25,000 out of action? Thatās 1 in 6 of the allegedly 150,000 that were (IIRC) said to be on the borders before the actual invasion started. 1 in 6!
Thereās a reply pointing out that soldiers from the separatist Donetsk and Luhansk Peopleās Republics wonāt be included.
But they werenāt in the 150,000 Russian troops massing on the borders, anyway.
(Did I misinterpret what you said?)
Oh - are you saying the casualties are even higher- but then the troop numbers total would be too - if DNR and LNR casualties/troops were included. Ok - I think I get it.
Still 1 in 6 of the actual Russians who crossed the border. (Or are still just the other side of it. If that number is significant then itās possibly more like 1 in 5 of those who crossed the border? Or higher?)
The irony that man who likely was a slave laborer creating rockets (at PeenemĆ¼nde) was killed by a flying bomb is painful to say the least.
If you dig through up thread are several deep dives and twitter threads on the failure of that effort and how Russiaās command structure still differs in having much higher ranking officers in the field and much more hands on. After all weāre seeing Generals of various sorts get mirked on the front.
But your last article there is dated February 2nd. Almost a month before the actual invasion, a lot of what it labels āthe realityā has turned out not to be true. So in hind sight at least it comes off as more of that Russian invincibility line.
In particular on that myth 3. The vast majority of troops Russia has sent in seem to be conscripts. The more professional ācontractā soldiers have mostly turned out to be more paramilitary in nature. Basically riot police and units used for suppression internally. Along with a few PR units that have been kept out of the fighting.
On the NCOs the deal is they apparently donāt have enough of them. They lack experience, respect of the higher ups due to class divisions, and arenāt given much actual authority.
Frankly the article just seems outdated, a lot of what itās predicting just isnāt what weāve seen. Even as thereās some good points in it.
Itās not just that they donāt have enough, itās that the ones they have arenāt professionals. In the US there is an entire education system for NCOs, the Noncommissioned Officer Professional Development System (which doesnāt OneBox):
They lack experience, respect of the higher ups due to class divisions, and arenāt given much actual authority.
This is basically the description of Russian NCOs, yes. And, to be fair, itās not just Russian NCOs. The system where professionalized NCOs are given more responsibility and leeway is a western/NATO thing that western/NATO countries have tried to bring to other areas. US African Command has entire schools devoted to teaching various African militaries how to operate in that context.
This originates in the US with Baron von Steuben, who created a professional NCO corps and gave them a great deal of responsibility. But it was hammered home in the US Civil War, which saw around 10% of Union and Confederate Generals killed on the battlefield. The officer ranks shuffled quite a bit, and many of the officers werenāt professional soldiers, but were instead elected to the ranks by the soldiers. So a well-trained NCO corps was critical.
Kamil Galeev wrote a thread claiming that soldiers and the army as an institution are not respected by Russian society or the government. Conscripts are mostly poor boys from the provinces (and, increasingly, ethnic minorities) who canāt get out of serving. Local gangsters extort money from army bases with impunity.
Putin and his KGB/FSB friends see the army as a potential threat, so they parachute in their own people to key army posts, obstruct promotion for career army officers and generally keep the army dumbed down. Army officers are chosen for a lack of intelligence, and they have a narrow education. The combination of unmotivated troops and unintelligent officers makes the army unfit for close infantry fighting and forces it to rely on artillery.
Yeah that was roughly speaking the line from the several things I run across explaining how theyāve repeatedly failed to fix this since Georgia and Syria.
Basically they tried to create a body of professional NCOs by offering long term contracts to conscripts. But down to low pay, and just lack of people to conscript. They didnāt get many people signing on, and very few of them stay on for more than one contract.
Since theyāre not drawn from the same social classes, nor attend the same school as the officers. The command doesnāt like them, and officers wonāt use them. Conscripts donāt like them because theyāre contract, and the other contract soldiers are mostly not in regular Army units. Theyāre for arresting protestors in St. Petersburg.
So it sound worse than not having enough NCOs. Even if there were more, and they were in the proper part of the command structure. No one would listen to them.
They basically created a psuedo-professional block of disgruntled cooks. A new class of soldier thatās just more likely to steal all your fuel before you invade a neighbor.
Yeah that seems to be the thing thatās been coming out more recently. And Galeev has been working it into a few of those threads.
It seems the professional class in the Russian military arenāt soldiers, or in the sort of units sent to Ukraine. Thereās officers. And then those Special Operations units and forces trained for internal control. Trained to disappear protestors and stamp out unrest in places you already control.
When you hear that most Russians are deeply afraid of Putin and the government. The volunteer,
āmodernizedā part of the military is apparently the mechanism for that. Iāve seen these units and forces pejoratively called riot police, and terror units.
Not to drift too far, but Cuba has a similar structure. There are neighborhood patrols that wear green, regular cops that wear blue, and another force in brown. But itās the black-shirted police (āLos Negrosā) who are truly scary. Theyāre for disappearing people, and are generally seen with K9s and automatic weapons. The black-shirts who serve in the east are usually drawn from the west, and vice-versa. Thereās a historic animosity, pre-dating Columbus, between the two regions and having the scary cops serve in the āforeignā area takes advantage of that. Ordinary Cubans are truly, truly scared of them.
If you mean Rosgvardiya, it absorbed the OMON riot police and SOBR paramilitary police.
I found this interview an interesting insight into Putin and (further into it) into his relationship with China.
Here is the introduction. Link below.
