Russia-Ukraine war and related tensions Megathread

[Stranger in a strange land]

https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/russia-hundreds-t90m-received-surge-production

Russian Army Has Received Hundreds of T-90M Tanks Under Surged Production - Reports

The Russian Army has reportedly recently several hundred T-90M tanks ready for frontline operations, according to an anonymous source cited by state media outlet Sputnik, with large numbers of new T-72B3M tanks having also been delivered. The announcement closely follows indications by Deputy Chairman Russian Security Council former president Dmitry Medvedev in the penultimate week of March that 1500 of the vehicles would be produced over the next year. "We will make 1,500 tanks alone this year. You can calculate how much our enemy will get, even according to the most optimistic calculations.”

As by far the most capable tank in Russian service, the T-90M completed testing in February 2020 and joined the Army in April that year, but was acquired on a very limited scale before the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian War in February. Major losses among older tank classes, and strong demonstration of the new model’s advantages, were key factors spurring a production surge.

One of the T-90M’s most notable advantages over older tanks is its integration of the 2A46M-5 gun and Kalina fire control system, which allow it to deploy the wide range specialised munitions some of which began to be seen in Ukraine in early 2023. The new tank also integrates a communication and command suite and digital communications systems significantly ahead of those of other operational Russian tanks. Its survivability benefits from the integration of the Afghanit active protection system and Relikt explosive reactive armour as well as isolation of munitions from the remainder of the vehicle internally, the benefits of which have already been seen in Ukraine..."

The Russian Army has received multiple batches of T-90Ms of unknown size since its forces began major operations in Ukraine in February 2022, with the vehicles beginning to be seen in the theatre in late April that year. Russia already comfortably outproduced all other tank manufacturers in the world combined with its T-90 output, although the large majority of these previously went to foreign clients most notably India and Algeria. The industry’s massive surplus capacity inherited from the Soviet era is expected to be key to facilitating production on a much larger scale not seen since 1991 to meet the demands of ongoing war in Ukraine and standoff with NATO. Whether production for export will continue to supplement the 1500 tanks produced for domestic use in the next year remains uncertain, with Russia’s dominant position in global markets for armour having been hard won and remaining highly prized.

Yeah, totally bro. 1500 T-90M. Thousands more to come. Pay no attention to the trainloads of T-54s coming out of storage in Siberia, I'm sure they're bringing those rust traps out of retirement because they have so many modern, functional tanks.

With reliable sources like Russian state media and even Dmitry Medvedev himself, I'll be taking this report very seriously.

If "1500 Black Tanks of Putin" includes everything from new production tanks to ancient T-54s being taken out of storage, then it's a plausible figure. It's entirely possible that in the Internet game of telephone, "1500 tanks put in service" somehow became "1500 tanks produced", which in turn became "1500 T-90Ms produced"

[Stranger in a strange land]

https://mobile.twitter.com/wgdunlop/status/1641145262209892614
https://mobile.twitter.com/TreasChest/status/1641211884194897920

bawhat?  But General Woody has been suggesting Ukraine leave for months and obviously he knows more than DoD intelligence.

Given the poor track record of US intelligence (right up to and including massive failures in both Afghanistan and Ukraine within the last two years) down the decades he probably does.

What failure would that be in Ukraine?

US Intelligence said exactly what was going to happen happened, but Euros weren’t listening because lol Iraq.

The one where they overestimated the strength of the Russian invasion force and predicted that Ukraine would collapse quickly (and if you don’t believe me you can search “US intelligence failure Ukraine” and read more about it). I wouldn’t consider the fact that they correctly predicted that there would be a Russian invasion to obviate the fact that they seemed to lack understanding of Russian strategy, the quality of the invasion force and, most bizarrely, the strength of Ukrainian resistance (given that the US has, you know, been cooperating closely with the Ukrainian military for years). That seems more relevant for assessing their competence in analysing the state of the Russian forces now than the fact that they successfully predicted that an invasion force would… invade.

[Stranger in a strange land]

I don't understand why the US isn't training Ukrainian pilots on the F-16 right now.

If it turns out down the road that the F-16 aren't needed, no harm is done.

Same here, especially since the US and other allies are retiring them as the F-35 enters service. Sure, these airframes are old and reaching the end of their service lives, but they only need to fly until the end of the war, after which they can be replaced.

[Stranger in a strange land]

The really enlightened position is that the Great War wasn’t a world war. The real World War I was the Seven Years’ War.

War of the Spanish succession imo

You know, I've always wondered why wars like The Wars of Spanish Succession, the Seven Years War, and the Napoleonic Wars aren't considered "World Wars" since they involved all the major powers of the international system and had fighting on multiple continents. By that standard, we would be on like World War IX by now.

