Trent Telenko Profile picture
Mar 23 19 tweets 6 min read Read on X
We are seeing a lot of posts and articles on X about Ukraine's OWA drone strategic bombing campaign against Russian refineries .

People, including Jake Sullivan over at the Biden Adm. NSC think this is about AFU cutting off Russian oil.

They're wrong. It's about explosives.
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The Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries are less about POL than reduction of nitrogen,ammonia and methanol feed stocks for Russian explosives and propellants for it's artillery and missile production.

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Ukrainian OWA drones are engaged in strategic counter battery fire against the Russian artillery supply chain providing the explosive fillings & propellent for shells, rockets and missiles.

[This also has knock on effects for Russian fertilizer production.]

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Nitrogen, ammonia and methanol are the bell book and candle of chemical feedstocks that Russian refineries supply to it's war machine.

Fixing nitrogen is especially key in making high explosives.

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When the US EPA talks about crude oil refining, it mentions nitrogen thusly:

"Undesirable elements such as sulfur, nitrogen, and oxygen are removed by hydrodesulfurization, hydrotreating, chemical sweetening, and acid gas removal."

5/
epa.gov/sites/default/…
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When you look up Russian Methanol production on Statistica, it reflects Russia's huge petrochemical refinery infrastructure.


6/statista.com/statistics/126…
The International Energy Agency's "Ammonia Technology Roadmap" says Russia is about 8% of the world Ammonia production capability.


7/iea.org/reports/ammoni…
When you look at modern explosives and artillery shell/rocket propellent on Wikipedia, a lot falls out that shows what Ukraine is up to with it's campaign against Russian refineries.

1. RDX and HMX are made from Formaldehyde that is made from Methanol and ammonia (both of

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1. Con't ...which are oil refinery products) via Hexamethylenetetramine.

2. TNT is made from Toluene, which is a refinery by product of gasoline.

3. Nitroglycerine is a made from Nitrogen, is a biodiesel by product, and is used to make #2 TNT.

9/
4. Ammonium perchlorate for rocket fuel comes from ammonia, for which see #1.

So, we have a lot of evidence here that Ukraine's anti-refinery campaign is more about removing oil refinery made chemical feedstocks for Russia's artillery supply chain than cutting off oil money

10/
...or fuel to the Russian Army. Yet, before I posted this, no one seems to have noticed any of that.

And everyone, especially the Jake Sullivan lead Biden Adm. National Security Council is screaming oil.

What's going on?

11/ft.com/content/98f15b…
Two things are happening here.

First, Illia Ponomarenko (@IAPonomarenko) is exactly right as to how Russian Reflexive Control Information Warfare has captured Jake Sullivan's crowd at the Biden Administration National Security Council.

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The second thing is US intelligence on Russia's artillery logistics and associated economic supply chain has sucked rocks for more than 80 years.

The CIA based all of it's Soviet artillery logistics projections on pilfered Warsaw Pact documents...

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...and mirror imaging pallets & forklifts on the Soviets without ever giving any collection priority to the problem or actually looking at chemical feedstocks.

The 80 year feedstock & forklift miss points to the intelligence validation step as a threat to career promotion

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...inside intelligence agencies.

It won't let senior intelligence analysts feed to senior politicians what they want to hear.

Their poor 1980's Iran-Iraq War intelligence product reflected this careertist patron-client defect.

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When the Lockheed Martin WARSIM software development team went to US Army TMs/FMs, the OPFOR World Equipment Guide and AMSAA for Russian log-data, it was INA (Item not Available) because "mirror imaging was good enough."


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What we are seeing with the combination of 80(+) years of intelligence dysfunction & the JD degree spin doctor run NSC is the ultimate American Government expression of the Dunning - Kruger Effect.


17/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E…
We have people running the US Russo-Ukrainian War security policy at the NSC that have absolute confidence in bad intelligence product, while knowing absolutely nothing.

And who are too lazy to do a flipping internet search on Russian refineries chemical feedstocks.

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More from @TrentTelenko

Nov 11
The idea of Russia substituting artillery tubes with 122mm rockets fails on a couple of counts - accuracy and propellent mass.

These two things are related.

