Putin's Potemkin Military

While it's still a military capable of mass, indiscriminate destruction, Russia's war in Ukraine has exposed grave weaknesses in both its battlefield capability and its ability to resupply:

Wrecked Russian fighter jets are being found with rudimentary GPS receivers "taped to the dashboards" in Ukraine because their inbuilt navigation systems are so bad, the UK defense minister said.

Speaking at the National Army Museum in London on Monday, Ben Wallace commemorated those who died in World War II and called Russia's invasion of Ukraine "senseless and self-defeating."

He also said there was evidence suggesting Russian military hardware was being pushed to breaking point by the invasion of Ukraine.

"'GPS' receivers have been found taped to the dashboards of downed Russian Su-34s so the pilots knew where they were, due to the poor quality of their own systems," he said.

"The result is that whilst Russia have large amounts of artillery and armor that they like parading, they are unable to leverage them for combined arms maneuver and just resort to mass indiscriminate barrages."

The Su-34 was first manufactured during the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, but is still one of Russia's leading fighter jets.

Most of us have used modern GPS systems, with some success and some failures.  If the Russians are using "rudimentary" GPS, it's a wonder they can find the sky.

Meanwhile, all those burned out Russian tanks that are littering Ukraine?  They can't be replaced:

“Because of the export controls we’ve already put in place, Russia’s top two manufacturers of tanks are no longer in business,” Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo said Monday. “Russia today has far fewer tanks than they had going into this invasion, and they can't make more because of the action that we're taking with sanctions.”

The White House says the controls have left Russia’s two major tank plants — the Uralvagonzavod Corporation and Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant — idle due to a lack of foreign components. And observers noticed fewer tanks than normal at the annual military parade on Moscow’s Red Square on Monday.

It also seems Russian conscripts have found a new way to avoid combat:

"According to local residents, Russian troops have shelled 20 of their own vehicles in Polohy in order to avoid going to the front line; they blamed the shelling on [Ukrainian] resistance fighters in the temporarily occupied territory of Zaporizhzhia."  [snip]

A battalion of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Zaporizhzhia Region reported that Russian troops deployed Solntsepek, a multi-barrel rocket launch system, on their own positions, thereby essentially "scorching" the Russian occupiers off Ukrainian land.

According to the Zaporizhzhia Military Administration, the morale of the Russian troops remains low: they regularly consume alcohol and flee from the locations where they are supposed to carry out their military service...

Perhaps word has gotten around to them about how they will be treated by their own military if they die:

Russian authorities in Ukraine’s occupied city of Donetsk are tossing the bodies of their dead soldiers in a secret dump “by the thousands” and charging their loved ones money to find them.

That’s according to a new audio recording released by Ukraine’s Security Service on Tuesday, which is purportedly an intercepted telephone conversation between two Russians discussing how one of their missing friends was finally found.

In the two-and-a-half minute recording, an unidentified man tells his female relative that the fate of “Inna’s brother” is finally known after he went missing a month ago.

“It’s better that you don’t hear this,” the man says at first, reluctant to spill all the grim details.

After more urging, he finally explains that the unidentified dead man’s “sister went to Donetsk, and there, basically, roughly speaking, is a dump.”

“They just toss them there. And then later it’s easier to make as if they disappeared without a trace. It’s easier for them to pretend they are just missing, and that’s it,” he said, noting that “there are thousands.”

“There’s nowhere left to place them. It’s a dump. I’m telling you in plain Russian—a dump. It’s as tall as a person,” he said, adding that the site is “fenced off, sealed, they don’t let anyone in.”

According to him, the only reason local authorities at the dump site let the woman find her brother was because she paid “good money.”

Poorly equipped, incompetent, corrupt, inhuman psychopaths -- not exactly a formulation for a successful anything, much less a modern military.

(Photo:  The very model of a modern Russian general (2012 re-enactor)/ Corey Flintoff, NPR)