Okay, buckle up.
@Littlejimmy will enjoy this one "I only have time for a short missive".
Lots of questions you may have about Kursk, the East and Russian ammo dumps should be answered here. Plus some questions you probably weren't asking.
And before I hand you over to my imaginary friend, you may have seen that a coup in Armenia was foiled.... the attempt was by a "unit" trained in Russia. The presence of a certain battle group that you know about had some bearing on the outcome.
Anyway.... a "short" missive.
"The Worst Day
As bad days go, the last 48 hours was by far the worst that Russia has suffered since Field Marshall Paulus decided to go vacationing in the Soviet Union. Or perhaps even worse, at least the Soviet Union managed to win after a long while.
As most of you know Tank Girl had an appendectomy two days ago, and I had to scoot on out and help out, being the only one that knows her entire plan. She’s nowadays so secretive that not even Zyrskyi knows it all.
So, I am extremely tired, and this will be somewhat more of a bullet points without reflection… Good part is that she is now complaining a lot from her hospital bed. “Why you move Brigade schmuck!”. I told her to lean back and paint toenails, I hope that she will be up and about pestering me sometime next week.
Tomorrow the doctors are about to release her back to ***** to recuperate under the stern care of Nurse Artyom. He is under strict orders to not let her out of the apartment by General Z.
Roads
As I stated a few days ago Tank Girl had nabbed a miniature road just North of the Seym River into Russia, she likes the backdoor it seems.
This way she could take a big new area of Russia that Russia can’t access due to having lost the bridges across the Seym. Note, the Seym pocket is South, we are now North of the Seym pushing East.
The First village to fall was Khodeikovo, and now 5 small villages are ours covering quite a chunk of land.
Next she pushed into the road complex, E101/M3 to Moscow via Bryansk, A142 to the junction to E105 between Rylsk and Oryol. We are now at the M3/E101 vs A142 junction. Russia is sad about this of course since they need to send troops to protect in two directions at the same time. Basically, they have to pick between protecting Bryansk/Moscow, or Oryol/Ryls.... choices choices.
And to add perfidy into the mixture, we are now munching on Russia at the E38 crossing to Kursk that is between the other two roads.
This meant that Russia had to start a mandatory evacuation of the Rylsk and Khomutovka Krai’s.
The Vatniks of Sackville-Baggins
There are now 3 sack where there was two. The 95 th and the 21 st are tying up the new Gluchkovo West and Gluchkovo East Sacks. And then we have the old Koronevo Sack.
Gluchkovo West has 2 000 sad Russians, Gluchkovo East has 3 500 even sader Russians, and 2 500 Russians are mumbling “shtool” in Korenovo.
The 21 st is mauling the 155 th Russian Marine Brigade for all they are worth, the Russians are most impressed with how well those CV90s are bopping them on their noses. The 95 th are using the same stuff on the Western Gluchkovo Russians.
Miscellaneous Sad Russia Noises
Over at Vovchansk a sizeable chunk of the 47 th Tank Division gave up… let me check notes: to 5 dudes on a smoke break from Azov.
1 st company 154 th Regiment got Himars’d and an adjacent training ground was 155mm’d.
83 rd Infantry Brigade and 2 nd Spetznas Battalion was finally crushed inside the Cement plant in Vovchansk, ending that stupendously long siege.
Back to Kursk, the 51 st VDV Brigade is taking a deep pounding North of Kauchuk. They tried a counter-offensive and took ungodly losses due to shellfire and good action from us. It has stalled and is slowly breaking into a rout now as we resume the offensive.
The offensive at Chasiv Yar is over, Russia is now throwing anything that can move into holding the line. Mechanics, airplane support staff, clerks, cooks, musicians… anything. The staff shortage there is extreme.
If it can be arranged Brigadier Plucky will get a couple of spare brigades and go on some punitive mauling actions, but obviously right now spare Brigades are a “tad short” on the menu. He will have to wait and continue blowing up saxophonist’s and short cooks.
But, the Motherland finally provides! Russia has a new law, if you are brought in on charges in Russia, then you will be sent directly to the frontline while waiting for your court date. Talk about being guilty until proven dead.
Now some more Kurskifications. Me has 1,100 little Russian teenagers that has given up to process. They were not overly impressed by being sent to fight in the Seym pocket instead of doing their normal military service.
