I've done three posts on Ukraine's Maidan Color revolution & aftermath, in this one I get into how Ukrainians are wired in dealing with dishonorable enemies.
"Ukraine is returning to its cultural roots from the Kievan Rus/Viking period, the Cossack period being an extension of that. Community is everything.
These people are at heart Viking berserkers – and we have seen it over and over again on the battlefield 3/
...over the last 9 months. Cornered Ukrainian officers, wounded, surrounded by Russian Spetsnaz, pulling the pins on a string of grenades, to take the enemy with them, which they did on multiple occasions."
I've been expecting the full Viking Berserkergang...and seeing it.
The Russian 247th Guards VDV Air Assault Brigade was pivotal to the Ukrainian loss at Ilovaysk in the 2014-15 fighting.
Thus it was likely involved in the Ilovaysk murder of Ukrainian wounded and POWs. 4/
The Ukrainian annihilation of that unit in this invasion was preordained.
A Ukrainian reading friend says he sees the phrase "revenge for ..." popping up all of the time in Ukrainian social media.
Then, when it was reported a Su-27s killed two Russian CANDIDs carrying VDV, 5/
...it was "revenge for the Luhansk Il-76 ambush".
Whatever else happens, Putin will not be able to conquer the entire Ukraine and may not even get to keep the Donbass.
Putin has created a Ukrainian nationalist monster that will hate Russians for both the great famine of 6/
...the 1930’s under Stalin and now the very raw territorial wound of detached Eastern Ukraine and Crimea.
Ukrainians will work for a 100 years to get all that back, minus anyone who is visibly, culturally, Russian.
The Ukrainians are now fighting a national people's war. 7/
The Russians are fighting as a classic Oriental despotism whose chief objective is to keep Putin in power, whatever effect this has on Russia’s long term interests.
This Ukrainian Viking Revival will be the defining event of the early 21st Century.
8/End
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I have been beating up on the Field Artillery crowd on X for literally years over the rapid firepower growth curve of drones compared to tube artillery.
Drones do cluster munitions far more accurately than tube artillery.
And the shortages of Ukrainian artillery shells through out the Russo-Ukrainian War has meant drone surveillance was the prerequisite for shooting any tube artillery at all, be it cluster munition or unitary.
Guns rule in the age of drones, but the "muffin top" Burke class DDG's are so top heavy with the SLQ-32(V)7 Surface Electronic Warfare Improvement Program (SEWIP) installation that the idea of adding 76mm or 57mm autocannons is insane from the metacentric height POV.
I've been posting about the inertia of Russian civil infrastructure industrial disinvestment for some time regarding Russian railways and it's foreign bearings.
The key tell going forward is triage.
This western part problem also applies to Russian Coal fired power plants 1/
...and we are seeing triage there now that will apply to Russian railways later.
Non-Russian core populations areas of Russia have been cut off from modernization and restoration of thermal power plants due to a lack of Western parts.
2/
There are grave implications in that for the electrified Trans-Siberian railway.
Russian railways are already seeing repair trains derail on the journey to go fix derailments.
...continue for years even if the fighting stops tomorrow.
The rundown of Russian stocks of western railway bearing will continue for years because the specialty steel supply chain feeding western bearing manufacturers has shut down unused capacity after 3-years of war.
2/
It will take years to "turn on" the specialty steel pipeline to even begin to make new bearings for the Russian railways.
Compounding the matter is the extreme age of the Russian rolling stock fleet of 1.1 million freight cars/wagons at the beginning of the war.