The missile attack on Przewodow has become a Rorschach test for how strong the West’s de-escalation faction’s "directed cognition" is in dealing with Reality in the Russo-Ukrainian war.
The “It was a Ukrainian missile” narrative doesn't match reality. This🧵will explain
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...why.
**Directed cognition, in rough layman terms, means making a quick & incorrect analysis from limited data and only picking more data to support that analysis.
The way to cure a directed cognition conclusion is to audit all the available data.
To do this I’m going to walk you through 5V55K missile design, fuzing, weapon effects, and some Ukrainian evidence. I'm going to leave radar & electronic warfare for another thread.
Below are infographics of the 5V55K & a data table. 3/
The 5V55K is a command link guided missile with a peak velocity of Mach 6.7 and a ~300lb warhead similar to the Buk warhead that downed the MH-17.
The 5V55K can be steered in any direction you want with the radio uplink from the 5N63 FLAP LID. ausairpower.net/APA-Grumble-Ga… 3/
The Ukrainian MoD video in this tweet & photo below shows a night time engagement and proper functioning of a S-300 missile proximity fuze and fragmentation warhead.
The spherical explosion/fragmentation was designed into the missile warhead for
Most current Western surface to air missiles have three fuze functions.
o Proximity
o Super quick impact
o Time
The proximity function is to set off a large fragmentation warhead so the fragments can destroy the target. The impact fuze
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... is for backup/secondary ground attack.
The time function is so the missile detonates when it misses as a safety measure.
Mid-to-late Cold War Era Soviet designed SAM's generally did not include this time feature, reasons.
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Below you see what fragments from a Buk warhead did to a MH-17 wing over Donbass and one of the "hour glass" shaped fragments looked after impact.
The wide dispersal between impacts was due to the missile/airliner closing velocities interacting w/the warhead fragment burst.
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These two photo clips show the 5V55K's "5Zh93" warhead in situ with a wartime shoot down on the left and a pre-war post launch accident Ukrainian police investigation.
The fuzes in both situations failed.
The shot down missile broke apart without the impact fuze being 8/
...initiated and in the pre-war photo it was never activated.
When you are firing the 5V55K in the ground to ground mode the proximity fuze function is deactivated, if only to prevent it being jammed & detonating before target impact.
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All of that previous data was to give you background to understand what you are going to see below, a July 2022 Russian land attack S-300 missile strike in Mykolaivska.
No 300lb fragmentation warhead built by mankind can dig a hole like that.
Almaz data and videos of the 5V55K show the 5V55K burn duration is around 8-10 seconds to reach Mach 6.7, roughly 2.1 kilometer per second
What you are seeing with the S-300 crater is mach 5(+) missiles dig deep holes and move a lot of dirt at near peak F = M*(V^2) impact.
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To calibrate your eyes to the "effective explosive power" of that impact, see this WW2 weapon effects diagrams.
Go back and look at the man in the Tweet 10/ photo clip versus what you see in the diagrams below.
The 5V55K doesn't carry 4K of explosives, just velocity.
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The "Przewodow Narrative" claims that it was an errant Ukrainian S-300 launcher fired a 5V55K missile from a nearby SAM base (see maps) that landed in a Przewodow Poland field.
Nearby 5V55K launches would be hypersonic into Poland.
The 5V55K's warhead was steel, not tungsten like the M31A1 AW, but massed 100-lbs more.
Even the decayed supersonic, very long range impact that caused that crater would have initiated the impact fuze train function.
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So that photo all but rules out the "nearby Ukrainian 5V55K missile launch" narrative.
The crater is too small and there is no fragmentation damage on the tractor and cart consistent with a "5Zh93" warhead in airburst or impact modes.
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Even the idea of a partial functioning solid rocket motor from a nearby Ukrainian 5V55K missile launcher is a nonstarter based on this thedrive -dot- com article.
There would have been burning defective solid rocket fuel all over the Przewodow crater. 19/ thedrive.com/the-war-zone/r…
Now some more Ukrainian Evidence via this Oleksii Hetman Facebook post that both details S-300 missile self-destruct & how the Russians modify 5V55K warheads for land attack use of same.
Everything about the Przewodow missile strike weapon effects is consistent with a 150km(+) flight Russian land attack modified 5V55K aimed at Ukraine's power interconnect with Poland fired from Belarus.
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Polish NSC says it was a Ukrainian missile. They claimed earlier to have NATO E-3 tracking data.
I call Bulls--t.
The idea that a 1977 vintage rotating radar antenna looking the wrong way 4.5 of every 6 seconds can track a mach 6.7, low RCS, crossing target is risible.
22/End
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Actually, the Soviet Union in the "Great Patriotic War" did suffer worse casualties and win.
It is that fact which powers the "Russian WW2 exceptionalism" myth that Putin used to zombify Russians over 20 years to make suicidal assaults over and over again.
Historic war mobilization production curves are heavily back loaded.
That is, the production rates of B-17's and B-24's bombers in the 3rd quarter of 1943 versus the 3rd quarter of 1944 showed a much higher production rate in late 1944.
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We are mid-way through the 3rd quarter of the 2025 where Ukraine's OWA drone annual production goal was 40,000.
Ukraine should be around 850-950 OWA drones a week in August 2025 and will be close to 1,200 a week in the 4th qtr. of the 2025.
Both polities had monumental hubris, the conviction that all was permitted, and that they were invincible.
The committed Nazis still believed they were winning in March-April 1945.
Japanese 'Yamato-damashii' beliefs took nukes to break.
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This Russian exceptionalist belief in the immunity to the consequences of their own actions is also why the Russians continue their insane suicidal assaults.
What is interesting for me is that the pre-2022 Western intelligence assessments of the Russian Army credited it with lots of tactical pipelines to move fuel.
Those would be far more useful in moving water than trucks...yet...where are they?
These pipelines seem to have fallen into that same logistical 'assume they exist but don't' black hole as Russian truck D-rings & pallets, tactical truck trailers, and Russia's "superior" tooth to tail ratio that acts more like 1863 Union Army where...
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..."every soldier is a logistical manual laborer when not in combat".
Water is heavy. Pipelines are more efficient that trucks. Yet all we are seeing is Russian water trucks?
Who stole the Russian Army tactical pipelines? Or were they nothing but disinformation?
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While we are getting Western intelligence assessments that continue to point out Russia's vast increases in production of military materiel, especially tanks, IFVs and APCs (from the same people who claimed Russia would over run Ukraine in 3-to-5 days)
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...claiming Russia is "obviously winning."
We are at the same time seeing economic signs of Russian "End Run Production."
The Russian wartime economy is functioning hand to mouth with oil sales revenues because all of the foreign exchange reserves are spent or frozen.
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Given what happened to DoD procurement after the 2nd Clinton Adm. annihilation of military specifications, which killed the configuration mgt, systems engineering & production engineering disciplines in defense contractors.
I've written about this issue for seven years starting on the Chicagoboyz weblog with a post titled:
"The 737 MAX and the Death of MIL-STD-499A SYSTEM ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT
March 24th, 2019"
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In 2020 I was talking how the decay of systems engineering skills are affecting US Navy nuclear sub safe programs due to the lack of good systems engineering talent in Defense contractors.