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🧵
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Slavonic = "Russian" religious space used to be really weird until the 16-17th cc. I mean, weird from the Western, Latin standpoint. It was not until second half of the 16th c., when the Jesuit-educated Orthodox monks from Poland-Lithuania started to rationalise & systematise it based on the Latin (Jesuit, mostly) model
One could frame the modern, rationalised Orthodoxy as a response to the Counterreformation. Because it was. The Latin world advanced, Slavonic world retreated. So, in a fuzzy borderland zone roughly encompassing what is now Ukraine-Belarus-Lithuania, the Catholic-educated Orthodox monks re-worked Orthodox institutions modeling them after the Catholic ones
By the mid-17th c. this new, Latin modeled Orthodox culture had already trickled to Muscovy. And, after the annexation of the Left Bank Ukraine in 1654, it all turned into a flood. Eventually, the Muscovite state accepted the new, Latinised Orthodoxy as the established creed, and extirpated the previous faith & the previous culture
1. This book (“What is to be done?”) has been wildly, influential in late 19-20th century Russia. It was a Gospel of the Russian revolutionary left. 2. Chinese Communists succeeded the tradition of the Russian revolutionary left, or at the very least were strongly affected by it.
3. As a red prince, Xi Jinping has apparently been well instructed in the underlying tradition of the revolutionary left and, very plausibly, studied its seminal works. 4. In this context, him having read and studied the revolutionary left gospel makes perfect sense
5. Now the thing is. The central, seminal work of the Russian revolutionary left, the book highly valued by Chairman Xi *does* count as unreadable in modern Russia, having lost its appeal and popularity long, long, long ago. 6. In modern Russia, it is seen as old fashioned and irrelevant. Something out of museum
I have always found this list a bit dubious, not to say self-contradictory:
You know what does this Huntingtonian classification remind to me? A fictional “Chinese Encyclopaedia” by an Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges:
Classification above sounds comical. Now why would that be? That it because it lacks a consistent classification basis. The rules of formal logic prescribe us to choose a principle (e.g. size) and hold to it.
If Jorge Borges breaks this principle, so does Samuel P. Huntington.
Literacy rates in European Russia, 1897. Obviously, the data is imperfect. Still, it represents one crucial pattern for understanding the late Russian Empire. That is the wide gap in human capital between the core of empire and its Western borderland.
The most literate regions of Empire are its Lutheran provinces, including Finland, Estonia & Latvia
Then goes, roughly speaking, Poland-Lithuania
Russia proper has only two clusters of high literacy: Moscow & St Petersburg. Surrounded by the vast ocean of illiterate peasantry
This map shows how thin was the civilisation of Russia proper comparatively speaking. We tend to imagine old Russia, as the world of nobility, palaces, balls, and duels. And that is not wrong, because this world really existed, and produced some great works of art and literature
The OKBM Afrikantova is the principal producer of marine nuclear reactors, including reactors for icebreakers, and for submarines in Russia. Today we will take a brief excursion on their factory floor 🧵
Before I do, let me introduce some basic ideas necessary for the further discussion. First, reactor production is based on precision metalworking. Second, modern precision metalworking is digital. There is simply no other way to do it at scale.
How does the digital workflow work? First, you do a design in the Computer Aided Design (CAD) software. Then, the Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) software turns it into the G-code. Then, a Computer Numerical Controller (CNC) reads the code and guides the tool accordingly
Relative popularity of three google search inquiries in the post-USSR. Blue - horoscope. Red - prayer. Green - namaz. Most of Russia is blue, primarily googling horoscopes. Which suggests most of the population being into some kind of spirituality rather than anything "trad".
The primary contiguous red area is not in Russia at all, but in West Ukraine. Which is indeed the only remotely "conservative" (in the American sense) area of the East Slavic world. Coincidentally or not, it had never been ruled by Russia, except for a short period in 1939-1991
In the blue and occasionally red sea, there are two regions that primarily google namaz, the Islamic prayer. That is Moscow & Tatarstan