Putin's legacy hinges on Crimea. Its a big trophy he's won for 10+ years. Russia isn't giving it up, and I don't see how Ukraine can take it from a logistics pov since Russia can do the same attacks on Ukraine, leave their troops stranded and open for slaughter. At most they can stop the Russian offensive and cut off Crimea from gas which seems to working well enough. Ukraine lacks manpower to retake Crimea and will focus on retaking inland territory.
just to provide counter argument, because I have the same issues (plus any sort of thunder run would require a breakout from Kherson or bypassing the defenders making it take longer and leaving your logistics dangerously exposed) but:
If Ukraine does this with say, less than a week before major operations end, that would leave Russia with no hope for shifting forces for a major counter offensive and in theory with things moving towards peace they wouldn't need to worry about getting picked apart like they are doing to the russians.
edit: forgot to add: Ukraine has no significant sealift capabilities. They could send Marine teams on zodiacs to those marches on the west for PR strunts, but they do no have the ability to land equipment, to say nothing of Russian drones hungry for targets. Over the Dnepier is the only viable route for mechanized assault.
Speaking of which, I heard that Russia has found some sort of jet turbine to strap to Geran drones, which could be an issue for the currently-quite-successful machine gun and interceptor drone based AA?
Yes but no, no but yes, and yes.
Russia has demoed jet-powered Gerans, they've been spotted in the wild. But in additon to points about increased costs, the guidance on the gerans is not up to running something jet powered, and you have to change how the control interface works; turbines are less good about being set to "idle". basically everyting from the engine to the electronics is more expensive.
As for gun based AA:
anything less than 20mm is straight fucked. Really anything less than 40mm unless you're really pumping rounds. but while they are faster than prop driven drones they aren't any more durable and infact under more strain from the speeds its more likely damage becomes catastrophic.
It definitelymakes things harder, but most CRAM are up to tracking missile. To put that more on point: they aren't super sonic, so anything automated shouldn't have too much of a problem. Anything manual could have problems with untrained crews - and pretty much everyone's crews will be untrained for jet drones.
But NVA got most of their kills on American jets with ground gun-based AA.
Interceptor drones:
difficulty of interception raised dramatically. You have all the issues with handling increase speed as the drone, but now you need something able to figure target speed and plot intercept course. There are things you can do, like use swarms with impact triggers, but that's its own level of problems.
It cuts their range and ups the price, but yeah it makes it harder (albeit not impossible) to hit via AA gun. Also it forces dedicated AAs like Tunguskas and Gepards into the job rather than "twin Dishka mounted on the roof".
Interceptor drones work because of how slow and predictable Shaheds/Gerans fly.
Shaheds/Gerans aren't cheap because of Russo-Iranian military magic and BROOCS economic efficiency, they're cheap because they don't need to be good.
An interceptor drone would be hard-pressed to work against an actual cruise missile like a Tomahawk or Kalibr, but that's fine because they're made to cheaply intercept shitdrones like Gerans.
As the line between actual cruise missile and one-way attack drones continue to blur, so too will their advantages and disadvantages.
Pretty much this.
fair point.
they're really in the position of power that's only strengthening by the day.
I think that's overstating things a bit. Ukraine is still being nibbled to death in Donetsk and can't really stop it - they are making it even more eyewatering costly than normal for Russia, but Russia gives no fucks about its soldiers only territory taken and is willing to feed in as many mobliks as it takes.
They are pressuring Russia every where else they can, but even the ZipZap counter offensive is likewise nibbling - the fact they rolled Russia back to almost 2024 lines is more a testament to how slow Russia has advanced than any sort of metric of a successful campaign.
Fucking Russia's economy extra hard to the point the population is Noticing(tm) and malding is only a power move if it translates to the government needing to end the war; it would be in the west where people can pressure the government, but Putin is still dictator with control of the media and sweeping arrest powers over a disarmed population.
The mouth peices allowed to have the microphones want MORE war not less as we saw from the malding posted here.
