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.
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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.
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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?
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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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This 2023 post is where I posed the question of how large Russian riverine/littoral/brown water logistical efforts were to support Russian occupation forces in southern Ukraine. 3/
Given the massive Ukrainian victory in the "Battle of the Azov Sea."
We can say Ukraine has achieved “Usable Drone Air Superiority" over the Sea of Azov in exactly the way the Chinese would in the waters around, & air over, Taiwan when it invades.
🧵
The "Battle of the Azov Sea" shares a lot of historical elements of both the WW2 "Battle of the Bismarck Sea" and the slaughter of Allied oil tankers in 1942 during Operation Drumbeat (Paukenschlag) and Operation Neuland.
2/
The Battle of the Bismarck Sea was the slaughter of 12 ships of a 16 ship Imperial Japanese convoy of eight IJA freighters and eight IJN destroyers moving 6,900 IJA troops.
Tipped off by IJN seaplane deployments & radio intercepts, only 2,700 IJA troops arrived w/o weapons or ammo.
3/
I asked @grok to document this Russian policy of atrocity at the link, excerpt:
"February 24, 2022–present (Full-scale Russian invasion): The scale escalated dramatically. As of May 2026, the WHO had verified more than 3,000 attacks on healthcare via its Surveillance System for Attacks on Health Care (SSA). A coalition of organizations (including PHR, eyeWitness, Truth Hounds, etc.) documented ~3,095 attacks, with 1,632 damaging or destroying hospitals and clinics"
When I've talked about the legacy of Soviet industrial gigantism (one big factory) making Putin era Russia far more vulnerable to a drone strategic bombing campaign.
I've talked about this vulnerability in a couple of previous threads. Here is a shorter one:
Putin's decades long "Russian exceptionalism" propaganda campaign, that says WW2 was won on the Eastern Front, has made Russians incapable of seeing this.
There is so much to object to here that I'm going to restate some basic design observations on the FP-5 to clarify how the Russian reflexive control data fed AI slop that is polluting public discussions of the FP-5.
1. The FP-5 Flamingo is about four times the launch weight of a BGM-109 Tomahawk (i.e. ~13,200 lb), and 2-3 times the range (i.e. ~1,620 nmi) while carrying twice the warhead mass (i.e. ~2,000 lb).
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2. The FP-5 design concept is modelled on the USAF MGM-13 Mace GLCM as Fire Point told Ukrainian military analysts - but designed with modern technology to be extremely cheap to make (claimed 1/6 the cost of a Tomahawk - likely not counting the engine cost).
The first thing that needs to be pointed out is that in 2026 Ukraine has not only replicated, but likely exceeded, the 2018 capabilities of the USAF's Stand-off Munitions Activity Center (SMAC) at at Barksdale AFB.