Russia’s army is learning and improving on the battlefield
economist.com
economist.com
Meatgrinder: Russian Tactics in the Second Year of Its Invasion of Ukraine by Dr Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, 19 May 2023
- HTML wrapper with executive summary: https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/special-r...
- Full PDF paper: https://static.rusi.org/403-SR-Russian-Tactics-web-final.pdf
> An overview of Russian adaptation reveals a force that is able to improve and evolve its employment of key systems. There is evidence of a centralised process for identifying shortcomings in employment and the development of mitigations. Nevertheless, much of this adaptation is reactive and is aimed at making up for serious deficiencies in Russian units. The result is a structure that becomes better over time at managing the problems it immediately faces, but also one that struggles to anticipate new threats. The conclusion therefore is that the Russian Armed Forces pose a significant challenge for the Ukrainian military on the defence. Nevertheless, if Ukraine can disrupt Russian defences and impose a dynamic situation on them, Russian units are likely to rapidly lose their coordination. Changes in the air combat environment, for example, have led rapidly to incidents of Russian fratricide.
Both sides are adapting, we'll see how this develops once the Ukrainian offensive starts.
Interesting. I wonder if this is via cryptanalysis or something like breaching key storage/espionage.
Or, more mundanely, they don't rotate the keys often, and the Russians just have some number of stolen radios. You can find videos of both sides picking up radios with drones too.
What Electronic Warfare is going to pull 5,000 drones a month out of the sky?
But it has to be a question of cost too. Drones are attritable by their nature and there may be no more reason to try to recover one than you would recover a discharged bullet.
A bigger upset is loss of communications, very few if any drones operate autonomously currently, and if there is loss of communications they may try to return to base. Off course it is more difficult to jam line of sight or drone to satellite communications than GPS.
I wonder if either or both sides are patching this out of software - otherwise, communications jamming becomes a quick way to make the drone lead the enemy straight to your base.
Drones are really limited in their autonomous abilities and vulnerable to GPS jamming. Someone needs to work on image-based return to base navigation.
I assume Ukraine would be trying to blow these EW systems up using HIMARS/GMLRS/etc? I wonder how hard that is.
- https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/himars-less-effect...
- https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2023/05/03/commentary/w...
You can also attack EW systems with RF seeking missiles.
If they can jam their control link and GPS, wouldn't they just crash?
IIRC, Ukraine (and Russia) are using a lot of civilian-grade drones, which I would assume would be very vulnerable to military electronic warfare.
1) Western policy risks building up a big Asian military alliance. It should be obvious to China that what is currently happening to Russia is also slated to happen to them. India will be nervous too unless they are hopelessly naive. China and the US were friends once too, back in ... the 2010s...
2) We're escalating towards WWIII. This is like watching athletes limbering up.
3) In the modern era it is astonishingly rare for the US military to get involved and leave a country better off than when they entered. The US does not have the resources to head in and rebuild Ukraine - that privilege now belongs to China, world manufacturing superpower. We're going to see massive distabilisation in Eastern Europe for a generation. The Poles are wise to be rapidly militarising.
Ukraine although not in nato, had been doing training with nato for a while prior to the invasion.
This argument is essentially denying Ukraine's right to sovereignty. It's a bad and disingenous justification for a wholly illegal and unprovoked invasion of a sovereign country.
How high do you let the gun get before you consider it provocation?
The invasion happened after the unofficial joining of nato, obviously.
Do you really think there is a country that would not react if a very big neighbouring country were to join an enemy military alliance?
The first was in 2008 when NATO decided Ukraine could start the NATO membership process.
This came to a head at the start of 2014 when Euromaidan revolution lead to a change of government.
In 2014, the Ukrainian parliament renounced Ukraine's non-aligned status.
In 2016, Ukraine was granted a NATO Comprehensive Assistance Package (CAP), comprising the advisory mission at the NATO Representation to Ukraine as well as 16 capacity-building programs and Trust Funds.
In 2018, Ukraine was officially given an aspiring member status.
2021 NATO reaffirmed that Ukraine will become a member.
Here is some basic information from the right wing conspiratorial outlet NPR:
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/29/1076193616/ukraine-russia-nat...
