Speaking of seizing assets, remember I mentioned about the Russian air industry last week? Well apparently the signs early this week point to the Russian government effectively nationalizing the foreign owned aircraft operated by Russian companies.
Here's a follow up video to the one I posted before:
Plus a couple news articles on the subject:
Business Insider (
archive)
Airline Weekly (
archive)
The short of it is that Russia's taken steps to enable quick re-registering of foreign registered craft in Russia, postponed some inspection requirements and made them easier to meet in Russia, and directed its airliners to not fly foreign registered aircraft abroad lest they be impounded or seized. This would also put Russia in violation of the
Cape Town Treaty they ratified back in 2011. It'll also make any aircraft kept that way virtually worthless in the future as maintenance records would become unreliable, and it's a lot harder to sell someone an aircraft if they don't have decent assurances it's been properly maintained.
I suspect that it's because the normal greenhorn Russians are having problems killing Ukrainians who aren't that different. Not enough Donbass vets to take the whole country. Chechens who are fine killing kufirs were poorly equipped and arrogant. Syrians have no qualms about killing whites because these whites are Putin's enemy. This wouldn't be the first time foreigners have been brought in to brutalize a population because regulars were too similar to the locals. Even in the American Revolution, Hessians were important for intimidating the colonists. Ottoman Empire made extensive use of non-Muslim mercenaries. In Vietnam, South Koreans who had lost family to North Korea were brought in to fight the VC. It's easier to kill people who don't look like you. Or bring in people who have been wronged by your enemy or people like them in an earlier conflict.
Yeah, I considered morale problems as well. I suspect morale is already bad enough when you're sending a bunch of green troops - some of which are conscripts - to just conquer another country. Only to take some painful losses when you'd basically promised them it'd be a walkover and they'd be greeted as liberators from a corrupt regime. Sending them in to engage in bloody urban fighting against people who might clearly be civilians conscripted for defense or even just having taken up arms in defense of their home is probably a thorny issue. Either send units in to get slaughtered and morale drops to the points that troops start to mutiny, or send units in only to see them surrender because they were "surrounded".
Russia has some experience of getting screwed over in urban combat in Chechnya. Russian armor would move in, and they simply could not elevate their guns high enough to hit Chechen rocket troops, who were firing from the rooftops of buildings. So the Russians specifically designed an armored vehicle called the BMPT Terminator with a high-elevation gun system that can elevate the autocannons 45 degrees.
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I have not seen a single one of these in the footage from Ukraine. It's all old BMPs, BTRs, T-72s, et cetera. It's literally all 40-year-old Cold War hardware. Why is Putin holding the good stuff back?
Do they even have enough of the good stuff in inventory? Most of their post Soviet stuff seems to have been produced it relatively small quantities. With even that article making it sound like Russia has maybe a couple dozen in service. Given the amount of problems and corruption Russia seems to have had with its military procurement and training, I wouldn't be surprised if their more modern equipment is little more than theoretical. Working models that prove the concept, but no pressures for large production runs and replacement of obsolete vehicles and equipment. It'd be easy enough to argue that most of their existing stuff was "good enough" for their purposes, and if something got serious enough to warrant building large quantities of modern equipment, either there'd be enough time to ramp up production, or it'd be a nuclear war and more modern equipment would be moot.