[Stranger in a strange land]

On the topic of casualties:

https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/1646902536362704896?s=20

I know Tucker has stupid fans but how exactly does he explain that Ukraine is suffering 7 dead to 1 Russian but they managed to pushed Russia out of Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson and Russia after a year of fighting is stuck in the Donbas?

He can't: none of this is possible or remotely believable unless your sources are Russian State Media or English-speaking pro-Russian social media accounts.

[Stranger in a strange land]

I've read most of Red Velvet's text blocks (you should seriously consider combining them into a book at this point) but I'm still unclear on:

1) Why Russia is part of the "Global South" when it was never colonized and was (and still is!!!) a colonizing country? Indeed, under the definition I think you're using, Ukraine has a better claim on being a Global South Country than Russia does, though IMHO neither is.

2) How it's striking against the corrupt, white supremacist world order in favor of the non-white majority world when Russia is majority-white and ethnic Russians are white people by any possible standard unless we're using weird 19th century racial science, which I don't think you are.

[Stranger in a strange land]

Imagine if this escalates to Russia supplying Hamas.

https://twitter.com/301military/status/1649105384169144344

Russia has almost certainly already agreed to supply Iran (in exchange for Iran supplying them), which in turn would arm Hamas and Hezbollah with whatever it can.

[Stranger in a strange land]

Red Velvet, Bakhmut Bob, Jaichind, Tim Turner: BOTH SIDES BAD

Russia:

https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1647962466536550409

This reality makes the smelling their own farts level simpering by red velvet, cassius, and are two main trolls in Chief just all that more detestable. How disengaged from reality does one need to be to not recognize there's a fundamentally basic right and wrong side here?

Tbh red velvet and hollywood are the only real ones who act like this isn’t a black and white conflict. Woodbury is more about pushing a “Russia is winning the war and it’s all Brandon’s fault if Daddy Trump were here everything would be right” and jaichind is more interested in promoting the idea of making money off the sanctions then the morality of the war

Either way, you know the reply is just going to be "But Muh Azov" or "But Muh 8 Years of Shelling Donbas"

[Stranger in a strange land]

I’m shocked Wagner isn’t a reliable source of information

You sure? Because not long ago you were quoting the same man like crazy when he was fearmongering.

Yes, I'm completely sure Wagner PMC is not a reliable source for a conflict that Wagner PMC is fighting in.

This logic is not inherently wrong, but it needs to be applied equally.

Ukraine is a democratic country, Wagner is a PMC staffed by convicts.

You think militaries in countries arbitrarily labelled as "democratic" are suddenly less likely to make things up or deny things?
You sweet, summer child...

Yes. Having a free press ensures less graft and corruption within the armed forces. Putin learned this last year when he discovered the truth of just how ineffective his military is.

I'll take this opportunity to remind everyone to watch Perun's masterpieces "How Corruption Destroys Armies" and "How Lies Destroy Armies" if you haven't already. Regarding the latter video, my theory is now that the US has a mole within Putin's office, which is why US intelligence is so spot-on when it comes to Russia's intentions, but tends to VASTLY overstate the Russian military's capabilities.

[Stranger in a strange land]

Another Russian oil refinery on fire:

Location of refinery

https://twitter.com/IntelCrab/status/1653926131731509251?s=20

Evidently the Ilsky Refinery was attacked again, this time by "sabetours":

https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1654378116876312577?s=20

This is most definitely not a coincidence. Why would Ukraine target refineries in Crimea and the Kuban? Almost all of the Russian military traffic going to the occupied portions of Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts goes from Krasnodar Krai, across the Kerch strait, and up through Crimea.

https://twitter.com/KyleJGlen/status/1654075479559684096?s=20

Ukraine appears to have some sort of new Deep Strike weapon. It's possible that they may have secretly been given ATACMS, or more likely, that they've McGyver'd another old Soviet System (similar to what they did with the old Tu-128 drones a few months ago) or commercially available drones to fly deep into Russian territory and hit critical infrastructure. Iran, a heavily sanctioned country with little to no aerospace industry built the Shahed series of drones with consumer-grade electronics. There's no reason to think Ukraine can't do something similar.

[Stranger in a strange land]

Ramzan Kadyrov chimes in.

https://twitter.com/albafella1/status/1654530349790003214?t=oGItQFpkDATt-t2wk0_S...

The other day I was thinking about how at the start of the war, we heard about Kadyrov and the Chechens all the time but nowadays we barely hear about them, which I guess makes sense when you consider:

1) A lot of the prominent TikTok warriors were killed because of, you guessed it, poor OpsSec
2) When the Chechens have actually had to fight in this war, their performance hasn't been all that great, and certainly hasn't lived up to the hype
3) A combination of the above two factors, combined with the rather silly nature of a lot of the TikTok and Telegram posts in the early days of the war, means that they aren't an effective propaganda weapon for Putin, and seem to inspire more derision and mockery rather than fear
4) There seems to have been a lot of anger among Russian milbloggers, particularly those close to the DPR leadership, that they did the actual fighting in Mariupol and then the Chechens showed up to claim all the credit.

