12:32 – Johan No.1
The Snow Leopards,
https://x.com/ukrainiansquad/status/1746583534276329860?s=46&t=Vah3JXV31B9lXwZOK5gF7w
You can’t win against these, Russia is now like when you were conscripted and fought with a personal weapon and the weather and finally fell asleep crying in a puddle, Ukraine is the final exercise where everything works and the platoon is like an organism where nothing needs to be communicated and everything happens automatically (well, not at all in my platoon but in what I’m trying to paint). I see maintained combat value in this video and with the Russians I see people hiding in pits, soaking wet, cold, and terrified of drones – sitting ducks.
https://twitter.com/chriso_wiki/status/1744648450124259493?s=46&t=orkL7v7od1Xd7j_pbj-Xdw
We leave “Operation Turn Off the Lights” for a few days and all the deep-frozen Russians.
From Erik14 yesterday about what the Germans think about escalation. Now it won’t happen but it’s always fun to reason about what could happen if Ukraine was abandoned by the West and lost, the analysis covers about half the picture. The man without Twitter has a unique ability to find relevant material, one must admit, nicely as usual.
In the long run, this is the risk the West plays with by “slow-walking” its support to Ukraine, and to clarify, I do not believe Russia (right now) succeeds in its intent to make the world a worse place but they have tried and lack of support to Ukraine could change everything.
https://twitter.com/jurgen_nauditt/status/1746750312059167087?t=9_YGiBnvU8Gh8rAqmbZ6GA&s=19
We have reasoned in the thread in the same direction and it is my conviction that NATO would not go all-in in the Baltics if it came to it given certain conditions that Russia suspects and then creates.
Massive subversive activity and a carrot of eternal peace if only the Baltics fall, blitzkrieg after occupation and then they face fate-compli after three battalions of Western soldiers have retreated from a large-scale operation. Is it worth losing 200,000 soldiers from the EU and USA to retake the Baltics – no, I don’t think the West will ever think so.
NATO’s relevance and especially its deterrent factor are at stake here and it is in Ukraine that it will be decided.
The link addresses the Baltics but there is quite a lot more IF this had gone Russia’s way –
-Serbia does something with the old Yugoslav countries and there is war in the EU’s backyard, again.
-Moldova falls.
-Slovakia and Hungary continue to block everything within the EU.
-Hungary and Turkey block everything in NATO.
-Further escalation in MENA, electricity threatened seriously.
-World trade threatened by pirates all over, not just Houthis.
-Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz, torpedo straight into the side of one of the larger civilian ships that sinks like a stone. Iran punishes the colonel who got carried away with a public hanging and apologizes profusely but the ship lies where it lies.
-China becomes increasingly aggressive towards Taiwan.
-Demonstrations against everything become more common in the West and paralyze politics completely, social media suggests citizens are in absolute rebellion mood and want the politicians’ blood.
-Terror attacks by MENA terrorists run rampant in the West.
-The EU’s electricity infrastructure suffers a large number of unexplained technical faults and electricity prices skyrocket.
At this point, is there anyone who believes that NATO would have gone all in in the Baltics?
Especially not when the anti-I…el demonstrations suddenly turn into anti-Baltic demonstrations and become very violent. Western politicians feel that the citizens really do not want to support the Baltics, and then it becomes difficult to send troops – on what national mandate should troops be sent if there are tens of thousands of angry demonstrators outside Rosenbad demanding eternal peace, and above all, it was not possible to get a majority in parliament for the operation, and other NATO and EU countries face similar problems.
Probably an exercise would have turned into a blitzkrieg that risked involving the few Western battalions sent, which would have had to retreat, and then the West would be left with the task of retaking the Baltics from Russian army corps behind a forest of mines. With the spring offensive in Ukraine fresh in mind, the lesser bad option is to wave goodbye to the Baltics and wish them luck in Soviet 2.0. Swedish politicians absolutely resist the idea that this would be a Baltic handover when two Viking Line ferries full of refugees were forced to turn back to Estonia after the Russian navy rammed them – they had no visas.
The armed forces in these countries are vanishingly small, and the countries are completely encompassed by the Russian sphere. Belarus’s armed forces are still unused and have been trained by Russia in rounds.
