Great Power contentions

[Montmorency]

Seems the Ukrainians blew up some facilities and at least 8 planes in a Crimean airbase. American and Ukrainian authorities have put forward a number of vague and/or contradictory explanations for how this might have occurred, suggesting Ukraine wants to obscure their capabilities to a degree.


I knew from the beginning of the war that estimating crew or passenger casualties from vehicle losses was going to be tricky. Even when vehicles aren't destroyed or captured when parked with no or minimal crew, even a record of a catastrophically-destroyed vehicle allows the possibility that the explosion occurred at a length from impact, allowing passengers to escape, or maybe even as a followup well after combat subsided. Crews and passengers abandon vehicles for all sorts of reasons, often related to panic - put even a tank under enough machinegun fire or small arms fire, or within some proximity to artillery detonations, and the human element might decide to take their chances elsewhere. (In case you ever feel like cursing a wargame's morale model.)

We've seen some crazy footage of the survivability of tanks. If you're not badly injured or disoriented, even a couple of seconds before detonation or deflagration can be enough to leap out of a hatch, depending on countless unique factors.

This clip might take the cake. A full-mounted BMP takes a pretty serious hit, perhaps from a missile. The front part - engine compartment? - immediately goes up in flames. Yet even so, I count at least 6 soldiers escaping the burning vehicle in decent shape, which amounts to up to an entire mechanized infantry squad associated with a BMP (vehicle crews are drawn from passenger squads) escaping a permanent vehicle writeoff more or less intact.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1557075448198303744