1/
The inaccuracy of the 122mm Grad rocket system is proverbial.

A full salvo of 40 rockets landing at 20 km range spreads over an area of up to 600 m x 600 m.

It is a wasteful weapon for tube artillery missions and is highly locatable when firing.

2/
characterisationexplosiveweapons.org/studies/annex-…Image
The Ukrainian SSU has made that vulnerability abundantly clear recently in showing 16 Grad launcher truck kill videos.

3/
mil.in.ua/en/news/ssu-ne…
Read 10 tweets
Nov 10
Ukraine's SSU used long range FPV drones with radio repeater drone to do counter battery for killing sixteen GRAD 122mm multiple rocket launchers.

21st century artillery counter battery🧵
1/
mil.in.ua/en/news/ssu-ne…
This YouTube video shows all the "greatest hits" with the SSU first person view (FPV) drones.

Ukrainian drone operators were able to steer the FPV's into the loaded rocket launcher where "cope cages" could not cover.


2/
This is a Ukrainian Armed Forces’ Matrice 300 RTK drone with relay antennas for extended range FPV drone counter battery strikes. ⬇️

Photo credits: Charitable Foundation “SOS palīdzība Ukrainas armijai”

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Read 5 tweets
Nov 9
I did an interview yesterday (Friday 8 Nov 2024) with @esherifftv on the lawfare going on between the Biden Administration and @elonmusk SpaceX over the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).

1/
Being a old DoD Quality staffer, I brought powerpoint slides.🤣

This 1st slide shows how the ITAR law defines what a "US person" is, versus the Dept. of Justice discrimination lawsuit claims under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

2/ Image
The second slide shows how "illegal exports" under ITAR includes 'foreign persons' - everyone not a 'US person' - seeing a ITAr controlled technical data package inside the USA counts as a 'export' to the nation an asylee or a refugee comes from.

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Read 15 tweets
Nov 5
Western media & political commentary are dominated by "doomers" predicting short & long term outcomes on the 'inexhaustibility' of Russia's personnel & equipment pools, despite overwhelming evidence that Russia is struggling badly.

Reality:
Russia is in a crisis of loss. 🧵
1/ See: https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/confirmed-russian-battlefield-equipment-losses-1730799222.html
The following are the things I've been tracking for some time:

1. The Russians are losing an infantry division every week to 10 days in terms of soldiers at a rate of between with a 1,100 to 1,700 and associated equipment.

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2. The Russian artillery is getting shorter ranged over time from losing the ability to make barrels and liners for 152mm guns. We are seeing literal WW2 122mm artillery pieces, presumably from North Korean stocks, in the Donbas.

3/
Read 15 tweets
Nov 3
This Warzone article is an example of one of the things that has been driving me bug house nuts watching the US Military deal with drones.

Recognizing the utter collapse of analytical rigor compared to the "Big Five"
1/
...procurement programs and the MLRS artillery rocket system in the late 1970's-to-early 1980's.

The post 1973 Arab Israeli War US Army understood the idea of "the logistical costs of a stowed kill."
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The US Army kept the 105mm on the M1 in production so long because the depleted uranium (DU) 105mm "Long Rod" APFSDS could kill a early T-72 and you could carry 55 rounds versus 40 rounds for a 120mm gun firing a tungsten APDS or early DU APFSDS round.

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Read 47 tweets
Oct 4
Thermite drones inside a bunker are all sorts of evil beyond burns.

My WW2 flame weapon research found that CO, carbon monoxide, fills the chemical bonds that O2 does in the lungs of air breathing fauna.

That means once CO hits those bonds in your lungs, you suffocate.

1/
What killed Imperial Japanese soldiers in WW2 "without a mark" inside bunkers was carbon monoxide poisoning, not a lack of O2.

Once you get enough CO in the lungs on the O2 chemical bonds.

No further O2 can get into the bloodstream and you suffocate.

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I ran across that fact in a trip report of a US Army Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) medical doctor sent to Leyte to take blood samples from IJA corpses that died from flame weapons.

It didn't work out and the CWS used goats in bunkers hit with flamethrower weapons to get the CO poisoning medical data.

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Read 4 tweets

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