Now it didn’t happen because Ukraine crashed the whole party, but that doesn’t mean this wasn’t the evil plan and something the West still has to consider in its risk analyses.
This one from Skator yesterday is also worth highlighting, RU is doing a lot to recover abandoned vehicles in poor condition at the Dnieper right now – previously they didn’t really care about abandoned vehicles, so a certain shift.
It could be local to the Dnieper defense that they are short on vehicles, but if they take a big risk to recover abandoned tanks, it means they think it’s worth the risk to get them back, and then they don’t have unlimited vehicles standing in the rear fully serviced and fully fueled, right?
I think I have found the answer to the riddle below.
https://charter97.org/en/news/2024/1/14/579375/
I have tried to dive a bit into the facilities for armored vehicles and which ones have burned because it became a fixation to prove to the thread that everything has burned up.
I must admit I am completely defeated 😐 but found lots of other interesting stuff – as usual, the trick is to evaluate sources and weigh the information against each other and I may very well have grabbed something wrong. Google is completely flooded with the Chelnyabilsk explosion so I don’t find much else but was pretty sure that the T90 and T80 factories had fires, even if not big mushroom cloud explosions. Of course, I don’t find much else than a tire factory burning in Omsk, a train set with fuel in Nizhny Tagil, and that the BMP factory half burned down, so there they seem to have succeeded.
What has definitely disappeared from the face of the earth is the facility that manufactures tank engines in Chelnyabilsk after a huge technical-fault explosion.
103rd Tank Factory in Chita (Transbaikalia) modernizes T62 – find nothing
Uralvagonzavod – T90 in Nizhny Tagil – there was a fire in a train set with fuel but not in the factory.
Kurganmashzavod – BMP – there have been large, serious technical-fault fires.
Omsktransmash – T80 – find nothing.
In October 2023, the link below came out, interesting and there are 60-80 T90M left assigned and until September only 52 were produced during 2023.
https://mil.in.ua/en/blogs/how-many-t-90m-tanks-did-russia-produced/
The “new production” of T80 seems to be 150-180 older T80s that have been modernized, not new production. Then apparently only 50 have been delivered until September 2023. Slow is best.
https://armyrecognition.com/ukraine_-_russia_conflict_war_2022/russia_ramps_up_production_of_t-80bvm_main_battle_tanks_and_delivers_them_in_ukraine.html#google_vignette
How the modernization of the T62 is going, who knows, but there were supposedly 600-800 total at the 103rd Tank Factory to be modernized and it is ongoing?
In the below from Forbes, it is suspected that they cheated and took T90A and converted them to T90M, apparently quite a few T90A are missing so some part of the “new production” is modernization. Forbes is otherwise ruthless in its criticism of Russian tank production, real doubters.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/01/10/what-is-missing-from-this-russian-tank-factory-promo-video-tanks/?sh=45c0c892b6c2
During 2023, only 100 “new” T80 and T90M have been added. There is some suspicion that T90A have been sacrificed for T90M in some cases and it seems to be older T80s that have been modernized, so nothing new has been added but 100 fresh vehicles have been delivered to the Russian armed forces.
Real new manufacturing should thus be vanishingly small.
It also seems that 140 T-72B3 and 140 T-72B3M have been added during 2023, quite uncertain numbers but I’ll go with them – these are modified T72s.
I’ll stick my neck out a bit and say that sure, there were apparently a couple thousand tanks left in the barns, but very few have been prepared during 2023.
Sure, maybe some still come directly from the bases but then they are in terrible condition, we have seen many examples of such vehicles at the fronts.
During 2023 –
-Say 400 “new” RU vehicles that have worse targeting systems than those Ukraine has received.
-Ukraine has received 600 and 300 are under delivery according to Oryx, and those are fully modernized vehicles with decent targeting systems.
But…
This is the best Russia can do while Ukraine has received 0.5% (i.e. very few!) of the tanks in the West’s barns, and still Ukraine has received twice as many as the Russian army during 2023.
Ukraine has probably lost 700 tanks according to Oryx while the Russians have lost 6,089.
It absolutely matters how many have been added in 2023 and for Russia’s part it is vanishingly few plus lots of T62s.
You understand why T62 and T54-55 have been seen in combat, there is nothing else available anymore.
