Thread by @TrentTelenko

This is going to be a long thread🧵on the ongoing collapse of the Russian Army and how it is shaping events in Ukraine, including the recent Russian chemical attack on Azov troops in Mariupol.

Saddle up, it's going to be a wild ride.

https://twitter.com/IAPonomarenko/status/1513602243148361735

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James Dunnigan's Strategy page -dot- com site put out a long analytical piece on Russian contract soldiers, conscription & the fading away of the Russian Army as a demographic consequence of the aging out of the
strategypage.com/htmw/htwin/202…
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...ethnic white Russian population inside the Russian Federation for the Ukraine War.

In a whole lot of words, Dunnigan lays out the current military power implications for the Russian Army of something @kamilkazani spoke to in the tweet here:

https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1505576226433343490

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Since Twitter analytics tells me almost no one bothers to click through a URL link. I am going to be clipping a lot of Dunnigan's text and creating a really long thread.

Bear with me, it will be worth it.

See:
"Even though over half of Russian military personnel are now

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...volunteers (serving on contracts) or career officers, the ability of the military to hold onto those contract (“contrakti”) soldiers is always weakened if there are a lot of casualties or too much chance of being sent to a combat zone. This manifested itself in 2022 when...
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...contract troops refused to renew contracts. Most of the combat units sent into Ukraine were composed of contract troops who were killed in large numbers.

When the survivors got back to Russia, either because of wounds or because many combat battalions returned because...
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...of heavy losses, there was a sudden shortage of contract soldiers. That was because most contract troops were near the end of their two-to-three-year contracts and refused to renew."

Short form: All the contract troops in the defeated columns NE & NW of Kyiv have been

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...burning up the cell & land line voice channels to all their relatives that they are getting their assets kicked and the Ukrainians are murdering them in job lots because of incompetent Russian Army officer leadership.
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And mind you, most of the 2-to-3 year “contrakti” we are talking about here were in the VDV, Interior Ministry armed police and a couple of show piece Russian Army Divisions acting as Regime Security Force Units.

Now comes Dunnigan's stinger...
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"The army had signed up many soldiers for the new (since 2016) short term (six to twelve month) contracts for former soldiers or conscripts willing to try it and found that there were far fewer vets willing to sign these short contracts because so few recent short-term...
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...contract soldiers had survived service in Ukraine."

If you missed the implications of that passage, let me explain.

The heart of all the non-Regime Security unit Russian Army BTG in Ukraine are filled up with 6-month “contrakti.”
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The Russian Army has an army destroying infantry replacement problem.

These 6-month “contrakti” are "peacing out" in June 2022 and there is nothing the Russian Army can do to stop it.

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Returning to Dunnigan's analysis:

"Soldiers with time left on their contracts were a liability because they told anyone who would listen that the Ukraine “operation” had been a disaster for Russian troops because of determined and well-armed (with anti-tank weapons)...
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...Ukrainians regularly ambushing columns of Russian armored vehicles and quickly destroying most of them.

While Russian troops were forbidden to take cell phones with them into Ukraine, the Ukrainians still had them to take photos and videos of the aftermath of these...

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... battles, and these were getting back to Russia where Russian veterans of the fighting confirmed they had seen the same grisly evidence of Russian losses or even survived one of these battles.

Russia played down these losses but the Ukrainian military maintained, and...

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...published daily updates of Russian losses in terms of soldiers killed, wounded or captured as well as equipment losses. After thirty days of fighting the Ukrainians were claiming that over a third of Russian troops sent into Ukraine had been killed, wounded or captured...

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...with even larger quantities of vehicles and weapons lost.

After six weeks the Russian military admitted that losses were heavier than previously acknowledged but would not give exact figures. In part that was because an accurate count was not possible until most of the...
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... combat units (BTGs, or Battalion Task Groups) had returned or confirmed as having been eliminated inside Ukraine and survivors assigned to other BTGs. Few BTGs were wiped out but many were reduced to half or a third of their original size (about 800 troops and several...
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...hundred vehicles).

