Trolls & bots fail to understand or accept that Russia is anything but infinite and inevitable - but numbers are numbers. They've spent half of their entire Soviet inheritance to steal what they sit on today. The war doesn't end when they get to zero vehicles. The half they've squandered is surely the BETTER half, and they still need an army for territorial defense and internal repression. Ukraine is not about the break, and this is probably the best position Russia is ever going to be in. This is the endgame of this messy, abusive Divorce, and Pootz has to come up with some whopper lies to say it was all worthwhile.

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[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 23 points 1 day ago (2 children)

North Korea are proving to be more helpful than expected and have tons of old Soviet era hardware that they would be willing to sell in exchange for some more rocket tech or nuke stuff.

According to Wikipedia the Soviet era tanks NK has is a few thousand T-55s and some T-62Ms. The T-62 varients are likely good enough to use on the battlefield, but the T-55s may not even be worth the fuel it takes to transport them. Remember Russia was fielding some T-55s not by using them as tanks, but by filling them with explosives and sending them uncrewed against Ukainian lines as bombs-with-tracks.

NK also has a bunch of 60 and 70s era Chinese tanks, but China may object to actual Chinese military hardware fighting in Ukraine.

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[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

Every single one of the tanks you just mentioned are so painfully obsolete when fighting against Ukraine which has good reconnaisance and artillery that it is actually probably hurting Russian soldiers chance of survival to see these tanks in action and believe they bring any kind of safety or strength to them.

Of course NK and China can keep providing equipment, I think in some sense neither nation will let Russia catastrophically lose it will just be that more and more of Russia will be sold off wholesale to the elite in NK and China in one way or another in exchange for them doing whatever is necessary to ensure Russia doesn't entirely collapse militarily in the middle of an offensive.

This kind of support is not anywhere near as useful as domestic capability though, just ask Ukraine about that... There are limitations, stipulations, logistical nightmares full of foreign equipment headaches, and at the end of the day the equipment China and especially NK are able to provide just isn't that comparatively effective and it especially isn't any more survivable than the trash armor that Russia uses so....

Yeah, Russia can continue this war for a long time, that is not in question, but the idea that Russia has this major stock of tanks they can wave a magic wand at to make suddenly relevant on the modern battlefield is a ridiculous one that just isn't supported by battlefield evidence or basic logic. They have a limited number of newer production tanks they have kept back from the frontlines because they stopped using them knowing how futile it was so shrugs.

Russia can take some of the obsolete older tanks and upgrade the turret, make it remote control, or sure they can load them up with explosives to use as a kamikaze tank but none of these uses of the tanks is actually an efficient use of them. The only consistent use these tanks would really have are as combat engineering rear backline bunker busters kept well away from intense frontlines and used to uproot machine gun nests that have been isolated and surrounded. However Russia can not even protect its anti-air, artillery or armor, there is no way it can protect obsolete siege equipment so yeah...

Russia ain't doing well, and I think Chinese and North Korean officials are probably pretty pissed that as much as they try to help Russia, Russia just simply degraded its military too far and threw away the lives of too many of its soliders carelessly to be recoverable to the degree it needs to be to even remotely have a chance of winning the Ukraine War. All China, North Korea and other foreign partners can do at this point is try to fill out whatever Russia is doing to make it look more intimidating in the hopes that it disguises the broken back of the Russian military.

[–] Skua@kbin.earth 15 points 1 day ago

Russia have lost hundreds of T-62s in this war already but barely any T-54/55s, so it seems that Russia agrees that fielding the older ones isn't worthwhile. Or 55s are magically invincible, of course, but I know which version I think is more likely