I maintain that this looks really bad for the Russians and that they will need to look for help during 2024 or else the tank will start to become an endangered species. Someone in the thread usually writes “snorkorta på pansar” (very short on armor) and I definitely think it looks like that now.
Everything else that doubters pick on is hot air from the Russians in my opinion.
I choose to believe this regarding AWACS – RU has 8 total. That fits well with Majsa-13 yesterday, one must admit.
I also think there is truth behind that they had 2-3 in Ukraine because there is quite a lot of other border to monitor and not all are presumably airworthy all the time?
A dozen thus and IL22-M is not unlimited either and two confirmed shot down in the war.
There should be a spectacular attack in that area soon with missiles and fighter jets now that the stage has been set.
https://x.com/maks_nafo_fella/status/1746953627778916807?s=46&t=Vah3JXV31B9lXwZOK5gF7w
Putin looks at what we do, not what we say, and so far there is very little that seems to deter him – he started on October 7 hoping the West would become even more indecisive but had not counted on the rest of MENA to betray and China to remain silent. 2024 is absolutely the decisive year and the more I dive into the numbers the worse it looks for the bunker dweller.
His big poker bluff where he barely reaches over the edge of the table and suspiciously glances towards the western players is exposed, and the UK has spoken out and promised “long-range weapons” in support during 2024 as well as to “help Ukraine win the war.”
Putin has every reason in the world to be worried because they are getting beaten right now and it is going downhill fast.
13:10 – Johan No.1
Obrigado Senhor.
Yes, those 300,000 small boats with shooters are hard to stop. I have left out the Finnish push because I don’t think they dare, but Gotland is probably in the risk zone if SE does not get strong guarantees or fortifies the island so it becomes a real threshold.
These Zapad exercises are quite tricky where they can suddenly move all landing tonnage from the territorial water boundary towards Gotland – you don’t have time to act on that.
13:38 – MatsExtrude
👍
A bit unfair to take Oryx numbers for the Ukrainian tank losses and then use AFU’s figures when it comes to the Russian ones. 😉
Oryx looks like this: 734 AFU, 2,623 RuAF.
So that is 3.57 times as large Russian losses as the Ukrainian ones, so it still looks good!
I also don’t think Russia can produce and renovate at the pace they lose them, and sooner or later they run out of renovation objects.
On the other hand, Ukraine also can’t produce in any larger quantities, so it’s important that we in the West replenish!
Here you have an article about the factory that manufactured engines:
“Plant manufacturing engines for military equipment on fire in Russia’s Chelyabinsk”
https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/11/26/7430467/
There has also recently been a fire there but in a wood factory:
https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1745753172021215233
15:09 – Johan No.1
Yep, it’s going to get messy but now we have two years of absolute dithering and there were still agreements between Ukraine – USA, UK and whoever else – I don’t see any determination here at all and then everyone puts their hope in NATO and the EU working flawlessly if we increase the temperature further.
I wasn’t thinking about the EU when I wrote this, I must admit, but for countries to act on Article 42.7 they must vote within the country, right?
For example, will Hungary and Slovakia send their entire defense forces to the Baltics and violently fight Russia?
Personally, I think history has clearly shown that after a big war, lots of alliances are formed to prevent the next big war until enough time has passed that no one honors the alliances when everything comes to a head and then the next big war comes.
Then we have JEF which has started acting independently and now most recently the UK which has taken the lead closely followed by Germany or vice versa – it’s probably not a sharp situation but blindly trusting that the alliances will work as intended is probably very dangerous.
15:12 – Johan No.1
Now I’m exposed 🧐
I think Oryx has better control over UA vehicles and there are many RU vehicles that are not registered so overweight Ukraine there. I have guessed a few thousand vehicles for UA before and there is no reason to question the death toll I thought.
15:15 – Johan No.1
Regarding the UA offensive, they have carried out the Kherson, Kharkiv, and Izyum offensives but with less material than they have today, I think.
But yes, the West is not resourcing the next offensive, that is very clear to everyone.
What you paint can absolutely happen but then RU after the presidential election has mobilized 300,000 more and made the entire front as well fortified as the southern front and built up enormous stockpiles of drones and other defensive weapons.
Between now and spring is the low point.
