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Ukraine – Those Guns Unknown To Me
Over the last months I read each Daily Report on the war in Ukraine by the Russian Ministry of Defense.
The reports list the losses of the Ukrainian side on each of the major fronts. I was especially interested in the dedicated counter-artillery campaign the Russian's have been waging during the last two months.
They numbers in the Russian reports may be wrong or exaggerated but they are in a range that is plausible for such a high intensity operation.
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The average daily Ukrainian losses are 12 major artillery pieces, one artillery radar and 3 to 4 artillery ammunition points or depots. The Ukrainian losses of men are listed at around 400+ per day. (The reports exclude the Wagner operations in Bakhmut/Artyomovsk.)
For the one month I recorded 214 destroyed truck pulled howitzers, 92 destroyed self-propelled howitzers and 56 destroyed Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS). About 12,000 Ukrainian troops were also reported to have been killed.
For comparison the artillery 'fist' of a NATO tank or motorized infantry division is its artillery brigade. It consists of 3 fire battalions each of which has 3 fire companies each of which has 6 guns or MLRS. That is a total of 52 major artillery pieces.
Losing a total of 362 major artillery pieces as Ukraine has done in a month is a lot, much more than the 'west' is able to replace. The current lack of ammunition that Ukraine claims to have will soon change into an oversupply simply because Ukraine will lack the guns and MLRS to fire it.
But that isn't the focus of this piece.
I have wondered about some howitzer/gun types the reports mentioned as destroyed. I had never heard of those and had to look them up.
What is for example the M101 truck pulled howitzer?
After World War I, the U.S. Army Ordnance Department studied various captured German 105 mm-caliber howitzers and developed the 105 mm Howitzer M1920 on Carriage M1920.
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A modified version of the M1 was trialed in 1932 which used semi-fixed ammunition instead of separate-loading ammunition.
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The original M1 carriage had been designed for towing using horses rather than trucks, and a new carriage, the T5 (M2), was developed in 1939 and standardized in February 1940.
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The U.S. military artillery designation system was changed in 1962, redesignating the M2A1 howitzer the M101A1.
So the M101, pictured below, is a U.S. copy of a German army howitzer design from World War I. Some 10,000 have been build mostly during World War II.
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The ones Ukraine has, and the two Russia claimed to have destroyed, were gifts from the Lithuanian army reserve.
The D-44 anti-tank gun was also unknown to me:
The 85-mm divisional gun D-44 (Russian: 85-мм дивизионная пушка Д-44) was a Soviet divisional 85-mm calibre field artillery gun used in the last action of World War II.
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The barrel was developed from that of the T-34-85 tank and was capable of firing 20–25 high-explosive (HE), armor-piercing, and high-explosive antitank (HEAT) projectiles per minute.
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A nice little museum piece.
There is also the Rapira anti tank gun which turns out to be a bit more modern:
2A19 or T-12 is a Soviet-designed 100-mm anti-tank gun. It was the first anti-tank gun to adopt a smoothbore barrel, and to introduce modern armor piercing shot, like the APFSDS. It uses long projectiles that are more powerful than its caliber suggests.
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In 1971 a new variant was introduced, T-12A or MT-12 "Rapira" (2A29). This has the same barrel, but has a redesigned carriage and gun shield.
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By the mid-1990s modern western tanks' frontal armor protection could no longer be penetrated by a 100 mm gun. The 100 mm caliber ammunition had reached the limits of what could be achieved with it.
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It is sad to see that the Ukrainian army has to use such museum pieces. Yes, they still may be useful in special cases. Also having such guns is probably better than having no gun at all.
But they have no chance to survive or even win on a more recent battle field.
