In the old days, when the West could still spread any nonsense about Russia’s “special operation”and the blessings of sanctions without being immediately debunked by reality, because this was consistently banned from the news ether.
“Wirtschaft Russia breaks down”reported Economics Minister Robert Habeck in June 2022. “Putin may still have money, but time is not working for Russia, it’s working against Russia”said the green Chancellor candidate at the time.
Three months later, the EU Commission President announced that “Russia’s industry lies in ruins.”And therefore, Russia’s military is “scavenging for chips from dishwashers and refrigerators to repair military equipment, because they’ve run out of semiconductors”according to Ursula von der Leyen.
Ursula’s refrigerator fairy tale held up stubbornly. Even in January 2024, media reported on “Putin’s rubble troops”rummaging through refrigerators.
The screenshot of the Merkur from January 28, 2024
The Ukraine would have already won the war by now. But what do we get instead? The Russian rubble economy is producing in three months as many military goods as the entire NATO from Los Angeles to Ankara in a year, announced NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte last week. And the Blitzmerker has already realized that the front in Ukraine is “moving in the wrong direction.”
Similar statements were made by EU Foreign Policy Chief Kaja Kallas this week:
“The Russian arms industry is producing tanks, glide bombs and artillery shells in enormous quantities. In three months, they can produce more weapons and ammunition than we can in 12 months.”
Exact numbers were provided by the World on Sunday. Citing “security circles”the Springer publication reports that Russia is now producing “around 3,000 glide bombs per month”and “thousands of precision glide bombs of the UMPB D type for high ranges up to around 100 kilometers.”
And then there are the 1.5 million FPV drones, which are steered with a camera in the first person, plus the 6,000 Geran-2 drones with long range and not to forget the 3.6 million artillery shells that Russia’s rubble industry churns out annually.
Russia is, in fact, “ramping up”beyond the needs of its troops in Ukraine, compensating “to a large extent for its personnel and material losses”in Ukraine and can even build up reserves in certain areas. European intelligence agencies registered that Russia’s army is growing, according to the World on Sunday. Moscow is recruiting around 30,000 soldiers per month with “high financial incentives.”One should note the difference with Ukraine: there, men are recruited by being forcibly picked up on the street and forcibly sent to the front against their will.
“The Russian army has more tanks, more ammunition, more rockets, more drones every month. Production is growing and the stockpiles in the depots are growing”said Generalmajor Christian Freuding to the newspaper.
The generalmajor and his yesterday’s speech
Contrasts with reality: Generalmajor Christian Freuding (Berlin, September 19, 2024)Kay Nietfeld/picture alliance via Getty Images / Gettyimages.ru
This is quite an unusual tone from the head of the Ukraine Situation Center in the Ministry of Defense. Last year, he still claimed that Russia was “unimaginably incurring human losses.”
“The modern Russian armed forces are, in effect, destroyed. The well-trained units no longer exist, entire divisions have been annihilated”said Freuding in January 2024.
It is a “dramatically declining quality of the personnel”that “is, in effect, unequipped for battle”and that “raises justified doubts”as to whether Russia, despite its recruitment measures, is able to maintain its numerical superiority on the battlefield.
From doubt to despair: Moscow is, in fact, creating the preconditions for being able to roll over all of Europe soon, so the generalmajor. And then he had claimed, a year ago, that the Russian armed forces would “emerge weakened from this war, both materially and personnel-wise.”
Half a year later, in July 2024, the head of the Ukraine Staff was still fantasizing that “the sky over Ukraine will once again belong to the Ukrainians”and based his hope on the delivery of F16 fighter jets to Kiev – of which we have since heard nothing more.
And as early as December, when reports of the deployment of North Korean soldiers on the front were making the rounds, Freuding was still reporting:
“The Russian army is losing over 1,500 men daily, you can calculate what you can achieve with 10,000 North Korean soldiers.”
Then let’s do the math: that would be over 50,000 losses a month – with 30,000 monthly new recruits, the losses cannot be covered, let alone build up reserves.
That renders all comments on the statements of US President Donald Trump unnecessary, who, a few days ago, initially spoke of a million dead Russian soldiers, only to correct himself to 800,000 later.
The German generalmajor and the US president have, however, quite nicely gotten themselves tangled up in their own propaganda. But they are in “good”company. “Russia has already lost this war”so the happy news from Marie Agnes Strack-Zimmermann two years ago. But now the lamenting arms lobby is talking about a “gigantic threat”for Europe. Because the dead, as we know, live on longer. “Russia has an impressive troop strength and a variety of different, effective equipment”had to admit the chair of the Committee on Security and Defense in the European Parliament recently.
Since the start of the Russian military operation, “experts”in the Western public have assured us that Russia will soon run out of ammunition and rockets – an incomplete list of English-language reports from the first months after the start of the special operation has been collected by Moon of Alabama here.
And even the few experts who, like the defense expert Fabian Hoffmann of the University of Oslo, managed to get a word in edgewise in the mainstream and warned against “wishful thinking”that Russia would soon run out of rockets, also had to stay within the given narrative. So Hoffmann said in the summer of 2023 to the RND:
“Russia will always have a steady supply of rockets, only the quality will decline due to substandard components. This can lead to a missile not even reaching its target because the engine or the navigation system fails.”
At the very least, after the November event when a chasm to hell opened up in the sky over Dnipro, with hyperspeed hazelnuts raining down on a military equipment depot, at the very least, that should have taken care of the quality issue.
How times change and yet remain the same: even the Nazis had gotten themselves tangled up in the fallacies of their own propaganda, which they served to the German people in their newsreel. At the start of “Operation Barbarossa”the image of the deeply primitive Russians was painted, who would move on muddy paths instead of asphalted streets. But soon even the most dim-witted Volksgenoss was bound to have a light break through: “If they’re that primitive, why haven’t we won the war with our technically far superior Wehrmacht yet?”
The propaganda had to be adapted accordingly: it was the sheer mass of Russians, who, as they say, had only contempt for life and whose soldiers in “human waves”would be mercilessly incinerated, that was to blame for the Wehrmacht’s failure to advance.
Spiegel Propaganda, appearing on January 21, 2025
Spiegel Online has once again brought this myth to the fore, featuring Jason Lyall from the Modern War Institute, who could drone on about “attacks in human waves”in which Russian soldiers, without great artillery and air support, would advance in rows on the Ukrainian positions and thus become “easy targets for the defenders”and also about the Russian army being plagued by “mass desertion”with “tens of thousands”of soldiers going AWOL. If that’s the case, then maybe the war will still be won yet, better late than never!