If UA does not carry out an offensive, Putin wins the election and RU can freeze all fronts then the West has the whole mess right in their lap, mostly self-inflicted. They have given Putin a win even though he doesn’t deserve it at all.
15:23 – MatsExtrude
Yes, maybe it can be that Oryx’s numbers match reality better when it comes to AFU’s figures compared to the Russians’. Hope so.
If the ratio were the same for both sides, it would otherwise mean that Ukraine has lost over 1,700 vehicles and that would be almost all of them..
15:33 – MatsExtrude
Russian tank losses according to Oryx = 2,623
Russian tank losses according to Ukraine = 6,113
Ukrainian tank losses according to Oryx = 734
(Ukrainian tank losses according to Russia = 540,350 🙂 )
We can try dividing AFU’s reported figures by Oryx’s figures for the Russians:
6,113 / 2,623 then gives 2.33.
If we assume that Oryx has missed the same proportion regarding Ukrainian losses, we end up at 2.33 x 734 = 1,710 vehicles.
We also get the same result if we take 6,113 divided by 3.57 (which was the ratio between Russian and Ukrainian losses according to Oryx).
Could Ukraine have lost 1,710 vehicles? Not entirely unreasonable but as far as I can see they barely had 1,000 at the start of the war.
If that were true, they would basically have none left now, and it’s not really that bad..
Somewhere it’s wrong and it can be wrong in more than one place.
15:47 – Johan No.1
Since Putin does not intend to stop at Ukraine, this is not an option for the West at all really.
Do we know that Putin will not stop – yes, I think we can draw that conclusion now.
Will Putin be able to run this war for another 5-6 years?
Absolutely not, I’m starting to get the feeling that he will have trouble handling this situation already during 2024 but there is some risk that I am optimistic.
In the US primaries, unfortunately, the orange man is steaming ahead right now…
15:53 – Johan No.1
The first step and what we are interested in is that Ukraine gets to restore its territorial integrity.
If we deviate from that, the world order post-WW2 is in ruins.
There are many outcomes for Russia and I advocate that they turn inward and Ukraine wants that too. Decolonization is very fashionable so why should they be allowed to remain as colonizers?
The outcome that RU retreats but Putin or other hawks take over and continue the war line – then the West must ensure that our eastern border is sufficiently fortified and that we pay for the perimeter protection in the countries that maintain it.
Then Georgia should be included in our perimeter protection and a few more countries.
16:02 – Johan No.1
What the heck you two are crashing the whole story here 😲
Do you have to run long credible calculation examples that completely torpedo my narrative..
16:10 – MatsExtrude
Sorry! 🙁
17:09 – Johan No.1
😀 meant in all goodwill but missed laughing yellow guy.
12:30 – Johan No.1
The snow leopards,
https://x.com/ukrainiansquad/status/1746583534276329860?s=46&t=Vah3JXV31B9lXwZOK5gF7w
It’s impossible to win against these, RU is now like when you were conscripted and struggled with your personal weapon and the weather and finally fell asleep crying in a puddle, UA is the final exercise where everything works and the platoon is like an organism where nothing needs to be communicated and everything happens automatically (well, not in my platoon at all but in what I’m trying to paint). I see maintained combat value in this video and with the Russians I see people hiding in ditches, soaking wet, cold and terrified of drones – prey.
https://twitter.com/chriso_wiki/status/1744648450124259493?s=46&t=orkL7v7od1Xd7j_pbj-Xdw
We leave “Operation Turn Off the Lights” for a few days and all the deep-frozen Russians.
From Erik14 yesterday about what the Germans think about escalation. This won’t happen now but it’s always interesting to reason about what could happen if Ukraine was abandoned by the West and lost, the analysis covers about half the picture. The man without Twitter has a unique ability to find relevant material, you have to admit, nice as usual.
In the long run, this is the risk the West is playing with by “slow-walking” its support to Ukraine and to clarify, I do not believe Russia (right now) succeeds in its intent to make the world a worse place but they have tried and lack of support for Ukraine could change everything.
https://twitter.com/jurgen_nauditt/status/1746750312059167087?t=9_YGiBnvU8Gh8rAqmbZ6GA&s=19
In the thread, we have reasoned in the same direction and it is my conviction that NATO would not go all-in in the Baltics if it came to it given certain conditions that Russia suspects and then creates.
