“We are not planning to fight a war with anyone, our goal is to create a perception so nobody thinks to fight us.”
President Vladimit Putin
Vladimir Putin has a name for the West. He calls it the “empire of lies”. The Russian leader’s announcement of his “special military operation” in Ukraine was driven by lies and deception by Putin’s oligarch. Not only has Russia’s invasion of Ukraine failed to boost Putin’s popularity, but there are early indicators that it has weakened his support base.
Putin’s perception and propaganda have failed miserably in the Ukraine invasion.
By occupying a peaceful neighbor, forcing the populations of its cities underground to escape bombardment, and allegedly committing war crimes, it’s clear even to Russians living in the Kremlin echo chamber that Putin presents an exponentially greater threat to Ukraine than Nazis, NATO, or whoever he may blame next.
1. Russia claimed: The Ukrainian government is led by neo-Nazis.
Fact: Putin and Russia are now paying a heavy price for the lies that the Kremlin told the world and itself. It turns out that the Ukrainian government is not led by drug-crazed neo-Nazis. The people of eastern Ukraine were not desperate to be “liberated” by the Russian army. Putin’s dreams of a swift victory crumbled when they encountered reality.
“One of the Achilles’ heels of autocracies is that you don’t have people in those systems that speak truth to power or have the ability to speak truth to power, and I think that’s what we’re seeing in Russia,” Blinken told reporters during a stop in Algeria on Wednesday.
President Zelensky himself a practising jew. Most Ukrainians are either Jew or Christian.
According to a U.S. official, the administration is hopeful that divulging the finding could help prod Putin to reconsider his options in Ukraine. The official was not authorized to comment and spoke on the condition of anonymity. The war has become a bloody stalemate in much of the country, with heavy casualties and Russian troop morale sinking as Ukrainian forces and volunteers put up an unexpectedly stout defense.
2. Russia claimed: Ukrainian would greet Russian with flowers.
Fact: Whether or not Putin genuinely believed that Ukrainians would greet Russian soldiers as liberators, it seems clear that he made a severe miscalculation when he gave the orders to invade Ukraine. The initial position of Russian forces seemed to indicate that Putin was planning a relatively short campaign to capture Kyiv, which would avoid protracted combat and result in a decisive Russian victory.
This plan has fallen apart. Russia’s military is actively bombarding Ukrainian cities. The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reports more than 100,000 Russian military deaths, while Russia is reporting less than 500. Putin has escalated to nuclear threats because they are his remaining leverage to prevent the consequences of his unforced error from coming to fruition.
Ukrainians greeted Russians with NLAW, Javelin and HIMARS.
3. Russia claimed: The Russian economy is perfectly fine after sanctions.
Fact: According to an independent analysis by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 2022 is a bad year for the Russian economy. By the end of 2022, Russia’s gross domestic product (GDP) is expected to drop by at least 3.4% in the best-case scenario and up to 5.5% in the worst-case scenario.
Russia’s economy will continue to shrink in 2023. Its GDP is forecast to decline by 2.3% year on year in the best-case scenario and by 4.5% in the worst-case scenario.
The intelligence community has concluded that Putin was unaware that his military had been using and losing conscripts in Ukraine. They also have determined he is not fully aware of the extent to which the Russian economy is being damaged by economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies.
The findings demonstrate a “clear breakdown in the flow of accurate information” to Putin, and show that Putin’s senior advisers are “afraid to tell him the truth,” the official said.
4. Russia claimed: Russian Federation is a superpower.
Fact: Barack Obama once described Russia as a regional power. That assessment did not go well in Russia because many Russians believed and still believed that their country was ‘great’ and ‘exceptional’.
If being a superpower means having nuclear weapons, then is Pakistan a superpower? Or India? Or North Korea? (by the way, the first two also have more population than Russia).
Russia’s GDP is 2% of the world’s, less than that of Italy or Brazil. Russia’s economy is roughly an order of magnitude smaller than the economy of the U.S., E.U., or China.
