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Armchair Warlord

@ArmchairW

Oct 15 • 13 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X

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Let's bust some propaganda.

Top 10 pro-Ukrainian talking points - and why they're nonsense.⬇️

10. Ukraine is a democracy!

False. The last free and fair election in Ukraine - not held under an ultranationalist jackboot after the 2014 coup - was in 2010.

All elections in Ukraine have been suspended since 2022, and Zelensky's five-year term from 2019 expired months ago.

9. Russia is an autocracy!

False. Vladimir Putin and United Russia enjoy approval ratings among the Russian public that are extremely high, even in polling conducted by Western-backed, anti-Putin organizations.

Putin is popular enough to win any election held in Russia handily.

8. There are no Nazis in Ukraine!

Oh come on. Ukraine's "founding fathers," Bandera, the OUN/UPA, the Galician SS? Nazis and Nazi collaborators, many implicated in the worst crimes of the Holocaust.

Ukraine's most prestigious military units? Packed to the rafters with Nazis.

7. Ukraine is a victim of Russian colonialism!

Nikita Kruschev grew up in the Donbass and considered himself to be Ukrainian. Leonid Brezhnev was born and raised near Dnipropetrovsk.

Both brought home a great deal of bacon for their home SSR. Kruschev gave it Crimea in 1954.

6. The Russians expected to take Kiev in three days!

False and nonsensical. This memetic talking point seems to have originated with US Army General Milley, then-CJCS. No Russian official ever made such a claim, nor did the Kremlin show any desire to overthrow Zelensky in 2022.

6 con't. This can be seen in the fact the Russians started negotiations with the Ukrainian government immediately after invading. Why would they negotiate with people they planned to topple?

Of note: The US Army took three weeks to take Baghdad against a prostrate Iraq in 2003.

5. The Russians have taken enormous casualties in Ukraine!

False in real terms. The best data available - Mediazona's count of military obituaries plus published casualty figures from the separatist republics - shows no more than 80,000 Russian military KIA over the entire war.

5 con't. Related talking point - the Russians have lost a huge amount of equipment in Ukraine!

False in real terms. The Russian military is far larger, far more lethal, and far better equipped today than it was in 2022, with once-rare vehicles like T-90Ms now quite common.

4. Ukrainians want to fight!

False. Enormous numbers of Ukrainian men have fled the country, some of them paying eye-watering bribes and facing great dangers, rather than face conscription. And the Ukrainian military is fed by press gangs ruthlessly sweeping for conscripts.

3. Russia's invasion was unprovoked!

False. If the last two and a half years have shown us anything it is that by 2022 Ukraine was an armed camp, spoiling for war and run by people with a fanatical hatred of Russia and Russians.

Putin gave Zelensky exactly what he asked for.

2. Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine!

False. The UN has identified slightly over 10,000 civilians killed during the two and a half years of the war thus far. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian language enjoys official status in Russian Kherson and Zaporozhie, and Tatar in Crimea.

1. Any negotiations with Putin are appeasement!

The only route to Ukrainian victory in this war is for NATO to go to war with Russia. That will not happen.

Ergo, our policy choice is to acknowledge Russia's victory now ("appeasement") or to have them rub it in our faces later.

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More from @ArmchairW

Armchair Warlord

@ArmchairW

Sep 15

How many plans has NATO gone through to try to beat Russia in Ukraine?

Let's count 'em!

Plan A: The FGM-148 Javelin

It seems absurd now, but in late 2021 NATO's leadership thought Javelin was a tank-deleting magic wand that would deter Putin from challenging Zelensky's scheme to conquer the LDPR.

Javelin failed in service and is a rare sight on the battlefield.

Plan B: The Kazakh Gambit

The West quite obviously fomented an uprising in Kazakhstan in January 2022 in hopes of distracting Russia from the then-boiling Ukrainian crisis.

Didn't work. CSTO troops arrived and helped the Kazakh government crush the would-be color revolution.

Read 16 tweets

Armchair Warlord

@ArmchairW

Aug 18

Anatomy of a Fiasco: The Bridge at Glushkovo

Late last week the Ukrainian command, seeing their offensive in Sudzha-Koronevo bog down, tried to expand the flanks of their salient into Russian territory in Kursk. Part of this was an attack on the Glushkovo district to the west.

The Glushkovo District is somewhat isolated from the Russian interior by the Seim River.

Having learned the wrong lessons from their 2022 counteroffensive in Kherson, the AFU command decided to try to induce a wholesale Russian withdrawal by attacking the bridges over the Seim.