That is laughable. They annexed Crimea in 2014, and now claim Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia. Very strange behavior for a country that is just 'protecting itself from NATO'.
Russia's problems are all of their own making. They had no need to invade Ukraine. They did so because Ukraine didn't want to be their puppet state like Belarus. The Russian government wants to treat former SSRs like they're still economic tributaries to Moscow.
What, the US has scheduled the Chinese invasion of Taiwan for the convenience in destroying China?
> it is astonishingly rare for the US military to get involved and leave a country better off than when they entered
I think you need to distinguish between a hostile occupation and a liberation. Which is what went wrong in Iraq, of course; it was astonishingly naive to assume that the US would be greeted as liberators there. But remember, Ukraine is being liberated by fellow Ukranians on the ground.
> The Poles are wise to be rapidly militarising.
The Poles are militarizing in case Ukraine loses and they have to fight the same war. It's extremely in Poland's interest for the Ukranians to win.
"If we arrest this murderer, other murderers might get worried!"
An international spanking for starting a war of aggression is a wonderful precedent to set.
> An international spanking for starting a war of aggression is a wonderful precedent to set.
That's the wrong metaphor. The West is in no position to provide "spankings" on demand. It's not the world's parent, and even it if was, children eventually grow up and parents pass their peak and decline in strength.
China will learn from this (Russia's tactical mistakes), and will adapt to avoid repeating them. The West may get cocky from the successes in Ukraine, and fail to adapt, and put itself in a position to be "spanked."
You can actually see the same dynamic in Ukraine: Russia invaded in 2014, and totally spanked Ukraine. Ukraine adapted, but the Russians cockily waltzed in in 2022 expecting to be able to repeat 2014, and got spanked themselves.
They seem to manage it fairly often, and certainly in this case.
> China will learn from this (Russia's tactical mistakes), and will adapt to avoid repeating them.
I most certainly hope they do. Giving up on taking Taiwan by force would be a wonderful result out of the Ukraine war. The West should encourage that lesson by pre-arming Taiwan with as many F-16s, Javelins, Stingers, etc. that they can produce.
That they'd just give up on militarily taking Taiwan because of this is more Western fantasy that reality, so I doubt that. The lessons they'll take will be ones of military tactics and strategy. They can assume the West will dump "F-16s, Javelins, Stingers, etc." into Taiwan, so how can they counter that? Maybe they develop a version of the US/Israeli Tropy system,* and put it on all their tanks. If they're competent at all, they're going to make sure they're making none of Russia mistakes (e.g. they're going to have someone making sure they're regularly rotating the tires on their military vehicles).
But maybe they don't have to do much if anything, since Taiwan will be far, far harder to resupply than Ukraine.
Russia already has such a thing (as does China). It'll never be perfect, especially against peer adversaries invested in countering it. (This includes Trophy!)
> But maybe they don't have to do much if anything, since Taiwan will be far, far harder to resupply than Ukraine.
All the more reason to do it in advance.
> If they're competent at all...
Folks thought the Russians were competent up until they had to prove it in combat. You don't think that gives the Chinese pause?
Did Russia widely deploy it?
> It'll never be perfect, especially against peer adversaries invested in countering it. (This includes Trophy!)
You could say the same thing about antitank missiles. The system doesn't have to be perfect to prevent a boatload of Javelin's from becoming some kind of trump card.
> All the more reason to do it in advance.
Sure, but supply chain problems could prevent that. Isn't the West pouring so much of their available stockpiles into Ukraine that they may not have enough send to sit in a Taiwanese warehouse?
> Folks thought the Russians were competent up until they had to prove it in combat. You don't think that gives the Chinese pause?
It will give them pause, but not a despondent "we give up forever because this proves we will always fail" pause, but rather a "lets make sure we're even better, so we can succeed when we try" pause.
It kinda does. A Javelin costs $100k. A main battle tank costs millions. Even if it takes 10-20 Javelins you're coming out on top.
> Sure, but supply chain problems could prevent that. Isn't the West pouring so much of their available stockpiles into Ukraine that they may not have enough send to sit in a Taiwanese warehouse?
Make more? Call it economic stimulus.
