Trolls & bots fail to understand or accept that Russia is anything but infinite and inevitable - but numbers are numbers. They’ve spent half of their entire Soviet inheritance to steal what they sit on today. The war doesn’t end when they get to zero vehicles. The half they’ve squandered is surely the BETTER half, and they still need an army for territorial defense and internal repression. Ukraine is not about the break, and this is probably the best position Russia is ever going to be in. This is the endgame of this messy, abusive Divorce, and Pootz has to come up with some whopper lies to say it was all worthwhile.
Guys just one more year
I swear Russia is gonna collapse this time
Russia will likely have more time than we expect. North Korea are proving to be more helpful than expected and have tons of old Soviet era hardware that they would be willing to sell in exchange for some more rocket tech or nuke stuff.
China would also likely be selling their old Soviet era hardware they might still have kicking around. A lot of countries around the world see Putin as desperate and rich so they will be happy to make some money selling older hardware back to the country that made it. Putin likely sees this as fine since the hardware works with the existing forces.
But the money and favors aren’t infinite. Putin is still dying of old age and disease. It’s a long road but Ukraine is destined to succeed.
North Korea are proving to be more helpful than expected and have tons of old Soviet era hardware that they would be willing to sell in exchange for some more rocket tech or nuke stuff.
According to Wikipedia the Soviet era tanks NK has is a few thousand T-55s and some T-62Ms. The T-62 varients are likely good enough to use on the battlefield, but the T-55s may not even be worth the fuel it takes to transport them. Remember Russia was fielding some T-55s not by using them as tanks, but by filling them with explosives and sending them uncrewed against Ukainian lines as bombs-with-tracks.
NK also has a bunch of 60 and 70s era Chinese tanks, but China may object to actual Chinese military hardware fighting in Ukraine.
Every single one of the tanks you just mentioned are so painfully obsolete when fighting against Ukraine which has good reconnaisance and artillery that it is actually probably hurting Russian soldiers chance of survival to see these tanks in action and believe they bring any kind of safety or strength to them.
Of course NK and China can keep providing equipment, I think in some sense neither nation will let Russia catastrophically lose it will just be that more and more of Russia will be sold off wholesale to the elite in NK and China in one way or another in exchange for them doing whatever is necessary to ensure Russia doesn’t entirely collapse militarily in the middle of an offensive.
This kind of support is not anywhere near as useful as domestic capability though, just ask Ukraine about that… There are limitations, stipulations, logistical nightmares full of foreign equipment headaches, and at the end of the day the equipment China and especially NK are able to provide just isn’t that comparatively effective and it especially isn’t any more survivable than the trash armor that Russia uses so…
Yeah, Russia can continue this war for a long time, that is not in question, but the idea that Russia has this major stock of tanks they can wave a magic wand at to make suddenly relevant on the modern battlefield is a ridiculous one that just isn’t supported by battlefield evidence or basic logic. They have a limited number of newer production tanks they have kept back from the frontlines because they stopped using them knowing how futile it was so shrugs.
Russia can take some of the obsolete older tanks and upgrade the turret, make it remote control, or sure they can load them up with explosives to use as a kamikaze tank but none of these uses of the tanks is actually an efficient use of them. The only consistent use these tanks would really have are as combat engineering rear backline bunker busters kept well away from intense frontlines and used to uproot machine gun nests that have been isolated and surrounded. However Russia can not even protect its anti-air, artillery or armor, there is no way it can protect obsolete siege equipment so yeah…
Russia ain’t doing well, and I think Chinese and North Korean officials are probably pretty pissed that as much as they try to help Russia, Russia just simply degraded its military too far and threw away the lives of too many of its soliders carelessly to be recoverable to the degree it needs to be to even remotely have a chance of winning the Ukraine War. All China, North Korea and other foreign partners can do at this point is try to fill out whatever Russia is doing to make it look more intimidating in the hopes that it disguises the broken back of the Russian military.
Russia have lost hundreds of T-62s in this war already but barely any T-54/55s, so it seems that Russia agrees that fielding the older ones isn’t worthwhile. Or 55s are magically invincible, of course, but I know which version I think is more likely
I wonder… what has become of those who first gave Pootin the “two weeks” figure?
Honestly - I think that’s probably what anyone would say to a Mad King. They honestly probably thought that life is too good to screw it up - that he wouldn’t actually invade and ruin the whole damn party. The intelligence services and siloviki (baron merchant oligarchs) were all fat, rich and controlled a huge, fairly rich country life a mafia. Why screw it all up? For the vanity of a wicked old perverted gangster ghoul.
