Posted on 02/25/2023 8:10:55 AM PST by SpeedyInTexas
This list only includes destroyed vehicles and equipment of which photo or videographic evidence is available. Therefore, the amount of equipment destroyed is significantly higher than recorded here. Small arms, ATGMs, MANPADS, loitering munitions, drones used as unmanned bait, civilian vehicles, trailers and derelict equipment are not included in this list. All possible effort has gone into avoiding duplicate entries and discerning the status of equipment between captured or abandoned. Many of the entries listed as 'abandoned' will likely end up captured or destroyed. Similarly, some of the captured equipment might be destroyed if it can't be recovered. When the origin of a piece of equipment can't be established, it is not included in the list. The Soviet flag is used when the equipment in question was produced prior to 1991. This list is constantly updated as additional footage becomes available.
(Excerpt) Read more at oryxspioenkop.com ...
“‘Something Was Badly Wrong’: When Washington Realized Russia Was Actually Invading Ukraine
A first-ever oral history of how top U.S. and Western officials saw the warning signs of a European land war, their frantic attempts to stop it — and the moment Putin actually crossed the border.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/02/24/russia-ukraine-war-oral-history-00083757
Highlights:
“
BILL BURNS: My own impression, based on interactions with him over the years, was a lot of this had to do with his own fixation on controlling Ukraine. He was convincing himself that strategically the window was closing on his opportunity to control Ukraine.
AVRIL HAINES: He saw Ukraine inexorably moving towards the West and towards NATO and away from Russia.
BILL BURNS: His conviction was that without controlling Ukraine and its choices, it’s not possible for Russia to be a great power and have this sphere of influence that he believes is essential. And it’s not possible for him to be a great Russian leader without accomplishing that.
AVRIL HAINES: He saw the Ukrainian military becoming significantly stronger.”
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“GEN. MARK MILLEY: I called up my counterpart in Russia a couple of different times. He just said that they were doing an exercise, and I confronted him on it. I talked to him as late as maybe two weeks before the actual invasion, I said, “This is a terrible strategic mistake. It’s placing Europe at risk. It’s obviously going to have tragic consequences for Ukraine. This is going to be an extremely bloody affair for Russia. This is an enormous strategic mistake that you’re making.” I think I said, “You’ll get in there in 14 days, you won’t get out for 14 years, and you will have body bags flowing back to Moscow the entire time. These people are going to fight you.” The demographic of present-day Ukraine is that anybody who’s 60 years or younger knows nothing but freedom for the most part, and a country like that is not easily conquered.”
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“LAURA COOPER: We were watching so closely to see what the signs of damage would be. One of our biggest concerns was that Russia could take out Ukrainian air defenses in those opening moments of the war, and Russia could have gained air superiority. There was certainly this realization that built over that day that the Russian strikes were not that effective — certainly there was damage, but not nearly on a scale that one might have expected. That was a big realization that the Ukrainians would be able to withstand a lot, actually, right off the bat.”
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“BILL BURNS: Our analysts here never underestimated the sense of Ukrainian determination — this was their territory and they were going to defend it — what I think it’s probably fair to say is that we did not understand clearly enough how ineffective the Russian military was going to be.”
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“REP. ADAM SCHIFF: It is certainly fair to say that the U.S. miscalculated the Russian’s military capability — perhaps only somewhat less than Putin miscalculated his own military capability.”
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“CELESTE WALLANDER: They were much less capable, the plan was much less coherent, there was much more dysfunction in the Russian military than was apparent in their exercises. The Russians were overconfident based on how easy it had been for them to intervene in Syria, and in fact that was not a good test of their capabilities.”
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“GEN. MARK MILLEY: The Russians thought that they had an effective competent army to execute combined arms maneuver, which is a very specific thing. The United States military does that very well, a few other militaries. What that means is they could coordinate and synchronize dismounted infantry with mounted infantry, mechanized infantry with armored tanks, with mortars, artillery, close air support, electronic warfare engineers, medical sustainment — you bring it all together in time and space to achieve your desired effect. As it turned out, they couldn’t do it. They stumbled around and they couldn’t pull it together.”