[Stranger in a strange land]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65550427

"Zelensky says Ukraine needs more time for counter-offensive"



My guess is that this is a cover for a smaller counter-offensive to start soon.  This retains the element of surprise and if it is not successful Ukraine can always claim that it was just a probing action and not the real counter-offensive.

If you believe the leaks, the offensive is to include brand new brigades, some of which would have had just 4 months' training at the end of April. Russia has just demonstrated the dangers of using relatively green troops in an offensive.

Also, one of the worst things you can do is launch an offensive in unfavorable weather, and apparently mud season is still ongoing in Ukraine. I wonder if there were a recent historical example of an offensive launched in mud season going poorly, maybe even from the current war. Hmm, gotta think real hard on that one...

[Stranger in a strange land]

Prigozhin already is an Atlas poster:
https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?action=profile;u=18362

Prigozhin is not so pro-Kremlin, like him

Speaking of which, I'm thinking of doing a poll on how long it will be until he trips and falls out of a ten-story window.

Wagner is widely suspected of being a tool of the GRU, the people who make people fall out of windows. The fact that Prigozhin hasn't fallen out of a window yet is a VERY bad sign for Putin.

[Stranger in a strange land]

Wagner is widely suspected of being a tool of the GRU, the people who make people fall out of windows. The fact that Prigozhin hasn't fallen out of a window yet is a VERY bad sign for Putin.

This is a common opinion, but GRU owned the Redut PMC, which completely failed at the very beginning of the war. I have no direct evidence, but based on open sources, it seems that Wagner is a structure within the FSO. Which allows the Wagnerites to insult the Ministry of Defense with impunity and contemptuously demand that it increase supplies. The FSO stands above the Ministry of Defense and above even Rosguardia (why actually Kadyrov with his Rosguardia's Akhmat called Prigozhin his elder brother), whereas the GRU is entirely subordinate to the Ministry of Defense.

The FSO is one of Putin's personal guard services, perhaps the most competent.

Thanks! I can’t read Russian and am thus pretty much limited to English language sources, and the Russian alphabet soup of Three-Letter agencies is even more convoluted and overlapping than the American one, but it sounds like what you’re saying is that Prigozhin and Wagner are tools of an even more powerful security agency, so Putin is even more f[inks]ed than I realized. Putin actually seems to take the “Third Rome” stuff seriously, and we all know what would happen when the Paraetorian Guard decided they wanted a new emperor…

[Stranger in a strange land]

We may soon be facing a situation where Russia has nothing left but reservists. I'll say this much: Red Storm Rising has been more accurate about modern war than just about any non-fiction book ever.

The Soviet Army in Red Strom Rising is much, much more competent, better-led, and less corrupt than the Russian Army that invaded Ukraine in 2022.

[Stranger in a strange land]

https://nypost.com/2023/05/22/ukraine-losing-10000-drones-per-month-to-russia/

"Ukraine losing 10,000 drones per month to Russian electronic warfare: report"

I’m pretty sure there aren’t 10,000 UA drones in the first place, but who am I to argue with America’s tabloid of record.
Keep coping bro

The drones shown in the article are those little quadcopter hobby drones you can buy off of AliExpress or Temu for 100-200 bucks, which Ukrainians have been using for recon or grenade drops. As Perun said in one of his videos, these are so cheap and disposable that they're more accurately regarded as ordnance rather than UAVs, but the fact that Russia now apparently has EW systems that can take them out is the real and concerning finding here. The 10,000 figure is to grab clicks and eyeballs, and even then I don't find it realistic. 

[Stranger in a strange land]

The lazy whataboutism towards Palestine and Iraq which more or less boils down to “well because the West did bad stuff Ukraine needs to suffer” has been one of the more cringe arguments coming from Putin enablers

Uhhhh Palestine STILL is ignored right now. And you see the opposite reasoning used to justify it. The “rules-based order” used to defend Ukraine simply doesn’t exist if it’s something that easily flip-flops depending single-handedly on “which side the west is more friends with”.

This isn’t necessarily wrong, but I think you know full well what people are usually doing when they say “What about Palestine?” in a conversation about Ukraine. The point is almost never that you should also support Palestine: it’s that you shouldn’t support Ukraine

[Stranger in a strange land]

You actually hear this point come up much more incisively from South Africans much much more than Indians or Brazilians. Africans in general feel this global marginalization much more strongly.

https://twitter.com/GUnderground_TV/status/1661344074018725889

isn't the ANC one of the most corrupt political parties in the entire world?  "how many crimes have you committed in your own country, to your own people Fikile?"

