As the war between Ukraine and Russia unfolds, the hunger for instant information is practically insatiable—with a massive volume of videos and images to help fill the need. One type of image that’s already become iconic in the conflict would have seemed unthinkable a few weeks ago: seemingly intact Russian vehicles, the vanguard of one of the most fearsome armies in the world, left abandoned by their crews.
The only visible damage of these cars were their tires blown out.
Modern warfare is so complex that it can defy understanding by most people. And few images would defy understanding more than an army at war simply abandoning perfectly good vehicles because of a flat tire. Doesn’t the Russian Army have spares? Don’t they have mechanics?
Enter the viral thread of Trent Telenko, a two-decade military veteran who ran the quality control auditing of the U.S. Army’s midsize vehicle program. Attempting to explain why so many undamaged Russian vehicles, including top-of-the-line combat systems, have been abandoned by their crews with flat tires, Telenko went into great depth regarding details that most people never think about when watching footage of war. But they’re the kind of details that can sink an army in the field.
According to Telenko, the “abandoned truck” phenomenon wasn’t a case of desertion by conscripts, nor was it because of the exceptional performance of the Ukrainian military, though both might have played a part. What’s really causing these breakdowns is likely bad preventive maintenance, particularly when it comes to their wheels. Telenko thinks Russian vehicles are being left in place for months without basic preventive measures. So when they go into battle, particularly off-road, their tires easily blow out, leaving many stuck in thawing mud. And since the Russians don’t seem to have brought enough spares either, they’re useless and have to be abandoned.
“Military trucks need to be turned over [have their engines started] and moved once a month for preventative maintenance reasons,” Telenko wrote in his Twitter thread from March 3, which has tens of thousands of retweets.
This needs to be done to ensure there are no leaks, no vermin in the tire walls, and so they aren’t subject to sun damage. “When you leave military truck tires in one place for months on end. The side walls get rotted/brittle such that using low tire pressure setting for any appreciable distance will cause the tires to fail catastrophically via rips,” he continued, linking to video of a Russian Pantsir anti-aircraft system stuck in mud and abandoned with its tires having blown out after Ukrainian troops tried to tow it away.
A followup thread from Telenko posits that at least one abandoned Russian vehicle might not have been moved or maintained in a year, with others easily spotting rotted tires on vehicles being shipped to the front. The upshot is that Vladimir Putin’s military build up took too long, and the Russian military already lacks enough trucks and supply vehicles to sustain their forces in the field. Combine that with poor maintenance of extant vehicles in the muddy conditions of Ukraine in early spring, and it’s easy to see why the Russian army is losing so much materiel.
Telenko and other experts offered a number of reasons for the lack of regular maintenance during Russia’s long buildup to invasion.
One is the rampant corruption in the Russian military, which is infamous for officers being paid off by military contractors to look the other way. Other reasons given by observers of the Russian military include lack of funds or fuel to perform regular maneuvers.
Another tweet in response to that thread also went viral by giving more depth to the maintenance problems—the tires were possibly cheaper Chinese or Belorussian copies of superior Soviet-era tires that don’t have the right load ratings and weren’t properly inspected. Hence they aren’t the quality needed to stand up to the rigors of war, especially when they aren’t maintained well.
Tire rotation is a fairly boring topic for most people who aren’t either tire experts or mechanics. But the heavy losses of Russian vehicles (Putin’s force has lost at least 200 trucks and 600 vehicles overall in nine days of fighting, according to photos and video from the battlefield) is obviously hampering their war effort. And the massive Russian convoy headed to Kyiv has made virtually no progress in days, with mechanical issues and poor tires at least partially to blame, according to intelligence experts.
But the esoteric subject of Russian tire walls isn’t the only place where the granular expertise of people in a wide range of fields is providing critical information to the public.
Twitter user Jan Nedvidek, who works as a “commercial solicitor focusing on asset finance transactions in the aviation, rail, and general leasing sectors” according to his LinkedIn page, went viral with a long thread on the extreme complexities of how the Russian aviation industry will respond to the many nations who have closed their borders to Russian commercial flights.
According to Nedvidek, if the war drags on even a few more weeks and the closures remain in effect, Russian aviation will all but collapse due to arcane leasing agreements and the inability to get spare parts.
“Very few aircraft are actually owned by airlines, and instead most are owned by lessor companies, most of which are Irish,” he wrote. “Under the sanctions regime [sic], the view in the legal community is that those leases have to be terminated, otherwise Irish companies will be criminally liable”, he wrote in a long Twitter thread. “More importantly: Russian operators are unable to effect insurances. Without those, no national aviation authority will allow access to its airspace. This would in effect mean the end of Russian operators flying internationally.”
Irish firms are already threatening to terminate their leases with Russian airlines, and at least one plane outside Russia has already been repossessed, though one Irish aviation expert has conceded that getting most of these planes back will be “mission impossible.”
But even if the planes can’t be repossessed, they might not be useful for much longer. Because of international sanctions, Russian mechanics won’t be able to get parts or service manuals for foreign-made engine—and some airlines are already freezing deliveries of parts to Russia. Russian airlines won’t be able to take their planes across international lines for service, either, due to airspace closures. Russian companies also won’t be able to make or receive payments from international banks.
The cumulative effect of these airline issues is that “Russia will be in effect cut off from international travel, perhaps with the notable exception of China. It will be more isolated than the USSR, and even domestic journeys will be severely limited,” Nedvidek wrote.
Finally, there was the viral thread by Woodrow Wilson Center fellow Kamil Galeev, who went into minute detail about the role that paratroopers play in Russian war doctrine—and the mythos around them. The media has run with the idea of these elite troopers being dropped from the sky as the vanguard of an invading force, on par with the paratroopers who jumped into Normandy the night before D-Day. But with Russian paratrooper units (also known as VDV) absorbing high losses, including the death of the commanding general of one unit, Galeev explained exactly what paratroopers do and don’t do in the Russian army historically.
Despite their reputation in Russia as an elite and legendary force, Galeev writes that the Russians have only dropped paratroopers three times since World War II, including Ukraine. They are big and tough, but not equipped for long-term combat, serving more as riot police and enforcers than as elite units capable of fighting a pitched battle.
“Paratroopers aren’t that strong. The firepower of an ‘elite’ paratrooper regiment is way weaker than that of regular, ‘non-elite’ infantry regiment,” he wrote in a thread with thousands of retweets. “They can’t defeat an army. But they aren’t supposed to fight against an army. They are supposed to suppress mutinies and rebellions.”
And that fits with how the Russians see Ukraine—not as a foreign country, but as a breakaway province to be brought back into line. For the easy, uncontested conquest Putin thought he was getting into, the physically imposing and nationally venerated paratroopers are perfect. But in intense fighting against a modern army with modern logistics, such as the disastrous VDV attempt to take Hostomel Airport in Southern Ukraine, their weaknesses are showing.
“Their entire legendary status is one huge psyop,” Galeev writes. “That’s not a secret, really well-trained forces such as those of GRU consider these guys to be fraudsters.”
As proof, Galeev posted several videos of the casualties that Russian paratroopers took in their efforts to take Ukrainian targets. Several videos included the now ubiquitous footage of burning or abandoned trucks or light armor —and naturally, most had had their tires blown out.
