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/
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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.