africa, in Greece, in Italy and in East Africa. There was no time from 1939 to 1945 where the British army was not fighting. Britain and the British Empire fought for two years before the Soviet Union was involved at all.
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  4. The whole area has been mined for over a hundred years, there are slag heaps everywhere. It'll be an old tunnel.
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  5. Bel Wallace and Grant Shapps want escalation but they don't run the government. Ben Wallace is gone and Grant Shapps was overruled by Sunak.
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  6. Yeah it seems delusional. Why does Dima even give it credibility?
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  7.  @scroopynooperz9051  Not all the Soviet losses were inflicted by the Germans. Many were killed by the Soviet regime and many simply died of hunger because the Soviet Union couldn't feed itself.
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  8.  @davecuddahy7872  Democracy has been suspended in Ukraine. Election postponed, opposition parties banned, opposition politicians arrested and assassinated. In what sense is it up to the people? How do you know what they choose?
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  9. The Russians lost a TOS system there recently. It's a short range weapon so it's vulnerable.
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  10.  @tannaeros  They'll emigrate either to Russia or to the EU.
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  11. Casualties affects morale. And morale affects the ability to keep fighting. If it were just about the amount of military equipment and manpower doesn't matter, Japan would have defeated China in the 1930s with their greater armaments. But China offseted its material disadvantage with its manpower advantage.
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  12.  @Zeidinho  If the war goes on long enough, running out of resources without unconditional surrender looks like Berlin 1945. How united is the command of the Ukrainian military? If the war is obviously going really badly, it's pretty common for a government to step down and hand over to someone else like Germany in 1918.
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  13. Three quarters of the population in England is still English and the average age is more like 40, not over 60. Your numbers are just made up. As for the First World War, the proportion of the British army who were Indian soldiers was tiny compared to the total size of the army. Go look it up.
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  14. Definitely a good channel but there's pretty strong pro-Russian bias. Also he has some pretty eccentric takes. Defense Politics Asia is probably more neutral and Theti Mapping is apparently totally neutral but only posts when he has time. Weeb Union is also good but only Dima does two detailed updates per day.
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  15. I've been partially shadow banned too.
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  16. Both sides report each other's claimed casualty numbers but the Russians give a breakdown of where enemy casualties were sustained. The Ukrainians just give a total.
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  17. Partly agree the Russians will have the terrain advantage once they're pushed back to the town but the Ukrainians can build a pontoon and the whole exercise does allow them to get their artillery closer to Crimea. Also sucks in Russian reserves.
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  18.  @ljubomirculibrk4097  They didn't have better artillery than the French but they had better positions, in the hills overlooking Dien Bien Phu from several times with their guns concealed in the jungle.
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  19. Obviously not intentional, better question is was it a Russian missile or Ukrainian air defence.
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  20.  @istinagy5835  I understand your argument and I don't disagree. I'm just pointing out that these kind of numbers are possible. The only hard numbers I have any trust in personally are Mediazona's numbers for Russian dead. BTW the classification of casualties was a huge issue in the British historiography of the First World War (which I did a masters dissertation on), British and German definitions of who is a casualty were different and raw casualty numbers led historians to underestimate the British success in battles like the Somme.
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  21. To be fair, HIMARS really was a game changer. It caused huge problems for the Russians and still causes problems.
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  22.  @jeffnorris8848  Defences in the north are surely weaker than elsewhere across the front. Why would they be forced to withdraw? Ukraine would have to pull in huge reinforcements to meet any new Russian front.
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  23. To be fair, the Institute for the Study of War updated their map around the same time this video was uploaded.
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  24. Yes but they're not spare officers, they'd leave the British army with a huge shortage.
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  25. He covered it yesterday.
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  26. Don't take them literally but they give an indication of where fighting is heaviest and how the magnitude of fighting is changing over time.
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  27.  @istinagy5835  In this kind of static warfare, there will be a lot of casualties from shell splinters and at this time of year, frost bite. Most of these casualties will be quite minor. Not minor enough to safely stay in the line, serious enough to require treatment but minor enough to allow returning to duty after a few days. So it doesn't seem totally impossible.
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  28. Britain sent Ukraine Harpoons (I think)
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  29. If it were possible to destroy those bridges I think Russia would already have done that.
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  30.  @maryginger4877  A submarine drone can cut its way through nets.
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  31. Probably more about the quantitative Russian advantage especially in aviation than about the quality of the equipment.
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  32. The ground is still hard enough for tank operations. It might be November before the mud gets deep.
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  33.  @tunny5802  Applies in some places more than others.
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  34. Yeah blocking the F16s seemed to be a sign that the US administration is changing direction.
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  35.  @henkschrader4513  Seriously? Do you mind saying which city you mean? I used to work near Den Haag and there were huge numbers of people from Africa in that area.
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  36. Zelensky is a prisoner of the nationalists. If he tried to make peace, he'd probably be assassinated. That's not to excuse his cowardice.
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  37.  @Ducks0420  Thanks! Yes Dima's channel tends to have more open minded, better informed listeners than most channels on the war.
