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

Feb 19
The vast majority of US military aid to Ukraine was in fact spent inside the USA to replace vastly overpriced by the Biden Adm. National Guard & Air Guard surplus weapons.

Spending aid money buying Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) to replace NG surplus Humvees

Infowar🧵
1/
...was just one of the aid grifts @JakeSullivan46 NSC crew played to pretend they were helping Ukraine while not offending Russia & buying US Defense contractor kit.

Pres. Trump is literally parroting Russian reflexive control scripts from Biden Adm.

2/
This should not be a surprise as I've pounded on the fact for 2 years that Russia has mapped & fed to each specific US tribal & professional demographic the data to eat up messages/memes Russia wants those groups to believe.

Calling Ukraine's...

3/
Read 7 tweets
Feb 9
This @sambendett thread here makes Russia seem like a poor kid looking through a candy store window at the "candy" of Ukrainian ground resupply drones.

1/
We still don't see D-rings on Russian UGV's to hold down pallets lifted by all terrain forklifts and telehandlers.

[Hey, @TimothyDooner! Rate this strap work⬇️]

2/
Image
I mean, seriously, Russia is now introducing a camel transport corps because the Russian startups and big defense contractors cannot produce supply UGV's at scale to deliver potable water to front line troops.

3/3
Read 4 tweets
Feb 9
This 🧵by @GrandpaRoy2 demonstrating the increasing battlefield obsolescence of tube artillery in the face of fiber optic fiber guided FPV drones is a useful jumping off point the following:

66% of RuAF AFV's & equipment killed in Jan 2025 were victims of drones

Drone tech🧵
1/ Image
Back in November 2024 I did a long thread on how drones were an "effectiveness revolution" on the battlefield and we would see drones displacing other battlefield weapons because of it.

2/
Drones are a cost effectiveness revolution compared to conventional weapons.

3/ Image
Read 12 tweets
Feb 7
It appears the collapse of Russian Army motor transport is nearly complete and hippo train (mules & horses) are being pulled out of the 19th century for the "2nd strongest Army in the world."

This won't end well for Russia.

A Mule Logistics🧵
1/
Being a WW2 historian of electronic warfare and logistics has it's advantages when it comes to looking up US Army standard operating procedures for horse & mule logistics.

See #1 thru #9 below and consider if a Mobik from a Russian city could do them.

2/ Image
Russian Mobiks have a hard enough time maintaining trucks, cars and tractors. How do you think they will care for a mule?

Again, from the US Army Wagoner S.O.P.:

"ROUTINE DUTIES OF THE WAGONER
It is a good plan to have a fixed time for every routine duty, as then there will be no chance of over looking anything. Certain duties should be attended to daily and others weekly. The following is suggested as a daily program to be followed:

3/
Read 16 tweets
Feb 5
The NTSB - via Epoch Times - is reporting the UH-60 and Commuter jet altimeters were showing different altitudes.

"Officials said the control tower recorded the Black Hawk helicopter flying at an altitude of 200 feet at the time of the collision,

1/5
theepochtimes.com/us/ntsb-confli…
...in line with its maximum allowed altitude for its flight path.

However, data from the passenger jet’s flight recorder show the collision occurred at an altitude of about 325 feet, plus or minus 25 feet.

2/5
“That’s what our job is, to figure that out,” NTSB member J. Todd Inman said during an evening news conference on Feb. 1.

Investigators hope to reconcile the altitude differences with data from the helicopter’s black box, ...

3/5
Read 6 tweets
Feb 5
I asked Grok a series of questions about what seemed like a pattern of reduced or suppressed news about Russian Glide bomb strikes.

This is what Grok told me in my last question:
x.com/i/grok/share/W…
This is the 1st half of the answer:

2/ Image
This is the 2nd half.

BLUF: There is more evidence of reduced Russian glide bomb strikes due to Ukrainian OWA drone strikes on Russian depots, but the huge loss rate of Russian ISR drones may also be playing a part.

3/3 Image
Read 4 tweets

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