Communications, even for BTG or brigade commanders, was unreliable inside Ukraine because of defective radios. That meant senior commanders of armies (which controlled over a dozen BTGs and many support units) were always using outdated data on unit...

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...strength and capabilities. This was reported back to Russia and was declared a state secret."

Side note: You really have to ask yourself how reliable those Russian Army reports going back are.

"Combat losing" equipment sold on the black market & men who never existed...
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...is almost as old as Colonels pocketing the pay for soldiers in their regiments who don't exist.

I've read about these combat loss corruption games going on in the Chinese "Warring state" period before the 1st Emperor.

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Given the failures of the Azart radio system via corrupt sales of same. There are copies of those Russian General officer reports from the withdrawn columns NE & NW of Kyiv in Ukrainian & Western intelligence hands.

The Ukrainians will be able to get a much better picture
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...than anyone else. They actually pay attention to such thing's both because they used to be part of the Soviet Army and their 8-year Donbas war with Russia giving them no choice but to reform or die.

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Dunnigan's analysis also tells us why we are seeing so many abandoned Russian vehicles in Ukraine and the implications for Russia in a long war.

"Without a lot of contract soldiers Russia could not replace BTG losses. Replacing lost tanks and other vehicles also proved to...
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...be more difficult than expected. On paper Russia had thousands of fully armed and equipped tanks and other armored vehicles in reserve for quickly replacing combat losses. Not surprisingly those reserve vehicles were often in bad shape, having been poorly maintained...
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...by conscripts and larcenous civilians who made a lot of money by taking key items from these vehicles and selling them on the black market.

These missing items were usually not reported missing until troops received these vehicles, which were generally mobile enough...

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...to be driven onto a railroad flatcar for transportation to units needing them.

Once received these reserve vehicles were found missing equipment and in need of extensive repairs to make the vehicles combat ready.

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So, between the Russian Army 6-month “contrakti” "Peacing Out" in June and the hollowed out by decades long corruption reserve vehicle park.

The unavoidable collapse sequence for the Russian Army is well underway.

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And it will never get better in a post-Putin Russian regime.

Again, returning to Dunnigan's analysis:

Conscription was in even worse shape, with the number of conscripts available declining each year. In April 2018 the Russian military only ended up with 128,000...
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... conscripts during the semiannual draft call. This was the lowest since 2006, a year when there were more young men available as well as more deferments and rampant draft dodging.

In the years since 2018 the decline was reversed by issuing fewer deferments, punishing...

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...more draft dodgers and enforcing laws against conscripts serving in combat zones. The one exception was if the fighting was in Russia and this was the excuse the government used as it claimed they were not invading Ukraine but reuniting Ukraine with Russia...

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...The Ukrainians as well as Russian conscripts and their families disagreed with this interpretation of the invasion.

Another reason for fewer conscripts is that there were fewer young men to conscript because of lower birth rates and more young men who were in poor...
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...physical shape, or addicted to drugs, or had a police record and considered more trouble than they are worth if conscripted. All this was expected but since the 1990s Russia has been seeking solutions and finding none that work well enough to keep the military up...

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...to strength.

Side bar:

What Dunnigan is talking about here is that the Russian Army has been accepting double digit percentages of what the US Army refers to as "Category IV" recruits for the last 30 years.

Think stupid, impulsive, prone to criminal violence that need
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... to be watched like hawks & supervised closely by an NCO Corps the Russian Army doesn't have.

This is an example of what letting those sorts of people in your Army in war means.

https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1510191354927796225

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And this:

https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1510636494612054016

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Returning to Dunnigan's analysis:

"The basic recruiting problem is two-fold. First, military service is very unpopular, and potential conscripts are increasingly successful at dodging the draft deliberately or otherwise. But the biggest problem is that the number...

