Yes, Russia has piles of old tanks in storage which are not serviceable and cannot be easily restored. There are no replacement parts for all the stolen optics, etc. They will be lucky to get 10% of these stored tanks running. Not to mention that ancient tanks such as T-55s, T-62s, and T-64s are easily eliminated by modern hand-held missile systems like the Javelin. Russia is in a bad situation regarding operable tanks that is not going to improve. Of course, Ukraine has captured an endless number of ancient Russian tanks -- which they find basically can only be used for towing other disabled armor and transporting people for short distances. Overall, Russia has lost more than half of its tanks in Ukraine. Let's look at reality regarding the tanks Russia had in storage... 'Emptying warehouses of older tanks in long-term storage would also not be a panacea. While Russia has up to 10,000 tanks “moldering” in its storage sites, they are often in horrific shape. A main reason for this is a familiar one in Russia: corruption. Ukrainian military intelligence claims that only about 10 percent of the tanks in Russian warehouses are serviceable, noting that “optical devices and electronic containing precious metals were stolen from the combat vehicles,” some of which were “completely dismantled,” even lacking engines. Other sources confirm the impact of corruption on the capability of Russian tanks. In some destroyed Russian tanks, Ukrainian troops found that the explosive reactive armor designed to defeat attacks on the tank had been hollowed out, “with only some of the requisite components intact and no evidence that the relatively valuable explosives had ever been there.”' Corruption hinders Russia's attempts to replace losses with old vehicles - Ukraine Mothballed Russian military equipment is being taken out of long-term storage, but stolen and missing parts are preventing the replenishment of vehicles and the replacing losses. https://www.jpost.com/international/article-702428 Russia is attempting to restore old military equipment held in long-term storage to replace losses suffered during its invasion of Ukraine but it is encountering difficulty in doing so because of corruption and the poor condition of the equipment, the Ukrainian Intelligence Directorate (GUR) said on Saturday. Military gear is being removed from long-term storage facilities and is being channeled to a repair and rehabilitation base near the Belarus and Ukraine border, GUR asserted, but in cases such as the Russian 4th Tank Division, the conditions of vehicles are such that only one-in-ten "mothballed" units is in working order. The Ukrainian Intelligence Directorate alleged that corruption had been a major reason for the "extremely unsatisfactory" condition of the equipment being taken out of storage. "Optical devices and electronics containing precious metals were stolen from the combat vehicles," said GUR. The intelligence body reported that many of the 4th Tank Division's stored tanks were "completely dismantled," and that some did not have engines. The Armed Forces General Staff of Ukraine said in an early morning Sunday operational report that Russia had not given up on trying to replenish the loss of vehicular equipment and arranging replacements for parts. The Ukrainian military claimed on Sunday morning that Russia had lost 582 tanks, 1,664 armored vehicles, 294 artillery pieces, 93 multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS), 52 anti-aircraft systems, 1,144 other ground vehicles and 73 fuel tankers. Open-source intelligence group Oryx, which has been documenting war losses with visual media verification, has identified hundreds of Russian vehicle losses, including 300 tanks, 218 armored fighting vehicles, 294 infantry fighting vehicles, 76 armored personnel carriers, 12 mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicles, 65 infantry mobility vehicles, 60 engineering items, 98 artillery pieces, 33 MLRS, 11 Anti-aircraft systems, 40 surface-to-air systems, and 621 other ground vehicles. The Ukrainian military added that corruption was impacting Russian troops stationed in Belarus and that soldiers had sold fuel and provisions, or exchanged military equipment for alcohol. Fuel serves as the Russian military's "second currency," Politico wrote on March 8, and that long-standing traditions of corruption had likely impeded Russian advances. Fuel shortages have continued to have been a problem during the invasion, though Russia has taken efforts to improve supply lines. Another issue hindering movement by Russian vehicles, as related by retired US Defense Department civil servant Trent Telenko in a widely read Twitter thread, is that corruption likely played a role in the lack of maintenance of the tires of military vehicles. Many videos and photographs have emerged of Russian vehicles abandoned even with fuel inside. Telenko assessed that the tires in some vehicles captured by Ukrainian forces, the unexercised tires were falling off. Corruption in the Russian defense establishment has also played a role in the development of munitions. According to Politico in 2012, a Russian arms company embezzled millions of dollars meant for a missile interception system. In 2016, a company embezzled funds for navigation and control systems for high-precision ammunition. In a UK Defense Ministry intelligence update on Sunday morning, it was noted that long-range precision weapons being launched from Russian airspace had a very high failure rate, though it was unclear what was the reason for these inadequacies. "Up to 60% failure rates of these weapons will compound Russia’s problem of increasingly limited stocks forcing them to revert to less sophisticated missiles or accepting more risk to their aircraft," the UK Defense Ministry attributed to US reports. Russia ranked 136th out of 180 countries in Transparency International's 2021 corruption perceptions index. GUR also noted on Saturday that there were other challenges besides corruption hindering Russia's restoration of old equipment, and that "in general, the Russian Federation often faces the problem of the impossibility of restoring equipment after 'deconservation' from warehouses." The intelligence body also claimed in the same report that a regiment commander in the 4th Tank Division had killed himself, but it was not clear if GUR was implying that there was a connection between the suicide and corruption, or equipment rehabilitation issues.