So why is Russia considered a superpower? Probably because the USSR, of which Russia calls itself a successor, was part of the World War II winning side. As such, it was allowed to grab over half of Europe, and the West turned a blind eye to massive repressions in the USSR against its citizens.
5. Russia claimed: the Russian military would retake Kyiv within 48 hours, worse case, 72 hours.
It has been almost ten months, and Russia didn’t capture Kyiv; instead fleed from occupied territories.
Fact: A BTR-80 armored personnel carrier can carry up to seven troops and is operated by three crews. According to the open-source intelligence website Oryx blog, Ukraine destroyed more than 7,684 several types of armored vehicles starting from the Soviet-era BTR-60 to new generation BTR-90 using direct artillery hits, NLAW, M72 rockets and the use of guided bombs. In a conservative calculation, if the armored vehicles were carrying five soldiers and driven by two crews, then 53,788 soldiers were killed or injured by Ukrainian attacks.
Expert estimates Russia’s total manpower loss could be more than hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
The Russian military uses 1891s rifles and Soviet-era clunky fighter jets with commercial GPS tapped on the cockpit. Heck, the Russian air force uses mobile phone’s navigation purposes.
Russian air force and navy are absent from the Ukraine war. Vladimir Putin once said in an interview, “we want to create the perception of a powerful military so that no one wants to fight with us”. That propaganda caught up with the Ukraine invasion when his military faced NLAW and Javelin anti-tank weapons.
6. Russia claimed: The su-35 with Irbis-E phased array radar is the best aircraft ever produced by any nation.
Fact: Despite the Kremlin’s claims of military and technical superiority, the Russian Air Force continues to face a big problem with its navigation systems. Russian military pilots are still actively using insecure, non-military navigation equipment due to the low quality of Russian own navigation systems.
Ukraine has shared abundant evidence that Russians have added off-the-shelf GPS systems, such as Garmin, to the cockpit of its combat aircraft. During the interrogation of the Russian pilot captured on June 18, it turned out that he had with him a Garmin navigator and a smartphone with the ‘Pronebo’ soft to have more accurate navigation than the onboard navigation aids of the Russian Air Forces.
GPS receivers have been found in wrecked downed Russian fighter bombers, attack aircraft, and even military helicopters.
Russian aircraft are good at airshows, not for actual combat duties. Russian aircraft is the least capable aircraft compared to any modern Western aircraft.
7. Russia claimed: Residents of four annexed regions will be “forever Russians”.
Fact: As Russia’s military commanders announced another significant withdrawal from Ukraine, pro-Kremlin commentators have described the retreat as a humiliating and significant defeat for Moscow and President Vladimir Putin.
Putin kept a low profile as Russia announced Wednesday it was withdrawing its troops from the tentatively occupied city of Kherson and the west bank of the Dnieper River, which bisects the Kherson region in southern Ukraine. The military said it could no longer supply its troops there and was worried about the safety of its military personnel.
It comes after Putin in September hailed the annexation of Kherson, following a sham referendum in the region, saying its residents were “becoming our citizens forever.”
Putin’s forces were forced to retreat from “forever Russian” Kherson leaves no doubt about Kyiv’s ability to impose a stinging defeat. Even pro-Kremlin commentators have described Russia’s withdrawal as a humiliating and significant defeat for Moscow and President Vladimir Putin.
8. Russia claimed: The T-90 is the best tank in the world.
Fact: The T-90 is the Russian Army’s current Main Battle Tank, and it was created from the successful features of the preceding T-72 and T-80 series.
Uralvagonzavod, the Russian machine-building company, produces it. The T-90 uses an integrated autoloader, a three-person crew, and a low-profile design, all common to Soviet-era tanks.
Because of its affordability, simplicity, and automotive attributes, the T-72 chassis was chosen as the foundation for the next tank generation. It was first named the T-72BU and then renamed the T-90 to distinguish the new type from existing T-72 variants.
There are several reasons why the T-90 is a poor tank compared to current MBTs. The first is that its design is outdated. The T-90, as we have mentioned before, is an improved version of the t72, formerly known as the t72b.