Massive subversive activity and a carrot of eternal peace if only the Baltics fall, blitzkrieg after occupation and then they face fate-compli after three battalions of Western soldiers have retreated from a large-scale operation. Is it worth the loss of 200,000 soldiers from the EU and the USA to retake the Baltics – no, I don’t think the West will ever think so.
NATO’s relevance and especially its deterrent factor are at stake here and it is in Ukraine that it will be decided.
The link addresses the Baltics but there is quite a lot more IF this had gone Russia’s way –
-Serbia does something with the old Yugoslav countries and there is war in the EU’s backyard, again.
-Moldova falls.
-Slovakia and Hungary continue to block everything within the EU.
-Hungary and Turkey block everything in NATO.
-further escalation in MENA, Israel is seriously threatened.
-world trade is threatened by pirates all over, not just Houthis.
-Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz, torpedo straight into the side of one of the larger civilian ships which sinks like a stone. Iran punishes the colonel who got carried away with a public hanging and apologizes profusely but the ship lies where it lies.
-China becomes increasingly aggressive towards Taiwan.
-demonstrations against everything become more common in the West and paralyze politics completely, social media suggests that citizens are in absolute rebellion mood and want the politicians’ blood.
-terror attacks by MENA terrorists run rampant in the West.
-EU’s electricity infrastructure experiences a large number of unexplained technical faults and electricity prices skyrocket.
At this point, does anyone believe NATO would have gone all in in the Baltics?
Especially not when the anti-I…el demonstrations suddenly become anti-Baltic demonstrations and very violent. Politicians in the West feel that citizens really do not want to support the Baltics and then it becomes difficult to send troops – on what national mandate should troops be sent if there are tens of thousands of angry demonstrators outside Rosenbad demanding eternal peace and above all it was not possible to get a majority in parliament for the operation, and other countries in NATO and the EU face similar problems.
Probably an exercise would have turned into a blitzkrieg that risked involving the few Western battalions sent who would have had to retreat and then the West would be left with the task of retaking the Baltics from Russian army corps behind a forest of mines. With the spring offensive in Ukraine fresh in mind, the lesser bad option is to wave goodbye to the Baltics and wish them luck in Soviet 2.0. Swedish politicians absolutely resist the idea that this would be a Baltic handover when two Viking Line ferries full of refugees were forced to turn back to Estonia when the Russian navy rammed them – they had no visas.
The defense forces in these countries are vanishingly small and the countries are completely encompassed by the Russian sphere. Belarus’s defense force is still unused and has been trained by Russia in rounds.
Now it won’t happen because Ukraine has crashed the whole party but that doesn’t mean this wasn’t the evil plan and something the West still has to consider in its risk analyses.
This one from Skator yesterday is also worth highlighting, RU is doing a lot to recover abandoned vehicles in poor condition at the Dnieper right now – previously they didn’t really care about abandoned vehicles so a certain shift.
Could be local at the Dnieper defense that they are short on vehicles but if you take a big risk to recover abandoned tanks it means you think it’s worth the risk to get them back and then you don’t have unlimited vehicles standing in the rear fully serviced and fueled, right?
I think I have found the answer to the riddle below.
https://charter97.org/en/news/2024/1/14/579375/
I have tried to dive a bit into the facilities for heavy vehicles and which ones have burned because it became a fixed idea to prove to the thread that everything has burned up.
I have to admit I am completely defeated 😐 but found lots of other fun stuff – as usual the trick is to evaluate sources and weigh the information against each other and I may very well have grabbed something wrong. Google is completely flooded with the Chelnyabilsk explosion so I don’t find much else but was pretty sure that the T90 and T80 factories had fires even if not big mushroom cloud explosions. Of course, I don’t find much else than a tire factory burning in Omsk, a train set with fuel in Nizhny Tagil and that the BMP factory half burned down so it seems they succeeded there.
What has definitely disappeared from the face of the earth is the facility that manufactures tank engines in Chelnyabilsk after a huge technical-fault explosion.
103rd Tank Factory in Chita (Transbaikalia) modernizes T62 – find nothing
Uralvagonzavod – T90 in Nizhny Tagil – there has been a fire in a train set with fuel but not in the factory.