Latest from Rolo:
“Twenty-six 2 week periods ago, the Russian Federation launched a surprise military operation, surprising the world, and most importantly, the top Kremlin functionaries as well. It was an auspicious and a hopeful time for the Russia internet expert community. Careers were built in those early days as the world tuned in to hear the truth, censored in the West, and now only available on true “darkweb” truth-bunkers like Patreon, Twitter and Facebook. In just three short days, the entire Ukrainian Nazi expeditionary force was eliminated, having put up no resistance whatsoever. By the end of the first two weeks, Russia had already achieved all of its stated objectives. However, a few weeks later, a new NATO army was airdropped around Kiev and Sumy and Chernigov and Kharkov, allowing Russia to pull back and adopt a new, ground-breaking military strategy going forward.
Now the West had done it. They had finally given the Russian bear the poke that it needed.
Russia allowed the West to fall right in its cleverly and carefully planned trap in the very beginning of the war by allowing Russian assets to be confiscated, and by not informing anyone except a select few insider “small hat” Russian patriots like Roman Abramovich that a SMO was even being planned. While Roman moved his money, as per plan, the West took the bait and stole billions upon billions of roubles from Russia, Russian businesses and, even private individuals in some cases, thereby handing the Kremlin a powerful moral victory in the war. Now the Third World knew which side was fighting for the good and the light. Millions of Africans and Arabs raised Russian flags and marched in their cities to signal their support for the “moral superpower” as many international experts had since taken to start calling Russia. Putin, the Humanitarian Czar, planned to use these moral victories to start trading with non-Western countries once the Western sanctions were imposed. Once again, Russia proved that they were simply better prepared than the West, and had baited themselves into sanctions so that they could sell more oil and gas to the Chinese for much cheaper prices, thereby securing another “moral judo flip” and also making heaps of money selling natural resources for less money than they would be getting on the market -a “moral harikiri” as it is referred to by all the top Russia experts.
But this strategy of “moral warfare” was just entering its open stages. NATOkranian army foolishly accepted Snake Island back from Russia, thereby handing Russia yet another moral victory and for grain shipments to flow to the grateful peoples of the Russia-loving world. Many military experts showed how small-minded they were by lambasting such a big-hearted gesture. They failed to understand that NATO and Kiev were playing 4D military checkers, while Russia had actually checkmated them several times in 5D moral chess. Instead of accepting their loss graciously, however, NATO and the West foolishly continued to push for more fighting even though they had already lost several times.
The Ukrainian army had already been defeated, the dollar had already been abandoned, and Russia had secured its position as leader of the free world. All this and we were only thirteen 2 week periods into the special military operation! What fresh wonders would the next thirteen 2 week periods bring? The sky was the limit and the internet experts began to brew fresh pots of tea boiled with the tears of NATO generals and sip it smugly while waiting for the leaves to settle so that the next blog post could be prepared.
We learned a great many things in the period that followed. That Russia was preparing a massive military offensive in September, then October, then November, New Year’s, January for sure, and, finally, on the one year anniversary of the start of the SMO.
During that time, Russia did not sit idly by and instead led the NATOkranian army into many well-prepared traps. They lured them into Kharkov by pretending to abandon it. Then, the enemy fell for the same trap again by moving into Kherson. In other words, Russia won two more moral victories and checkmated their opponents three more times in that period. But, again, because of their hubris, the West refused to realize that they had been beaten already and instead began to quietly mass new units for a fresh push in Zaporozhie.
We are now only two weeks away from the final checkmate of the NATOkrainian army.
This Not-War was won the minute that Vladimir Putin was born and the plan to checkmate the West jotted down in crayon at the nursery.”
Posted by: Longhorn | Feb 26 2023 3:57 utc | 218
That’s why I began advocating Pesos as they’re very easy to acquire, while other foreign currencies can be obtained via main Bank of Mexico branches. Even so, people within the Dollarzone are going to be hit as our income and debts are all in dollars.
Posted by: karlof1 | Feb 26 2023 5:14 utc | 234
Everywhere I go in Mexico I see international BIS network banks. Presumably National Bank of Mexico is also on their network given only Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba are not (!). HSBC’s everywhere. Santander. Even Bank of Nova Scotia (albeit mainly in tourist towns); they are the oldest bank in North America – set up by the Rothschilds of course.
