This is hardly surprising. The Russian Army (and before it, the Soviet Army) never had a maintenance culture. Most of their military-industrial complex's greatest contributions to weaponry innovation have been distinguished by their reliability when poorly maintained (AK, RPK, RPG, etc).
That reliability when poorly maintained is essentially sloppy, loose designs. If you ever watch an AK fire in slow mo, you can watch every part wobbling all over.
Was that by design, or did they lack capabilities of mass production of high precision pieces?
By design... The AK is mostly stamped material which makes mass production cheap, fast and easy. While the slop makes it less accurate, it is far more reliable, especially when dirty and poorly maintained. Compare that to an ultra precise AR-15, if you get a little dirt in it, it begins to malfunction.
> Compare that to an ultra precise AR-15, if you get a little dirt in it, it begins to malfunction.
That 'ultra-precise machining' does have some advantages, though:
InRangeTV simulated whether a weapon will still work if it gets covered in mud. Originally they tried doing this buy having a guy crawl around in the mud; later, they realised they could just drop mud on the weapon.
AR-15 ("This AR15 mud test was performed right after last week's AK47 test: the same exact mud, the same wheelbarrow, at the same location, a mere 10 minutes later.")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAneTFiz5WU
Yup. The stamped design was intended not only to make mass production cheap, but to make the factories themselves a viable export product for the USSR's client states in the third world during the cold war.
Stamped design? I think you're thinking of MAK-90s or AKMs. AK-47s (up through the 2a, at least) have milled receivers and machined piston guides. And the receiver cover is stamped, but that's sort of an insignificant to the operation of the firearm.
We're I equipping a small army, I would look into something like the galil which mixes the best features of the AK (easy to manufacture lower receiver and reliability) with the best features of US weapon systems (accuracy at 300-500m). And the bottle opener on the front handguard is a definite plus.
This article reads "weird", I wonder if it's written by "AI" or some content-farmer, but it basically rewrites a tweet into something longer. Also the header, "technology.org / science & technology news" is so generic and screams even more "content farm".
It looks like the principal difference is the amount of rust on the T-90 and the fact that the thing looks like it hasn't had much attention paid to it.
I imagine this is one of those things that is a question of scale. If you're using the machine, you're only 10% likely to encounter a failure. But at a fleet of 1000, you actually have 100 tanks out of full operation. And in crucial moments, it may be that you're forced to jam the gear shift forward multiple times, or compensate for a misaligned sight or something that leads to overall reduced operational efficiency.
And one can imagine that if these parts are rusted, other critical parts have also encountered poor maintenance.
So overall, the short message is that this tank is in bad condition. The longer message is that this tank is typical of Russian tanks and Russian force preparedness and is therefore an indicator that the invasion they're prosecuting will encounter difficulties.
There's my speculation, and I hope it's concrete enough that someone will correct me about the parts I'm obviously wrong about. Sadly, neither the article nor the linked tweets were obvious about what is shown in detail.
There's a linked tweet to a picture of the inside of the tank, which looks like it's in pretty bad repair. There's rust, dirt on equipment - just evidence in general that basic maintenance is not being done. And, fwiw, the T90A entered service in 2004, so it's maybe a 19 year old tank.
The key thing is the grime, dirt, and rust everywhere in the crew compartment. That's where the tank crew is basically living for weeks on end, and if they can't even keep that clean what is the maintenance quality of the engine like?
Typical western propaganda? Haven't seen any articles about how anything Russia has been doing is good or effective, yet they undeniably continue to fight and serve Putin's wishes. I am located in the USA.
I wish there was a way to consistently get current events news with less extreme nationalistic bias.
Part of it is consuming extremes from both sides and figuring out the Venn diagram of the truth based on what both parties are acknowledging. You can also look at a variety of commenters who are reasonably middle-ground in their analysis. On YT, for me, I consume Perun (pro-Ukraine but largely factual analysis), WillyOAM, Military History Visualized, and History Legends (comes across kinda pro-Russia). I also like the ( https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/ ) subreddit, which has Russian-leaning mods, oddly making it perhaps the least-biased subreddit on the war (everywhere else is a DEEP pro-Ukraine echo chamber, including r/combatfootage). For general reasonably-non-biased news, avoid r/worldnews and visit...... r/anime_titties (note the underscore). Seriously, that's a news aggregator subreddit.
Their approach has historically been to just throw whatever people and equipment they have at the front and overwhelm with numbers. I suspect they initially sought a different approach and fell back on ol' reliable.
Now the small amount of modern equipment they have are being shown to be in bad condition too.
If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then there's really a chance that it might be a duck.
Russia has proven to be weak on the battlefield so have been forced to pivot to a war of attrition, hoping to win by sending more men into the meat grinder and using systematic war crimes, presumably in an effort to weaken the defenders' resolve.