Kurganmashzavod – BMP – there have been large fresh technical-fault fires.
Omsktransmash – T80 – find nothing.
In October 2023 the link below came out, interesting and there are 60-80 T90M left in units and up to September only 52 were produced in 2023.
https://mil.in.ua/en/blogs/how-many-t-90m-tanks-did-russia-produced/
The “new production” of T80 seems to be 150-180 older T80s modernized, not new production. Then apparently only 50 have been delivered up to September 2023. Slow is best.
https://armyrecognition.com/ukraine_-_russia_conflict_war_2022/russia_ramps_up_production_of_t-80bvm_main_battle_tanks_and_delivers_them_in_ukraine.html#google_vignette
The modernization of the T62 wheat, damn if I know how it’s going, but there were supposedly 600-800 units in total at the 103rd Tank Factory that were to be modernized, and it’s presumably ongoing?
In the below from Forbes, it is suspected that they cheated and took T90A and converted it into T90M; apparently, quite a few T90A are missing, so part of the “new production” is modernization. Forbes is otherwise not kind in their criticism of Russian tank production, real skeptics.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/01/10/what-is-missing-from-this-russian-tank-factory-promo-video-tanks/?sh=45c0c892b6c2
During 2023, only 100 “new” T80 and T90M have been added. There is some suspicion that T90A has been sacrificed for T90M in some cases, and it seems that older T80s have been modernized, so nothing new has really been added, but 100 fresh vehicles have been delivered to the Russian armed forces.
Actual new production should therefore be vanishingly small.
It also seems that 140 T-72B3 and 140 T-72B3M were added during 2023, fairly uncertain figures but I’ll go with them – these are modified T72s.
I’ll stick my neck out a bit and say that although there were apparently a couple of thousand tanks left in storage, very few were made ready during 2023.
Sure, maybe some still come directly from the bases, but then they are in terrible condition; we have seen many examples of such vehicles at the fronts.
During 2023 –
-Say 400 “new” Russian vehicles that have worse aiming devices than those Ukraine has received.
-Ukraine has received 600 and 300 are under delivery according to Oryx, and those are fully modernized vehicles with decent aiming devices.
But…
This is the best Russia can do while Ukraine has received 0.5% (i.e., very few!) of the tanks in the West’s stockpiles, and still Ukraine has received twice as many as the Russian army during 2023.
Ukraine has lost about 700 tanks according to Oryx while the Russians have lost 6,089.
It absolutely matters how many were added in 2023, and for Russia’s part, it is vanishingly few and a lot of T62s.
You understand why T62 and T54-55 have been seen in combat; there is nothing else available anymore.
I maintain that this looks really bad for the Russians and that they will need to look for help during 2024, otherwise the tank will start to become like an endangered species. Someone in the thread usually writes “snorkorta på pansar” (shortage of armor), whoever that is, and I undeniably think it looks like that now.
Everything else that the doubters attack is just hot air from the Russians, in my opinion.
I choose to believe this regarding AWACS – Russia has 8 in total. That fits well with Majsa-13 yesterday, one must admit.
I also believe there is truth behind the claim that they had 2-3 in Ukraine because there is quite a lot of other border to monitor and not all are presumably airworthy all the time?
A twelve-pack thus, and there isn’t unlimited IL22-M either, with two confirmed shot down in the war.
A spectacular attack in that area with missiles and fighter jets should come soon now that the stage has been set.
https://x.com/maks_nafo_fella/status/1746953627778916807?s=46&t=Vah3JXV31B9lXwZOK5gF7w
Putin watches what we do, not what we say, and so far there is very little that seems to deter him – he launched on October 7 hoping the West would become even more indecisive but had not counted on the rest of MENA to betray and China to remain silent. 2024 is absolutely the decisive year and the more I dive into the numbers, the worse it looks for the bunker dweller.
His big poker bluff where he barely reaches over the table edge and suspiciously glances at the Western players is exposed, and the UK has taken the bull by the horns and promised “long-range weapons” in support during 2024 as well as “help Ukraine win the war.”
Putin has every reason in the world to be worried because they are getting beaten right now and it’s going downhill fast.