Yes. There was once a time when the ANC would have had the moral standing to make this sort of criticism, but those days are long in the past.

[Stranger in a strange land]

https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1661669704375627777?s=20

Or the projection of Russian nationalists, when they turn the fact of the territories annexed from China in the Far East into a story about the sale of Russian territories to the PRC, became true and Putin really sells forests to the PRC  

I doubt China actually has designs on Siberia or the Russian Far East: it's much cheaper and easier for them to just buy the resources at fire-sale prices and not have to pay the cost of garrisoning and administering the territories.

[Stranger in a strange land]

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2023/05/sad-reality-the-ukraine-war-is-now-going-russias-way/

"Sad Reality: The Ukraine War Is Now Going Russia’s Way"

The same author wrote:

Ukraine’s Long-Expected Offensive: Why It Won’t Beat Putin

Bad News: NATO Tanks, Planes, And Artillery Unlikely To Win Ukraine War

America Can’t Give Ukraine So Many Weapons A Nuclear War Starts

Why Is Europe Paying So Little To Defend Ukraine Against Russia?

Putin Could Launch A Big Winter Offensive In Ukraine To Cut Off Weapons

Putin’s Coming Winter Offensive Is A Clear Threat To Ukraine

I’m curious. Does the “Coming Winter Offensive” he wrote about refer to the Battle of Bakhmut which started in August, or Vuhledar where the Russian assaults on fortified positions failed to move the line at all? Those were the only Russian attacks I can even remember going back more than half a year.

The consensus among people who study the war seriously is that Vulehdar was the Russian Winter Offensive.

[Stranger in a strange land]

Чемодан-вокзал-Россия!

https://twitter.com/alinavictoriaw/status/1661745047279398915

Woodbury_IRL

While I don't believe this woman should be arrested or assaulted for posting her opinion, however vile it may be, you do have to wonder why this type of person chooses to live in the degenerate "Collective West" rather than in Holy Mother Russia.

[Stranger in a strange land]

If there is a sound reason to expel Turkey it will be expelled, and what the US wants will be what happens. Turkey not really making much of a contribution is not a good reason to expel. The alliance historically has had a lot of members that do essentially nothing. As mentioned above, sharing military secrets with enemies might be a good reason, or perhaps arming enemies. So far as I know, Turkey is not giving aid to Putin.

The issue with Turkey is that it's both the biggest headache and one of the biggest contributors, both in material terms and its geographic location, which controls the the only direct connection between Asia and Europe not under Russian Control and blocks Russia from accessing the Mediterranean. All in all, it's much better to have Turkey causing problems inside the alliance rather than outside of it, and the same applies for Turkey: in addition to preventing openly hostile relations with the US, the UK, and to a lesser degree Germany and France, having Greece as a nominal ally rather than an open enemy is a little-discussed but important benefit.

[Stranger in a strange land]

Again, this damn is kind of an illustration of a point is if that if there is a nuclear confrontation with Russia, it was probably always inevitable.

Thank you for this cheerful thought. I still think Putin gets offed if that really looks like happening.

Putin is fine with Random Ukrainians (as well as of course Random Russians) suffering, but not with his own suffering. There have been multiple points in the war so far where using nuclear weapons could have offered him an out, but where he chose either strategic withdrawal (abandoning the Kyiv Offensive when it became obvious they couldn't take the city and the attacking forces were in danger of being cut off and pocketed, the withdrawal from Kherson, etc) or other steps that didn't involve nukes (the September mobilization after the Kharkiv Counter-Offensive). He cares most of all about his own self-preservation and personal safety and comfort.

[Stranger in a strange land]

Looks like Zaporozhye area will see rain in the next few days.  The mud will slow down any mechanized advances or movements by either side.

https://twitter.com/Eureka_News_ENG/status/1667832637568761856

Russia can always count on General Weather.

You managed to make the General Frost idiotic stereotype sound even more idiotic, even though it seemed impossible.

"General Winter", "General Mud", "General Frost" and now seemingly "General Weather" are euphemisms for poor planning and logistics, and they are chaotic neutrals, not pro-Russian:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kyiv_(2022)

[Stranger in a strange land]

*WARNING the following is quite disturbing
We can add more war crimes to the list as there are now hundreds of reported cases of recently returned Ukrainian pows who were found to of been castrated during their time in captivity and in one case the Russian solider who did it told his victims it was to prevent them (Ukrainian soldiers) from having kids so can we start finally calling what Russia in doing in Ukraine a genocide yet?!
https://archive.is/2023.06.17-184144/https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/4561e12a-0d14-11ee-aa7c-6e26d8c3ad9b#selection-841.0-841.78

Not clicking the link, but if true, this seems like a great way to get your enemy to fight to the death.