Daily reminder that Putin's army of invasion was trained on the Rheinmetall-built training centre Mulino. In 2014 they "left" and construction was finished by "Гарнизон" company, probably a proxy. 100% of its imports came from Germany, last Rheinmetall shipments coming in 2019
In 2011 Rheinmetall got a contract for building a training center in Mulino, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast. They modelled it after the training center of Bundeswehr in Altmark. They planned to build "the most advanced system of its kind worldwide"
Mulino started in 2011 was the high point of Serdyukov's reforms. Two things you must understand about Serdyukov ministry:
1. No other minister of defence made such a big focus on the land army 2. No other minister of defence was so eager to import ready solutions from the West
Russian media was pretty open about it back then. See an article from 2011 kp.ru/daily/25636.4/… Now their straightforwardness may sound weird. Back then it was normal. Russia really started to hide its degree of cooperation with Western (German mostly) partners only after 2014
They say that Rheinmetall "rebuilt" it. Not quite true. Gorohovetsky centre in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast is the largest in Russia. But it got obsolete. So new German-built Mulino was created very close to it, but on a new field. It was easier to build from scratch than modernize
In September 2021 Vladimir Putin visited Mulino to see the main phase of the Russian-Belarusian strategic manoeuvres "West-2021". Few months later the same troops were sent in Ukraine. Check Kremlin's website kremlin.ru/events/preside…
Mulino was finished in 2020 (FYI: the last Rheinmetall shipments are dated by 2019). My sources say though that Mulino doesn't meet the planned standards. Russian proxies were stealing too much. Otherwise Russians might have the NATO-level training centre
(Putin in Mulino, 2021)
You see Putin coming to the West-2021 manoeuvres with Minister of Defence Shoygu and the Chief of General Staff Gerasimov
The sign says: "Putin came to the main phase of manoeuvres in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast"
Indeed. The only modern Western built centre Mulino is located here
That's Klaus Eberhardt who signed the deal to build Mulino in 2011 as the CEO of @RheinmetallAG
I urge the media to question this person regarding his role in building the Putin's war machine. He started construction of the centre to train the future Russian army of invasion
I urge the media to question this person regarding Rheinmetall's ties with the Russian "Гарнизон" company that finished Mulino after Rheinmetall "left" in 2014. Did he supply them with equipment to finish Mulino *after* 2014?
We urgently need the investigation of @RheinmetallAG involvement in building Mulino, the only modern Western-standard training centre that Russia has. That's where Putin's army of invasion was trained. That's where he launched his last strategic manoeuvres before marching West
@RheinmetallAG CEO Klaus Eberhardt started building the Truppenübungsplatz Altmark-modeled training centre for Putin in 2011. And there are strong indications that the CEO Armin Papperger continued the project *after* 2014 through via a Russian proxy "Гарнизон". See data for 2019
Until a few days ago a press release about the @RheinmetallAG winning "a major order in Russia" (=Mulino) was still on their website rheinmetall-defence.com/en/rheinmetall…. It was there on July 5 when I wrote a thread on their role in building the Putin's war machine
Since then they deleted it
Well, I knew that the @RheinmetallAG are gonna to delete the article on their involvement in building Putin's best training centre where the Russian army was preparing for their march west
That's why I screenshoted it
Once again, I urge the media to investigate the @RheinmetallAG role in preparing the Putin's army for the war. That includes their connections with the Гарнизон company which was finishing the construction after the Rheinmetall "left" Mulino in 2014. Question CEO Armin Papperger
I also urge the media to investigate:
1. Other (German) suppliers of "Гарнизон" which was building Putin's training Mulino 2. German politicians who allowed this to happen. Did they do it knowingly? That must be investigated
Putin's war machine is fully import dependent. It was supplied from all over the world. In very rare cases it had such exotic equipment suppliers as Turkey, Brazil or China. Most equipment however is Western/Japan/Tigers. It's *not* Chinese. And most importantly, German
No other nation bears so massive and so direct responsibility for preparing Putin's army for this war as Germany. In this regard I find German stance quite cynical. It were your companies that armed Putin and your politicians that allowed it to happen. Investigate them. The end🧵