> It will give them pause, but not a despondent "we give up forever because this proves we will always fail" pause, but rather a "lets make sure we're even better, so we can succeed when we try" pause.
Do you think it's impossible to make Taiwan a tough enough target to resist an invasion, of the kind (massive-scale amphibious) China's never performed before?
According to Wikpedia, they cost more than double that, without the launcher. 20 x 250k = 5 million. For comparison, an Abrams tank costs $6.21 million.
According to https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/type-99-tank-how-chin..., the most-advanced current Chinese tank currently has a unit cost of $2.5 million.
And you're talking like they're some wonder-weapon that makes tanks obsolete. I highly doubt that's true. IIRC, one of Russia's big mistakes, which increased their vulnerability to Javelins, was they tended to drive around big masses of vehicles without adequate infantry support. Tactics are something the Chinese could change.
> Make more? Call it economic stimulus.
Oh, they want to, but my understanding is those production lines take years to ramp up (at least in the West).
> Do you think it's impossible to make Taiwan a tough enough target to resist an invasion, ...
Short of giving it nukes or turning whole country into a military camp, probably.
> ... of the kind (massive-scale amphibious) China's never performed before?
There's always a first. IIRC, the US never did such a thing before D-Day.
It's also harder to invade, what with the lack of land routes, and there is a reason for the AUKUS nuclear submarine partnership and the US plan to equip sone of its existing ballistic missile subs with new high-speed, long-range, conventional precision weaponry starting within 5 years.
It seems like really bad idea that could easily be confused for a nuclear missile launch.
Pretty sure Russia started this war, not the other way around.
So your position is, "we should stand aside and turn a blind eye to Russia's violent and unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation because China might worry that we won't allow them to violently invade other countries?"
For all the horrors in the Middle East, the Iraq war was less damaging locally than Ukraine will be for Europe.
This one war could easily accomplish what took decades of coups and army movements over in the ruins of the Ottoman empire.
And that is assuming the reasonably optimistic outcomes where Russia avoids launching a volley of nukes east or west as a final "screw you all we're not going out alone".
It's evident they end up killing Russians, we even get videos of it!.
> And that is assuming the reasonably optimistic outcomes where Russia avoids launching a volley of nukes east or west as a final "screw you all we're not going out alone".
You're telling me that the entire chair command, when faced with losing an external war to Ukraine is going to all the way down make the decision to launch and nuke and kill everyone last of themselves?.
I think thats unlikely to happen.
Having Ukraine become an official NATO base of operations is that dangerous to Russia, especially if it happens after they were just conclusively beaten in a war. It would obviously soon mean NATO support for separatists in Russian states directly, and the end of the federation.
I really hope that nuke works and that not one person in that command chain has reservations about ending the country he lives in existence in its entirety.
Make no mistake, detonating a nuke will not only bring a response from NATO, it would bring a response from the world. Russia is done for if they do that.
> Having Ukraine become an official NATO base of operations is that dangerous to Russia, especially if it happens after they were just conclusively beaten in a war. It would obviously soon mean NATO support for separatists in Russian states directly, and the end of the federation.
How is having Ukraine become a NATO member anymore dangerous then Finland?, who literally just joined NATO.
Based on literally nothing but your own fantasies.
lets call it what it is, its not bullies, in the case of Ukraine its a concerted effort by Russia to wipe a country out of existence, including the use of rape and torture.
But your policy doesn't sound so benign when its "let rapists rape and torturers torture" does it.
2. We're already in WW3, heavy hitting countries aren't directly firing at each other but enough of the world is indirectly or directly in war via proxies that I'd say the world is already in the war.
3. Ukraine isn't being rebuilt by just one country. A good portion of the free world already has established funds for non military aid to Ukraine. As far as I am aware China has not really aided Ukraine at all.
A world war would require some kind of equal threat, but that’s just orders of magnitude not the case with Russia vs NATO, and China has no reason to go against NATO for Russia either. Sure, we have nukes now so we still are standing in a bucket of gasoline with a lighted match, but suicide is not in the interest of Russia either - hopefully someone would coup before that.
A lot is wrapped up in "regional" conflicts that mask how much economic powers are influencing and fighting each other through proxies (to secure resources).