A mix of T80 and other tank pieces have been combined together, and reactive armor has been put onto the end result; this is what the T-90 really is. The t72 was not built to have “box-out box-in” modifications like other tanks like the Abrams, making it difficult to update.
Many flaws, particularly in electrical components, have been eliminated, but they still need to be addressed. Despite all of these improvements, there is still a glaring omission: The Range.
Today’s tanks are capable of striking opposing tanks at a range of up to 5000 meters. But due to the inability to raise the cannon, the T-90 loses this battle.
The tank’s next problem is that it is manufactured with a low-cost mindset. When designing the t72, the Soviet Union was still using the mass-attack tank tactics from World War II. Which the Russian Army is still using now in the Ukraine invasion.
Because the T-90 is only an update, it retains the cheap-built defects, including the armor. To achieve a penetrating shot at a modern tank’s armor, the T-90 will have to get closer to the tank, which makes it vulnerable to attacks.
Heck, the Russian T-90 was found to be using rubber instead of reactive armor in the Ukraine war.
The T-90 has also been proven to be a big failure in the Syrian civil war and recently in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Time had passed, but the T-90 remained the same, useless tank! During the recent invasion of the Russian Army into Ukraine, the T-90 was used. Even though it has not yet been recorded to have any T-90 shoot by Ukrainian Army, filmed videos show many Russian tanks being completely destroyed, and maybe the “miraculous” T-90 is among them.
Not only that but many of the T-90 tanks and other Russian tanks have been filmed while stuck in the mud and lost their mobility completely.
9. Russia claimed: Russian soldiers and pilots are highly trained and equipped.
Fact: As Russia looks to bolster its defense lines with soldiers, reports are emerging of Russian recruits dying after receiving little combat training, The New York Times said Sunday.
“They are giving them at best basics and at worst nothing and throwing them into combat, which suggests that these guys are just literally cannon fodder,” William Alberque, an expert on the Russian armed forces, told The Times.
As the Ukrainian army continues to make strides, Russia’s move to ignore proper training to quickly fill its ranks could backfire in the long run, experts told The Times.
“The Russians will have to make a choice — build a unit properly over time and then risk losing the war, or using that unit now because the war demands it, but the unit will be half ready,” Johan Norberg, a Russia analyst at the Swedish Defense Research Agency, told The Times.
Russians are buying body armored and articles of clothing from Iran. Social media, including accounts associated with Russian military bloggers, shared photos of Rouin-3 ballistic vest with NIJ IV ceramic plates and an NIJ II helmet, both manufactured by Iranian Milad Industrial.
According to RUSI, Russian pilots barely received 100 hours of training in a similar or training jet once a year. Those who are lucky, some Russian pilots were able to fly Soviet-era Su-27 or MiG-29 aircraft. According to British Defense Minister Ben Wallace, Russian pilots received scripted training to impress their superiors rather than combat training.
10. Russia claimed: The S-400 can intercept HIMARS rockets.
Fact: The Ukrainian Artillery engaged the Charnobiyevka airfield near Kherson on 2nd July for the 23rd time in a row. Reportedly, 12 Russian officers were killed there, including one General, Daily Telegraph reports. The most important piece of news is that the engagement involved the US-made HIMARS system – the air defence assets protecting the airfield were helpless here.
According to the available reports, the Russians have been unable to shoot down even a single rocket launched by the quite active Ukrainian HIMARS systems. The rumors suggest that the Kremlin authorities have been furious, as the S-400 turned out to be ineffective against the US-made rocket artillery system – probably that ineffectiveness also extends to other systems of this kind.
Gerashchenko possibly referred to the series of Ukrainian attacks in recent days on several Russian arms depots in Donetsk, Lysychansk, and Kherson, etc., using the HIMARS MLRS system provided by the US.
Anton Gerashchenko, the Advisor to the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, said in a tweet on July 11 that Russian S-400 anti-aircraft defense systems cannot intercept HIMARS rockets.
Gerashchenko did not provide any specifics relating to the failure of the S-400 system against the HIMARS rockets. Still, he said, “Russian Armed Forces, their ammunition and fuel warehouses are unprotected from the power of American weapons.”
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