I hope you are right about pesos but since AMLO has put in motion a CBDC study with testing period, I suspect that Mexico’s currency and transaction services will fall in line with new digital world order along with US, Russia, China, Iran, Ukraine, UK, Germany, France, Italy, India, Malaysia, Australia, NZ, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Greece, Israel, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, South Africa and… well, you get the picture.
On old maps depicting physical terrain it may well be a multipolar world that’s coming but on computer screens, the only real estate which truly matters in this emerging AI-run digital age, it will be a one-world system of algorithms (replacing laws) in cyberspace.
Welcome to our wonderful new world of keystricken materialism.
Posted by: Scorpion | Feb 26 2023 5:32 utc | 236
As an aside this type of population thought control was implemented during the pandemic.
If you went agains the narrative you were a heretic. If you did not get the mRNA genetic shot, you might die or you are a risk of giving it to loved ones and they might die. That’s how that fear and silencing of other viewpoints was packaged &sold. The form & structure was there this censorship about the conflict is just a continuation. Like a one,two punch to free thought
Posted by: Dingo | Feb 26 2023 7:35 utc | 260
You sure about that?
Because since mid-2021 the latest, and certainly after Omicron hit, the dominant narrative has been that COVID is no big deal, go out and live your life, stop wearing masks, pandemic over.
We had chief archglobalist WEF demon Bill Gates hailing Omicron as the virus that will be the vaccine we were all looking for, etc.
BTW, that was also the narrative before mid-March 2020 — famously, the NYC mayor was advising citizens to go out and eat at restaurants, drink, and be happy a week or two before shit really hit the fan there.
So how come the assumption is that they were lying in 2020 but were not lying in 2021, 2022, and 2023, when in general they lie about everything?
Please explain to us how that follows?
The truth is that they had zero desire to lock down (remember Boris Johnson’s “let the bodies pile in the thousands” remark?), it was forced on them by the gravity of the actual medical situation. Because it really threatened to cause such a catastrophe that it would undermine their power.
Remember what happened in NYC at less than a quarter of the population infected? What would have happened if everyone had gotten infected in March to May 2020 over the whole of the US? The only reason the situation was barely handled in NYC was that medical teams from all over the country went there to help. With no “lockdown”, full let-it-rip from the start, force infect kids by mandating that they keep going to school (and through the kids then infect everyone else), etc. policies, there would have been no such external help because every area that send help to NYC would have been its own disaster zone, and those disaster zones would have faced a crisis 3-4 times bigger than what NYC had to deal with (again, NYC was very, very far from saturation). The infection fatality rate in the beginning was 1.5% in the US. So we were looking at 3-4M dead easily from the initial wave alone, concentrated in the span a few a months.
That is absolutely catastrophic, and it would have create a huge crisis of confidence in the system. Because people would have realized they were deliberately led to slaughter. It’s hard to remember three years later, but people still cared about their health back then, and that sort of situation would have developed only under policy that openly force infected them.
Which is in fact precisely what a lot of voices in the business elite advocated (so much for the conspiracy to keep us locked down), but clearly it was decided that it was too risky to do it immediately, people had to be eased into it. So we had “lockdowns” (really, there was nothing of the sort ever in the US, only in China and in a few places in Europe) but not to elimination, only in order to stretch deaths over time and to normalize the situation.
Something that they greatly succeeded in achieving. The US still lost at least 1.3M people, but it was done slowly, not all at once, so people didn’t really notice it the same way as they would have if we had 3-4M dead in 2-3 months.
Which brings us back to the question of where the real conspiracy is — the evil plot here wasn’t to keep us “locked down”, but to normalize the uncontrolled transmission of a BSL3 pathogen and to undo two centuries of civilizational progress in the area of public health. We are looking at life becoming nasty, brutish and short for the masses once again, i.e. a return to Victorian England.