China and India have a weird, nasty little border dispute where they've agreed not to deploy firearms so troops routinely have fistfights instead. Anyone claiming they're on the verge of an anti-US alliance can't be taken seriously. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-53062484
India is aware of this and is desperately trying to decouple from the Chinese economy. On the other hand India has deep ties to all the major Western economies with healthy trade balances that are not skewed either way.
People claiming India is looking to ditch the Western alliance and hook up with the Chinese are hilariously ill informed and unintelligent and lazy. India sees China as its top existential threat. Top Indian public officials have gone on to the extent to openly state that India's nukes are only meant for China. India's main foreign policy imperative since the days of the cold war has been to prevent a Russia-China alliance. This objective has now seemingly failed.
But a Russia-China alliance that will take shots against India is such a crazy nightmare for India that even now they are trying everything possible to maintain good relations with Russia, in spite of the Russians being pushed into a Chinese embrace. Ukraine's total destruction (or not) in the grand scheme of things is not of equal concern to India, compared to a hostile China that is joined by an equally hostile Russia.
Edit: In addition, it has to be mentioned, that India has always been skeptical of western support. Recent US withdrawal from Afghanistan is seen as proof that the West can never be relied upon and will ditch their friends for minor political gains. The unreliable nature of the west and the potential existential danger of an anti-India Russia-China alliance will keep India away from endorsing the Ukrainian side in the current war or even taking hostile steps against any Russian behaviour in the future. Neutrality in the current Ukraine conflict is the best any informed western analyst can even hope for.
Sounds pretty far fetched really. Just using emotive meaningless words -- China has no colony in India.
> with India being disadvantaged
With India being overall advantaged though, otherwise they would not enter into the relationship in the first place. Just possibly somewhat less advantaged than China.
This isn't some tiny nation being bullied and coerced, it's the country with the largest population in the world! And while they might share some border, China controls virtually none of India's important trade or transport routes.
I wonder if China's plan is to give Russia enough aid to keep the war going and build a sizeable debt, but not enough for Russia to actually win. In that plan, China would hold economic and political power over Russia.
I don't see why China would want Russia to win. A nuclear neighbor run by a defacto dictator high on the spoils of war? NATO strengthening ties and military forces in response to a major adversary? Sounds terrible. A subservient neighbor without access to any other advanced country's economy, so you can squeeze them on imports and exports, and they also have nukes you can rattle by proxy? Chance of NATO calming down after a few years of good behavior from Russia? Sounds nice¹.
¹Not nice for anyone but China, of course.
From a long term perspective, Russia has already lost handily - the cratering of the male fighting-age population (either from casualties or from fleeing the country) will be nearly impossible to recover from.
This is happening to Ukraine as well. Ukrainians are not having children right now.
Even before the war, they weren't having very many. Now they're having even less.
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1155943055/ukraine-low-birth-...
Also, video's of fighting and people dying isn't very informing, they are too situational and too local.
Lesson of the day, both UKR and RUS media are not very trustworthy. It's gotten to a point where I've stopped investing in it.
The F/16 deal is evidence towards the idea that the war is settling in to be a long one.
I think predictive success is more down to the person sorting the info than the source. I ignore most of the war of words and focus on the territory changes. Maps are more honest.
[1] https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/nato-membership-for...
Congrats on the favorable terms of your best, I guess.
The funiest millitary book I have ever read was Decision in the Ukraine written form the Western (German) perspective... It is basically accusing Russian army of not fighting "fair" - digging with defense in depth, using well places artillery and minefields to blunt the offensive of elite German SS Panzer corps.
Russia Against Napoleon is also well worth reading to realize to what lengths Russia can go to win the war... This small Russian, hungry army in rags in Lower Silesia in 1813 who still had the spirit to carry the war to Paris by 1814...
https://www.amazon.com/Decision-Ukraine-Operations-Stackpole...
https://www.amazon.com/Russia-Against-Napoleon-Story-Campaig...
Being not one generation separated from Russian émigrés myself, that resonates with my outsider's view of the national character: charismatic, paranoid, chimeral, but deeply brilliant. It's unfortunate that these qualities somehow never gave rise to secular skepticism, but perhaps such a large land mass doesn't have much room for that kind of civitas.
