Mighty Russia felled by cardboard
How badly is Russia's war effort going? Well, this badly.
Ukraine claimed that an attack that damaged five fighter planes at a Russian airfield was carried out using "cardboard" drones from Australia.
Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) told the Kyiv Post on Saturday that it had struck an MiG-29 and four Su-30 fighter jets at Kursk airfield in western Russia.
As well as the planes, the drones damaged two Pantsir missile launchers and part of an S-300 air-defense system, the SBU told the outlet.
The prominent pro-Russian Telegram channel @fighter_bomber, which closely follows the Russian air force, said the attack was the first use of Australian-provided delivery drones made of cardboard.
You read that correctly. Fighter jets and anti-aircraft systems worth billions of rubles were reduced to charred metal via the use of cardboard drones.
Oh, but it gets worse.
Ukrainian forces have breached Russia’s main defensive lines on the southern front for the first time, according to open source investigators.
Geolocation specialists tracked fighting involving Ukraine’s 82nd Air Assault Brigade to the outskirts of Verbove, a village behind a line of Russian fortifications including “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank spikes, trenches, and minefields.
"Fixed fortifications are a testament to man's stupidity," or words to that effect. The problem with Russia's Surovikin Line is that it could eventually be bypassed and attacked from the side and behind, much like the Germans did in 1940 against the Maginot Line. Unless Russia had built the line to extend across the entirety of its conquered territories, it was always going to fall, eventually.
And the problems for the Russians are even worse. The fact is that the army has no strategic reserve. Russian commanders have lost two hundred thousand troops since the beginning of the invasion. That is after eighteen months of war. To compare, in ten years, the Soviets lost fifteen thousand soldiers killed and thirty-five thousand wounded in Afghanistan. There's a quiet, continuing mobilization in Russia, but it's not enough. These conscripts are sent to the front line and used as cannon fodder. And Russian president Vladimir Putin is wary of calling for a mass mobilization, as that may finally awaken the politically apathetic populace to question why this war is occurring in the first place and threaten his position. He well remembers the support the late Yevgeny Prigozhin's mutiny garnered. The whiff of 1917 is in the air.
I have said before that historians would categorize America's adventure in Iraq as one of the worst geostrategic blunders in modern history. Well, move over. The United States not only survived that mistake, but has shaken it off. Russia will not be so fortunate. This short piece in Reuters, sourced from the British Ministry of Defense, lays out just what condition Russia finds itself in:
Aug 28 (Reuters) - Russia has highly likely cancelled its planned joint strategic exercise, ZAPAD 23, which should have taken place in September, the British defence ministry said on Monday.
Russia has likely cancelled the exercise because too few troops and equipment are available, the ministry said in its daily intelligence update.
The "Zapad-2021" war games ran last two years ago on Russia and Belarus' western flanks, including sites close to the European Union's borders, and alarmed Ukraine and some NATO countries.
(Emphasis mine.)
And there's more:
WASHINGTON – Just 14 months into Russia’s war on Ukraine, Moscow’s military has become so degraded that it could take up to 10 years for its forces to recover, US intelligence officials told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Thursday.
“The reorganization that the Russian military took in the early 2000s … to be better, faster, smaller from what they were in the Soviet era – that army largely is gone,” said Defense Intelligence Agency director Lt. Gen. Scott D. Berrier.
“And they’re relying on reserve [troops] and reserve equipment, older, Soviet-era kinds of [equipment.]”
The bleak outlook comes after the White House on Monday estimated that roughly 100,000 Russian forces have been killed or wounded since December alone, bringing the approximate Kremlin casualty total to about 200,000 since the war began Feb. 24, 2022.
What Russia built was a Potemkin army. It wasn't designed to fight an enemy like Ukraine. And it wasn't designed to withstand a Ukraine armed with Western weaponry. It was designed to deter the West with splashy military drills. But both its training and its leadership were not equipped to fight a modern war. Between incompetence and corruption, the military was a hollow shell. And now we've seen the proof of that after a year and a half of fighting.
Czars have lost their thrones and lives for lesser failures. Putin has beggared his country in his pursuit of reconstituting the Russian Empire. As polling is suspect in an authoritarian regime, it's hard to tell how much real support he still has. But once Ukrainian forces reach Tokmak, and bring Crimea under fire control, thus threatening the Russian position in the peninsula, what Prigozhin began before he was blown out of the sky will be finished by someone else. At that point it won't be civil war in Russia; it will be anarchy, with different factions vying for the Kremlin.
May you live in interesting times.
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