News on Arms
While everyone is bickering on long range weaponry in the West, there are other weapons news that people are missing.
First one is that Frenchies have sneaked a bit and trained Ukrainians on the Mirage 2000 attack aircraft, and that they will arrive in about 3 months. This will give additional attack capabilities to Ukraine since it is a light bomber/weapons carrier.
******* factory in Ukraine has started production of “Built in Ukraine” IFV’s, and they will start to hit units in 2-4 months. This will do a huge difference on a year scale and improve Ukraine’s offensive capabilities.
500K 155mm shells just showed up mysteriously after EU “found” them somehow. This is surplus production shells above what was expected. Let us rejoice, we are now ahead of the curve.
Drone production is now confirmed to be 3 million per year, and the production is still slowly ramping up, so nobody really knows when or where it will hit a maximum.
There’s more fun stuff around the corner, but I will wait with talking about that until it is appropriate.
Toropets
The Toropets ammunition storage facility was one of the largest in Russia. It was where they stored the bulk of what is produced before loading it on trains. Think of it as a huge “flow tank” taking up any excess that was produced.
Due to Russian logistics and train problems, it was filled to the brim with missiles, shells, explosives, mines, etcetera. So, it was a perfect opportunity to go big on Russia.
Normally things were sent out of Toropets to smaller, but still massive ammo depots closer to the border of Ukraine, and from there on to Russia’s usual large ammo dumps near the front. You can think of it as one of their master-depots, if not even Thee master-depot.
And since it was not going anywhere a more thorough operation was planned, even a bit experimental in nature.
The main attack component was jet-propelled Palyanytsia drones operating in a swarm. But the place is so massive that there was an opportunity to hit it with something else beside the drones. In a way, the drones were back up just to be sure to what the experimental part.
Remember the Ukrainian Hrim-2 missile launcher? Problem was that there was no missile production, and there was no stockpile of missiles due to Ukraine not being able to afford to purchase a number of them before the war.
But, with Ukraine getting EU-funding that changed. While they were at it the Ukrainians incorporated what they had learned from other missiles they had received and topped all of it up with new tech from the west, and out plonked what we can call “Hrim-3” ballistic missiles.
The original had a 280km range to fall within the treaty of 300km range for medium range ballistic missiles. But, with Russia having cancelled said treaty, that limit went out the window, the range is now 700km.
This produced a bit of a problem, there’s not enough of Ukraine to do a test-launch safely. Thankfully Russia agreed to provide a test-landing field in Toropets, and there was much rejoicing in Ukraine over Russia’s kindness.
In other words, Budanov decided to missile the spot. This presented a tad of logistics issues, he wanted the missile to hit before the drones swooped in, but with as little gap as possible in case it failed somehow, as to not give the Air Defence time to get ready.
I am sure that it was a chore to somewhat accurately predict the individual flight times of the drones, and on top of that an untested missile with unproven flight characteristics. In the end there was a ballpark figure giving the missile a minute lead-time on the drones, in reality it was 30 seconds.
And while at it, the missile was set to target the S-400 unit protecting the place with a couple Palyanytsia’s as backup. In retrospect those drones could have been sent somewhere else since the missile hit dead on.
Obviously, Russia was very happy about their part in the missile program, and powerful airborne radars and satellites gave very good telemetry on the flight, it seems like it hit with a 50cm probability. But that is a bit hard to decide since it was an airburst spreading a merry load of tungsten balls and no cameras was pointed at the spot, well at least Ukrainian cameras.
After that the Palyanytsia’s was able to merrily dunk down wherever they saw fit to do so. Judging from satellite data and Russian video-clips the entire thing is now a thing of the past.
Number of Russians
As I was taking a dump in bush 2 days ago after looking at some 1,100 bewildered Russian teens that found life captivating, I pondered how many Russians might be left. It is sort of useful to know after all.
Especially since the expected average lifetime of a Russian frontline soldier in the trenches or on attack is 3 days according to Russian figures. We know this since the soldiers are provided with ammo and food for 3 days and told that they will not need more since they will be dead after that. Russia is truly a death cult at this point.
Let us start off with binning the 2021 data from 20-59 aged males. Why that number? Well, they are the bulk of those in the trenches, over that age they are high ranking officers, and below they are conscripts aged 17-19. I will get back to the conscripts later.