[1] Or not so dramatic at all. With better numbers, historians of the 21st Century have become increasingly certain that the reverse was not so dramatic, and that German victory in the East might well have been impossible. It never feels like that at the time, of course; go ask any unfortunate American veteran how in control of events they felt on the streets of Fallujah.
When Russian tanks entered German towns in 1945 they had been greeted with Panzerfaust... So the Russian tankist started welding spring beds to their armour making Panzerfaust useless in city warfare.
The list of Red Army improvisations and peculiarities during WW2 is huge and impressive, with several of them having significant impact:
* Later war, setting off kerosene fires on their tanks at the start of action, which made enemy gunners think the tank had been knocked out. "Why is the dead tank moving?" might seem obvious, but remember it's not uncommon for a knocked out tank to continue to advance, even with the crew mulched. So, short of ammo, which the Germans most certainly were, no one risked a follow up shot . . until the Russian machines were on top of them.
* It also turned out that sunflower oil worked great as bolt lube, and although "the Ivans" were basically starving the entire time, Red Army always seemed to be able to find sunflowers.
* Grenade improvisations: several ingenious incendiary layouts and formulations including many with powdered aluminum and elemental sodium; more than a few molotovs had mixes that when ignited were basically chemical weapons; harnessing (fish?)hooks to thrown grenades (to catch on netting and slats, to explode higher) against embrasures; improvised shape charges from recovered plastic explosive (reverse-engineered from Faustpatrones); wooden cases for mines and incendiaries to evade magnetic sweeps.
* There's more artillery improv than I could list here. The Red Army seemed much more canny with smoke and flare than the Wehrmacht did, perhaps because the German infantry had a very strong reliance on offense and, well, shooting straight. Red Army made no such assumptions. Probably the best known arty "invention" is the double-usage of corps-level artillery like the 152 mm (ML-20) as self-propelled assault guns that accompanied smaller groups as surprise antitank guns or as good old fashioned bomb tossers. A surprising number of life's problems can be eliminated by yeeting 50 kgs of high explosive at them.
* The 7.62×25mm Tokarev was (is) an extremely spicy pistol round, and made the massed SMG fire of Red Army conscripts as much as 20% longer ranged than the enemy's 9×19mm equivalent. Not until the 7.62mm Kurz would (some) German infantry have better automatic fires at the individual level (although German GPMGs - specifically the MG-34 and particularly the MG-42 - were almost certainly the best of the war). Konev was aware of this range difference between PPD/PPSH/PPS and MP40, although he felt that the Russian round's advantage was in greater cover penetration (which, honestly, he might have been right on that, busting cover creates a lot of secondary fragmentation - see also youtubes re: "could you survive in a shot up car"). You know what they say about imitation: Wehrmacht troops would fill their hands with PPDs at the first opportunity, which says a lot.
* The overpowered 14.5×114mm anti-tank rifle (PTR series) stayed relevant long after the equivalents in German (using 7.92x94mm Patronen) and British (using .55 Boys) service passed into obsolescence, and was pressed into all sorts of usages: anti-aircraft, extremely long range anti-personnel, and what we would today call anti-materiel (radio masts, landing lights, map boxes, fuel dumps)
* Something more tactical they started doing towards the end of the war was to "fight out" an enemy unit but leave a tunnel through the envelopment. While it seems inferior to destroying the force, the Red Army found that destruction of a unit that started in good fighting trim was generally not worth it, and you would be better off having them route (losing heavy equipment, fuel, and most weapons) into their supporting units, where they would dilute stores. It's one of those little tweaks that shows just how much freedom Stalin was giving his commanders towards the end of the war. He'd come down on the entire country like a ton of bricks after the surrender, of course, and the Red Army would wait another fourteen years for their revenge on Beria. Death of Stalin is not a documentary, but it gets the rhythm exactly right, even if it's tightly compressed.
Reading about WW2's Eastern theatre is always frickin' haunting to me, no matter how jaded I think I am. I know: we've had recent campaigns fought at that intensity - Fallujah comes to mind, Shahikot valley too - but nothing that went on and on and on with millions of people for years and years without pause. Two peoples, each bent on the other's destruction. Like Rwanda with white people; pre-1945 Europeans did not dick around. I should say pre-nuke Europeans. Human-powered genocide got obsoleted right quick in 1945.