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“GEN. MARK MILLEY: The Russians have never achieved air superiority. Because they haven’t achieved air superiority, they didn’t have close air support for the ground forces. Another thing that they didn’t do — which everyone thought they would do — is effectively use electronic warfare, jamming, shutting down the electronic spectrum. We don’t really know yet why they didn’t. One thing could be that the Russian radios and the Ukrainian radios were essentially the same old Soviet-era model radios, using the same spectrum, same frequency band. So if you shut down the Ukrainian radios, then you might be shutting down your own radio?
Another reason might be that the Russians anticipated taking over the commercial air waves — the television stations, the radio stations — in order to put out their propaganda. The Russian special forces and intelligence services are specifically tasked to do that, and they failed. They have a lot of special operations forces, and usually we think they’re pretty well trained, but their special operations forces did not, as best I can tell, play a significant role in Russian operations. Everybody thought that they would be much more effective. Their paratroopers, assault forces, were not nearly as effective as we would have thought.”
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“AMB. JOHN SULLIVAN: Some of the calamities that befell the Russian military people just have forgotten about — they had their troops digging trenches in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, digging up irradiated soil and poisoning their own people; their flagship for the Black Sea, the Moskva, was sunk by Ukrainian missiles; the number of general officers using cell phones and getting blown up. It was pretty catastrophic and shambolic.”
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“LT. GEN. SCOTT BERRIER: The Russian army in history is a learning army. They don’t seem to be learning a lot of lessons — or maybe it’s too hard to put into practice the lessons they are learning. In World War II, they actually got better as the war went on. We don’t see them applying those lessons to a great degree inside the conflict today. It will take them years to rebuild their military no matter how this turns out.”
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“JON FINER: This war may well go on for a lot longer, but already Russia has suffered enormous costs on the battlefield and financially — their position in the world, their status, their standing, their stature has eroded significantly from where it was for February of 2022.”
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“Russia’s spies misread Ukraine and misled Kremlin as war loomed”
“In the final days before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s security service began sending cryptic instructions to informants in Kyiv. Pack up and get out of the capital, the Kremlin collaborators were told, but leave behind the keys to your homes.
The directions came from senior officers in a unit of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) with a prosaic name — the Department of Operational Information — but an ominous assignment: ensure the decapitation of the Ukrainian government and oversee the installation of a pro-Russian regime.
The messages were a measure of the confidence in that audacious plan. So certain were FSB operatives that they would soon control the levers of power in Kyiv, according to Ukrainian and Western security officials, that they spent the waning days before the war arranging safe houses or accommodations in informants’ apartments and other locations for the planned influx of personnel.”
“FPV kamikaze drone of the 74th Separate Reconnaissance Battalion blows up the occupying BMP.”
https://twitter.com/antiputler_news/status/1629201170311831553
“The assault group of the invaders prematurely ended their attempt to storm Bakhmut.“
https://twitter.com/antiputler_news/status/1629201164750184448
Bring out the ‘modernized’ T62s
“It appears we have the first sighting of a new Russian T-62 modernization in the combat zone - a so-called “T-62M obr. 2022”. Tanks of this model received” a new 1PN96MT-02 thermal sight instead of the old optics however even ERA wasn’t installed.”
https://twitter.com/UAWeapons/status/1629485577530748928
Keep severing ties between EU and RuZZia. RuZZia is no longer a European state but an Asian nation.
“Top EU diplomate Josep Borrell wrote that the new sanctions package targets 121 individuals and entities, and also includes significant new import and export restrictions, and bans Russian propaganda outlets.’
https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1629462760923754498
“Official: Explosion reported at Russian ammunition depot in occupied Mariupol. An explosion allegedly occurred at a Russian ammunition depot in occupied Mariupol, Donetsk Oblast, earlier on Feb. 24, reported Petro Andriushchenko, an advisor to the mayor of Mariupol.”
https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1629413185815019520
“So in Mariupol, enemy warehouses from BC are burning and detonating Now there are explosions again in the Mariupol district along the line of the village. Yalta / village Yuryivka (place of large concentration of occupiers)”
https://twitter.com/antiputler_news/status/1629387591710646273
“Two BMPs, a tank and a self propelled gun were destroyed during one the latest strikes on a Russian base in occupied Mariupol. It is also reported that around 50 Russians were either heavily wounded or dead.”
https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1629387573486297089
“UK Defense Ministry: Russia has likely run out of Iranian-made drones. Since around Feb. 15, there have been no reports of Russia using Iranian-made “one-way attack” drones to carry out strikes against Ukraine, the U.K. Defense Ministry said in its latest intelligence update.”
