Trent Telenko Profile picture
Apr 1, 2022 20 tweets 6 min read Read on X
This is going to be a Russian casualty ratio🧵thread with a lot of Russian corruption thrown in to give you a feel for the political-military pressures inside Russia's ruling Kleptocracy.

1/
I've done a thread previously on Russian casualty ratios in order to demonstrate how the ratio of dead to wounded meant Russia didn't have a modern military medical system.

This meant that for every two dead Russians, there were three wounded due
2/
...to the complete lack of modern blood clotting bandages & a "golden hour" medivac care system.

So, the UAF report of 17,700 dead Russians means there are another 26,550 wounded out of an estimated invasion force of 190,000.

61,950 total KIA & WIA out of 190,000 is 32.6%

3/
And note, neither the UAF or RuAF are acknowledging the 3,000(+) plus the UAF has captured.

The problem with these numbers is there is evidence that the 190,000 Russian number is over inflated by up to 25%.

4/
See:

"A war trophy in the form of an order of battle for a VDV BTG as of February 12th. Unit 42091, which is apparently a part of the 7th VDV division. States that it’s supposed to have 538 troops in total but only has 403. So they were low on people to begin with."
5/ ImageImage
Colonels of regiments cheating governments by reporting more soldiers than there really are on the payroll & pocketing the difference is a corruption template dating to the "Great King" of Sumer in Mesopotamia at the dawn of recorded civilization.

6/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer
We know this because the "Great King's" scribes placed his complaints on clay tablets modern archeologists dug up & translated

This payroll corruption template was endemic in pre-Napoleonic Western militaries

You only see it now in Kleptocratic militaries today like Russia's
7/
Remember early on in this latest invasion of Ukraine that Putin was professing to be surprised conscripts were in the Russian Army invasion force?

He was not lying.

Putin was genuinely surprised.
8/
Putin fired his honest defense minister in 2012 replacing him with a get-along guy who let the kleptocrats steal whatever they wanted.

Putin did this because his power was shaky enough that he needed a new income source to keep his cronies happy.

9/
If you have not read @kamilkazani thread about that. Go there now and read it. He explains the players & structure of Russia's Kleptocracy that is the background for this tweet thread.


10/
Putin is suffering from the traditional dictator's trap of believing his own press releases because he has made it too dangerous for his cronies and underlings to tell him the truth.

It's pretty clear Defense Minister Shoygu let every Regimental


11/
...Colonel in the Russian Army & regime security units under the defense ministry, like the VDV, run at 25% under strength in the old payroll dodge so they could share the rake off

The VDV has a different more politically reliable recruit pool than the Russian Army "contract
12/
...soldier" units. So the VDV could not grab just any conscript like the Army did.

Since almost all VDV units were slated to go in. The VDV could not do sharing deals between units & went in 25% understrength.

13/
It didn't occur to Putin when he put in Shoygu, and no one told him, that this would tube his armed forces' military ability.

And everyone down the military started stealing from the military too.
14/
Remember all those reports of Russian soldiers getting frostbite?

That was company commanders selling Russian cold weather gear for tank & other vehicle crews. The scam broke down because Ukrainian drones forced vehicle crewmen to sleep in trenches
15/
...at night to avoid getting killed as Ukrainian drones homed in on hot running engines.

This payroll corruption has two knock on effects.

16/
1st, there is no way in h--l that the Russian army can reconstitute the forces it lost. It isn't just a matter of lost vehicles.

The Russian Army units not in the invasion force are all well below 75% strength because they were picked over to fill out the invasion force.

17/
2nd, their are huge issues here with Russian Regime stability.

Will Putin's military cronies put up with loss of a significant part of their income because they must now stop stealing from the military just because Putin insists that it fight a war?

18/
Will they put up with losing the very important benefits they enjoy from touring Western Europe?

Plus have to face the possibility of their own underlings try to kill them to get more money?

19/
Putin's cronies can continue supporting Putin and lose a very large portion of their income for the foreseeable future, or they can kill him, blame him for everything and try to get the sanctions ended.

Which to choose?

IS THIS A TRICK QUESTION?
20/

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Trent Telenko

Trent Telenko Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @TrentTelenko

Apr 14
USN flag ranks & their staffers have been fighting the idea of distant economic blockade of China tooth an nail as a response to China invading Taiwan for 30 years.

