Alexander Clarkson Also big thanks to Elizabeth Tsurkov🌻 who's been helping me edit my threads from their initial and barely intelligible form.

This is not meant to be a critisim of Alexander Clarkson but more of a way to present another view of how giving up the territory might unfold.

Similarly as has already been pointed out several times, mechanised units that have a high degree of cohesion and coordination make mince meat of enemies in towns.

Russia's got existing problems with both in this case. In terms of quality of dismounts, we're not even talking about adjacent timezones here.

Moreover holding built up areas as a defensive position is only beneficial in terms of economy of forces if you can resupply and if the quality of your dismounts is in the same ballpark as the attacker.

Third, we ought to consider the effect on morale. We saw how Russian morale broke in Kupyansk, Izyum and even Lyman. The amount of equipment abandoned that cannot be replaced is staggering.

Russia went past the DPRK and straight into the hunger games...

Alex Luck Steve Trimble Rufy Cruising Sometimes a nation's leadership that is unwilling to fully mobilize to salvage the immensely stupid war they started is then dragged by reality kicking and screaming towards it and slowly and ineptly takes every step possible to make said mobilization as pointless as possible.

15/ This is a case study on civil-military relations. What if the civilian government is given all the facts but can't understand what they mean? In this case it meant an almost inevitable defeat.

14/ Russia didn't have that cash & the MoD performing sort of adequately despite budget shortfalls made the Kremlin assume that the MoD isjust nagging for a bigger budget like every other institution.

13/ For reference, a proper year of training to operate a tank should be comparable to the cost of acquiring that tank when you factor in everything. They also spent the past several years depleting their ammo stocks because it was cheaper even if less efficient.

12/ And it's been nearly a decade in which every kneejerk reaction ate from their procurement and operations budget. They got tanks and IFVs slowly and never got the money to train on those. The army & esp mechanized forces & the dismounts didn't actually train.

11/ The exception being Kadyrov’s forces but they have already shown a proficiency in TikTok and on their own aren’t a substitute for a security services branch. An army utilizing mechanized & combined arms warfare lives & dies on the quality of its dismounts.