The implied poor Russian Army truck maintenance practices | Hacker News Reader

The implied poor Russian Army truck maintenance practices

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114 pointslxm17 comments

I can only add my own experience with Russian/Soviet army which dates 30+ years back to mandatory military service. It was always the same. Widespread theft meant that not all trucks and tracked vehicles had batteries in them, so the starting them was always either by towing or jumper cables. Oil was so thick that to start in winter you would use blowtorches to heat engine oil sumps from beneath the trucks the night before. During the drills good part of the vehicles could not leave their dislocation areas, and longer marches meant that most part was lost along the way due to breakdowns, disorientation, miscommunications etc. I participated in the drill which required a relatively large unit (approx 10,000 troops in total) to arrive in area some 300 km away from the main base. Later I overheard officers talking that only 25% of the units arrived there on time. Mind you, those were not reserve units, they were supposed to be ready to repel NATO attack on the short notice, hence we had full staff on site and ammunition loaded. Sure later heads of the higher command rolled, but nothing really changed on the ground level. So this does not surprise me at all.

My father talked of similar experiences from his military training. The norm was that 50% of armor would make it 100km when travelling on their own

The prelude to the invasion was a large-scale military training exercise, which included moving the troops and equipment from fairly remote parts of Eastern Russia. Seems like that would involve some assurances that equipment is operational.

Not necessarily. They were transported there by rail. Sure, you need to get them to the point where the trucks could be loaded onto rail cars, but that's whole different story than to be on the hundreds of kilometers long march which is happening now in Ukraine.

I recommend this video from a Finnish army intelligence expert & researcher to those trying to understand logic behind Russia's actions. It's in Finnish but English subtitles should be good enough. Really awakening stuff at least for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF9KretXqJw

To be honest the first 5 to 6 minutes are very offputting: the presenter (some ex-military PhD guy) claims that we need to understand the Russians through the genetic lens of the Mongol invasion of Russia!

There may be other worthwhile points throughout the lecture but that is insanely racist and useless as any sort of analysis.

It does not bode well for the rest of the lecture and reflects very poorly on the speaker and on the university that is allowing the promotion of this race hatred; both on the grounds of the simple-minded racism and then the lack of intelligence at expressing this in public.

https://youtu.be/kF9KretXqJw?t=347

After he has already kicked off with the dubious statement that during the Mongol occupation "the only ways to survive were lying, corruption and violence" he follows up with the flat out bonkers statement: "[...] as the Mongols who had previously ruled the country merged into the leading layers, which is still visible. When looking at genetic inheritance they are pretty, pretty dark eyes for example. There are not many flax heads in Russia."

I hope no one flags the OP. I want this post to stay up so that we can all be aware of the racist, Russophobe undercurrents to much of the criticism of Russia's violent, unjustifiable aggression against the people of Ukraine.

The more I watch this the more I distrust the presenter. Lines like¹ "'A little warfare in the border areas is needed to maintain a patriotic spirit.' This was said in the 1800s century, bu this could have been said in the 2010s or 2018" is wholly unconvincing. It appears that the presenter is projecting his racist animus, inserting words into the mouths of his perceived adversaries and generally carrying on in a non-intellectual, unintelligent manner which seeks not to understand, but to caricature.

Again, what on earth is the academic institution allowing this drivel to be associated with their name?

Why does YouTube take down other racist, hate speech videos while leaving this one up? (I am completely against taking any videos or posts down for any reason, but the selective nature of their actions suggests that some racism and misinformation is deemed not just acceptable to them, but even palatable.)

1. https://youtu.be/kF9KretXqJw?t=1263

This video is the gift that keeps on giving¹.

"The notion of lie and truth works differently in Russia. Examples: The Terijoki government (Russian attempt to make puppet government to Finland in 1939) had a story that the working population of Finland was tired of the Mannerheim-Tanner (Marshal of the Finnish Defence Forces in the 1939) fascist junta and formed a government to liberate the Finnish people then when the Russians attacked they found out it wasn't quite the same as what the propaganda [had said]."

What is he insinuating here? This is in a section which does a "fifty words for snow in eskimo" attempt to claim that Russians are linguistically programmed to be liars. He has just discussed a picture which shows the "technological backwardness of Russia" in which the saviour is the German steamship coming up the the river in the far distance. Is he suggesting that all Finns were favour of the collaboration with the NAZIs². This is really weird.

Then he goes on to mix in the Russian poisoning of Skripal, some probably true information about Russian forces operating in Donbass and Crimea with some never-before-heard conspiracy theory about all the people on MH17 being dead already and the hotly disputed DNC and Clinton were hacked by the GRU. Basically a hodgepodge of whatever he wants to believe, all cherry picked with the intent of his stated aims of showing that the Russian leadership are genetic Mongols who have linguistically programmed their boyar and working classes to believe lies. This is poisonous, rock-bottom stuff.

1. https://youtu.be/kF9KretXqJw?t=2465 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland_in_World_War_II#Finlan...

This speculation on likely Putin successors interesting though https://youtu.be/kF9KretXqJw?t=3406

Absolutely fascinating.

Slightly off-topic, but there's a chrome extension to redirect all twitter links to nitter: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nitter-redirect/mo...

Thanks for referring to Nitter. I didn't know about it, and Twitter's nags to log in got really annoying lately.

I do however prefer to do this kind of thing through bookmarklets, so here's one I found in a quick search: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/451#issuecomment-946...

Consequences of teaching people to tell you what you want to hear, instead of the truth. Hallmarks of poor leadership...

There's reports reservists were called up for "3-5 days of training" and pointed towards Ukraine.

And here I was thinking the Ukrainians had cleverly found a way to damage tires when inadequate maintenance was the culprit.

Let's not forget to thank Xi for asking Putin to wait until after the Olympics giving time for the mud season to take hold.

This would explain a lot of the strange “road only” movement in the north. Glad I read it!

Great link, I found it surprisingly interesting, and it explains a lot.

I hope more people will see it and give their opinions.

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