The two key railway marshalling yards for the Russian Army in occupied Ukraine are in Belgorod and Rostov on Don.
And Belgorod railway marshalling yard just got cut off from the north.
Rerouting train traffic like this hasn't happened in Russia since 1941.
2/
This Reddit map of AFU advances indicates the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), upper right, may soon be isolated from the Russian power grid to points south.
Given the Rostov on Don NPP lost one of two reactors to a maintenance casualty.
Given the number of confirmed AFU brigades involved in the Kursk operation, and the complete lack of a Russian strategic ground forces reserve anywhere.
It is looking far more like @secretsqrl123 idea strategic envelopment of Belgorod than mine of a strategic raid.
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The much reported AFU woes in the Donbas were the result of mostly 2nd line units being put into the front lines behind a "Ghost Army" strategic deception while the elite units were being quietly prepared for the Kursk/Belgorod axis envelopment.
Meanwhile, AFU ground forces are making amphibious raid demonstrations at the Kinburn Spit to try and freeze RuAF ground units in Kherson from redeployment.
The defence-blog -dot- com website reported a very important observation on the production quality of current Russian Shahed production.
It's individual quality is declining, _Hard_.
1/ Russian End Run Production 🧵
From the article:
“The Russians have adapted these drones to their needs, but due to a lack of components and efforts to reduce costs, their quality has declined,” Kulchytsky explained.
Earlier iterations of Shahed drones contained numerous foreign-made components,
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...including Japanese-manufactured bearings and precision-built servo drive rods.
However, recent versions have shown a transition to simplified bearings and direct rod assemblies, indicating a shortage of high-quality components."
3/
The US Navy, as an institution, had a really horrid record of "friendly fire" in WW2, to include shooting down a FM-2 Wildcat fighter coming of the catapult of the CVE USS Tulagi in Kerama Retto on 6 Apr 1945.
Another FM-2 Wildcat, damaged in the same Kerama Retto engagement resulting in the USS Tulagi's FM-2 getting shot down, was in turn blown out of the sky by panicked USN gunners over Kadena airfield causing massive damage to fighter fuel logistics & strafing Army troops ashore. 3/
Congress being held accountable for stealth legislation & pork barrel spending _BEFORE THE VOTE IS CAST_ is my most unexpected and welcomed result of Artificial Intelligence large language models (LLM) in 2024.
It would take eight speed reading lawyers with eidetic memories 16 to 24 man hours to parse a 1000 page piece of legislation.
Specialty lawyers charging hundred of dollars an hour working for K-Street lobbyists.
2/
Now any competent person can feed huge pieces of legislation to Grok, or other LLM, for nearly no cost and generate a similar work product in minutes to post to social media.
K-Street lobbyists in DC, & Congressmen/Senators sucking up their cash, just had their world burn.
3/3
I've been involved with three US Army FMTV reset programs.
So this newest report from Ukraine's Defense Express on the the repairability problems with Russian AFV's out of their reserves is so much fun to share with you all.
Defense Express pulled an article from the No. 10 issue of the Russian magazine "Material and Technical Support" on how horrid the vehicles coming out of reserve are plus problems with battle damaged reserve vehicles.
"The central takeaway from this publication is that the actual repairability of Russian tanks is 3-5 times lower than what is claimed in official manuals. This discrepancy has extended repair times for equipment by at least 15-20%."
3/
The infographic figure below is a typical commercial production line curve.
Ukraine's stated production and use of the Peklo (Hell) cruise missile marks it as being on the 'start of production to market entry' ramp up part of the curve below.
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Over two dozen Peklo were shown in this public unveiling by Ukraine, which is over 1/4 of the stated production to date.
How many were pre-production prototypes or low rate initial pilot production models isn't knowable. 3/
"According to Andriy Klymenko , head of the Institute for Black Sea Strategic Studies , both vessels are very old and have a "river" class, which implies certain limitations.
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He published and commented on the relevant map, which indicates the approximate location of the tanker disaster.
"It is about 8 miles from the seaport of Taman (a transshipment port south of the Kerch Strait).
3/