As an example, he pointed to main battle tanks. Before the war, he said, Russia was delivering about 150 to 250 a year. But of those, he assessed, about 20 to 30 would have been new, while the rest were heavily refurbished. So while Cavoli’s written testimony in April said Russia could make up to 1,200 tanks per year, Connolly estimated that, at a maximum, 400 of those are new or heavily refurbished. Everything else, he said, is pulled from storage, lightly repaired and then deployed. The RUSI report from February estimated about 80% of Russia’s wartime production was actually refurbished, aging materiel.

Only in the West can one find a way to interpret an increase in armored vehicle production by the opposition to actually be good news because it’s actually fake.

A predictable story from start to finish.

Ukraine started off as the most well-armed European army besides Russia. Thousands of tanks, armored fighting vehicles, artillery pieces, hundreds of jets, large stockpiles of artillery ammunition and small drones, etc. This was all backed by years of ideological hardening and training and the willingness to conscript right off the bat.

All of that has been whittled down and the delusion nurtured both by Ukraine and the Western media to dominate the (English-speaking) information sphere. This has the effect of the West sending minimal replacements for the equipment spent and lost because they believed they only had to kick in the door for the whole rotten structure to fall apart.

It’s not coincidental that Lefteast keeps on publishing a ton of nonspecific leftists and liberals. It’s not a coincidence that their “anti-war” tag is filled up with results applied to Russia yet never Ukraine or their Western backers. Their loyalties are wholly with the West especially when they publish an article petitioning for even more effective economic warfare and color revolutions: https://lefteast.org/invasion-should-change-sanctions/

Yeah the article itself is decent when it’s not hitting the limits of ultra-leftism with regards to geopolitics.

There’s some real stinkers on the website though: https://lefteast.org/wagnerization-how-putin-degraded-the-russian-state/

A democratic transition in Russia, which is not accompanied by the disorganization of the state similar to the 1990s, will be a real miracle. And yet, only a democratic transition can ultimately lead to the emergence of a strong, capable state in Russia. Putin’s model of authoritarian state-building showed its results after 23 years: the bombing of the highway near Voronezh, the dead pilots, the Deputy Minister of Defense, being scolded by a former criminal who now leads the army of criminals. “Russia needs a strong state power and must have it.” … Ilya Matveev is a researcher focusing on Russian and comparative political economy. His academic work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Journal of Labor and Society, Europe-Asia Studies, East European Politics and other journals. He has contributed to Jacobin, openDemocracy and other media outlets. He is a member of the Public Sociology Laboratory, a group of Russian social scientists studying post-Soviet societies from a critical perspective. Ilya is also an affiliate of the Alameda Institute, a new research network of left-wing intellectuals.

It’s a pretty fascinating juxtaposition between that article about how liberalism deindustrialized Kyrgystan and only to then see this republished article concluding there is a need for even more liberalism to be applied again to the Russians written by someone with a background compatible with liberalism.