without a doubt. that's why i said it heavily depends on what ukraine has left when they arrive. that said, the leo 1 will STILL be bad at fulfilling the core role of a MBT on a modern battlefield - and the much hyped t-14 is by far not the only thing it will be hopelessly outmatched by:

while russia has indeed been largely 'recycling' their own outdated scrap metal in ukraine, they SHOULD have a ton of t-90s left - but any kind of anti-tank weapon, drones, any kind of air force, and even modern artillery to a certain degree can easily render the leo 1 completely useless.

imo it shows how desperate the situation is if ukraine is willing to put their limited training time and limited manpower into learning to operate and maintain such outdated machinery. it's not like they can just employ russian tactics and throw wave after wave of expendable manpower and cheap equipment at their opponent in order to overwhelm and tire them into submission. you can't just out-russia the russians. well, china could, but not ukraine... xD

Russia has nearly zero Armata (t14) which has technical issues. Russian soldiers don't even want to drive those.
For t-90 i think they lost a large majority already (75%?). This is hard to know how much they can produce anyway, same for old stocks: how many can they put back to life ?

Zombies at it again.

obviously all of this is speculation to a large degree, but my GUESS is that they have tons of t-90s rotting in arsenals all over the country that they are currently working on reviving.

I have the same apprehension: reviving old stocks, real production capacity, real... stocks. Minus a "security" margin that has to stay in Russian territory.
Still: Ukrainians probably know what they need considering the mutual spying.

Did I say that Russia will stabilize Ukraine? Let me know if you're having trouble understanding and I can make it simpler.

See, that's the key difference: there was virtually no resistance by the local Afghan population when the Taliban swept the country in the summer of 2021. Biden for once said something very astute:


Compare this to the resistance the Ukrainian military has put up against the Russians; their willingness and preparedness to fight for their country. In this conflict, we (for once) aren't the ones bombing or invading other people, we are helping the side which is getting bombed and invaded.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Feb 8 2023 10:19am

Western democracies are the fragile and finely balanced result of interest groups and a thousand plus years of history. Government power is constrained by what the public will accept. Judicial norms are entrenched, facilitating rule of law. Economic stability creates significant inertia to rapid, revolutionary changes to the status quo.

Afghanistan was coming from a very different place. The only way to "build up" a democracy is to watch it develop (or not develop) organically over hundreds of years, or put it into place by force, Soviet style, and put down internal resistance with overwhelming force. For a nation as large and populous as Afghanistan, that would have required decades and a 500k+ US military presence, American bureaucrats in charge of every department (to start), and complete control over the education system with the goal of producing sympathetic, allied Afghani leaders. Replacing one corrupt government with another corrupt government, and expecting soldiers with tribal loyalties to value the "Afghani nation" was a project doomed to collapse.

And they spent 200 million a day to keep army there with excuse of "we want girls to be able to go to school".
Now they left, kept their central bank in US control, those same girls are now not only not going to school but starving to death. But who cares anymore right...
As long as we have retards that will believe all the fake humanitarian reasoning for terrorism performed by US, they're gucci.
Literally profiteering off wars. And as they did in Afghanistan, they're doing now in Ukraine, and they're profiteering from conflict in Yemen which is apparently the worst humanitarian crisis in decades. But lets not talk what could harm the US financial gains

You are saying it's Russian's goal... How about "pacify" then or "rectify" ... Oh wait: "Simplify" That's it: Russia's goal is just to simplify Uraine.



It is pretty much unique because it's a failed ex-superpower trying to physically grab a smaller buddy in a new military environment after a failed 21th century hybrid war.

Russia's goal is maximalist with respect to Ukraine. Our goal therefore is to stabilize Ukraine. We do that by preventing a collapse of core Ukrainian territory. At this point Donbass and Crimea are not core Ukrainian territory. Crimea has been completely integrated into the Russian Federation, and Russia has occupational control over vast tracks of Southern and Eastern Ukraine.