The large road bridge at Glushkovo, the district center, would be their first target. As in Kherson two years ago, HIMARS fired on the bridge with GMLRS. As in Kherson two years ago, it was ineffective.

Unlike in Kherson two years ago, the Russians killed the HIMARS launcher.

Read 8 tweets

Armchair Warlord

@ArmchairW

Aug 16

Today was probably the worst day for the Armed Forces of Ukraine since February 2022.

Let's walk through it.

The Russians started the day off by destroying two HIMARS launchers at their hide site in Sumy. This has likely ended GMLRS support for the Kursk operation temporarily.

Next to emerge was a video of a MiG-29* struck at an airfield near Dnipropetrovsk, just as it was being armed and the pilot had climbed in for preflight.

Once again the Russians coldly waited to cause maximum casualties among key AFU personnel.

* initially reported as an Su-24

13 Ukrainian soldiers were caught on camera surrendering in Kursk, and today was the first day I didn't even hear substantive rumors of new AFU advances in the area. Instead they seem to have lost considerable ground.

Read 12 tweets

Armchair Warlord

@ArmchairW

Jun 30

Putin HATES THEM!

Or does he?

Top 10 Failed Wonderweapons of the Ukrainian War⬇️

My criteria are simple - these are weapons (defined loosely) that were heavily hyped by Western pundits that actually failed in service.

So, for example, the Leopard 2 isn't on here because it's actually a perfectly functional tank that has performed in line with other tanks.

10. The Ukrainian Foreign Legion

After the war kicked off, Western outlets began encouraging adventurous foreigners to travel to Ukraine to fight. These new recruits were housed in barracks at the Yavorov Training Ground.

One Russian missile strike largely ended the project.

Read 12 tweets

Armchair Warlord

@ArmchairW

Jun 23

Apparently four missiles were shot down at sea, with one hit far enough into its final dive that falling submunitions still killed several civilians.

As this occurred on a Sunday afternoon and the nearest military target is three miles away, this was likely a terror attack.⬇️

First of all, I'd like to note the speed with which Ukrainian propagandists, while still celebrating the deaths of Russian vacationers, have come around to a remarkably pro-Russian position while commenting on this event: (1) that Russian air defenses shoot down pretty much everything fired at Crimea; (2) that the Russian Ministry of Defense generally puts out accurate information to the public; and (3) that civilian casualties from downed enemy missiles and malfunctioning interceptors are the responsibility of the defender rather than the attacker. I'm sure they won't immediately do another 180-degree turn as soon as they are presented with a less convenient fact pattern.

Secondly, the range at which this attack was delivered (>160km from any point of UKR-held territory) indicates that the Ukrainians have received a number of M39A1 extended-range ATACMS missiles with cluster warheads. There were only a small number of these manufactured around the turn of the century and apparently most were subsequently converted to unitary models, suggesting that the US is already scraping the munitions barrel to keep Ukraine supplied with missiles (and explaining our reluctance to hand any over previously). ATACMS activity has certainly fallen off dramatically in the last two weeks.

Thirdly, as I pointed out upthread, the nearest obvious military target is an airfield located three miles north of this particular beach. There's also an area of farmland about a mile and a half to the east that may serve as a SAM positioning area. Ballistic missiles that get clipped late in their flight don't fall three miles away from their intended targets, and if the Ukrainians had been interested in a military target they would have done what they always do and attacked in the middle of the night. They struck instead on the afternoon of Orthodox Pentecost Sunday, when the streets and beaches would be crowded with civilians. As such - and in light of a pattern of Ukrainian attacks targeting civilians in Russia gathered for holidays - it is likely this attack was intended to terrorize civilian residents and vacationers in a wealthy Sevasopol suburb and the work of Russian air defenses prevented an enormous number of deaths and injuries.

Addendum: Just to provide some visual context on exactly how far this beach is from the airfield in question - it's farther from it than from the harbor!

Addendum 2: It's not clear from the way I wrote it, but there were five missiles in total - four shot down at sea plus one over the beach in question.

I apologize, should have been clearer.

Read 5 tweets

Armchair Warlord

@ArmchairW

May 20

D+10 update for the Russian Spring 2024 offensive. I mentioned last time (D+8) they'd begun to turn the pressure back on in the Donbass after easing off to let the Ukrainians pull troops to Kharkov.

They've marked up gains in 14 locations across the front in the last 48 hours⬇️

1 / Starting from the north, Volchansk, Russian troops have secured the north of town and pushed troops across the Volcha River to begin evicting the AFU from the south side.

2 / No map for Liptsi because the location of the contact line in the area is astonishingly murky for this fishbowl of a war, but the fighting is visible from Kharkov.