From the start it was known there will be no immunity to this virus (it is a coronavirus after all), that it causes lifelong health issues even when it does not kill, which accumulate and compound, and that people will get endlessly reinfected, and gradually (or not so gradually) deteriorate over time, leading to drastically shortened life expectancy and to much lower quality of life.
There was no alternative but harsh global lockdown to elimination if we wanted to preserve the privileged disease-free comfort of the second half of the 20th century. That could have been avoided if proper measures had been taken in January 2020 and a serious containment effort was launched when that would have succeed without population-scale measures, but that wasn’t done because of the “economy”.
Then we did not lock down properly because doing that would have meant paying people to stay home and not work. That was completely unacceptable to the oligarchic class that rules us, so here we are.
And that is the real conspiracy.
A testament to the reality of how much they control you is that the only violent action there ever was during the pandemic was against public health measures. Not for strict such measures, and not for a paid shut down.
When the truth was that by the end of 2020 the latest, if there had been widespread awareness of what is happening, every single person with a significant stake in the stock market and every politician in power should have found themselves as decapitated corpses in roadside ditches as a result of the global mass uprising against the genocidal policies they were ramming through.
But in the real world timeline that was never a serious possibility. Because even here, in the “alternative” web, the dominant narrative is that COVID was a scam. That is the level of mind control “they” have achieved…
P.S. Much of Russia’s “amazing” performance in the war was foreshadowed by its response to the pandemic. It also lost at least 1.3M people (that’s the excess mortality, exceeding the official count by several times), but with 40% of the US population, i.e. it did much much worse and nearly 1% of the population died. It did some half-measures early on, then gave up and let it rip. And that was done for the same reasons it was done elsewhere — the oligarchs in Russia didn’t want to pay the plebs to stay home. The job of the plebs is to generate surplus for the oligarchs, and if they are not doing that, well, then they are worthless biomass that can just die. Same mentality of the ruling class as in the West.
Now do you expect from people who let that happen to be fighting an existential war the same everything-for-the-front-everything-for-victory way Stalin was back in the days? Of course not, these are the same criminals and mass murderers that sacrificed 1.3M of their own people at the altar of the interests of the oligarch class, after they sacrificed both the country and several times that many people in the 1990s. BTW, Stalin would have never let COVID rip, he would have done Chinese style lockdowns, with the same (or even better) ruthless efficiency, and we know that because in the real world timeline it was during his rule that most serious infectious diseases were rooted out in the USSR, and prevention was established as the key principle of the healthcare system.
But the organizational mess was also very telling – modern Russia didn’t even really have a centralized response to COVID, most of it was left to the regions. Just as it was in the SMO, when the regions were left to equip the forces they were sending to the front on their own (how exactly are they supposed to do somethin that is clearly Shoigu’s job is still left unanswered). Which is a disastrous idea for a multiethnic country with a vast but sparsely populated land mass and a history of separatism. There are now multiple governors equipping private armies analogous to “Wagner” and in addition to what Kadyrov has long had, which may be sent to the front in Ukraine, but may be used for other purposes too. And the Kremlin is not doing anything to stop it even though the danger is obvious, quite the opposite — it set the policy of establishing military formations on a regional basis…
Posted by: shadowbanned | Feb 26 2023 10:38 utc | 268
The whole society, culture, civilization, is a collective conspiracy.
Society gives you concepts, narratives, propaganda,
Society gives you political systems, prejudices, divisions and religions.
So you will never be able to look directly, always society will be there to interpret.
No society allows you to see directly.
It always comes in and interprets, and you are befooled by it.
The whole society exists by manipulating others.
That’s why no society allows rebellious people; every society requires obedience, conformity.
No society allows rebellious thoughts that go against their narrative.
Why?
Rebellious thoughts make people aware that the whole thing is just a game, and when people become aware that the whole thing is just a game they become dangerous, they start going beyond the society.
Society exists as a hypnotic state, and the hive mind is a hypnotizing factor.
This has to be constantly remembered, as they are fooling you in such subtle manners…
NATO – Five Eyes,’The sanctions are working’ propaganda!
