Ask HN: Who needs help this holidays?

In the meantime, I'm noting a few things from your comments. Can you confirm my impressions are correct?

1. Field communications are difficult, presumably due to Russian signals intelligence.

2. Russians have a weaponry advantage. Presumably this is mainly driven by artillery? Last I heard, airspace is still contested. Is that still the case?

Taken together, I'm under the impression field mobility and coordination is a challenge. Indeed, this is why my mind jumped to car parts, batteries and radio. Do you find yourselves needing to do things on foot? If so, I'm sure I could figure out a way to send things like socks, footwear and rain gear.

Also, please let me know if there are any supplies that could help with morale. I've also spent some time in a fox hole, so I know how much little things like coffee and chocolate can mean to someone after several days of rain or snow.

If you would prefer to speak about this somewhere else, I have a Matrix account I'm happy to share with you.

Exists three big problems.

First, they intercept signals and if possible use intercepted info to target their artillery or aviation, and they have superiority in both. In artillery they have about two times superiority (on begin of war was 10-20); in aviation, 5-10 times.

For about air defense, looks like they have more number of long range systems, like S-300, but we now have grown number of short range systems, like Gepard.

Second, they have developed electromagnetic warfare, and interfere our communications, and for example, in many cases could disable our drones just by EW equipment. They invested really huge resources on this, so even Western precision-guided munition suffered limited accuracy.

Third, they have their own spy satellites, and have experienced people working with tech intelligence for years, and we in Ukraine are mostly agrarian people, experienced only with light guns. Also, Russians actively involve academy resources (yes, literally universities) to conduct war research and to teach operators of new tech, like drone (uav) operators.

As example of war research, our hackers intercept documents, that in Russian civilian universities conducted researches of best routes for Russian drones to hit Ukrainian infrastructure objects.

Also, Russians heavily use civilian building equipment to build fortifications. And Russians constantly hit Ukrainian civilians, but Ukrainians, avoid to target civilians at all costs.

This sometimes remember me colonization of America history, where on one side was tribes with bows and arrows, and on other side colonizers with rifles and guns.

Partially, we in Ukraine working on peer level, to research and to teach people, but I near have not hear about government programs of doing this, and our bureaucracy is constantly late on this.

Fortunately, Ukrainians much better in peer working than Russians, but I'm not sure this will be long superiority.

And I don't know, when we fix our weak bureaucracy.

And yes, Western equipment is far better than Russian, but we have it in too little quantities, to achieve superiority. For example, Russians usually have to spent ~50 artillery shells to hit target; with Western guns, Ukrainians in many cases need only 10, but Russians have these 50 shells and Ukrainians have not these 10.

And sorry to repeat. This is really big war, in which things changed constantly. And changes are so huge, even NATO analysts sometimes said, they was not imagine this could happen. For example, people said, at NATO they trained that mine field will be square 200x200 meters, but in reality seen many kilometers strip about kilometer deep. And when Ukrainians use anti-mine system, make pass and go there, immediately, Russians fire from artillery and use systems for remote placing land mines.