Very few of their tanks and APCs in storage even work because so many parts got stolen and sold on the black market. Makes sense now why the trains are shipping in whatever old clunker vehicles they can find that run. Unclear whether that commander who was involved in selling the stuff commited suicide or was suicided. It also would not surprise me if Ukraine was one of the biggest customers of these black market arms deals.
There are reports that the missile cruiser Moscow, which is the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, has been hit with two Ukrainian anti-ship missiles.
The Russian equipment shortage is getting so dire they are issuing Mosins (WW1/WW2 rifles) to some troops. The radios they're issuing are apparently cheap Chinese junk that you can buy on Amazon for $25.
Jesus... both of those were assisted suicides. First guy drove in reverse perfectly timing grenade thru the sunroof LOL. The other guy would've been safe if he hadn't even moved.
Russia is shipping T-62s into Ukraine to replace lost tanks. So now they’ve gone from 50 year old T-72 variant tanks to 60 year old tanks. It has no autoloader, so the crews won’t have to worry about that going off when hit. But it also has armor so thin even a common RPG can penetrate it. I don't see a single brick of ERA on these either. The Russians must be running out of it. These things were already pretty dated when the Soviets used them in Afghanistan back in the 1980s.
The US is sending HIMARS. It's some of the most technologically advanced rocket artillery available. Ukraine badly needs artillery in The Donbas.
Ukraine's counter-offensive is going well. The Russians are retreating from the Kharkiv region. https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-kyiv-world-news-kharkiv-e06b2aa723e826ed4105b5f32827f577 https://www.npr.org/2022/09/10/1122201033/ukraine-russia-troop-pullback-kharkiv
I'm a little concerned about Putin getting pushed into a corner. It would be awesome if he stepped down, but I don't think it will happen.
That's a concern I have too. With his conventional military being defeated will he resort to using nuclear, biological, and/or chemical weapons? Or will he go the North Korea route and become super repressive and cut off from the rest of the world? People in rural parts of Russia wouldn't notice much of a change. But people in St Petersburg and Moscow are highly westernized and consumerist. Maybe he gulags a bunch of them until they fall in line?
I don't think sending in large numbers of poorly trained, poorly equipped forcibly conscripted guys that Russia doesn't have the logistics to support is going to turn things around. On the contrary I think it's probably going to lead to a humanitarian crisis of starving, freezing Russian troops in the coming winter. I don't see how these guys will be anything but a burden. It's more mouths to feed in an Army where a lot of them are already living like hobos.