The hour-long conversation between the two presidents focused on Russia's war in Ukraine and the situation in the Middle East, according to Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov.
  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
    2·
    13 hours ago

    Let me re-emphasize here to clarify some other comments I have made, with what main battle tanks and armored fighting vehicles will Putin do so with?

    While Russia is beginning to produce T90 tanks at a decent rate producing tanks is inherently a slow business to be in and Russia needs to restock its basic supply of tanks before it even thinks about an actual, honest real armored offensive again. Russia also seems to producing its current armored vehicles at a rate that somewhat replaces them one for one with vehicles lost on the battlefield (which is only maintaining an already critical lack of armored vehicles for them) but Ukranians should rejoice if they keep doing that because their armored fighting vehicle armor fucking sucks especially against skilled FPV pilots like Ukraine has and artillery like Ukraine has. Even when Russia fields main battle tanks with heavy armor they rarely at a basic level extend that grace of protection to the infantry carrying armored vehicles.

    The Bradley IFV demolishes their armored fighting vehicles, it makes Russian tankers think twice, Europe has other counterparts that are similarly effective and… Russia for the most part doesn’t and if Russia does with some of their BMPs there is a very small chance that the armor crews and associated nearby infantry, artillery and air support are trained at all about how to support them in a way they can be used decisively. Most of those Russian armor veterans with that experience are probably long long long long dead because the armor on the vehicles they were ordered to use again sucks. When your armored fighting vehicle crews don’t survive engagements and they have to keep fighting against armored fighting vehicle crews that do (even if their vehicles don’t), it is a losing proposition on every level.

    You can argue in a defensive war that Ukraine doesn’t have an advantage here because armor is for assaulting not defending, but that is misunderstanding the basic role of armor especially “tank killers” as they were referred to in WW2. When an enemy inveitably makes a decisive breakthrough in your front lines through application of overwhelming force (artillery) and number, the speed with which your forces can move to contain the breakthrough determines whether the situation becomes a strategic defeat. Armor allows friendly Ukranian forces to decisively smash Russian breakthroughs in the Ukranian frontline from the sides while minimizing the hazards that would come from being forced to truck a similar amount of infantry unprotected in normal military trucks blindly at the Russian assault force and hoping that your scouts see them before they see you… or just hoping the Russians can’t exploit the opening the inherent slowness of friendly infantry moving over hostile terrain creates.

    Russia’s poor performance has likely been caused by several factors: the Russian military’s reliance on dismounted infantry and mechanized forces to take Ukrainian territory, Russia’s failure to use operational fires in a coordinated way that enables maneuver, and Ukraine’s effective utilization of defense in depth.

    …

    Changes in the Russian-to-Ukrainian fighting vehicles loss ratio underscore the growing inefficiency of Moscow’s invasion. In early 2024, Russia experienced loss ratios higher than those it suffered during its initial 2022 invasion in exchange for only a fraction of the territorial gains. Russia’s offensives since January 2024 have yielded only marginal territorial gains but consistently suffered unfavorable loss ratios. The disparity points to the challenge of attempting repeated frontal assaults into well-prepared defenses and Russia’s reliance on mass rather than maneuver. Russia has attempted to offset these losses by greatly increasing its domestic defense production and supplementing with foreign supplies, including from China, Iran, and North Korea

    Although the Kremlin appears willing to absorb high attrition in a bid to outlast Kyiv, the sustained disproportionate equipment loss rate erodes its capacity to generate fresh, high‑quality formations for the decisive breakthroughs it still seeks. Since January 2024, Russia has traded vast quantities of equipment for mere meters of ground—a strategy that decisively falls short of Moscow’s objective to greatly expand its control of Ukrainian territory.

    https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-battlefield-woes-ukraine

    Civilian vehicles now account for 90 percent of the hundreds of vehicles the Russians lose in action every month. There are a lot of wrecked compact cars along the front line—enough for the Russians to begin cannibalizing the wreckage in order to build new compact cars.

    https://daxe.substack.com/p/the-russians-have-lost-so-many-compact