This and cheap alcohol are the only things in abundance in Russia.
So while the "farmer steals tank" stories were funny, it was likely part of a well-trained, well-organized, and well-equipped resistance. Russia's 2022 escalation improved that preparation as theory met reality and they adapted. Ukraine had 8 years to dig in for a long fight. Russia had 8 years to let its armor rot more.
This is why other countries send troops every time the US goes to war. They send them to practice and learn. Certainly, the United States did not need the help of Ukraine, Latvia, and Moldova in the Iraq war. They went there to learn.
The Middle East has been the largest playground for the world's armies.
That’s a significant drop in Javelin range.
Also, do you have an argument as to that “it didn't happen for the last 200 years” claim?
https://hromadske.ua/en/posts/russia-is-struggling-with-a-sh...
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/04/02/indoor-plumbing-st...
#1 is not an option if you leave far away from a town.
#2 is not an option unless you can pay for it and its maintance.
I understand that this sound like a problem or some savagery but in reality this is not much different from the fact that most countries do not have centralized hot water or heating.
My summer house also does not have a flush toilet despite the fact that I can easily afford one. What's the problem?
From the first link in my previous comment.
Just bringing data to whether or not Russia is well equipped with flush toilets (or really more the point public sanitation).
From a public health standpoint, human waste reaching rivers tend not to be good.
"Untreated human sewage teems with salmonella, hepatitis, dysentery, cryptosporidium, and many other infectious diseases."
https://www.americanrivers.org/threats-solutions/clean-water...
https://www.growingblue.com/septic-or-sewer/#:~:text=Septics....
They're generally sanitary (when maintained) and are a whole septic system. And are attached to flush toilets.
That's massively different than raw sewage making it to streams and rivers.
However none of this really matters because the point is that many rural Russians lack access to water and proper sewage (apparently as laid out in the above previous links). So politely you're wrong. Have a good day.
I really doubt about 1/5 but yes, sure, some parts of Tula look like this: https://st05.realtymag.ru/1911/2023-03-31/0/2101217236877371... basically a village with no connection to Tula's centralized sewage system.
>From a public health standpoint, human waste reaching rivers tend not to be good.
It doesn't in most cases. It goes into a hole. By the time it reaches river via ground waters there is literally no problem.
I've had the same shitty (pun intended) toilet argument on HN with other Russophobs and there's just no reaching these people seething with racial hate.
And poke around Youtube sometime. Plenty of people in Russia loading up videos (including westerners) of what life is actually like there.
I was there for the world cup, and after my country was out of the competition I traveled outside the cities hosting games including some very distant places. Agriculture in Russia is mostly an industrial affair just as in the West, with the usual John Deere dealerships dotting the margin of the roads along with some Chinese and Russian brands I've never heard of before, but that seems to be big there.
Of course, I stayed in the western portion of Russia, not even crossing the Urals. It is a gigantic country, and probably as you go east, probably things are more backward.
In general, the Russian experience, at least at the time of the world cup was basically the standard European experience for a traveler, things mostly work, the trains are absurdly better than American ones, on the same level as European trains, and at least in the big cities, you can get around speaking English. If you stay in an Airbnb and cook your meals, supermarkets had incredible variety at good prices.
Probably some things are worse or a lot worse now with the War Economy and sanctions, but on the other side, it is clear that Putin has been preparing for this for a long time, and export substitution has been going on for a long time.
The bottom line is that Russia is not like Elbonia from racist Scott Adams cartoons like so many people think.
You’d have to argue that wasn’t better than it was around 1820.
Or chose a number different from 200.
My point is that the Crimean War resulted in reforms later on.
Hardly seems like being outclassed when Russia has spent the last year redeveloping it's logistics.
Additionally this is Russia's best vs the Wests hand-me-downs.
Yes. With old Soviet equipment (largely S-300s and BUKs). Which further proves my point. But those are running low and Ukraine has already lost a Patriot system just a few weeks after going into service.
Ukraine might have some better ranged munitions than they did previously like British Storm Shadows. They have even less range than the the US ATACMS and both are getting intercepted on the regular. And vs. the Russian Kalibrs, neither are all that special.
