Daily reminder that Putin's army of invasion was trained on the Rheinmetall-built training centre Mulino. In 2014 they "left" and construction was finished by "Гарнизон" company, probably a proxy. 100% of its imports came from Germany, last Rheinmetall shipments coming in 2019
In 2011 Rheinmetall got a contract for building a training center in Mulino, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast. They modelled it after the training center of Bundeswehr in Altmark. They planned to build "the most advanced system of its kind worldwide"
Mulino started in 2011 was the high point of Serdyukov's reforms. Two things you must understand about Serdyukov ministry:
1. No other minister of defence made such a big focus on the land army 2. No other minister of defence was so eager to import ready solutions from the West
Russian media was pretty open about it back then. See an article from 2011 kp.ru/daily/25636.4/… Now their straightforwardness may sound weird. Back then it was normal. Russia really started to hide its degree of cooperation with Western (German mostly) partners only after 2014
They say that Rheinmetall "rebuilt" it. Not quite true. Gorohovetsky centre in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast is the largest in Russia. But it got obsolete. So new German-built Mulino was created very close to it, but on a new field. It was easier to build from scratch than modernize
In September 2021 Vladimir Putin visited Mulino to see the main phase of the Russian-Belarusian strategic manoeuvres "West-2021". Few months later the same troops were sent in Ukraine. Check Kremlin's website kremlin.ru/events/preside…
Mulino was finished in 2020 (FYI: the last Rheinmetall shipments are dated by 2019). My sources say though that Mulino doesn't meet the planned standards. Russian proxies were stealing too much. Otherwise Russians might have the NATO-level training centre
(Putin in Mulino, 2021)
You see Putin coming to the West-2021 manoeuvres with Minister of Defence Shoygu and the Chief of General Staff Gerasimov
The sign says: "Putin came to the main phase of manoeuvres in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast"
Indeed. The only modern Western built centre Mulino is located here
That's Klaus Eberhardt who signed the deal to build Mulino in 2011 as the CEO of @RheinmetallAG
I urge the media to question this person regarding his role in building the Putin's war machine. He started construction of the centre to train the future Russian army of invasion
I urge the media to question this person regarding Rheinmetall's ties with the Russian "Гарнизон" company that finished Mulino after Rheinmetall "left" in 2014. Did he supply them with equipment to finish Mulino *after* 2014?
We urgently need the investigation of @RheinmetallAG involvement in building Mulino, the only modern Western-standard training centre that Russia has. That's where Putin's army of invasion was trained. That's where he launched his last strategic manoeuvres before marching West
@RheinmetallAG CEO Klaus Eberhardt started building the Truppenübungsplatz Altmark-modeled training centre for Putin in 2011. And there are strong indications that the CEO Armin Papperger continued the project *after* 2014 through via a Russian proxy "Гарнизон". See data for 2019
Until a few days ago a press release about the @RheinmetallAG winning "a major order in Russia" (=Mulino) was still on their website rheinmetall-defence.com/en/rheinmetall…. It was there on July 5 when I wrote a thread on their role in building the Putin's war machine
Since then they deleted it
Well, I knew that the @RheinmetallAG are gonna to delete the article on their involvement in building Putin's best training centre where the Russian army was preparing for their march west
That's why I screenshoted it
Once again, I urge the media to investigate the @RheinmetallAG role in preparing the Putin's army for the war. That includes their connections with the Гарнизон company which was finishing the construction after the Rheinmetall "left" Mulino in 2014. Question CEO Armin Papperger
I also urge the media to investigate:
1. Other (German) suppliers of "Гарнизон" which was building Putin's training Mulino 2. German politicians who allowed this to happen. Did they do it knowingly? That must be investigated
Putin's war machine is fully import dependent. It was supplied from all over the world. In very rare cases it had such exotic equipment suppliers as Turkey, Brazil or China. Most equipment however is Western/Japan/Tigers. It's *not* Chinese. And most importantly, German
No other nation bears so massive and so direct responsibility for preparing Putin's army for this war as Germany. In this regard I find German stance quite cynical. It were your companies that armed Putin and your politicians that allowed it to happen. Investigate them. The end🧵
