David Sacks Tweet is very ignorant of the realities of this war. It looks like he hasn't updated his assumptions about the quality of the two forces since February 24.
The Russian mobilization is going like everything else Russia has tried in this war, it's an utter shambles which will put a bunch of untrained, unmotivated idiots on the front line who will just get killed. They are nothing more than a speed bump to the Ukrainian army.
The Ukrainian army has shown it has taken the NATO training it got since 2014 to heart. They fully mobilized at the start of the war and they now have a large force of well trained personnel who have high morale and are extremely well motivated to fight. Ukraine's only problem is a shortage of heavy equipment.
The Ukrainians have plentiful small arms equipment. Every frontline trooper has body armor and a modern helmet as well as plenty of secondary arms like rocket launchers and grenades. A recent video by a Wagner group soldier showed how good Ukrainian body armor was. He shot a breast plate with his AK and it didn't even dent the backside of it.
Russia has demonstrated that their army was a paper tiger. On paper it was supposedly the 2nd best in the world, but in reality it's a third world shambles incapable of any complex operations. The vaunted huge equipment reserves the Russians had turned out to be a lot of junk either picked over by thieving servicemen looking to make a buck on the black market, or rusted out from decades of sitting through Russian winters.
Called up servicemen are being given AKs that are more rust than gun, or ancient guns from past wars. Some mobilized men have been seen with WW 1 era rifles that were being phased out when the Germans invaded in 1941. Others have been given WW II surplus weapons and equipment.
The conscripts are surrendering in large numbers. Many said the only weapons they had was a rifle. No grenades, rocket launchers, or anything else.
There is some possibility that Russia will use a nuclear weapon, but it's unlikely NATO would immediately respond with a nuclear strike of their own. Experts who have been planners in the Pentagon (who are now retired) have all said the likely NATO response will be a conventional air war to wipe Russian war power in the region off the map and possibly take out Russian war assets in other parts of the world.
The idea that an outside power like the US would basically negotiate an end in Ukraine's place is old thinking. I recommend anyone with the time watch this lecture series
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz_1Mx1MaO6sw_
It's a class being taught at Yale this semester on Ukrainian history. Professor Timothy Snyder also talks a lot about the Psychology and how language shapes thinking. In Slavic languages there is a word "na" that we translate as "the". It refers to a region with some cultural identity but no political existence. Like in the US people using that terminology might say "na Appalachia". Appalachia is a cultural entity, but it does not have defined borders or any kind of government representing the region. The region has governments, but none represent the place called Appalachia.
The Russians always refer to Ukraine as "na Ukraine" or "the Ukraine" in English. It's recognizing that Ukraine has a cultural identity, but denying it any legitimacy as a political entity. The idea that the US would negotiate an end to this war without Ukraine is furthering this thinking. It's Russian fed thought processes.
I think the most likely outcome from this war is Russia is going to devolve into internal chaos which will force them to withdraw the burnt out husk of their army. Economists who have been watching the Russian economy under sanctions are saying that the wheels are beginning to wobble. Some key areas of the Russian economy are showing large cracks.
One of these areas is because of the lack of western equipment. Russia is 100% dependent on western parts and know how to do many things. One area that has been discussed is in the parts they need to make their more sophisticated weapons. The supply for those have dried up so they can't make smart missiles, aircraft, anti-aircraft defense systems, or tanks.
But another are which is beginning to have an impact is in the lowly cassette bearing. These are only made by 5 companies, one Swedish and 4 American. They are used in every Russian railroad wheel on every locomotive and every rail car. They require specialized metallurgy that neither Russia nor China possess. Russia has been parking their rail cars due to bearing failures and they have no ability to replace them. This thread goes into detail about it
Thread by @TrentTelenko on Thread Reader App
Russia is the most rail dependent country on Earth. If the trains stop moving, their economy grinds to a halt very quickly.
Modern Russia has a tendency to get revolutionary when they lose a conflict. In 1906 when the Japanese sank almost the entire navy and handed Russia a serious defeat, there was a major uprising that the Czar was only able to put down because the army was mostly intact. When WW I went bad, they had a civil war that led to the communists coming to power. When they had to pull out of Afghanistan, the USSR fell apart shortly after.
This war is leading to a military defeat on the scale of their 1917 loss. The army is in shambles now. They are depending more and more on tanks and other equipment built in the 1950s and 1960s. There are relative antiques being encountered on the battlefields of Ukraine. And Russia is running out of trained people to operate this equipment. This summer they stripped all their training personnel and sent them to Ukraine, which gave their army a brief sugar high until those people were killed, but now they have nobody to train new troops, so they are basically handing conscripts rifles and sending them to the front untrained.
That is what's called a Lanchester Square Collapse.
Thread by @TrentTelenko on Thread Reader App
Ukraine is moving slowly on offense right now because it is fall mud season. Once the ground freezes the poorly equipped Russians will be freezing to death and the Ukrainians who know what they are doing in winter conditions will be free to move about in the snow. I expect the Ukrainians will take back a lot of their territory by spring as long as the west keeps sending them what they need.
The only failure condition for Ukraine hinges on the west losing the will to keep them in the fight. Russia faces several losing scenarios including straight up battlefield defeat, a coup in Moscow, uprisings in the provinces, and an oligarch revolt. I read a few days ago that most of the oligarchs in Russia are putting together their own private armies and only a few of them are sending them to Ukraine. Prigozhin has the most famous army, the Wagner Group, but he's no longer alone in this.
We could see Russia devolve into a Game of Thrones scenario with warlords fighting one another for who controls the Kremlin.
Russian conscription leading to a stalemate is a scenario out of a different universe. Forcing a settlement from the outside is also outdated thinking.
