Ukraine v Russia II

Putin and Russia have told Xi that they do not agree with China's peace plan and are not going to leave Ukraine's territory. So i guess there is nothing left for Zelensky to be able to agree on.

 

Putin has said that Ukraine is not a real country and people but are all Russians, and so have to submit to being part of Russia, or die if they do not. Obviously this is never going to happen.

 

You forget a couple of things.

First, Putin doesn’t include any of the countries that broke away from the Soviet Union to be real countries, therefore, there is no sovereignty being violated by invading them.

Second, even if Putin considered Ukraine to be a sovereign country, the occupied territories are now part of Russia, so it is the Ukrainians that are invading Russia..

 

Two trainloads of T-55 tanks have been taken out of storage and are being prepared for service.

🧵/ link in the last tweet. T-62s were too modern for you to see in Ukraine? Now Russia is moving its T-54/55 tanks to the front line, as @CITeam_en finds out from the photos obtained from their source. @planet satellite imagery corroborates this claim. pic.twitter.com/PMTwWaqFJL

— Mark Krutov (@kromark) March 22, 2023

The only reason I can think of doing this is that there's probably a lot of 100×695mm high explosive ammunition still being kept in bunkers and this ancient tank is the only way to use it.

 

There is still time to see T-34s!

 

Most of the 'Tiger Tanks' in the movies produced in the three or more decades following the end of the war were (poorly disguised) T-34s.

 

They made a big deal about the movie Fury having both of them in the film.

 

Are you not familiar with the Stable Genius Head of State model?

 

They genuinely need them and they are incapable of making enough T72s (or higher) battle ready in time.

The facilities capable of upgrading the T-72, 80s etc have their hands full. The 800 T62 are already in the process of being upgraded.

Also they seem to be minimally upgraded. At least the Slovenian M55 have many genuine upgrades. For example they have 105 mm L7 while the vanilla T55 has 100 mm gun

 

None. Russia thinks in numbers not quality

They need 10 tanks here 20 tanks there 15 tanks over there. So they are being sent. That BTG lost 20 T-90Ms. Now they are getting 20 T-62s. Problem solved

That is Russia's MO and I know it very well because after 50+ years of communism my compatriots would do the same

 

They have to do that because they are running out of shells for regular artillery. The 100×695mm was an extremely common shell in Soviet inventory from the last year of WWII up to about the 1970's. If they kept them, then they have a large store of ammunition than can be tapped, but only by this tank (I don't think they kept any SU100 tank destroyers from WWII).

 

I'm not sure that getting a peace deal is the point here, it's a diplomatic ploy to paint China as a credible "peacemaker" after the Saudi-Iran deal while trying to make the West look as the unreasonable "warmonger". If successful, this allows China to make more diplomatic gains with their intent to expand the use of their currency in global trading.

This is a PR move by the Chinese as realistically, nothing short of unconditional surrender will satisfy the Russians at this point

 

In the eastern part of Ukraine you can't really see that long directly. Every farm has a row of trees around it, so you can only see one farm field at a time.

They can do indirect fire the same way the Ukrainians do. I hear they got a very large number of small drones from China recently.

 

Russia has some for parade purposes. They had Korean War era ones for a while, but in 2019 got 30 real WWII ones from Laos.

 

In addition to what waitforit said, they've been using T-62s as mobile artillery (or not so mobile), so you may see the T62s moved into a more direct combat role, while the T55 is backfills the T62 as mobile artillery.

 

And some people were laughing at Denmark/Germany/The Netherlands donating 80 of the 99 retired "Danish" Leopards 1A5 that were upgraded up until 2005 before being send off in 2010 to the German company FFG in Flensburg who keep, upgrade and sell older tanks and armored personnel carriers from both the Danish and German military, but in this case were still available. So Zelensky and the Danish PM were openly talking about this tank donation on 30. January when the Danish PM visited Mykolaiv, and apparently then Denmark quickly got Germany and the Netherlands in on the idea of a fairly large donation. I believe with Germany paying for their battle ready maintenance-upgrade (Just as they also had done with the 54 M113 G3DK/G4DKs armored personnel carriers Denmark earlier had donated)


As for the 99 Leopards 1A5, then some of them were used by Denmark in Operation Bøllebank (Operation Kickass/bully-bashing) during the war in Bosnia back in 1994. It was a confrontation between Bosnian Serb military forces armed with anti-tank missiles, several artillery pieces and 3 T-55 tanks, facing the Danish "peacekeepers" and 7 of their Leopard 1A5's. One of the Leopards was damaged and disabled, but no casualties, while the Serb side lost an ammunition depot and several bunkers that got struck and blew up, as well as their 3 T-55 tanks and up to 150 dead and likewise as many wounded, though the high number of casualties were disputed by the Serb's.