Thread by @TrentTelenko

This thread🧵 will be my Ukraine War overview.

Russia is losing 2/3 of a battalion combat group of equipment a day and we are into day 79.

That's over 52.6 full battalion equipment sets out of the 120 initially sent into Ukraine & ~180 over all in the Russian Ground Forces

1/

IOW, 43% of the total committed Russian mechanized combat vehicle fleet and likely the best 29% of the total Russian combat vehicle fleet have been destroyed or captured.

Percentage casualty rate wise, this is the institutional equivalent of the III Armored Corps in Ft Hood
2/

... Texas catching a high yield tac-nuke for the US Army.

Per the Oryx visual compilations, Ukraine is losing one vehicle destroyed or captured for every 3.5 Russian vehicles.

If the current Ukrainian casualty rates match the 2014-2015 fighting.

3/

Ukraine is taking about one casualty for between 5 & 7 Russian casualties right now.

The Ukrainian diaspora email list I participated in carefully collated Ukraine versus Russian casualties in the 2014-2015 period of Donbas fighting.
4/

The aggregate Ukraine vs Russia losses in 2014-2015 were:

AFU Losses in total: ~3,000 "KIA";
AFU Non-Combat Losses: 1,294;
AFU Combat Losses: ~2,000 KIA;
Russian Combat Losses: ~15,000 KIA;

5/

This yields two kill ratios:

Aggregate Kill Ratio: ~5:1 counting all AFU losses;

Combat Kill Ratio: ~7.3:1 counting only AFU losses due to Enemy Action;

Note: "AFU" is Armed Forces Ukraine
6/

An unknown are the claimed ~800 Ukrainian MIAs. If those men are counted as KIAs, it pushes that kill ratio number for the AFU down.

Suffice it to say I expected Ukraine to do far, far, better than most defense analysts when this latest round of fighting kicked off.🤷

7/

Chief Military Prosecutor of the AFU, Gen Matios stated in this article:

Shocking statistics of non-battle casualties of Ukraine's army
web.archive.org/web/2016081515…
6/

Chief Military Prosecutor of the AFU, Gen Matios stated in this article:

Shocking statistics of non-battle casualties of Ukraine's army
web.archive.org/web/2016081515…
8/

An unknown are the claimed ~800 Ukrainian MIAs. If those men are counted as KIAs, it pushes that kill ratio number for the AFU down.

Suffice it to say I expected Ukraine to do far, far, better than most defense analysts when this latest round of fighting kicked off.🤷

7/

Chief Military Prosecutor of the AFU, Gen Matios stated in this article:

Shocking statistics of non-battle casualties of Ukraine's army
web.archive.org/web/2016081515…
8/

...that the single largest cause of AFU non-combat losses was lethal medical conditions, resulting from inadequate medical screening of personnel who were being called up during the conscription campaign, that covered men of up to 45 years of age.

9/

As the list-admin observed at the time:

"1. Russians are accustomed to taking heavy combat losses and the political blowback is much smaller than would be seen in any Western nation;

2.The high combat loss rates deplete the aggregated experience pool in the Russian military
10/

... dumbing it down, and making it more likely to take foolish risks, and offer bad assessments to the nation's political leaders;

The realities of (1) & (2) have been observed repeatedly in the Ukrainian war, and given the losses sustained in middle ranking and junior
11/

...officers in the campaign, the propensity to blind optimism and the tendency to starting fights that sane people would not start will obviously continue for decades.

The punchline is that the culture of yes men surrounding the leader, the general insensitivity to combat...
12/

...losses, and the depletion of talent and expertise will make the Russians prone to starting fights they cannot win for the foreseeable future.

Put differently, the Ukrainian war has made the Russians much more dangerous than they were before this war."
13/

The previous passage was why I was stating Twitter in January & early February 2022 that the Russians really were going to go for a full regime change invasion.

The reason I didn't surface any of this then was Russian disinformation had so overrun Western government policy
14/

...makers, the ranks of senior intelligence officials, and corporate media that anyone mentioning it without months of videos showing incompetent Russian military performance versus superb Ukrainian combat tactics would be labeled a flipped out kook.

15/

The applicable proverbs which applied while I waited to surface this:

"There are none so blind as those who do not wish to see."

"There none so deaf as those who do not wish to hear."

16/

Simply _No One_ wanted to see or hear that the Russian Military is really a uniformed version of the movie "Idiocracy."

25,000 dead Russian soldiers still isn't enough for many of them right now.

"Directed Cognition" does that.

17/

For the rest of you, we have this BBC screaming headline:

Ukraine entering new phase of war, defence minister says - BBC
bbc.com/news/live/worl…
18/

Ukraine is going for a one million citizen military mobilization.

The six years of Dombas fighting conscript classes plus prewar Ukrainian military is ~650,000 right there.

Add in the mobilizing territorials, & yeah, one million Ukrainians under arms are here by 30 June.
19/

These Ukrainian reinforcements include the six conscript classes who fought in Donbas in 2016-2021.

That is, the Ukrainians are calling combat veterans back to the colors fighting in the same areas that they served six to nine months of combat in, working with NCO's
20/

...who are already fighting there.

Russian conscripts present in Ukraine & being called up are barely trained greenhorns with no NCO's to speak of.

Effectively, 100 Ukrainians are generating the same combat power as 300 Russian troops.
21/

And this combat effectiveness value ratio is increasingly in Ukraine's favor over time.

As the Russians lose more and more of their best soldiers & vehicles.

Their greenhorn replacements die faster & kill fewer Ukrainians.

22/

The Russian offensives at Izyum and Severodonietsk failing beyond recovery is confirmation that my prediction of the Russian tactical truck fleet collapsing right now is close to the mark.

Russia has lost the ability to do more than a single push out of the Donbas, and then
23/

... only with civilian trucks.

We are in the beginnings of a Russian Lanchester square law curve collapse.
24/

https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1520885569651617792

Like Japanese airpower in WW2's Pacific theater. There is no easy way to analytically predict when that sort of collapse happens.

I've publicly stated on Chicago Talk Radio that the end of June is when the trend lines say the Russian Army falls apart.

25/

Ukrainian J2 MGen Budanov was just interviewed & predicting the Russians will break in August.

Kyiv, in the first week of the war, called out for all Ukrainians anywhere with any military experience to come home and fight.

26/

Ukrainians are returning from all over English speaking world. This is a enormous pool of manpower with diverse skills.

Whatever else you want to say, in the manpower game. Russia has lost absolutely.

27/End