But the biggest problem is Ukraine doesn't have sufficient launch platforms for them (they are air launched and have to be retrofitted to Soviet era aircraft).
Now Russian logistics is a different story...
And in addition to the soviet equipment they have IRIS-T SLM, Patriot and some other western systems.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/19/ukraine-air-...
Patriot system has been reportedly consistently shooting down Kinzhal.
Not questioning whether or not Russia posses(ed) some great engineers (this would have to include Ukrainians then since this stuff was designed in the USSR) that certainly can do it's job when deployed correctly. Rather that Russia has somehow outclassed the "West" seems rather farfetched here.
And did you see the full video of the Patriot blowing two full loads before getting taken out in Kiev by Kinzhals (2:14 hit)?:
Yes, its simple hypersonic ballistic missiles are nowhere near new, whats new is hypersonic glide vehicle of which Kinzhal is not. You simply aim for where the missile is going to be in the future and hit to kill it.
Also, the Kinzhal is close to 30+ years old as well as it's just a Iskander thats air launched.
> And did you see the full video of the Patriot blowing two full loads before getting taken out in Kiev by Kinzhals (2:14 hit)?:
You have the video, can you show me a single image of an exploded patriot, you cant because it missed the only damage was from shrapnel from nearby buildings and that was quickly repaired.
Would love to see evidence that the system was destroyed (as in couldn't be repaired; couldn't still do it's mission) and that Kinzhals have not been shot down.
The US got out of WW2 with minimal casualties and a ton of riches, compared to a beaten down Europe/USSR. It’s not a fair comparison. For what it’s worth, the USSR indeed had very great education and have some excellent textbooks/papers as legacy.
This time Russia has nukes and the means to deliver them to any address on this planet.
Zhukov: "People say that the allies didn't help us. But it cannot be denied that the Americans sent us materiel without which we could not have formed our reserves or continued the war. The Americans provided vital explosives and gunpowder. And how much steel! Could we really have set up the production of our tanks without American steel? And now they are saying that we had plenty of everything on our own."
School might also have noted the complicated history of the USSR and the Nazis; things like the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.
Not really. They mostly started coming after the USSR stopped the Nazis in 1942.
"complicated history of the USSR and the Nazis"
Too bad your school forgets to mention the Munich agreement between the Nazis and the West, and all the efforts of the USSR to forge an anti-Nazi pact with the Great Britain and France. All of which happenned before the M-R pact.
But its not like after Munich, Britain and France invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia while Hitler took the Sudetenland, so bad as it is, it doesn’t compare to the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact.
The USSR took back what your lovely European hyena bit off from the corpse of the Russian Empire 20 years before that [0][1].
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curzon_Line
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_Bounda...
That's exactly the problem with cherry-picking Molotov-Rippentrop pact.
And btw no one of significance has ever called Russian Empire a hyena. Unlike Poland.
But Poland and Hungary did [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Czechoslovakia_(...
The USSR crushed over 600 thousand strong Quanqtung army in less than a month in Machurian strategic offensive operation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria
They waited until Japan was beaten, then grabbed some land.
And let me quote the wiki article I linked to: "The Soviet entry into the war and the defeat of the Kwantung Army was a significant factor in the Japanese government's decision to surrender unconditionall".
As were the rest of the Allies. Soviet help with Japan probably would've been welcome much earlier.
> And let me quote the wiki article I linked to: "The Soviet entry into the war and the defeat of the Kwantung Army was a significant factor in the Japanese government's decision to surrender unconditionall".
The Japanese home islands were blockaded, constantly bombed, and hit with nuclear weapons after a grinding campaign across the Pacific. They'd lost by the time the Soviets jumped in; they were solidly on that path since 1942.
Soviet entry may've reinforced the hopelessness of continuing, but the Pacific part of WWII was largely fought by the US and UK alone. Contesting "the US won over the Japanese in the Pacific" is a tough path.
So, you know, not exactly the same as now.
No, I’m not; Stalin is recorded to have made the comment at the 1943 Tehran Conference with Churchill and Roosevelt.
Zhukov’s statement was 20 years later, addressing Cold War revisionism which minimized that contribution.