Trent Telenko Profile picture
Mar 10, 2022 21 tweets 8 min read Read on X
This is a quick thread on Russian plans, maps, and trucks.🧵

We are going to start with Ukraine & explain.
1/
Most people have no clue as to how truely large Ukraine is. So, to cure that, I have gone to the thetruesize.com appin order to educate people.

In this case by laying the US state of Texas over Ukraine. The Texas-Louisiana border to El Paso is roughly the distance
2/
between Ukraine's Russian & Polish borders.

The distance of Kyiv from the Belarus border to be about that of the Oklahoma border to Dallas, Texas.

The tip of Crimea to the Ukraine-Belarus border is roughly from Brownsville Tx to the Red River border w/Oklahoma.
3/
Driving from Texarkana on the N.E. tip of Texas to El Paso at the western tip is 814 miles & 12 hours 13 min. non-stop on US interstates with a 75 mph speed limit

There was no way the Russian trucks like this were going to make it from Belarus to Kyiv
4/
...let alone cross Ukraine North-to-South or East -to-West. What was the Russian General Staff thinking?

Well, we know because the Ukrainians captured the plans from a Russian Naval Infantry Colonel.

See:
5/
Putin's generals thought it would take 3 days to overthrow the Ukraine government and 12 more days for the 190,000 troops to occupy the entire country of 43 million people, twice that of Texas.

That is one Russian conscript per 266 Ukrainians & 3.1 sq. km
6/
This plan assumed the Ukrainian military would put up a token resistance and the newly installed Puppet government would arrange the surrender of Ukraine's army of 250,000 men and 45,000 man territorial defense force without any weapons or soldiers going insurgent.
7/
Nor do those armed Ukrainian numbers include the six annual conscript classes that filled up that 250,000 man army in the eight years of fighting in the Donbas.

Assuming 1/2 of 250,000 x six, that is 730,000 combat veterans who would take great exception to Russia's puppet
8/
Assuming only a perfect plan for the Ukrainian Army, territorials plus Russians faced only 150,000 of those conscript classes. Russian & puppet forces would only outnumber them 3.2 to one in a popular insurgency.

That isn't enough to win.

9/
See these #'s

"However, when facing broadly popular insurgencies, counterinsurgents lost every time they possessed a force ratio advantage of 5-1 or less, failed half the time with odds between 6-1 and 10-1,

10/
smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/manpo…
...but succeeded three-quarters of the time when outnumbering the insurgents by 10-1 or more."

Short form:

Putin lost the moment he decided to invade Ukraine.

Russia has no political or military options to achieve successful war termination.
11/
The only agents in this war with the power to achieve war termination in Ukraine is the Ukrainian people.

Not the Ukrainian government

The people.

Ukraine is engaged in a national people's war against a Kleptocratic potentate.
12/
The Ukrainian people's terms are "We want the Russians gone, all our lands back and even then we will still keep fighting Russia while Putin is in power."

No Ukrainian government can force them to settle for anything less.
13/
Since Putin's 15-day plan has failed & Ukraine's military is fighting. Lets turn to another map that represents the reality on the Ground in Ukraine.

Ukraine is big.

So big that we have a lot of space between conventional armed formations like the WW2 N. African campaign.
14/
There are more armed Ukrainians than Russians in Ukraine.

While the Russians are fighting conventional Ukrainian Army unit for cities and choke points.

The Ukrainian territorials are fulfilling a role much like the colonial militia of the American revolution.

They are

15/
...filling the the space between armed units and destroying Russian Army truck convoys in the 21st century like the Colonial militia destroyed British army foraging parties around Philadelphia in the 18th century & impelled then to retreat or starve.

16/
Now we are going to address the mechanized battle of attrition between Ukraine & Russia.

Long road marches of 300 AFV's see as many as 100 fall out for mechanical defects.

When these are Russian, the fallen out AFV are destroyed, or worse, stolen.
17/
Over and over again.

All Russian operational losses and the repairable half of combat AFV losses are either permanent losses or they become Ukrainian Army GAINS.

/18

President Zelensky claimed on Mar 9, 2022 that more Russian equipment has been captured than Ukrainian equipment lost in the campaign to date, and thus all Ukrainian losses have been covered in operational units by Russian AFV trophies, especially MBTs.

