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

Jan 24
I'm sorry, but this statistic:

>>Violent crime is falling, with homicides down ~21%. The largest annual drop on record.

...has been heavily polluted by improvements in trauma care, particularly hemostatic (blood clotting) bandages.

US Trauma care & FBI statistics🧵

1/ Image
The statistical comparison in the FBI data from pre-1961 is invalid as the underlying medical systems have so changed as to utterly pollute the "murders per 100,000" data.

Violent crime data pre-1961 and post 1961 are apples to oranges comparisons.

2/
-Trauma care centers (1961),

-Standardized trauma procedures (1978),

-Adoption of military Korea/Vietnam medical emergency treatment & air transport procedures,

-Improved triage (1986)

-And (since 2011) widespread adoption and use of blood clotting bandages...

3/
Read 8 tweets
Jan 24
Chairman Xi suffers from the traditional dictator's trap of believing his own sh*t because he has made it too dangerous for his cronies and underlings to tell him the truth.

He has failed the "Dictator on the Wall Test."

1/
Thanks to that, Chairman Xi's Regime has pretty much no resilience in adversity because it's so kleptocratic and it's all about what the guy in charge can do for his next set of corrupt cronies today.

2/
This 1970's comment about the Shah of Iran is so historically on point in 2026 because it shows how Xi's regime is failing "The dictator on the wall test."

3/ Image
Read 8 tweets
Jan 22
Greenland is badly needed by the USA to engage nuclear armed hypersonic glide vehicles and FOBS from China and Russia aimed at the continental USA.

So-called experts saying Greenland is "unnecessary" are "Cold War thinkers" focused on traditional ICBM threat geometries.
1/ Image
Image
Image
Image
They are not thinking in terms of the detection geometries required for lofted or depressed trajectory ICBM's, HGV, and/or FOBS.

For those threats, the further forward you can deploy radars and interceptors, the better for detection and intercept.

2/3 Image
Image
Image
Image
When geometrically minded experts in Australia looked at PLARF depressed trajectory ICBM's, HGV, and FOBS threat set.

They ended up placing a TPY-2 radars on the Cocos Island & Christmas Island ("Greenland for Oz") to generate tracks for SM-3 & THAAD interceptors.
3/3 Image
Image
Image
Read 4 tweets
Jan 20
This map of 124 Russian railway electric traction stations and the 40K OWA drone fired in 2025 demonstrates the political-military leadership failure of the Zelinskyy government.

Like Stalin's failed winter 1941-1942 counter offensives against Nazi Army Group Center,

🚅🧵
1/
...Ukraine is penny packing OWA drones everywhere to no great effect based on which military "Union" faction was last in the room with President Zelenskyy before a decision

Even Ukraine's vaunted oil offensive is a bare plurality of total drone strikes
2/
The latest @RyanO_ChosenCoy thread detailing the bureaucratic issues of Ukraine's military in targeting Russian logistics makes clear Ukraine's military has inter-service and intra-service union/factional disputes that are positively American in scale.

3/
Read 6 tweets
Jan 19
Untrue⬇️

If the target of a US "rapid strike" was either the Kharg Island oil export facility or Iran's banking/financial system with a combination of explosives and non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse munitions, the Mullahs will fall.

COA🧵 Image
This post is typical of analytical thinking regarding strikes on Iran.

Note the complete lack of either Kharg island or the Iranian financial system on the list.

Regime Security Force as a distinct target set that needs a payroll is missing.

2/
There are two real courses of action (COA) for an American air campaign if Regime Change is the goal.

The Schwerpunkt - political center of gravity - of the Mullah regime is its ability to pay for the use Regime Security Forces & foreign hired mercenaries.

3/ Image
Read 8 tweets
Jan 18
This is one of the 3 major strategic mistakes of the Zelenskyy Government.⬇️

Putin has shown better, more consistent, and more effective leadership in the strategic bombing of Ukrainian electrical infrastructure than Zelinskyy has in striking Russia's railways.

1/
Russia remains uniquely vulnerable to a focused drone strike campaign on it's electrical railway traction step down transformers.

Zelenskyy's leadership not only ignored hitting that unique Russian vulnerability since Feb. 2022.

See the figure below⬇️

2/ Image
To give you an idea of the abject political-military failure of the Zelenskyy government in this regard one has to look at the industrial supply chain for those traction substations.

The Soviet Union had two major transformer factories: Tolyatti and Zaporozhye.

3/
Read 8 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!

:(