Hey, look who is going broke next year. Russia could run out of money next year, says oligarch Oleg Deripaska Western sanctions are causing serious pressure, with budget deficit forecast to jump https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/02/russia-run-out-of-money-oleg-deripaska The oligarch Oleg Deripaska has said Russia could run out of money by next year unless the country secures investment from “friendly” countries as western sanctions bite. Deripaska, an energy and metals tycoon who was once Russia’s richest person, told an investment conference in Siberia on Thursday: “There will be no money already next year. We will need foreign investors.” Deripaska, who is subject to UK, US and EU sanctions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, said funds are running low and “that’s why they’ve [the Russian government] already begun to shake us down”, according to a Bloomberg report. He said that Russia was suffering from “serious” pressure from western sanctions, and that the country and its businesses would have to look to other countries with “serious resources” to invest. “We thought we were a European country,” said Deripaska, who is founder of Rusal, the biggest aluminium producer outside China. “Now, for the next 25 years, we will think more about our Asian past.” It comes as the European ratings agency Scope warned that Russia’s budget deficit may rise to 3.5% of gross domestic product (GDP), compared with the government’s forecast of 2% of GDP. In 2022, the official shortfall came in at 2.3%. Scope said this was due to lower revenues from oil and gas exports, as the west weaned itself off Russian energy. “Sanctions and the war are constraining Russia’s fiscal flexibility … due to lower energy export revenues, higher war-related spending and a steady decline in GDP,” it said, according to a Reuters report. “For now, Russia can finance its deficit relatively easily by drawing down the national wealth fund, set to amount to only 3.7% of GDP by end-2024 from 10.4% of GDP at end-2021.” The ratings agency said Russia’s huge spending on the war would harm its economy in the long term, because it was at the expense of investments in infrastructure, digitalisation, housing and environmental protection.