/19
Contrafactual Short form:

Ukraine is winning the vehicular firepower war of attrition with Russia because it has trained & combat experienced reserves from its previous conscript classes to fill those tractor captured Russian AFV's.

Long conventional war favors Ukraine.
20/End
PS.

Yes, the thread turned out to be long, not short.

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More from @TrentTelenko

Dec 19
Let us be clear what has happened here.

Ukraine has a drone armed merchant raider lose in the Mediterranean hunting Russian shadow tankers.

Upshot: There will be more elsewhere on the world's oceans in the near future effecting maritime trade.

2025 Merchant Armed Raider 🧵
1/
@grok answered the following questions for me:

" Please summarize the pre-World War 1 to 1942 career of merchant armed raiders and compare that data to Ukraine's recent drone attack in the Mediterranean with a drone armed commercial vessel."

2/ Image
Image
Image
This is @grok's final summary:

"In essence, Ukraine's approach modernizes the raider concept—swapping guns for drones and merchant disguises for stealthy launches— but lacks the historical volume due to the conflict's constraints.

3/
Read 11 tweets
Dec 11
US Ground force flag ranks deny this 2025 reality 🤡⬇️

"The Ukraine war has exposed a large and increasing gap between Western reconnaissance doctrine and modern conventional battlefield reality.
1/3
In Donetsk, reconnaissance operators face constant drone surveillance, electromagnetic degradation, and hyper-local combat conditions that invalidate long-held assumptions about stealth and standoff intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR).

2/3
This article contends that NATO must, with urgency, reform its reconnaissance doctrine, training, and force structure to survive and efficiently operate in a drone-saturated battlefield."

Upton Sinclair reports:
3/3 Image
Read 4 tweets
Dec 9
I said this about the US Navy in 2023 (⬇️)

....and the institutional failures on display in the USS Truman CVBG Red Sea deployment proved me correct in 2025.

1/2
Every competent USN surface officer knows in their gut an anti-aircraft cruiser should not be operating with downed identification friend or foe (IFF) and Link-16 data link with no E-2 Hawkeye AEW support.

2/
news.usni.org/2025/12/04/inv…
Those officers know in their guts that radar skin paints alone from their ship's SPY-1 will be borderline for high tempo engagements...

...but this is not the first time this kind of problem occurred:

3/
twz.com/air/how-uss-ge…
Read 6 tweets
Nov 16
Just...listen...to this video clip with your eyes closed.

The predominant sound isn't artillery.
It isn't assault rifles.

It is the scream of drone rotors coming close, punctuated with the explosion of the drone upon impact.

1/3
That sound drama isn't World War One or any "medium intensity" conflict since 1918.

It is the sound of how 21st century Peer-to-Peer conflict is fought.

A conflict Western ground militaries are obsolescent in equipment to face.

2/3
That Russo-Ukraine War video is a soundscape US Army National Training Centers are too obsolete/incapable of replicating, because US Army flag ranks are allergic to training with high densities of small/cheap/many FPV drones.

3/3 Image
Read 4 tweets
Nov 10
WW2 is calling again with Ukraine developing Drone version of SHORAN.

_SH_ort
_RA_nge
_N_avigation

1/
SHORAN was a WW2 blind bombing system using two radio stations and an electromechanical computer.

In 1938 an RCA engineer named Stuart William Seeley, while attempting to remove "ghost" signals from an experimental television system, discovered he could measure distances
2/ Image
...by time differences in radio reception.

Instead of building a radar unit with this discovery, he proposed using this technique for precision ground-based radio beacon navigation bombing aid.

3/ Image
Read 12 tweets
Oct 29
One the DCMA quality inspectors on my team worked at an EMALS contractor in Texas.

I can't say more than the Chinese tested their EMALS at subsystem level (unlike the USN) with the knowledge the four catapults needed to be independent of each other for operations,

EMALS🧵
1/5
...based on how the USN f--ked up their EMALS design.

That is, when any single EMALS catapult on the Ford class goes down for any reason. They all can't be used.

2/5
As strategypage dot com put it in 2019:

"EMALS proved less reliable than the older steam catapult, more labor intensive to operate, put more stress on launched aircraft than expected and due to a basic design flaw if one EMALS catapult becomes inoperable,

3/5
Read 5 tweets

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