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
The primary weakness of this argument is that being true, historically speaking, it is just false in the context of American politics where the “communism” label has been so over-used (and misapplied) that it lost all of its former power:
“We want X”
“No, that is communism”
“We want communism”
Basically, when you use a label like “communism” as a deus ex machina winning you every argument, you simultaneously re-define its meaning. And when you use it to beat off every popular socio economic demand (e.g. universal healthcare), you re-define communism as a synthesis of all the popular socio economic demands
Historical communism = forced industrial development in a poor, predominantly agrarian country, funded through expropriation of the peasantry
(With the most disastrous economic and humanitarian consequences)
Many are trying to explain his success with some accidental factors such as his “personal charisma”, Cuomo's weakness etc
Still, I think there may be some fundamental factors here. A longue durée shift, and a very profound one
1. Public outrage does not work anymore
If you look at Zohran, he is calm, constructive, and rarely raises his voice. I think one thing that Mamdani - but almost no one else in the American political space is getting - is that the public is getting tired of the outrage
Outrage, anger, righteous indignation have all been the primary drivers of American politics for quite a while
For a while, this tactics worked
Indeed, when everyone around is polite, and soft (and insincere), freaking out was a smart thing to do. It could help you get noticed
People don’t really understand causal links. We pretend we do (“X results in Y”). But we actually don’t. Most explanations (= descriptions of causal structures) are fake.
There may be no connection between X and Y at all. The cause is just misattributed.
Or, perhaps, X does indeed result in Y. but only under a certain (and unknown!) set of conditions that remains totally and utterly opaque to us. So, X->Y is only a part of the equation
And so on
I like to think of a hypothetical Stone Age farmer who started farming, and it worked amazingly, and his entire community adopted his lifestyle, and many generations followed it and prospered and multiplied, until all suddenly wiped out in a new ice age
1. Normative Islamophobia that used to define the public discourse being the most acceptable form of racial & ethnic bigotry in the West, is receding. It is not so much dying as rather - failing to replicate. It is not that the old people change their views as that the young do not absorb their prejudice any longer.
In fact, I incline to think it has been failing to replicate for a while, it is just that we have not been paying attention
Again, the change of vibe does not happen at once. The Muslim scare may still find (some) audience among the more rigid elderly, who are not going to change their views. But for the youth, it is starting to sound as archaic as the Catholic scare of know nothings
Out of date
2. What is particularly interesting regarding Mamdani's victory, is his support base. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that its core is comprised of the young (and predominantly white) middle classes, with a nearly equal representation of men and women
What does Musk vs Trump affair teach us about the general patterns of human history? Well, first of all it shows that the ancient historians were right. They grasped something about nature of politics that our contemporaries simply can’t.
Let me give you an example. The Arab conquest of Spain
According to a popular medieval/early modern interpretation, its primary cause was the lust of Visigoth king Roderic. Aroused by the beautiful daughter of his vassal and ally, count Julian, he took advantage of her
Disgruntled, humiliated Julian allied himself with the Arabs and opens them the gates of Spain.
Entire kingdom lost, all because the head of state caused a personal injury to someone important.
One thing you need to understand about wars is that very few engage into the long, protracted warfare on purpose. Almost every war of attrition was planned and designed as a short victorious blitzkrieg
And then everything went wrong
Consider the Russian war in Ukraine. It was not planned as a war. It was not thought of as a war. It was planned as a (swift!) regime change allowing to score a few points in the Russian domestic politics. And then everything went wrong
It would not be an exaggeration to say that planning a short victorious war optimised for the purposes of domestic politics is how you *usually* end up in a deadlock. That is the most common scenario of how it happens, practically speaking