Originally Posted by
Count of Monte Bisto
We have not been without our issues ourselves over the years. Go back in history and you will find the scandal of the Sherman tank (or Tommy Cooker as it was known). It had a rubbish 75mm peashooter main gun, poor armour and would go on fire in an instant due its petrol engine. I remember seeing a Germany officer being interviewed after the war who had been in charge on an 88mm anti-tank battery. I think he said his unit took out 18 Shermans, but had to retreat in the end because another 6 kept coming when he had run out of ammunition! In that one event you had the wonders of American industrial power on display - they had the wrong tank, but in the right quantities to overwhelm the opposition. The Russians have some of the right equipment but seem completely unable to run a campaign. Russian losses historically have been eye-watering, but as a nation they do not seem to flinch. In the space of a month they have lost the same number of dead as they did in the whole of the Afghanistan conflict and still they do not seem to care. Their Air Force cannot operate and their tanks are either out of fuel, stuck in the mud or being destroyed by the Ukrainians using UK and American anti-tank weapons. They are facing economic collapse, shortages of basic goods and food - not to mention utter humiliation on the battlefield. Yet most of the population are drinking the Kool Aid and believing they are liberating Ukraine for Nazi oppression and that it is the Ukrainians who are destroying their own cities to curry favour with the West. It is simply insane, but that is a mere detail in the eyes of most Russians. Crazy stuff.
It is apparently the consensus that the Russian Army is poorly led and hugely wasteful in its tactics. There are certainly plenty of early invasion images that would support that thesis, but there are countertrends.
In particular, we should look at the gradual progression of the Russian invasion in the eastern regions, where the insurrection had attracted the Ukrainian Army's focus and where there has been intense fighting even before the invasion..
We hear little about that front, but the French Defense Dept maps indicate that the Russians are advancing there and have cut off parts of the Ukraine forces.
It seems to be a meat grinder type of combat which the Russians are prepared for. The dismissal last Thursday by Zelensky of two of his senior military officers for being 'traitors' may be a reflection of these realities.
Separately, I have to doubt the claim of economic collapse or of food shortages.
Given that Russia was a major exporter of foodstuffs, energy and raw materials, with a large perennial trade surplus, the various sanctions seem to me to do more damage to us, the buyers, than to them, the sellers. Russia will certainly have fewer imported consumer goods and Russian industry will suffer, forced to retreat to older technologies or reinvent workarounds of the embargoed systems, but that is not unusual in Russia.