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One thing you need to understand about wars is that very few engage into the long, protracted warfare on purpose. Almost every war of attrition was planned and designed as a short victorious blitzkrieg
And then everything went wrong
Consider the Russian war in Ukraine. It was not planned as a war. It was not thought of as a war. It was planned as a (swift!) regime change allowing to score a few points in the Russian domestic politics. And then everything went wrong
It would not be an exaggeration to say that planning a short victorious war optimised for the purposes of domestic politics is how you *usually* end up in a deadlock. That is the most common scenario of how it happens, practically speaking
Global politics are usually framed in terms of kindergarten discourse (“good guys” vs “bad guys”) with an implication that you must provide “good guys” with boundless and unconditional support
BUT
Unconditional support is extremely corrupting, and turns the best of the best into the really nasty guys, and relatively fast
Part of the reason is that neither “bad” nor “good” guys are in fact homogenous, and present a spectrum of opinions and personalities. Which means that all of your designated “good guys” include a fair share of really, really nasty guys, almost by definition.
Purely good movements do not really exist
That is a major reason why limitless, unconditional, unquestioning support causes such a profound corrupting effect upon the very best movement. First, because that movement is not all
that purely good as you imagine (neither movement is),
Let's have a look at these four guys. Everything about them seems to be different. Religion. Ideology. Political regime. And yet, there is a common denominator uniting all:
Xi - 71 years old
Putin - 72 years old
Trump - 79 years old
Khamenei - 86 years old
Irrespectively of their political, ideological, religious and whatever differences, Russia, China, the United States, Iran are all governed by the old. Whatever regime, whatever government they have, it is the septuagenarians and octogenarians who have the final saying in it.
This fact is more consequential than it seems. To explain why, let me introduce the following idea:
Every society is a multiracial society, for every generation is a new race
Although we tend to imagine them as cohesive, all these countries are multigenerational -> multiracial
In 1927, when Trotsky was being expelled from the Boslhevik Party, the atmosphere was very and very heated. One cavalry commander met Stalin at the stairs and threatened to cut off his ears. He even pretended he is unsheathing he sabre to proceed
Stalin shut up and said nothing
Like obviously, everyone around could see Stalin is super angry. But he still said nothing and did nothing
Which brings us to an important point:
Nobody becomes powerful accidentally
If Joseph Stalin seized the absolute control over the Communist Party, and the Soviet Union, the most plausible explanation is that Joseph Stalin is exercising some extremely rare virtues, that almost nobody on the planet Earth is capable of
Highly virtuous man, almost to the impossible level
Growing up in Russia in the 1990s, I used to put America on a pedestal. It was not so much a conscious decision, as the admission of an objective fact of reality. It was the country of future, the country thinking about the future, and marching into the future.
And nothing reflected this better than the seething hatred it got from Russia, a country stuck in the past, whose imagination was fully preoccupied with the injuries of yesterday, and the phantasies of terrible revenge, usually in the form of nuclear strike.
Which, of course, projected weakness rather than strength
We will make a huuuuuuge bomb, and drop it onto your heads, and turn you into the radioactive dust, and you will die in agony, and we will be laughing and clapping our hands
Fake jobs are completely normal & totally natural. The reason is: nobody understands what is happening and most certainly does not understand why. Like people, including the upper management have some idea of what is happening in an organisation, and this idea is usually wrong.
As they do not know and cannot know causal relations between the input and output, they just try to increase some sort of input, in a hope for a better output, but they do not really know which input to increase.
Insiders with deep & specific knowledge, on the other hand, may have a more clear & definite idea of what is happening, and even certain, non zero degree of understanding of causal links between the input and output