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  38.  @MaximumEfficiency  Doubt it - not after almost a year of heavy casualties. It's questionable whether they still outnumber the Russians at all now.
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  39.  @lithuanianwarrior1081  I don't believe 5000 either but Russian army dead might not be much higher than that. On the Russian side, DPR, LPR, Wagner, Chechens irregulars and the Russian army are all fighting on the front line. The Russian army is a minority of the overall infantry. This 5000 number probably refers only to the Russian army. Total Russian side dead will be much higher.
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  40.  @scroopynooperz9051  I don't say "as many" but it was certainly millions. We've all read Solzhentsyn and that all started before the wartime food crisis.
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  41.  @andersonarmstrong2650  Your opinion AND immaterial. Read Applebaum then
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  42. Ukrainian losses from a static artillery battle would be pretty low. Losses are going to be high only if one side is attacking.
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  43.  @davecuddahy7872  Yes you can call it martial law, that's fine. What you can't call it is democracy.
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  44.  @dogwhistle8836  The average intelligence of the Russian population is about medium by European standards, I doubt it's significantly different from the average intelligence of the Ukrainian army.
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  45. I've never heard of an army that's 20% officers but it is true that non combat roles like intelligence and electronic warfare will have a high proportion of officers. The problem is, the officer casualties are going to be concentrated in the infantry. And nowadays, artillery. You can't just swap in say a supply officer into an infantry platoon. Totally different skills and knowledge required.
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  46.  @chadchadus9251  I'm curious, why do you think the Russians are losing? I follow several neutral (or close to) sources and it seems the Ukrainians are taking higher losses especially in manpower without gaining more than trivial territory and they're the smaller country by far. Yes they're supplied by NATO but it doesn't seem sustainable especially economically.
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  47.  @codaalive5076  Yeah the Russian state has just been exploiting the population of the Donbas. The Russian army has treated them like cannon fodder at times. Hopefully after the war there'll be a lot of investment and rebuilding but I'd guess Russia might not have much money to spare after this expensive war.
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  48. The other consideration is that the country east of Kerson, inland from the river is very sparsely populated. There aren't big towns to hide forces in. The area north west of Avdivka and especially around Kherson has large settlements.
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  49. It might freeze but it's very rare it would freeze thick enough for armoured vehicles. Ice would need to be almost a metre thick to be safe for a Leopard to cross. I think winter will make it harder for the Ukrainians, there'll be less concealment and Russia has the firepower advantage.
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  50. Strongly doubt British police are in Ukraine. It's possible Ukrainian police might have been supplied some British uniforms.
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  51. I'd guess there are some deep bunkers there, the Ukrainians have had years to fortify it.
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  52. Yes and the important thing to know about Ben Wallace is that he's no longer defence minister. What he thinks and what he wants doesn't matter any more.
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  53. These reports come from the Ukrainian government. Until we see the prisoners, such claims are worth nothing. The largest Russian unit I've seen surrender in the past few days was an infantry platoon of maybe fifteen guys.
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  54. Yes they're trying to prove to NATO they're willing to attack the Russians and willing to make sacrifices for the upcoming conference to boost their case for being given more weapons.
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  55. There is zero chance that European populations will be willing to fight Russia. Maybe in Poland but in Germany, France, Italy, Czech, Netherlands, people will refuse. European governments are already falling.
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  56. There are other possible sources of generals - for example successful senior officers could be promoted.
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  57.  @jeffnorris8848  Logistics look pretty good across most of the north east. Yes the Ukrainians have fortifications everywhere but you can't imagine the north east is going to be as entrenched as the south east. Anyway fortifications on their own aren't enough you also need men to defend them. And opening another front will stretch Ukrainian reserves. Anyway talking about attacking Odessa or towards Kherson at this stage seems totally unrealistic. Ukrainian defences are degraded but they still exist. Any large scale amphibious operation to Odessa would be suicide.
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  58.  @jeffnorris8848  Kharkov: lots of major roads up to the border and Belgorod gives a huge supply base close behind the front. Sumy: can be attacked from all of the north, the north east and the east. Roads there are adequate too. I don't think the Russians need major highways. It's probably more effective to use a very wide front with a slow, careful incremental attack, clearing mines and eliminating counter battery fire as they go rather than a sudden armoured breakthrough attempt like at the start of the war.
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  59.  @jeffnorris8848  If you're arguing an armoured charge of hundreds of tanks to Kiev in a few days is unrealistic then I agree. All I'm arguing is that the heavily prepared hedgerow by hedgerow attacks which generate slow but successful results elsewhere on the front are even more viable on these fronts.
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  60.  @meisterproper8304  It doesn't really matter who is strongest in a conventional war because it would probably become a nuclear war quite quickly.
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  61.  @chrisgoold9816  For a start, your estimates of Russian dead look like fantasy. You can't possibly know that. Actual confirmed Russian dead are like 10% of that.
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  62.  @WilliamAshleyOnline  Potentially quite a lot. Potentially get Adivka under fire control.
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  63.  @gurglejug627  The Russians are obviously aiming to advance in particular places, we see their attacks. He's right, Russian vehicle losses are pretty high.
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