Guancha had a great livecast today with Shilao, Ayi, Xi Yazhou and their resident Russian expert on the war, with a lot of details on the level of informatization within Russian forces. Other than that they had a very long discussion on casualty and destruction of technical equipment on both sides.
The one conclusion they came to is the idea of a "breaking point" for Ukraine. That is the war will continue on to be a very slow slogfest that we're seeing now, until suddenly you find Ukrainian defense just collapsing and you will start seeing Russians start to worry about where to keep all the PoWs they're getting and advancing at rapid rate. You will also see all Ukrainian counterattack end at this point.
Ukraine is losing well trained highly motivated troops at the rate of 3 digit a day, and similar rate in equipment. Manpower loss are being replaced by less well trained and lower morale territorial defense troops and even with NATO giving them supplies, they are having trouble replacing all the gears they are losing. In particular they point to these photos in recent days as evidence:
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This BMP-2K with very unusual camo, captured and put back into use by Chechen troops belonged to the military department of Chernivtsi University (western Ukraine) and was used for study purposes. You can imagine the state of Ukrainian equipment if they're pressing vehicles like this to the front line.
As the quality of men and equipment decrease due to attrition the standard of replacement will keep on falling, and as they fall their combat effectiveness also falls which will lead onto even greater loses, so on and so forth into an acceleration feedback loop. And along with the losses the morale will also fall creating discipline problems. We are already starting to see front line units refusing to fight. As long as Russia keeps the PoW option open by treating prisoners well as they did with those from Azovstal that option becomes more and more tempting, until the breaking point is reached and Ukrainian defense start to collapse in earnest.
NATO may try to keep Ukraine in the fight by providing equipment of ever greater quality. If the chips are down and NATO decide to go all in and start shipping MBTs and that sort of heavy equipment then Ayi argues there's suddenly great value in keeping Russians in the fight in face of this onslaught, as every missile that falls onto them will mean one less missile on top of PLA when the moment of reunification finally comes. Thus should this happens who knows what crazy weapon will suddenly appear in Russian hands.
