Trent Telenko Profile picture
Mar 23, 2024 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.
1/
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.

2/
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.

12/
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...

13/
...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

14/
...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.

15/
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."


16/
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.

18/18 End
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More from @TrentTelenko

Jul 11
I've been advocating that Ukraine strike Russian tugs as part of a larger campaign against Russian riverine and littoral maritime traffic since 2022.

Ukraine has delivered on all my expectations of what that would accomplish in the last five days.

Brown Water logistics🧵
1/
This is where I underscored the historical Russian use of barge logistics in WW2 as a basis for what they would be doing in occupied Ukraine

2/
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/
Read 9 tweets
Jul 10
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.
🧵

1/
united24media.com/war-in-ukraine…
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/ Image
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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/Image
Read 12 tweets
Jul 2
Just...no. Russia HAS BEEN "Battle of the Cities" from the very beginning...targeting hospitals as a means of destroying ethnic minorities.

This has been Russian policy for DECADES.

Ukraine retaliating for atrocity is _RECIPROCITY_ per the Laws of War, not degeneracy.
1/2
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"

x.com/i/grok?convers…
2/
I'm afraid @cdrsalamander has gotten the moral vectors in the Russo-Ukrainian war wrong.

What is degenerate here isn't RECIPROCITY.

Degeneracy here is defined as using Woke NGO Elite definitions of morality, AKA claiming AFU RECIPROCITY per the laws of war as a war crime.
3/3 Image
Read 4 tweets
Jun 30
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.

This is a very good example. ⬇️

Strategic Drone Airpower🧵
1/3
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.

2/3
If strategic airpower was irrelevant then. So is damage from it now. 🤦‍♂️

Here is the larger in-depth thread detailing the vulnerabilities of ex-Soviet "One-Big Factory" infrastructure (AKA gigantism) Ukraine is exploiting.

3/3
Read 4 tweets
Jun 28
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.

FP-5 🧵
1/
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).

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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).

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Read 17 tweets
Jun 23
It's time to revisit how 992 Ukrainian drones and 10 small cruise missiles were used to saturate Russia's Moscow air defenses.

There was a lot of technology, technique & tactics involved.

Drone War 🧵
1/
The first thing that needs to be pointed out is that in 2026 Ukraine has not only replicated, but likely exceeded, the 2018 capabilities of the USAF's Stand-off Munitions Activity Center (SMAC) at at Barksdale AFB.

I've mentioned this before ⬇️
2/
In 2018 a Dallas chapter of the Association of Old Crows gave an award to SMAC & we got an open source brief of what they did to earn the award.

These guys do the evasive routing for integrated cross-service standoff munition attack profiles.

3/
Read 14 tweets

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