They really don't want a recent precedent of a successful blockade...

1/3
...to prevent their Carrier fleet Pickett's charge into the South China Sea.

Specifically distant blockade as a strategy against China makes having/regaining 100 Cold War era

2/3 Image
Image
Image
...frigates and destroyer tenders supporting them on distant blockade stations outside the 2nd Island chain, "budget relevant" for a military strategy of conducting three years of blockade enforcement.

3/3 Image
Image
Read 4 tweets
Apr 14
The high death rate of Russian troops due to a lack of casualty evacuation was highly visible in March-September 2022.

I've documented this consistently, repeatedly and at great technical depth.

Russia Strong "slopaganda" has buried it over and over.

1/
I was calling out two dead for every three Russian wounded in Sept 2022 as the more realistic Russian casualty ratio in Ukraine because it was taking more than 24 hours to get to the equivalent of a battalion aid station.

2/3
I asked @grok to summarize my receipts on Russian casualty ratios since February 2022, which are clipped below:

3/3 Image
Read 4 tweets
Apr 1
This fact:

"Oil revenue collapsed to roughly 5% of the national budget, down from 32% the prior year. Taxes increased over 60%. Food prices climbed at least 50%. ATMs across major cities are running out of cash."

Underlines a major point of mine. 🧵

1/
Since Clausewitz, the West recognized "war as an extension of politics."

The corollary of that is "politics is an extension of money."

Iran doesn't have any money, thanks to hyper-inflation and now an 84% reduction in oil revenue.

2/ Image
The failed January 2026 Iranian uprising kicked off because hyperinflation caused massive food insecurity that required the mass murder of 30,000 (+) Iranian protestors to suppress.

The 12-day war and the current one have made Iranian hyper-inflation far worse.

3/
Read 6 tweets
Mar 31
Not for US aircraft. ⬇⬇️

Hardened aircraft shelters are against the secular budget religion of US flying service flag ranks.

Not that other Western air forces are any better.

1/
The Chief of Air Staff RAAF 12 months ago gave a lecture trashing HAS as a bad idea and how "dispersal is better."

Dispersal didn't help USAF E-3G's in Saudi Arabia because they had nowhere to disperse too.

Places like Italy are politically off limits.
2/ Image
The RAAF CoS appeared to believe that every HAS was like the cheapest Iraqi HAS that we could crack with a single BLU-109/B, not the serious HAS needing multiple BLU-109/B down the same hole.

All of China's HAS built since 1991 are of the 2nd variety or are 'super-hardened' deep tunnels.

3/3Image
Image
Image
Read 4 tweets
Mar 29
War is a question of interests, not legality. Iran with, it's support of the October 7th attack, kicked off an existential war with Israel for the latter to prevent Iran from getting the A-bomb.

Israel won't survive as a nation after three Hiroshima class nukes...

Iran War🧵
1/
- riding ballistic warheads in a saturation missile attack - slam into its major cities.

The Trump Administration agreed with Israel on Iranian nukes both in the 12-day war and with the current war.

2/
The Iranian use of a space launcher as an ICBM against Diego Garcia made the current Iran war an existential one for the USA, given the EMP threat Iran represents to the unhardened American power grid.

Imagine the population of the American west - especially Las Vegas! -
3/
Read 9 tweets
Mar 27
How the mighty RAND has fallen.

Anyone claiming Iran will survive long term without explaining how Iran recovers from currency hyperinflation IN THE MIDDLE OF A WAR marks themselves as incompetent yo-yo's.

1/3

bylinesupplement.com/p/why-the-iran…
Hand waving, "They will use ForEx from oil and barter instead of the rial" is ignoring what happened during January 2026.

I dare anyone to do a word search at that link for the text strings "hyperinflation," "Rial" or "foreign exchange."

None are present.

2/
The Iran questions at hand are as follows:
1. Will the Regime fall via a controlled air campaign driven collapse, or
2. After a protracted Syria style civil war with 6 or 7 figure #'s murdered by IRGC thugs, &
3. Will Iran destroy the Gulf's power & H2O supply while dying?

3/3
Read 4 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(