Posted on 08/04/2023 5:49:54 AM PDT by SpeedyInTexas
More confirmation UA has broken thru first line.
“”Our troops in the south have already broken through the first line of defense and moved to the intermediate one. And there they face the fact that the enemy at the main, key dominant heights built engineering fortifications. This certainly complicates the movement of our troops and the fighting itself,” Deputy Minister of Defense Hanna Maliar reports. “
https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1687504884097064967
“It’s official! The Ruble hit 1-cent”
The decline seems to be accelerating, and seems (to me) to be driven by fundamentals and the markets, rather than some policy.
I believe it has further to fall, when Russia’s financial reserves are depleted, and they have to step up printing of new rubles to cover their spending.
They can try to raise interest rates further to shore up their currency, but that would further depress their real economy as well.
All that Speedy is doing is shoving any opposing replies way down the page in order to hide them and/or to make his/her/its post look like it has more engagement. It is as simple as that.
To: Worldtraveler once upon a time
That’s what PIF does. I wonder how many even read their monstrous post.
39 posted on 8/4/2023, 9:15:49 AM by dynoman (Objectivity is the essence of intelligence. - Marilyn vos Savant)
RuZZian Boys are comical.
Best just to keep a post to 1 or 2 short comments of no more than 10 words to keep you from having to scroll down - so laborious ... when there is the ‘View Replies’ button you could click on to avoid that horrible problem. One would get the impression you don’t like the message - Ood, that.
But then with out Friends of Putin’s inane comments, the page would be a lot shorter ...
I agree with Worldtraveler once upon a time.
When one is a peacock, displaying a sizable feather plume is a way of appearing bigger than one is. When one is a puffer fish, one inflates.
It is the “deimatic behavior” used in offensive, defensive acts, and sometimes used in appearing sizable for sexual interest.
You and Speedy are compensating for a lacking in many things.
You keep on defending duplicitous propaganda practices. Pathetic.
I don’t doubt that, I just keep seeing the Russians are done articles, yet they keep fighting and we keep sending in more money and weapons to Ukraine. So truth being the 1st casualty of war and man do we have a lot of casualties!
Aww, you must like me.
From the article that you linked:
“So in fact, Russia might have as few as 3,800 repairable tanks in reserve (inactive storage).”
(3,300 more were on active status in the Russian force structure before the war (including those assigned to Reserve units), but more than 10% of them were likely in inoperable condition).
“A Russian source told Novaya Gazeta that Uralvagonzavod and Siberia-based Omsktransmash can restore 600 old tanks a year on top of the 250 new T-72s and T-90s Uralvagonzavod can build.”
That is a central theme of this (Speedy’s) recurring post - tracking the expenditure of the old Soviet arsenal.
Tanks are a headline item, but the same thing is happening across their fleets and stockpiles - Artillery, cruise missiles, attack helicopters, etc..
They are expending everything much more rapidly than they can replace them (except perhaps, for human bodies).
Generally speaking, the best stuff has already been used first. Overall, they are roughly halfway through their Military inheritance from the Soviet Union, and they are already deep into having to shift over to less effective options than the ones they started with.
Some items, like precision deep strike missiles (some types of cruise missiles, Iskanders and Tochkas) are already over 80% expended. Some items, like submarines and bombers, are largely untouched by the war far (a few bombers were lost).
The Soviet Union looked to be 10 feet tall in its day, but collapsed. Today’s Russian Military is only about a quarter the size of the Soviet Union’s, and the old Warsaw Pact Countries that used to support them, are now mostly in NATO.
Once that old Soviet stockpile is gone, it would likely (financially) take Russia a generation to rebuild it, if ever.
The Russian ruble has been reduced to less than an American penny.
Putin is a Master Strategist.
Russians are screwed.
https://www.cfr.org/article/how-much-aid-has-us-sent-ukraine-here-are-six-charts
let’s use 3000 Russian tanks destroyed and the 75 billion dollars we sent. That’s 25 million dollars per tank destroyed! So who’s really winning? Note our Abrams tank costs about $9 million to build.... so for every Russian tank destroyed it’s like the cost for 2.5 Abrams..... we’re not losing tanks, just the money to build them if ever needed...
So now, the average annual Ruzzian income, expressed in dollars, has gone from $14,771 to $12,400.
https://www.timedoctor.com/blog/average-salary-in-russia/
Russians are screwed. Yep.
“I just keep seeing the Russians are done articles, yet they keep fighting”
It is an enormous undertaking. In some respects, it is the WWIII that we prepared for during the Cold War (in slow motion, and without some of the worst parts). Cities have been destroyed, and millions of people displaced. The Russians alone have fired more than ten million Artillery rounds, and they have made the Ukraine the most heavily mined place on Earth.
By several measures, the Russians had the largest stocks of (some types) of military gear on Earth (like those many tank hulls in their old boneyards).
But their resources are not unlimited, and they continue to race toward those limits at an historic rate.
Among those limits, are finance. Although a lot depends on the price of oil (a wild card), they are on track to exhaust their war chest of financial reserves (including gold reserves) around Christmas. As that approaches, and after, they will have to print more money, tax more, and cut other spending. They can become like North Korea, and continue fighting for years, but their relative combat power, standard of living and political freedom would have to decline dramatically.
Putin has driven Russia off a cliff, in terms of the lives of the Russian people. He has likely squandered a generation’s worth of improvement in the standard of living, in the last year and a half.
Ruble continued its death plunge today.
“the Biden administration and the U.S. Congress have directed more than $75 billion in assistance to Ukraine.”
A bit more than half of that was Defense (>$40 Billion), the rest was economic and humanitarian aid.
$40 Billion is about 5% of the annual US Defense budget, but that amount was spread over two fiscal years - 2022 and 2023. Some amount of that was old inventory, that does not need to be replaced (although most does).
The non-defense aid is even a smaller percentage of the non-defense budget.
So the financial impact on the USA is quite marginal.
“let’s use 3000 Russian tanks destroyed and the 75 billion dollars we sent. That’s 25 million dollars per tank destroyed!”
All the other Russian gear that was destroyed, should be considered against that $75 Billion as well - about half the Soviet arsenal. The bulk of the military gear sent to the Ukraine was designed and stocked, specifically to address the threat posed by that old Soviet stockpile. It is successfully completing the mission of destroying that stockpile, without a single American soldier dying, and without damage to America itself (assuming that the Freeport LNG terminal explosion in Texas was not Russian sabotage).
As several US Senators have noted (most famously, retired Air Force Colonel Lindsay Graham), this is a hugely cost efficient way for the USA to achieve that objective.
Thanks. I prefer to not be a victim of circumlocution.
Especially cut and paste circumlocution!
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