https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1629403269796700161
“Again, vpn drones establish a connection with Russian boys in panties”
https://twitter.com/antiputler_news/status/1629489581308387328
“Excalibur destroys the Russian counter-battery radar ARK-1 “Lynx” in the Kherson region”
https://twitter.com/antiputler_news/status/1629489146120077314
Droned
https://twitter.com/antiputler_news/status/1629488960475987970
https://twitter.com/antiputler_news/status/1629382742302490624
https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1629461635617247235
POWs
https://twitter.com/antiputler_news/status/1629488445314695170
https://twitter.com/antiputler_news/status/1629382976973729792
“Stugna-P destroys the equipment and infantry of the Russian army”
https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1629508910548672518
I can’t tell if this is new footage or old.
“Russian advance and rapid subsequent retreat on the Vuhledar front. By 72nd Separate Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian Ground Forces”
https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1629422086547439616
“’ Mortar calculation from the 36th marine brigade, with the support of the UAVs of the 503rd separate battalion making that forest strip very hard to take for Russian troops.”
https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1629460600806862854
Please focus on East Palestine, Ohio rather than this corrupt country.
One of the lessons that should be learned from the war in Ukraine on the anniversary of the start of Russia’s Special Military Operation is that the United States has the most expensive military in the world but is totally unprepared to fight a first world power. During the last year we have learned that javelins, stingers and HIMARS are not game changers for Ukraine. The war in Ukraine has exposed the weakness of the U.S. and European military industrial base. NATO has lost its ability to produce essential ammunition required to sustain Ukraine’s needs in the battle and lacks stockpiles of tanks and armored vehicles that Ukraine begs for on a daily basis. The U.S. is no longer the industrial behemoth that churned out tanks, planes, aircraft carriers, destroyers and bombs in the Second World War.
Russia, for its part, continues to steadily advance along the entire 1000 mile front (not as fast as a bunch of arm chair generals want) and is inflicting massive casualties on the Ukrainian forces. At no point since February 2022 has Ukraine been able to mount a counter attack against a numerically equal Russian force. Ukraine’s much ballyhooed offensive from last August/September was against an outnumbered group of military police and Russia managed to effect a professional tactical retreat.
The real game changer is Russia’s industrial base. Russia has the natural resources, the factories and the skilled workers to produce the weapons, vehicles, tanks and planes it needs to sustain its forces in the field. The Biden Administration, the media and the pundits in America fail to grasp this reality. Instead they continue to repeat the lie that Russia’s economy is in tatters and drowning under the weight of U.S. sanctions.
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t is true that U.S. forces took control in 2003 of sizeable chunks of Iraq and occupied Baghdad. But the Iraqi Army lacked air power and effective artillery. Yee haw!! America beat up the kid in a wheel chair. Let us not forget that the United States’ policies in Iraq also spawned a deadly insurgency and led to the birth of ISIS, which carried out epic terrorist attacks in Europe, the Middle East and America. Iraq displayed the impotence of U.S. military power to create a stable political order.
I really question the intelligence of a person who touts the “U.S. rolling over the Taliban and Al Qaeda in 2001 – 2002” and blithely ignores the U.S. ignominious defeat in Afghanistan in August 2021. The Taliban that we supposedly vanquished took back Kabul and forced the United States into a panicked withdrawal. Oh yeah. The U.S. abandoned thousands of Afghans who we had promised previously to protect.
And then there is the ghost of Vietnam. “We won every major engagement against the Vietnamese communists.” So what! Killing Viet Cong in the jungles and mountains did not prevent the North Vietnamese from sweeping down and vanquishing the South Vietnamese government. Here again, U.S. military power was impotent to create a political outcome that served U.S. national interests.
Most Americans indulge the fantasy that if we just use more military force (i.e., more cowbell). This insanity continues to posses the political class controlling Washington and they show no sign of relenting in their quest to destroy Vladimir Putin and magically transform Russia into a lackey of the West. That is what is at stake in Russia’s war in Ukraine and the majority of the Russian people, not just the political and military leaders, understand this threat.
We are witnessing the end of the era when the strength of the U.S. economy and its control of the world economy via the petro dollar enabled Washington to pursue its reckless, multiple overseas military expeditions.
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