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... of 18- year-olds is rapidly declining each year. By 2009 all draftees were born after the Soviet Union dissolved. That was when the birth rate went south year after year. Not so much because the Soviet Union was gone but more because of the economic collapse (caused by...
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...decades of communist misrule) that precipitated the collapse of the communist government. The number of available draftees went from 1.5 million a year in the early 1990s to less than half that today. Less than half those potential conscripts are showing up and many...

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...have criminal records or tendencies that help sustain the abuse of new recruits that have made military service so unsavory."

Now is time for another aside from Dunnigan to explain how truly awful Western intelligence is here on the Russian Army in the 21st Century.

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Russia's 18-year old conscript class fell from 1.5 million in the 1990's to less than 1/2 that in 2022.

Russia, as a nation of 143 million, has an 18-year old conscript manpower pool smaller than 1914 France with a population of 40 million.

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Various Western intelligence service connected elites have been speculating about Putin being sick with cancer as the reason he grabbed at Ukraine.

That is a poor excuse being thrown up as poop against the wall and hoping it sticks.

Nope, Demographics rule us all.

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Putin had to grab & assimilate Ukraine ASAP if Russia was going to halt it's slide into minor power status.

Putin tried & failed in 2014-2015.

2022 was his last chance.
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So why hasn't any of this kind of analysis reached Western leaders since the 1990's?

Bluntly, Western intelligence has turned Russian.

They tell Western leaders what they want to hear, not reality. It beats working.
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We can actually measure this by comparing what Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling (Ret.) (@MarkHertling). commander of U.S. Army Europe from 2011-2012, was reporting about the Ukrainian Army compared to the DoD computer model that predicted
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thebulwark.com/i-commanded-u-…

...Ukraine's fall in 72-96 hours.

"In December 2015, U.S. Army Europe formally established Joint Multinational Training Group – Ukraine (JMTG-U), where a multi-national team of Americans, Poles, Canadians, Lithuanians, and Brits began training Ukrainian battalions...

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...as combined arms teams. Command Sergeant Major Davenport sent me a note a few years ago saying Ukraine had formally established an NCO corps, with standardized training and leadership requirements. Henadii’s vision had become a reality, accelerated by...

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...the urgencies of the Russian existential threat."

The intelligence officials who wrote that DoD computer model literally didn't listen to the commander of U.S. Army Europe from 2011-2012 who told them something contrary to what the politicians of the Biden

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...Administration wanted to hear.

So, to sum up what our Russified Western Intelligence services can't see, 'cause they don't wanna.

The Russian Army is suffering an irreversible collapse sequence because

1. Russia can't keep it's contract troops of any sort. They are
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..."Peacing out" and telling everyone who can hear of draft age in Russia to run for the hills.

2. Because of #1, anyone who is combat trained will not be around to train/act as cadre for the next Russian conscript class.

3. Even if they were, Putin's 22 year run as...

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...corruptocrat-in-charge has hollowed out the Russian Army's reserve vehicles such that they will be no d--ned good & in too few numbers to equip the April 2022 Russian Army conscript class.

4. This means some time no later than June 2022 the Russian Army will have a
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...general collapse in the field such that Ukraine will over run Crimea as well as Donbas.

5. Putin is a dead man walking. The coercive power of the Russian state has collapsed. He simply cannot make anything better because there is a war on after 22 years of stealing
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...$125 billion from Russian state coffers. All Putin can do is make enemies by trying. Putin is costing his associates to much money and the power they want to keep. He is now a threat to their continued survival.

That observation brings us back to the West's
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Russified intelligence agencies. They are so bad they can't even get the down side right.

Of course whoever replaces Putin will be worse.

The downside in the coming the interregnum between Putin and solidification of power by his successor isn't loose nukes.
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It is the possibility that a vial of something a lot worse than COVID-19 will make it out of the Russian Gangster State.

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