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.
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/
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.
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.
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
...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/
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
We are seeing a lot of posts and articles on X about Ukraine's OWA drone strategic bombing campaign against Russian refineries .
People, including Jake Sullivan over at the Biden Adm. NSC think this is about AFU cutting off Russian oil.
They're wrong. It's about explosives. 1/
The Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries are less about POL than reduction of nitrogen,ammonia and methanol feed stocks for Russian explosives and propellants for it's artillery and missile production.
Ukrainian OWA drones are engaged in strategic counter battery fire against the Russian artillery supply chain providing the explosive fillings & propellent for shells, rockets and missiles.
[This also has knock on effects for Russian fertilizer production.]
"March 20, 2024: Hard limits are appearing on Russia’s ability to continue the Ukraine war. It has begun running out of tube artillery (as opposed to rocket artillery) and light armored fighting vehicles (AFVs). The artillery shortage is because tube artillery barrels are
...wearing out, while the light AFV shortage is because so many have been lost in combat."
and later in the article:
"It is highly likely, given Russian corruption and maintenance standards, that only about 3,000 of the nominally available 4,000 pieces of 122mm artillery
2/
The Jake Sullivan run Biden Adm. NSC's whole FT argument that Ukraine should stop plinking Russian refineries to prevent "oil market instability" is utter nonsense.
The Iranian sponsored Houthi blockade of the Suez has a much much larger "oil market instability" impact.
2/5
Biden won't do anything effective regarding Iran.
Meanwhile the Biden Adm. attempt to restrain Ukrainian refinery strikes is actually doing great damage to American foreign policy credibility in Eastern Europe and particularly in the Baltics.
It has been Biden Administration Russo-Ukrainian War policy to keep the Russian energy sector intact for Western economies.
Ukrainian victory has always been a 3rd tier consideration of Biden's "De-Escalationist" foreign policies behind preserving the Russian energy sector. 1/
What the Biden Adm. did with the UK Financial Times article blotivating about Ukrainian drone strikes was make the strategic mistake of telling the absolute truth that Russian oil is more important to them than Ukrainian victory and European security.
The Biden Administration foreign policy is to keep Russia intact and it's natural resources away from China.
Ukraine was never seen as an allied free European democracy by Biden, Sullivan et al, but rather, a client state to be played in the great game with China.
3/
"Along with the Russian oil refineries, which should no doubt continue to be struck, Ukraine has a number of other easy targets. We are talking about railway transformer substations - their destruction will greatly spoil the logistics of the