The 2nd comment below pointing to the Russian Federation suffering from 40% of their railway rolling stock being sidelined by bearing shortages come Feb 2022 represents a transportation calamity.
There is a reason I've hammered on the destruction of the Russian Army tactical truck fleet followed by the impressment and loss of Russian civilian trucks in Ukraine.
5/
Global and national just-in-time supply chains fail catastrophically when transportation capability is mildly disrupted.
While the fall of Russian imports from Western sanctions have reduced the need for Russian railway rolling stock.
The mass rail movement for the Feb 2022
6/
...Ukrainian invasion massively used up much of Russia's railway bearing reserves to get the huge mechanized forces in place.
Furthermore, the Russian mobilization is now making use of that Western import railway capability to...
7/
...move and support 'Mobiks' deep in Ukraine by rail.
These transportation trends are pointing to Russia suffering a Venezuela style failed state economic collapse as early as the winter of 2022-2023 due to a lack of rail rolling stock & trucks to distribute goods.
8/
The economic repercussions of Russian energy & food suddenly just falling out the world economy from this pending "transportation apocalypse" beggars the imagination.
Western national security and economic policy makers need to be putting together crisis teams to evaluate
9/
...the implications for both the world economy and for obtaining an armistice using access to railway cassette bearings as a leaver to obtain to two most important concessions -- Pre-2014 Ukrainian borders & getting back Ukraine's kidnapped populations -- that will make a
10/
...lasting cessation of hostilities possible.
The Russians have already started eating themselves inside Ukraine.
Defeat there will see exactly this sort of collapse in Russia.
The various Russian Oligarchs raising private military organizations right now looks a whole lot like Lebanon in the political-military run up right before it fell to Civil War.
Western governments failing to plan for Russian defeat/transportation collapse, so as to manage the transition to a stable post-war world, will put post-Putin Russia on the slippery slope to the hell of becoming a continent spanning Lebanese Civil War with loose bugs,
12/
... loose nukes & novachuk gas equipped sprayer drones.
It may not be possible to avoid this Russian meltdown collapse, but failing to plan for the possibility is planning to fail.
13/
If the USA had a real foreign human intelligence capability.
Now would be the time to be making openings to all of those Russian oligarchs to cushion the Russian transition with minimal bloodshed & economic disruption.
Unfortunately the 1970's Church Committee hearings...
14/
...destroyed that US capability without replacement.
This means the West & the USA in particular using either Ukrainian or Israeli human intelligence assets in Russia to make those approaches.
15/
Given the De-escalation Faction in the Biden Administration's irrational fixations of not escalating the Russo-Ukrainian War by denying ATACMS, F-16's & M-1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine & restarting the Iran Nuclear deal blocking the use of Israeli agents doing these approaches.
16/
We are left in the position of being spectators praying for the best & expecting the worse.
17/17 End
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The additional accumulated damage - beyond revisits to already damaged refineries - to the Russian power grid and POL supply chain in the next two months may speed this up to four months, to late November 2026, AKA just in Time for the US elections.
Russia lost 83 power 2/7
...sub-stations since 1 July 2026 in occupied Ukraine.
Russia will have to strip its own unique power grid to replace these losses, shutting down supply in "less significant" parts of Russia.
This 2023 post is where I posed the question of how large Russian riverine/littoral/brown water logistical efforts were to support Russian occupation forces in southern Ukraine. 3/
Given the massive Ukrainian victory in the "Battle of the Azov Sea."
We can say Ukraine has achieved “Usable Drone Air Superiority" over the Sea of Azov in exactly the way the Chinese would in the waters around, & air over, Taiwan when it invades.
🧵
The "Battle of the Azov Sea" shares a lot of historical elements of both the WW2 "Battle of the Bismarck Sea" and the slaughter of Allied oil tankers in 1942 during Operation Drumbeat (Paukenschlag) and Operation Neuland.
2/
The Battle of the Bismarck Sea was the slaughter of 12 ships of a 16 ship Imperial Japanese convoy of eight IJA freighters and eight IJN destroyers moving 6,900 IJA troops.
Tipped off by IJN seaplane deployments & radio intercepts, only 2,700 IJA troops arrived w/o weapons or ammo.
3/
I asked @grok to document this Russian policy of atrocity at the link, excerpt:
"February 24, 2022–present (Full-scale Russian invasion): The scale escalated dramatically. As of May 2026, the WHO had verified more than 3,000 attacks on healthcare via its Surveillance System for Attacks on Health Care (SSA). A coalition of organizations (including PHR, eyeWitness, Truth Hounds, etc.) documented ~3,095 attacks, with 1,632 damaging or destroying hospitals and clinics"
When I've talked about the legacy of Soviet industrial gigantism (one big factory) making Putin era Russia far more vulnerable to a drone strategic bombing campaign.
I've talked about this vulnerability in a couple of previous threads. Here is a shorter one:
Putin's decades long "Russian exceptionalism" propaganda campaign, that says WW2 was won on the Eastern Front, has made Russians incapable of seeing this.
There is so much to object to here that I'm going to restate some basic design observations on the FP-5 to clarify how the Russian reflexive control data fed AI slop that is polluting public discussions of the FP-5.
1. The FP-5 Flamingo is about four times the launch weight of a BGM-109 Tomahawk (i.e. ~13,200 lb), and 2-3 times the range (i.e. ~1,620 nmi) while carrying twice the warhead mass (i.e. ~2,000 lb).
2/
2. The FP-5 design concept is modelled on the USAF MGM-13 Mace GLCM as Fire Point told Ukrainian military analysts - but designed with modern technology to be extremely cheap to make (claimed 1/6 the cost of a Tomahawk - likely not counting the engine cost).