Tweet

More from @kamilkazani

Kamil Galeev

@kamilkazani

May 30

Native Siberians and North Caucasians* are hugely overrepresented among the Russian casualties in Ukraine. Consider these estimates of the Free Buryatia Foundation. It looks like Russia is ready to fight till the last indigenous person, solving two problems at once

* There is however an exception in the North Caucasus. It is Chechnya. Compare two neighbouring regions Chechnya and Dagestan. Chechnya has 1,5 million people, Dagestan has 3,1 million. Despite being just about 2 times more populous than Chechnya it has 40 times more casualties

What does it mean?

1. Dagestanis fight in the regular Russian army, comprising disproportionate number of troops and of casualties in Ukraine
2. Chechens do *not* fight in the regular Russian army. Whatever badges they have, it doesn't matter. They're the Kadyrov's personal army

Read 39 tweets

Kamil Galeev

@kamilkazani

May 29

A military recruitment station in the very centre of St Petersburg, on the Palace Square. Inflatable Strelkov is inviting passerbys to sign an army contract. What is important here is that it is happening in the second largest city. Which means Russia is running off of manpower🧵

The Palace Square is located between the Winter Palace and the General Staff HQ (yellow). That's the very heart of St Petersburg, the second largest and most important city in the country. Moscow and St Petersburg are viewed as two capitals and have special place within Russia

Since the start of the war, the Russian authorities tried to expend provincials, most importantly South Siberians (Buryatia, Tuva) and Dagestanis, but saving the people from Moscow and St Petersburg. That explains a heavy imbalance in the casualties in Ukraine by region

Read 34 tweets

Kamil Galeev

@kamilkazani

May 28

Why Russia is more fragile than you think

Russia presents a paradox. It looks robust. Still, it tends to collapse from time to time to everyone's surprise. Why? Russia tends to avoid small manageable risks thus accumulating unmanageable ones. Some of them are purely biological🧵

What has always puzzled me about the Russian studies is this weird obsession with the "high culture" and the "people in power". Kremlenologists, Sovietologists & their modern followers tend to focus on everything high status. In other words they focus on the oldies

Everything high status is dead. By the time people climb up the hierarchy they're usually old. Yeah they hold power or symbolic capital and gonna hold it for awhile. But soon they're gonna die. Everything they loved, believed in, stood for will die with them and nobody will care

Read 26 tweets

Kamil Galeev

@kamilkazani

May 27

How long will this war go?

Andrey Illarionov used to be Putin's economic adviser, advocating for liberalisation of Russian economic policies in early 2000s. Later he turned into one of Putin's most outspoken critics. I very much like his sober, realistic and informed analysis 🧵

In the course of this war various Western experts tried to make prognoses - how long could this war go? Illarionov collected some of those estimates and listed them in his ЖЖ (livejournal) in a chronological order. I think this list is very informative aillarionov.livejournal.com/1301538.html

@KofmanMichael

March 5, 2022. @KofmanMichael gave Russian forces three weeks before they are exhausted in terms of combat effectiveness, which could lead to a a ceasefire or a settlement

Read 19 tweets

Kamil Galeev

@kamilkazani

May 26

https://twitter.com/jordanschnyc/status/1529651938052263937

I have no idea. Mosca's works on Qing diplomacy indicate that early Manchu rulers made direct parallels between the Qing and the Ottomans. In his letter to another Manchu prince, the emperor Qianlong described China as one of great empires similar to the Mughals and the Ottomans

https://twitter.com/jordanschnyc/status/1529651938052263937

Two things are interesting about this letter. First of all, it's written in Manchu. Indeed, one of major points of the New Qing historiography is that the self-representation of the Qing rulers varied greatly depending on the language they were writing on

When writing in Chinese Qianlong and others acted in accordance with the Confucian tradition, presenting themselves as traditional Chinese rulers. But their Manchu-writteb texts make a completely different impression, more of an Inner Asia rather than traditionally Chinese empire

Read 6 tweets

Kamil Galeev

@kamilkazani

May 25

War and Procedure

It's not the Russian regulars who are bearing the main burden of war in Eastern Ukraine. It is the troops of pro-Russian puppet states Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic. Just now 105th and 107th regiments of the DPR refused to fight 🧵

When Russia took control over parts of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts it didn't annex or unite them. They created two states: DPR and LPR, which were formally sovereign and separate from each other. This procedural decision backfired now with DPR fighters refusing to go to the LNR

Watch this video with fighters of DPR's 107th regiments. They just spent three months fighting for Mariupol. Now they complain that their commanders want to send them fight to the LPR which is a "completely different republic", presenting them as "some Cossack volunteers"