Don Lemon said on CNN ‘This Morning’, that he had gone into a food shop in Moscow recently and had asked for two fillet steaks and a dozen sausages. The shop-girl had answered, “No meat today, my friend.”
“No meat!” he shouts. “No meat! They haven’t got any meat!” He runs into the street with both arms raised, shouting at the top of his voice, “No meat! No meat! They haven’t got any meat!” Then on he continues down the street shouting at everyone, “They haven’t got any meat! No meat!”
He makes such a noise that the police come running. They see him shouting his head off, immediately arrest him and take him off to prison. In his cell he continues to cry out as he shakes the bars, “No meat! They haven’t got any meat!”
“We’ll have to teach this American a lesson,” says the prison officer. “Take him out into the yard and pretend you’re going to shoot him. That’ll soon shut him up!”
So the guard marches the man, still shouting, into the yard. They line him up against the wall, load the rifles with empty cartridges, take aim and fire.
There are a few seconds’ silence and then suddenly the cry goes up. “No bullets! No bullets! They haven’t got any bullets either!”
How the false makes all kinds of propaganda for itself.
The false will try to convince you with all kinds of arguments.
The truth remains silent.
Unless you are ready to receive it, it will not even knock on your doors.
The false is afraid that if much smoke is not created around it, the falsity of it will be seen by you.
So beware of the rationalizations of the false, its propaganda, its argumentation, its proofs.
And also remember the silence of truth, utter silence, absolute silence.
Truth will never persuade you, it will wait, it can wait for eternity.
But the false cannot wait, it is momentary, it can’t be so patient.
It has to persuade you, it has to seduce you as immediately as possible.
The false is very hypnotizing.
Their ways are totally opposite.
Truth is achieved through awakening, and the false is achieved through deep sleep.
The false is like a tranquilizer, it is very consoling, comforting, cozy, secure, safe.
It gives you all kinds of protections, insurances.
It goes on telling you, “Be with me and I will protect you.
I am your guardian, your guide, your friend, your philosopher.”
The truth never claims anything.
See it.
Seeing is relevant.
Don’t be fooled by the false lies and propaganda.
They have driven the whole of humanity into a kind of madness.
Can’t you see the mental illness of all the people who are powerful?
Are they happy?
Do you see any joy in their lives?
Can’t you observe the rich oligarchs?
They live a dog’s life, in utter misery!
The only thing to be achieved is alertness, not respect, not respectability.
Because that is one of their tricks, they make you obedient through respectability.
They say, “Just follow the society and the society will pay you much respect.”
This is a mutual arrangement.
The more dead you are the more society will pay you respect, the more alive you are the more society will create trouble for you.
Society needs efficiency, so it makes you more and more automatic.
In everything you do, society says be automatic.
It doesn’t bother about your awareness, your awareness is a problem for society.
You are asked to be more efficient, more productive.
This is how the society fools you.
You become efficient, but your soul is lost.
The whole society exists on exploitation.
Remember, it is everywhere.
Don’t be exploited.
You are not a thing, you are a being.
Change yourself, transform yourself.
The whole effort of meditative techniques is to de-automatize you, to make you again alert, to make you again human, fully alive, not a machine.
The NATO war machine of aggression against Russia must be broken and NATO itself must be dissolved!
The whole NATO – Five Eyes propaganda machine is owned by unconscious Christians who want the apocalypse to happen now with the end of our beautiful world, because in their mental illness they think it will signal the return of Christ.
Consciousness is the only antidote and that has to become your very presence through which you can come out of the darkness.
No-mind is this consciousness, this light, this very moment, here-now, inside you.
If you can go into your consciousness, if you can feel, see, realize the nature of your consciousness, that is the way.
The Russian and Ukrainian people are beautiful people as all people are beautiful.
They deserve the love and sympathy and compassion and help of the whole concerned world.
Meditation is the way.
Posted by: @lienChrist | Feb 26 2023 13:59 utc | 297
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