There’s 22.2 million Russian men in total in this age bracket, and if we would add on the conscripts, we get a 23.3 total available Russians.
If we take this at face value, we get a ratio of 1 to 8.9 men in the 20-49 span being in the army. A staggering ratio. If we chuck in the conscripts, as we should since they are now fighting, we end up with a ratio of 1 to 9.3.
This being men in their most productive years, both in terms of economics, industrial productivity, and child production, we can easily see that this should affect all 3 in various degrees. And we see that, more than expected, and that leads us to the “apparent” part of Russian demographics.
Let us start with the Russians that left Russia, either temporarily to avoid the war, or permanently. Let us here use the hard numbers from governments that actually bother with keeping track of Russian emigree’s. That number is 3 million, all of them in the relevant age bracket, leaving us with 20.3 million Russians and a combined ratio of 1 to 8.1.
But, this is Russia so it is getting worse. During this time this age bracked has shrunk for natural reasons. Russia is au naturel loosing 0.5 million citizens due to low birthrate on the 2021 data, and now with the birthrate being below 1 it is 750K all of a sudden. Per year. On top of that 2 million have by now moved out of the bracket without being replaced by young ones due to the low birthrate.
Let us say here for the point of things that there’s 0.5 million less Russian males in the age bracket due to nativity/natural death rate disparity, and 1 million falling out. This leaves us with 18.8 million Russians of the correct age, and a ratio of military to civilians that is 1 to 7.5
Now, let us deduct the dead and wounded that has been retired due to injuries, after all we know those figures well enough, so time to deduct 1.4 million Russians and we land on a final number 17.4 million in the age brackets, giving a ratio of 1 to 6.9.
Time to remove the medically unfit and handicapped, according to Russian statistics that is 2.1 million, leaving 15.3 million and a ratio of 1 to 6.2.
You do not need to be a genius here to understand that Russia theoretically has 6,2 more armies to go. A staggering theoretical number, but a number that can never be used up. Long before that Russia’s economy and industrial output will fall below the threshold.
Also, it is sort of hard to even keep the paltry birthrate at just a smidge below 1 if every single Russian above 17 years of age is gone. Okay, gerontophilia is perhaps a thing, but even that will not make a huge dent in the numbers since there’s not a heck of a lot of old horny Russian men with a mountain sized pile of Viagra.
If Russia goes much further down this road, Russia will seize to exist to all points and purposes due to nativity. Remember that we are already at the point where it would from a nativity point of view make sense for a law allowing Russian men to have two or more wives.
Jokes aside about potential weird Russian sexual practices, and yes incest is already legal in Russia, they are not in a good place, and it is getting worse by the day.
Remember that the Russian civilian industrial output has diminished down all the way to 62 percent of prewar levels, and that it will never get back up to prewar levels, and that to run the wartime production they are now sending school children to work in the military industry. The latter obviously F***ing up their studies lowering the competitiveness of Russia permanently.
It is already impossible for Russia to keep the numbers up, almost without a fault everyone is now refusing conscripting, the contract signing number is now as low as 7 000 per month. Yes, they can force mobilise people, but that will just make the industrial output, economic output and baby plopping numbers drop even further and faster.
Conclusion, Russia has reached peak militarisation that can be sustained, and we should take the word sustained very lightly here. From here on Russia is now rolling down a steep hill towards extinction due to demographics and economic/industrial output.
And the best/worst part is that the damage is now so bad that Russia can never get back to 2021 numbers, and for every single day now Russia is falling so far into the societal collapse that it is scary.
Remember that the 2021 numbers indicated that Russia would go from 141 million to 67.5 million citizens at the turn of the century. Now? Let us just say that Russia is closer to 40 at that time, and that requires getting the birthrate up to 2021 levels very fast after the war is over, and every week the war goes on the lower the number of Russians will be the year 2 100.
If they continue this race to the bottom until they truly run dry there will be no Russians at all to all points and purposes. Nill and Nada.
We should here also remember that no society has ever suffered such a fast population decline, all on its own it would collapse their society. Russia is already in unchartered territory, and there are monsters out there lurking.
For me? Time to go and improve the decline of Russia as much as possible, and continue being a substitute Tank Girl. At least there will now be 1100 teen Russians alive in the end, but they might opt to stay here in Ukraine. "