The U.S. is looking to countries which are helping Russia evade sanctions. The pressure is now going to ramp up acutely on these countries. Unlike China most of these smaller countries can easily be targeted with economic and political measures to make them stop shipping banned items to Russia. UAE is 'country of focus' as US looks to target Russia's economic partners US official says semiconductor devices that could be used in Ukraine's battlefield coming from UAE https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/UAE-country-focus-US-effort-target-sanctions-evasion-russia
Imagine that. The economic data coming out of Putin's Russia is pure bullshiat. How the IMF naively parroted Putin’s fake statistics–and botched its economic forecast for Russia https://fortune.com/2023/03/06/imf-...and-botched-economic-forecast-russia-ukraine/ The chorus of voices claiming the Russian economy has proven vastly more resilient than expected is growing. Even former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and CNN’s Fareed Zakaria have wrongly despaired over the inefficacy of Western sanctions on Russia. The implications are equally disturbing–that unprecedented U.S.-led sanctions don’t work. Following on the IMF’s latest assessment that the Russian economy shrank by a less-than-expected -2.2% in 2022, many of these commentators point to the IMF’s projection of fractionally positive economic growth in Russia of +0.3% in 2023, outstripping Germany and the U.K., as evidence that the economic pressure campaign against Russia has failed. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Far from serving as the independent arbiter of the statistical underpinnings of global economic activity, the IMF has been asleep at the switch. With respect to Russia, it is naively echoing Putin’s own invented GDP forecasts, in effect, canonizing and legitimating these economic myths with no verification–in fact, no independent analysis at all. The IMF’s dubious methodology in tracking the Russian economy warrants close scrutiny. Nothing short of its institutional credibility is at risk, especially since the current IMF chief, Kristalina Georgieva, has been accused of pressuring economists to boost China’s business climate ratings during a previous tenure at the World Bank, which she denies. For starters, the IMF’s forecast of economic growth in Russia exceeds even that of the Russian central bank, which expects GDP to fall by at least 1.5% this year. Even Russian oligarchs such as aluminum tycoon Oleg Deripaska are openly fretting about how Putin will run out of cash next year–and how he’s been cannibalizing Russian companies to make ends meet! Yet the truth is, as they candidly admitted to us, the IMF Russia Desk economists have “basically zero visibility” into what is actually going on in the Russian economy. This is at odds with IMF protocols. Since the outbreak of war, the IMF has allowed Russia to be in violation of its own membership standards–which require member states to disclose transparent, verifiable, and comprehensive national income statistics. Putin now refuses to disclose major economic indicators ranging from foreign trade data, monthly output data on oil and gas, capital inflows and outflows, financial statements of major companies, central bank monetary base data, foreign direct investment data, domestic value added by industry, and lending and loan origination data. Even Rosaviatsiya, Russia’s federal air transport agency, has stopped publishing data on air passenger volumes. Yet these are the major high-frequency flow statistics that go into the construction of an economy-wide GDP forecast for any nation–from the U.S. to China. Thus, the IMF simply does not have the data needed to independently calculate Russia’s GDP by any accepted method–whether it’s by expenditures, production, or incomes. They are flying blind, with the Russian institutions offering zero visibility. Rather than publicly admitting what they don’t know, they privately admit the “massive uncertainty.” The IMF Russia Desk economists unquestioningly swallow what little data Putin does release–cherry-picked and fabricated data releases spewed out by the increasingly unreliable Kremlin agency Rosstat, falsely certifying Putin’s fable of economic triumph. There is no shortage of reasons why Rosstat releases should be treated as dubious when not verified against cross-channel checks and alternative benchmarks. Rosstat has a long history of manipulating official economic statistics to please Putin, “bending over backward to correct bad numbers and burying unflattering statistics” under the pressure the Kremlin has exerted to corrupt statistical integrity. The agency has been “switching to new methodologies” and “recalculating data” with alarming frequency. Then there’s the overt political interference–Putin has fired the heads of Rosstat, transferred control of the agency to political appointees, and appointed a blatant political pick as deputy economic minister. It is no wonder outside observers ranging from international organizations to foreign investors regularly sound alarms over “concerns about the reliability and consistency of the Kremlin’s economic releases.” However, the IMF remains mysteriously silent on the issue of Russian data integrity. Curiously, top IMF Russia Desk economists have admitted to us that they have “not had any engagement” with alternative Russian data sources. Apparently, that is too difficult to do, especially having “evacuated their entire Russian team.” That is especially worrisome since so many independent economic facts contradict their published estimates. For example, our latest tabulations show that over 1,000 major multinationals have completely exited the country in protest of its illegal war in Ukraine. Collectively, they have combined in-country revenues equivalent