Check out a site like Ground News if you want to look at a story across the board on perspectives. It gives pretty great insight into how stories are framed differently among competing publications.
The Russian army was several times the size of the Ukrainian in troops and armored vehicles. Their air force was even larger, relatively speaking. They've been a major arms exporter for half a century, with all kinds of supposedly cutting-edge equipment (like these tanks). They were one of the largest and deadliest militaries in the world, on paper. This was supposed to be an absolute cake walk for them, and the result was considered a foregone conclusion.
More than a year later, they're struggling to hold on to a few border regions against Ukrainian counterattack--and to accomplish that required large-scale conscription and rolling out obsolete mothballed equipment.
So I wouldn't dismiss reports like these as propaganda so easily, myself...
I think of it as roughly equivalent to Texas seceding from the US, the US invading, then being pushed back and desperately trying to hold on to El Paso and Amarillo to the point that they are putting conscripts into M60s and sending them to the front lines.
All that may well be true, but sometimes I am just curious about the facts. For instance, when the US was invading Iraq, they encountered a sandstorm that delayed them for quite a bit in Mar 2003. The news around me at the time had red pictures of US troops stalled in the advance and unable to progress and whatnot https://www.instagram.com/p/Cp9mBlygryI/
Underneath you knew the US-led Coalition was a monstrous force that was ultimately going to smash Saddam Hussein's army, but the news would report on the delays. And in some parts of the world where I was traveling through, they'd talk about how the coalition was not powerful because they were delayed so long to Baghdad or whatever. It wasn't true, they were going to win for sure.
It would just have been cool to have known the truth. Not that I would have done anything with it. But just to know would have been good.
Not to make this political, but it's sort of like on Reddit when Ron Paul was running for President. The site was full of stuff of about it's going to happen. In that case, you could just go try some other site and it was okay, but on Russia's invasion of Crimea, or on this more recent invasion, you can't really find out the truth.
You have to go find some OSINT Twitter Feed and form a picture of who is sending propaganda and who not. It's a natural result of the importance of media, but still, it would be nice just to know for the sake of knowledge.
Well... I wasn't in the Crimea in 2014 so I don't have direct experience. But journalists I trust from the BBC, Al Jazeera and the New York Times were there and reported directly observing irregulars with sterile uniforms (no unit or country insignia) speaking Russian with Russian equipment and weapons.
It is widely believed Russia provided arms, equipment and personnel to aid paramilitary separatists, effectively taking over Crimea in 2014.
Despite earlier attempts to hide their involvement, Russian defense minister Sergey Shoygu admitted russian forces were involved.
While I often recommend readers take Wikipedia articles with a grain of salt and try to verify citations, the "Annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation" article recounts a narrative consistent with my memory.
I shouldn't say Twitter sources do the exact opposite, however. Twitter is a "bullshit generator" in the way Harry Frankfort used the term. While there are many accounts on Twitter that appear to support observations in consensus reality (the sky is up, water is wet, fire is hot, Russia invaded Crimea, etc.), they are often drowned out by comments by people who don't care about the factual nature of their statements. They may say something that's externally falsifiable, or maybe they won't; demonstrable falsifiablity is not germane to their narrative. They're not actively lying, because lying involves a level of self awareness (and awareness of external reality) that they do not seem to possess.
Clearly it's not everyone on Twitter behaving this way, but enough of Twitter acts as a bullshit generator that it's hard to separate people who are right, wrong, duplicitous, ill informed or just plain spouting BS.
Several things are in dispute. Some people on Twitter say it didn't happen. The Russian Federation vacilates between "we've always owned crimea" and "we didn't invade, but we helped some separatists." The current Ukrainian government asserts that the Russians invaded Crimea.
I deeply respect Vladislav Surkov and his ability to weave a dazzling narrative. But at the end of the day most of the talking points he constructed regarding Ukraine and Donbas are complete BS.
Didn't mean "he current Ukrainian government asserts that the Russians invaded Crimea" was debatable, but that the Ukrainian government asserted the Russians invaded Crimea and that the Russians for quite some time claimed they didn't (and that they didn't know who the LGMs seen in Crimea were.)
But getting back to this gravity thing... sure stuff frequently falls to the ground, but have you ever SEEN gravity itself? [Yes, this is a joke, but your point is well taken, I had a comment a bit ago about how it's hard to take some twitters comments seriously and that they often seem to just spout BS. The good news is that it's not everybody spouting BS, but it often seems like most people are.]
Russia claimed to have no involvement in Crimea (later admitting they had); they also claimed the day before invading Ukraine they had no plans to do so. These are just bald-faced lies, and I think it's important to differentiate between that and "it's not possible to tell what the real truth is" scenarios.