While Russiaās increasing isolation may be a well deserved consequence of its brutal war in Ukraine, it nonetheless poses several dangers for the West. One is that the Russian public will lose its last access to honest reporting about whatās happening in the United States, in Ukraine, and in their own country. Another is that figuring out what the Russian people are thinking, and their government is planning, will become even harder for those of us on the outside. In the hopes of getting a glimpse inside the black box before it closes entirely, I reached out to on Friday to an old friend, Alexander Gabuev . A former diplomatic correspondent and editor at Kommersant , a Russian newspaper, heās now a senior fellow and chair of the Russia in the Asia-Pacific Program at the Carnegie Moscow Centerāalthough he, like many of his colleagues and a huge number of other Russians, recently left the country. We spoke about Putinās mindset, how he got Ukraine so wrong, andāsince Sasha is a China expertāabout what this all means for the relationship between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
And itās already started. Voronov said that the authorities within days of the conflict raided the homes and offices of countless LGBT+ and human rights activists. Some are being arrested for holding pieces of paper.
āThe question is not about winning or losing. The question is where the authorities will find a reason for the loss: human rights defenders, āforeign agentsā, traitors of ātraditional valuesā and everyone who was against the war.
āThe responsibility for the loss will be assigned to us.ā
I suppose this is part of what Putin had in mind when he talked about the āself-purificationā of Russia.
āThe Russian State needs to search for enemies all the time, and these enemies are human rights defenders, LGBTQ people and activists, political opposition, āThe Westā, et cetera.ā
In part. But also actual police groups. Military police units within the Army itself. Apparently those Paratroopers in the tight blue shirts, who actually never actually jump out of planes. Even much of what makes up Spetsnaz units as a category, and those āeliteā Chechens.
Apparently theyāre all actually trained for internal security and policing. Theyāre for crowd control, making sure individual officers and officials donāt gain too much control, stamping down internal opposition groups and ethnic out groups.
It seems pretty much daily I run into an explainer about some group or unit, that are actually not technically part of the military. Or thatās in the military but is specifically for internal control, and usually kept separate from regular army. Many of them do seem to be part of Rosgvardiya. But it seems like they sneak this shit into everything, like I ran across something on the paramilitary wing of their transportation department. Chiefly used to suppress protests!
Itās common enough.
But it seems like Russia has an endless supply of different groups. The thread @GagHalfrunt posted is mostly about how central they are to Russiaās internal structure. How they deliberately undermine their own military so they couldnāt possible challenge Putin or the State Security forces. Who are rigidly loyal to Putin.
So whatās probably on thread:
Itās these groups. Not Oligarchs that keep Putin in power. Oligarchs stay Oligarchs by not getting Putined by the Paramilitaries. And while there are key Oligarchs in charge of this stuff, he apparently keeps them loyal by making these groups the new Russian social elite. Straight down to the bottom.
I have no words for the sadness.
I have some context, though. As @Mangochin already pointed out, Romantschenko survived slave labour building rockets for the Nazis.
Please click through for a photo of him, in 2015, reading the words āŠŠ°Ń ŠøŠ“ŠµŠ°Š» ā ŠæŠ¾ŃŃŃŠ¾ŠøŃŃ Š½Š¾Š²ŃŠ¹ Š¼ŠøŃ Š¼ŠøŃŠ° Šø ŃŠ²Š¾Š±Š¾Š“Ń.ā at Buchenwald, in Russian language.
https://www.buchenwald.de/en/47/date/2022/03/21/boris-romantschenko-getoetet/
I want to remember Boris Romantschenko, and the legacy the survivors have for us.
I kindly as you to tell people who, on the 23rd of March, will talk about Wernher von Braun as if he was a hero, what is sadly still obscure knowledge.
Mittelbau-Dora wasnāt just a concentration camp. It was the place dedicated to von Braunās work on the Vergeltungswaffen. When you hear the news about Kinzhal rockets these days, you might get an idea what that was all about. Mittelbau-Dora was founded after the Heeresversuchsanstalt PeenemĆ¼nde was attacked in 1943 by the allies. Dornberger and von Braun had demanded for forced labourers, they got them at first from Buchenwald. More than 4000 were planned to be used at PeenemĆ¼nde. After the British air raid, von Braun went under ground in Mittelbau-Dora. In the end, more than 10,000 were killed for the rocket program. I cannot imagine the conditions. They died from hunger, from exhaustion, were murdered by the SS for trivial things.
I recently heard an excerpt from interviews with a survivors from Buchenwald. One said: āIch wusste, Buchenwald war eine TodesverkĆ¼ndung. Aber Dora? Man wagte kaum, Dora, den Namen, Dora, auszusprechen. Wenn man nach Dora kam, dann war es aus.ā
The other: āDie letzten Monate, '44 und '45, waren schlimmer wie zwei Jahre Auschwitz fĆ¼r uns.ā
Wernher von Braun defended his āworkā after the war, said he had only done his duties. During a war, any engineer would be a soldier. He tried to deflect all responsibility for slave labour, terrible conditions of the workers, and murder to the SS. But we know now the personally chose inmates in Buchenwald. He knew the conditions at Dora. He was actively profiting from those conditions. In fact, he wasnāt only profiting - he was a major part of the reason for the whole concentration camp to exist.
I assume you know how important the German rocket engineers were for US weapons programs. You know how von Braun was idolised before, during, and after the Apollo program. Please take care, however, never to forget that more than 10,000 people were murdered for this. And talk about it to others. Donāt let it slip. Otherwise, horror like Mittelbau-Dora, horrors like genocide, horrors like total war will continue to repeat.
Let us remember the life, and death, of Boris Romantschenko.