They seem to have run out of tanks about a year ago. They of course have thousands left, but they now have to consider the risk that a tank might be destroyed today and thus not usable tomorrow. They still use tanks, and lose a few, but they no longer take risks with tanks without considering the costs and so they don’t use nearly as many as they used to because they want to preserve those they have left.
We generally expect the same is happened to artillery about now, though we don’t know exactly when. They get to choose how many they will risk.
Whether they have run ‘out’ is moot. They’ve squandered their BEST, at any rate, and aren’t bothering to use what remains, and that’s kind of the point. Saying that it’s ‘half gone’ is the same as saying it’s ALL gone in the context of trying to conquer ukraine. You have to keep a fleet available for credible border defense, future offensive operations (which are now probably off the books) and internal oppression of your own population. And as you say - both in terms of armor and artillery - even if you have remaining stockpiles, you can’t sustain this burn rate, and each piece you move forward is less effective that the one it replaced, both in terms of age, utility and the caliber of who’s left operating it.
Capabilties degrade when you piss away your army in a sunk cost fallacy revenge project.
Good time to invade.
China if you are listening…
Someone should invade Russia. I’m sure it would be easy to take a slice of territory if you wanted it.
If this were a board game, now is precisely the time that China would push into Siberia all the way to the Western edge of the Urals, and there’s not much Russia could do about it short of nukes.
short of nukes
That is a very big thing Russia could do about it.
Which would assure their complete and total destruction. Of course nukes are a big thing. They’re the LAST thing.
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Russia doesn’t have any working nukes. If it did, it would have thrown one at Ukraine. And nobody would give a fuck about it - neither the US nor any other nuclear power would get into it over Ukraine getting nuked. Am ukrainian, before y’all talk any shiz.
I suspect Russia is worried about how well their nukes will work. The small tactical ones (battlefield nukes) are the most complex and so most at risk of a maintenance failure.
Russia’s worst fear is deploying a nuke, only to have it fizzle. At this point it’s strategic or nothing. Deploying a strategic nuke would cause massive political fallout. Far more than Russia could cope with. No-one, including China and India, want that genie back out of the bottle.
Russia has thousands of nukes. No doubt they aren’t in the best shape ever but they don’t need all of them to work. And there’s no way they’d nuke Ukraine. The rest of the world would ostracize them. You’re just wrong.
Russia has been ostracized.
I suppose they could get embargoed harder by China and India, but if they nuked Ukraine they might get buked back.
The US might decide to hold off but the UK or France could put one down.
I doubt they would nuke a major city, but they might set one off in the country as a “Consequence”
Have you seen these nukes? Do you believe the russians at face value?
This is a horrible take; russia underspent on their army (with current results) to upgrade and refurbish the nuclear forces.
No. They underspent on their army because Midget Pootin and his cronies, needed new holiday palaces, Yuri.
The trick is that the money for the nukes was stolen. Nukes have value as a boogey-man and the russians expected everybody to be scared of the idea that they had nukes. You seem to believe them on this front.
Well yes, I am a sane person who watched a nuclear program, monitored by outside observers, be refurbished.
What, you got a really cool youtube video I have to see?
Found Moscow Rose’s account.
lol what?
China must be loving this…
No doubt. Wihout expending a single soldier’s life or piece of equipment, they got promoted to undisputed master of the axis of authoritarian nightmare shitholes, can demand ANYTHING from russia going forward and won’t be refused. They solved all their water, resource and mineral needs for a century or more, have gained strategic access to the North Pacific, which China has n-e-v-e-r ever had in history. Russia has become the junior vassal resource yard for China’s next century of growth. Now they have to solve their demographic problems, or it won’t matter much.
Putin will end up being the worst russian in history, which is REALLY an accomplishment. The man who gave the country away to China, pissed away the entire inheritance of the USSR, destroyed their primary export markets for a vanity revenge project.
and this is probably the best position Russia is ever going to be in.
I would disagree. They were even better off when they had Kharkiv and all of Kherson. Now Russia has lost all of Kharkiv and more the entire western half of Kherson.
sure. but I don’t think Ukraine is much in a negotiating mood to give away things that Russia can’t even hold. That’s not even the laws of war. You get what you can hold. If you can’t hold it, then you never really had it.
