Russo-Ukrainian War Thread - Page 401

On March 11 2023 19:27 Magic Powers wrote:
For additional good guy status, imagine being hugely dependent on the invading nation and deciding to cut ties with them as much as possible within the span of just one year - not because you have to, but mostly because you want to signal full support to the defending nation. It's not like Putin himself would've decided to cut ties with the EU at any point now or later, he was also hugely profiting off of this relationship. Although the job isn't quite done yet, a lot of progress has been made and more will be done.
Or consider the Baltic states basically stripping their own military all but naked for the duration of the war just because they're eager to send everything they have to Ukraine.
Also, from which nation did we receive brutal images of saboteurs setting recruitment stations on fire and shooting recruitment officers? Russia. Not Ukraine. Many Russians themselves agree that this war is unjust. I've yet to hear from a single Ukrainian disagreeing.

On March 11 2023 22:55 Magic Powers wrote:


My point isn't that there are no pro-war Ukrainians, but that they're a tiny minority compared to the anti-war Russians.

On March 11 2023 22:55 Magic Powers wrote:


My point isn't that there are no pro-war Ukrainians, but that they're a tiny minority compared to the anti-war Russians.

On March 13 2023 05:36 ZeroByte13 wrote:
The majority of russians does NOT think the war is awesome and they're gonna win.
You probably know few people in Russia personally, if any (please correct me if I'm wrong), I know hundreeds of people personally and know the overall "mood" over there.
The vast majority of them do NOT think like you've described here. Of course, I might be not very representative here, most of my friends and colleagues are good people and also they're pretty smart.

But still, I'm 100% sure even in general only a small percentage think the war is awesome.
A bigger percentage think it's shit but "probably those guys above know better" - as they want to believe all this shit is at least somewhat justified.
A lot of people understand it will end up in really bad consequences and they are super unhappy about the war.

Don't get me wrong - in absolute numbers a LOT of people support the war.
Russia has population of 145 millions or so, so even 10% is 15 millions. But not majority.

Russia’s tank shortage is worse than some observers previously thought. The Kremlin’s stocks of its most numerous tank, the Cold War-vintage T-72, are running out fast.

The worsening T-72 shortfall helps to explain why the Russians increasingly are equipping their newly-mobilized battalions with obsolete T-62 and T-80B tanks.

When it comes to assessing the Russian tank arsenal, one of the best independent sources is a Twitter user with the handle @partizan_oleg.

Drawing on unclassified data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and other sources, including the Oryx blog’s painstaking count of visually-confirmed vehicle losses in the current phase of the Russia-Ukraine war, @partizan_oleg estimates how many tanks the Russians have left after more than a year of hard fighting.

Their assessment of T-72 stocks has changed—for the worse. In a mid-February count, @partizan_oleg assumed Russia went to war with nearly 2,000 of the 50-ton, three-person T-72s with their 125-millimeter smoothbore main guns.

In the first 12 months of fighting, the Ukrainians destroyed or captured nearly 1,200 T-72s or likely T-72s that Oryx could confirm. Since there undoubtedly have been tank losses that didn’t leave video or photographic evidence, the Oryx count is an undercount. If Oryx confirmed 80 percent of losses, then the Russians actually have written off 1,500 T-72s.

But per @partizan_oleg’s earlier count, the Russians had 6,900 old T-72s in storage, around a third of which might’ve been recoverable after decades of corrosive exposure to rain, snow and cycles of hot and cold.

The problem, for the Kremlin, is that @partizan_oleg’s February count was off. Double-checking their numbers on Tuesday, @partizan_oleg realized that, in fact, the Russians probably only have 1,500, not 6,900, old T-72s in storage. “And many of them are probably not in good shape,” they pointed out.

The recount was pretty straightforward. @partizan_oleg started with the number of T-72 hulls that Soviet industry produced in a 23-year production run between 1968 and 1991—18,000—and started subtracting tanks the Soviets and Russians either lost in combat or exported to foreign customers.

That’s how they arrived at the much lower number of war-reserve T-72s. The big variable, @partizan_oleg acknowledged, is that their production data might not include the very first T-72 model, the crude T-72 “Ural.” It’s unclear how many Urals the Uralvagonzavod factory in Sverdlovsk Oblast may have produced then stored. Perhaps hundreds. Perhaps a couple thousand.

But even after adding some very old Urals to @partizan_oleg’s T-72 survey, a stark conclusion is unavoidable. The Russians have lost potentially two-thirds of the T-72s that are in active service or in recoverable storage.

So it makes a lot more sense why the Kremlin is pulling out of storage T-62 tanks that are even older than any T-72, as well as T-80Bs that are roughly contemporaneous with early T-72s. Russian industry can produce just a handful of new tanks every month—far too few to make good monthly losses in the triple digits.

All that is to say, the Russians are running out of tanks. And quickly.

On March 13 2023 20:49 Excludos wrote:


I'll be honest, with the casualty numbers we're seeing from the Russian side, I'm extremely surprised we haven't seen more protests yet. Sure, protesting is dangerous, but when you lose enough friends and loved ones, that starts mattering a lot less. If the war was somewhat justified, you could kind of see it as the cost of protecting your country, but if what you're saying is true, then people there knows it isn't so.

On March 12 2023 09:13 Manit0u wrote:


This is supposedly a picture of a field near Bakhmut after another failed Russian attack. Red checkmarks show where the bodies are...

On March 14 2023 07:12 Manit0u wrote:
That's why I wrote "supposedly" in there. Can't really trust most of the stuff like that from either side unfortunately.