Don's Weekly, 5 November 2024: Part 3

by Donald Hill

(…continued from Part 2…)

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Russia

Since 2022, Russia added 520,000 workers into the defense industry, but they still need 250,000 more. Of those workers, they needed 75,000 specialists in 2023 and now need 160,000 specialists. Of those 160,000 specialists, 50,000 highly qualified designers and engineers were required. Unemployment in Russia is extremely low at 2.4-2.8%. With few workers available and so many jobs unfilled, salaries have risen by 54% in two years.

By 2030, it’s estimated that Russia will have a labor shortage of 2-4 million people in jobs throughout the economy.

In June, Russia’s industrial output dropped sharply. Military equipment, optics and electronic production fell for two straight months (as of this August report). This drop is most likely caused by the labor shortage and high interest rates.

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Butter prices rose 25.7% since December and supermarkets are taking measures after a rise in shoplifting. Imports from Belarus aren’t enough so they are buying butter from Turkey, Iran and India.

"Specifically, butter has increased in price, some fruit and vegetables too. Potatoes and cabbage are very expensive," said Elena, a Moscow pensioner. However, she had been able to find cheap cucumbers and buckwheat. Said another shopper, "Every morning, we have to eat butter for breakfast. We buy milk, cheese, sausages, eggs and bread. And where has that 1,500 roubles ($21.34 Cdn) gone? It's very expensive. It is not clear why prices are going up," he said.

"It's all because of enormous Russian defense spending," said an economist. "So I think the medium term outlook to long term outlook is quite bleak."

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The results vary from one unit to the next, but some Russian units won’t retrieve wounded infantry, but they’ll send someone to bring home wounded machine gunners, auto-grenade launcher gunners, drone operators and radio operators. All of them are specialists that are harder to replace.

One Russian says that when units run out of infantry they send these specialists as infantry. Most of them trained as infantry and joined these informal groups. The author believes that a better solution is to create official groups removed from the infantry so they can continue to provide support to the infantry that saves lives. He also mentions that they don’t have secure radios and are using Starlinks.

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A Russian blogger reports that another Su-34 was shot down.

A Russian soldier shot ten of his comrades in the Zaporizhzhia region. And the deputy commander of the 810th Marine brigade was shot in Kursk by a private.

Google owns YouTube and earned $307 billion in 2023. It blocked Russian propaganda channels, 17 of which filed legal claims. When two of them won a court case against Google in 2020, Google was fined 100,000 rubles, an amount that doubled each week they refused to comply with the order to unblock the propaganda channels. Google stopped advertising in Russia to comply with sanctions and its subsidiary went bankrupt in the summer of 2022. The fine continues to grow and has passed the 2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ruble mark. That is the equivalent of $22.1 trillion.

A Chechen special forces university was hit and Kadyrov promised retribution.

A video of Russia sabotaging their electrical grid.

In Russia, they created a memorial for all the Russian soldiers that killed themselves. Because of course they did.

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Occupied Ukraine

Russia is holding about 8,000 soldiers and 14,000 civilians prisoner. On Ukrainian soil they have about 100 prisons, detention centers, camps and basements where citizens are tortured, raped and killed. Ukrainian children have been sent to Russia to live. Travel is restricted. There used to be a crossing between Russia and Ukraine in the Sumy area but that was closed with the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk. Information and access to media is controlled and Ukrainians are subjected to propaganda in the workplace and in schools, where lessons are taught in Russian. They are faced with the choice of accepting Russian citizenship or losing their property and being expelled. That is reason enough to keep fighting.

The port of Berdyansk has been used to ship out stolen grain and to ship in arms and ammunition. Ukraine says they blew up a railway bridge connected to the port. Russia said the explosions were related to Russian military exercises.

Ukraine

A Ukrainian general says that the situation in the Donbass was caused by a lack of ammo, a lack of personnel and the “imbalance of management”.

A leader of a successful assault group discusses the tactics he uses to clear houses with a four, eight or twelve man assault team.

Sumy started being hit by glide bombs last February. The Russians used their glide bombs on Kharkiv soon after and in September they started to pound Zaporizhzhia with glide bombs. So far, two have been killed and 100 wounded in that city. Residents are sleeping in their clothes to reach bomb shelters faster. The overnight attacks cost everyone hours of sleep.

In Nikopol, a pair of 12 and 13 year old girls were seriously hurt when they were targeted by a Russian drone.

Construction on a Turkish drone facility in Ukraine is 80% complete and the machinery is being ordered. The factory will begin to produce TB2, TB3 and Kizilelma drones by August 2025. The engines are a joint Turkish-Ukrainian production. In the image below, from left to right, is the TB-3, TB-2 and the Kizilelma, which has a low radar cross section. The fourth drone is a high altitude, long endurance Akinci drone.

An American that describes himself as Christian and conservative was spying for the Russians the last two years.

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Diplomacy

In addition to the observed irregularities in the voting in Georgia, the statistics show that while there was a normal distribution of votes in the urban areas, the voting in the rural areas was skewed in a manner that is consistent with ballot stuffing. All of this is explained here. Here are some observations of irregularities at some polling stations, and a thread describing how the fraud was conducted.

Despite reports of Russian meddling, the pro-EU candidate claimed victory in her re-election bid.

Last year, courts in The Hauge ordered Russia to pay Ukraine’s Naftogaz $5 for assets seized when Crimea was illegally annexed. Last week, on Ukraine’s behalf, Finland seized $4.25 billion in Russian-owned properties, including houses and apartments used by diplomats. Russia summoned Finnish ambassadors and said they would use all legal means to contest the seizure and will take retaliatory measures, if necessary.

Russia has a shortage of machine tools. Turkey provided them with 26% of their imports and China provided them with 17%, (86% of which was bought from other countries. Taipei was 5th on the list with 6% of Russia’s imports, but as of March they stopped sending machine tools to Russia.

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Equipment

Half the shells Russia uses come from North Korea. Many of them are in poor condition straight out of the box. This video shows the Russians cleaning mortar shells, and they say that only one in five of them will fire, but that is very likely a huge exaggeration.

The Switchblade 600 is a very good drone with a range of 40 km and a price tag of $100,000. So it’s reserved for high value targets, such as this Russian air defense system.

200 Strykers are headed for Ukraine.

The Hrim-2 missile has a range of 700 km, a 500 kg warhead and some maneuver ability to make it more difficult to shoot down. It was designed to replace the Tochka-U missiles inherited from the Soviet Union. The program was stopped and started several times since 2007. Ukraine said that recent tests were successful and it will be used on the battlefield soon but the number of missiles available and rate of production hasn’t been stated.

Somehow more than 20 armored cars from the UAE ended up in Russia. Considering the alliance between the two, much more must be expected to follow.

Russia is using non-standard low frequencies to avoid jamming. To counter this, Ukraine will need jammers with longer antennas to jam those lower frequencies.

Ukraine is developing an MRAP with a 30 mm cannon.