How would ordinary troops/people know this?
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Cool story, but how could they tell?
It’s not like they’d drop a Maytag board into a missile launcher. The boards would go back to Russia, the needed parts stripped off, then installed on the Russian boards.
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How would troops know what electronics can be pulled from commercial equipment to install in military hardware?
Seems bogus to me.
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Perhaps it’s more that circuit boards that originally had rare or custom chips have been redesigned for CPUs that are widely used in domestic appliances. In any case this would be the result of sanctions imposed after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, because it’s too soon for the latest sanctiions to affect anything in the field now.
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Anyone remember “Stop Loss” from the Iraq war? It’s like Russia is determined to repeat every mistake the US made.
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Raimondo recently met with Ukrainian officials who told her that they found parts from refrigerators and commercial and industrial machines when searching captured or abandoned Russian tanks,
Maybe all that means is they are using off the shelf components that at one point were destined for dishwashers etc. Companies ordering units for Russia Maytag under the guise of using them for kitchen appliances, but actually being used to build weapons. A way to get around weapons bans.
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At least a third of any given Russian oligarch’s money is actually Putin’s. That percentage goes way up for girlfriends and friends (e.g. the billionaire cellist). This is a gangster’s racket and it has to be treated as such by Western authorities.
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I know about Putin’s “wallets”, as Navalny calls them, but what’s the basis for saying that every oligarch is holding money for Putin?
By the way, the cellist’s brother was a KGB officer and later went into the gas industry.
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I’ve seen that figure quoted independently in several articles by or interviews with people familiar with the Russian kleptocracy. Bill Browder and Peter Pomerantsev come to mind but there are others.
The percentage may vary a bit, but you don’t get to remain an oligarch in Russia unless you pay tribute to Putin.
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I assume that his plan was to only bring back his side of glorious cold war nostalgia; but Putin being pretty much the single person in the world with the power to make NATO look keenly relevant rather than like a dwindling social club for Americans who want to feel powerful and pretend that their real problems aren’t China is irony thick enough for even Robert Hamburger to safely build a foundation on.
It’s not like it was just going to curl up and die; organizations can be pretty good at prolonging themselves even when their only remaining mandate is prolonging themselves; but so long as Russia was largely just sitting in kleptocracy there wasn’t a line of eager new blood banging down the door; and existing members were content to fudge the numbers on military spending and (often correctly) take a jaundiced view of much of the action as just in service of American desire for ‘multilateral’ when the can’t get the UN to sign off.
And then who ignores a few decades of pieties about diplomacy and constructive engagement and sends a mass of Russian armor surging west; which gives off a scent of renewed purpose that NATO can smell from halfway across the planet.
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Ok, so if he dies do cooler heads prevail, or does Russia double down.
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