50,000,000 times greater if my arithmetic and your units are correct.
Tera - E12
Mega - E6
Whoops, left off three zeros.
I see a bilateral trade agreement shaping up: The USA exports trumpers and takes the Russian professional class.
There are people in the US who have told reporters that they would rather have Putin as their president than Joe Biden or said that better Russian than Democrat. At minimum, send those people to Russia. Maybe some of them will get a clue that the people they idolize are much worse than the people they hate here.
Ukrainian officials said they have killed approximately 12 generals on the front lines, a number that has astonished military analysts.
www.japantimes.co.jp
Article on the US Intelligence agencies helping target Russian generals
The Russians are learning, but it's been painfully slow. They are being more cautious then they were in the first days of the war. However, if they do take anything away from this war, they should realize that if the Ukrainians can do as much as they can eliminating senior officers with their hodge podge of former Soviet equipment combined with some home grown and modern equipment from other countries, the US intelligence's ability to track their senior staff combined with US weapons would mean the US could wipe the board of most senior officers in a few days.
If I was a Russian officer, I would be terrified of NATO getting into this war.
Basically, the Russians will permanently occupy Ukrainian territory by an elaborate "ethnic cleansing" strategy. Women, children and the elderly fled the occupied eastern and southern Ukrainian lands. Others who didn't leave were rounded up and deported to Russia. The rest were either murdered or killed by bombing and missile attacks.
Remember how the Ukrainians stated that they would fight to the last man? If there's no last man, there can be no urban warfare against the Russian military. So now the war will fall back into its previous frontal stalemate. I don't see that the Ukrainian army has a strategic advantage in a frontal theater when the Russians can send missiles and bombs from Russia. The Ukrainians can't reciprocate except by staging hit and run attacks on Russian border targets. This is what Putin will announce on 9 May.
The Ukrainians are on the offensive now. They aren't talking about it much and the media isn't picking up on it. Most of what they are covering is the fighting around Kharkhiv.
Institute for the Study of War
The salient around Molodova is much wider than it was a couple of days ago. I thought they were pushing towards Kupoansk, but they widened the salient instead. They may still push through to Kupiansk in the coming days.
Then in the south the gray area that ends near Nova Kakhova was blue a few days ago. It looks like they're are firming up their flanks around Novovorontsovka instead of pushing further south. These are areas the Ukrainians have advertised they are advancing. The gray salient may have grown, but neither side is talking about it.
The Ukrainians defended Mariupol and a relatively small force tied down a much larger Russian force for two months. They also inflicted heavy casualties on the Russians. The Russians won a battle they should have won anyway, but it took 30X longer and had significant casualties. The definition of a Pyrrhic Victory.
Russia is running out of everything. Missile attacks are way down from a month ago. Most of their land based missile systems are silent because they are out of ammunition. Most of the missile strikes in recent weeks have been coming from the Black Sea. Their frigates and more recently their submarines have been firing missiles into Ukraine. Anti-shipping missile parts have been found around strikes indicating the Russians are so low on naval to land missiles that they are pressing anti-shipping missiles into the role. They have probably stripped their navy to do that.
Additionally their land based missile systems that didn't get committed to the war probably had their missiles stripped too.
Russia's ability to make more weapons has been compromised from the start. In the first weeks of the war their aircraft started dropping dumb bombs because they were out of smart bombs. They also lost the ability to make more smart bombs and missiles due to the sanctions. All their smart weapons require parts from Europe. Their tank factory also shut down in the early weeks of the war because of a lack of parts.
In the last few weeks they have been losing other military manufacturing. The chemical plant that burned to the ground near Moscow was the only plant in Russia that made some key chemicals needed to make gun ammunition and rocket fuel. The other day a munitions plant blew up and burned.
Rumor has it that on May 9 the Russians will formally declare war so they can fully mobilize the army. That sounds good on paper, but they are short of everything they need to do that: uniforms, boots, small arms, probably ammunition, etc. Even if they skip training all those raw recruits and send them directly into combat, it will take 2 months minimum before they get anybody on the front line. In the meantime the army they have is withering on the vine and the Ukrainians are starting on the offensive.
In two months time the Russians will be starting from square one (pushed back into Russia) with vastly poorer quality troops and a lot of equipment that's broken and needs to be rebuilt before they can be used. Their supply situation will be worse than it is now.
Russia is running out of the ability to make what weapons they can make without outside help due to sabotage. They also started the war with a bottleneck in their supply chain which was how many trucks they had in the army. They had vastly fewer than they should have had for an army their size. Those trucks have mostly been destroyed now. The ones that haven't have been beaten to death.
Trent Telenko was involved in rehabbing US trucks after two years of war in Iraq. US trucks are babied compared to Russian trucks and the US trucks had 20-30 years of wear on them after 2 years.
The Russians have a compromised ability to manufacture supply and they have an ever diminishing ability to deliver it. They are stripping Russia of civilian trucks to fill out their losses, which is destroying the trucks (civilian trucks aren't built to take the abuse they are getting) and it's leaving their economy with no trucks to move goods, including war goods.
All the sabotage attacks deep in Russia is an indication that they have a serious problem with an internal insurgency brewing from their own citizens. They are facing a possible rebellion or civil war. Conscription is already very, very unpopular in Russia. Draft riots are a thing many countries have faced. Russia could see a massive draft riot that ends up turning into some kind of significant, long lasting unrest and could break up the country.
This war is not going to settle into a war of attrition. Russia's army is going to start falling apart within the next month and Ukraine is getting stronger every day.
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