to 40% of Russia’s pre-war GDP by our estimates. Moreover, Russia has been reduced to irrelevancy in the global economy, as the world has moved on from Russian energy, food, metals, and other commodities. Energy, the mainstay of the Russian economy, is in especially serious trouble. Energy export earnings are now down $500 million a day relative to last year’s highs. Due to insufficient pipeline capacity to major customers like China and India, Russia can’t seem to sell the 86% of its natural gas exports which previously went to the EU. Moreover, with the persistent Urals oil pricing discount, Russia is not making much money on every barrel of oil they sell when the price of oil is only around $55/barrel. Our triangulation of primary source data–wherever Russia was the buyer we checked with the seller and vice versa–shows that virtually every sector has collapsed, with some such as automotive down more than 90%. Millions of people have fled Russia this past year to neighboring nations, with TASS reporting 700,000 emigres just in April. The Uzbek ambassador to the U.S. told us last week that almost 500,000 Russians have fled to his country with employment in the Tashkent Technology Park soaring 500%–in what is dubbed the “Tash rush.” Yet the IMF publicly chooses to ignore all of these well-documented data challenges, merely putting out a Putin-echoing sanguine GDP assessment while obfuscating the underlying inputs and assumptions. We don’t presume to know why. In fairness, we should ask why the Biden Administration and Congress have not filled the U.S. seat on the IMF’s Executive Board, leaving the largest vote share (16.5%) unrepresented–while Russia remains well represented by a veteran IMF insider who has the most seniority of any country’s representative, tilting IMF governance politics. As Abraham Lincoln famously warned, “You can fool some of the people all the time and all of the people some of the time.” It seems Putin can fool sophisticated Western media voices–and even economists and former policymakers much of the time. The economic experts and media pundits who are parroting presumed wisdom are fueling sanctions skeptics, naively falling for Putin’s propaganda, and drawing a false sense of comfort from an unfortunate seal of approval that comes with a now-tainted IMF brand. For whatever reason, they are helping Putin erode Western unity. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is the Lester Crown Professor in Management Practice and Senior Associate Dean at Yale School of Management. Stephen Roach is the former Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and Chief Economist of Morgan Stanley. He is currently a senior fellow at Yale Law School. Steven Tian is the director of research at the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute and former investment analyst at Rockefeller Capital.
‘If you go to war with somebody, you don’t keep your money in their pocket’ Russia might lose trillions of dollars due to the invasion of Ukraine, a leading scholar on inequality and globalisation Branko Milanović estimates https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/20...y-you-dont-keep-your-money-in-their-pocket-en
Let's check out the latest Russian "tanks" in Ukraine... Desperate Putin building ‘Frankenstein tanks’ with ageing NAVAL guns welded on top as Ukraine wipes out Russian military https://www.thesun.ie/news/10343439/desperate-putin-building-frankenstein-tanks/ VLADIMIR Putin's battlefield efforts have become desperate as the warmonger has been forced to build "Frankenstein tanks" with ageing naval guns welded on top. Russia's failed campaign in Ukraine has seen its military already lose more than 1,700 tanks and its dwindling armoury stockpile has meant the Kremlin needed to improvise. A Russian improvised tank with a naval turret welded on top Images have emerged of the crudely-engineered vehicles being deployed in Ukraine. Footage from an undisclosed location appeared to show a 25mm 2M-3 twin-barrelled naval anti-aircraft turret fitted to a Soviet-era MT-LB amphibious fighting vehicle. The bizarre contraption is believed to be built with machinery parts from 1945. Its guns were likely taken from a naval patrol boat, while its tracks could date back to the 1950s. The "Frankenstein tanks" are believed to be an improvised response to the Kremlin's shortage of essential war materials. Ukrainian forces have also destroyed large numbers of Russian tanks through the use of drones, which Putin has been unable to replace. Videos obtained by The Sun Online showed Russian tanks being obliterated in the Donbas region. Justin Crump, an intelligence and geopolitical risk analyst, told The Telegraph he believed Russia was forced to use a naval turret because its sea fleet still had a surplus in gear. (Article has video of this laughable Russian "tank".)
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/08/economy/imf-kristalina-georgieva-interview/index.html IMF chief: Ukraine war will have ‘devastating’ consequences for Russia’s economy
Russia’s biggest bank suffers 78% collapse in profit as sanctions bite https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/09/business/russia-sberbank-profit-plunge-sanctions/index.html
Great question? The short answer: The Russians are robbing other planes they grounded & cannibalized for parts, smuggling in parts from the grey market and attempting to fly the planes to countries like Turkey to get maintenance and parts. The bottom line is with each passing month the Russian commercial planes get less and less safe. Anyone who currently flies on a Russian commercial airline has got to be an idiot with no personal regard for their own safety. How are Russian airlines still flying if they can't import spare parts? https://sports.yahoo.com/russian-airlines-still-flying-cant-170800955.html