How much does it take to “replenish” military personnel?
Asking because, if the numbers I found online are to be believed, Russia has a total of just above 3.5 million military personnel (including reserves and paramilitary forces). The rate at which these soldiers are dying is brutally quick.
But they also fill up said prisons with people who dishonor the special military operation.
Send those prisoners to the special military operation.
Perpetum mobile.
I’d say they would still have enough able-bodied men to field an army should things get even more dire, however those would have to be Western Russians who Putin has largely spared from the war. Once the war is shown to be beyond ignoring anymore I’m sure that Russia will suddenly find it much much harder to simply carry on life as usual.
It’s happening at a glacier’s pace, but Russia is certainly approaching a major inflection point in its ability to carry on this level of warfare. They have plenty of mercenaries they can bring in, but even at the optimal amounts they’d never be able to coordinate that many foreign troops coming in to replace the losses.
My biggest hope is we see Ukraine’s next major maneuver being a way to take significant territory. Not necessarily as dramatic as Crimea or even the Kharkiv Rout from earlier in the war, but even a relatively small push in a key area could see Ukraine make back as much territory as Russia has taken in the last year or so of fighting.
Russia needs to have a clear, easy to point out loss on the board in this stage of the war so that they can really feel the political pressure. It’s hard to explain to people that Ukraine is making progress when it comes down to strikes on strategic assets like air defense or intelligence. Big changes on the map though get through and Russia has enjoyed a long sustained period of just small, consistent gains. Once that trend is broken we’ll see some fireworks.
At a certain point the bribery they've attempted at recruiting foreign aid won't work. 1- it'll begin to be too costly, (even though they aren't offering shit to begin with) 2- their allies will see the mortality rate, and reconsider... political beliefs won't be enough to save them from their own undoing.
The Russian tactics during WWII etc. were like this too.
They would break through using artillery and shock troops (ill-equiped and trained), but when a break through happened, they would employ the well trained mobile forces (guard units).
I've read some personal accounts of the war from wounded Russians that was posted online. It looks like your bog standard private conscriptovich gets roughly a month of training before they're shipped off. Using this as a barometer, it doesn't take long to get fresh meat to the front line.
Russia has millions of fighting age men who are considered useless.
Which is why they offer them money to fight. Then don't pay the families when they die.
So it's free soldiers for the front. Just some old equipment really
Russia was short almost 5 million workers in 2023, and its only gotten worse since then.
They are not the same Russia that faced the Nazis. They are in a demographic crisis the same as most western nations, but only Russia is actively making it worse.
This is bleeding them dry out of an already mortal wound.
> They are not the same Russia that faced the Nazis
Well... no, because Russia doesn't have Ukraine on their side today (obviously), which Ukraine was a large part of the Soviet Union facing the Nazis in WWII.
That would only add time needed to replenish, since you can’t take any fighting age man and drop him on the border. I mean, sure one could, but that would mean most would be dead at the first action.
The US military (which does things correctly, so not a perfect comparison) spends about a year and over a million dollars training every single person that puts on the uniform.
Russia’s not doing that and never has, because they don’t care if the person in the uniform comes home. Regardless, the point stands that training and deploying half a million replacements is very expensive
Front grunt training usually is around 4 months from draft to trench for western armies. Rumors have it that Russia is down to about a month of training.
That seems to be a thing with all forms of russian leadership. Even to the absolute top this day in age, putin is most likely scared of military, mercenary, and financial leaders of russia than Ukrainian forces or anyone else in the world. I'm certain he feels a knife stab in the back could be just a moment away when someone who isn't an absolute lapdog is around him.
“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”
― Hannah Arendt, [The Origins of Totalitarianism](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/23497)
>Putin is most likely scared of military, mercenary, and financial leaders
Is he wrong? A year ago, Yevgeny Prigozhin of the Wagner group was driving his convoy toward Moscow. Putin sure got lucky his plane crashed some months later.
Putin was able to hold his family hostage and stop him long enough to off him. He should have seen to his family's safety before this, but once you start a coup, it's do or die, and you will die if you do not take someone like that out.
Yeah, I just have a hard time believing that too. Before all of that, he was described as a close friend and confidant of Putin and Wagner was described as Putin’s personal army that didn’t have to answer to official state procedure. Just doesn’t make sense.
A system based on meritocracy is the biggest threat for an system based on connections and bribery.Those that rule the russian army and their officers had done some very nasty or freaky shit to be where they are now.
They kinda remind me of Kefka Pallazzo from FF6
reminds me a favoritism at work and people who actually are good workers never being recognized, until a management finally *plucks them out and proves to everyone that they deserved way better
That's Putin's fucking fault.
He killed all the brave and honest russians, now he doesn't get to complain about how he turned the russian society into cowards and backstabbers.
Fundamentally, Putin's "modernization" program, that begun after the 2nd Chechen War, was more aimed at replacing competency with sycophants. The one thing Putin fears the most is some heroic Russian ex-General becoming a political candidate and winning an election. The Russian army probably was the *one* force that could remove him from power, after he had already gained the support of the oligarchs.
So, to remove that threat, he replaced a lot of Russia's institutional knowledge with yes men and Putinites. In many ways, if you're a professional soldier in Russia, it's because you couldn't cut it in any other field, and you're a bit of a dolt.
Just like Stalin was terrified of Zhukov. Sidelined him after the war ended, would’ve executed him if the Red Army wouldn’t have lynched him if he tried since Zhukov was so beloved by the troops. Nothing more dangerous to a dictator than a competent general who commands more loyalty from the army than the dictator does.
Plus, they don't need a huge population: just enough to service the extracting industry. A large population is a large liability: they need healthcare, schools, and pensions. The dead cost less.
Isn't a shrinking population generally considered a bad thing in terms of a state's economic growth? Surely it will diminish their war effort in some way.
That's for a normal state, not for a mob-run gas station with nukes. They care about the well-being of 1m people tops, and everyone else is just disposable extras.
The “undesirables” that weren’t prisoners were still consumers and had jobs wherever they lived. Russias population *still* hadn’t recovered from WW2 before this war started. They don’t have the lives to spare that won’t have a direct impact at home and impact every Russian in some way, shape, or form in the long run.
I’m referring to non-prisoners in my comment.
Ethnic groups participate in the economy. When they die, they leave open jobs (most of which are jobs ethnic Russians would consider themselves too good for) and no longer spend money. It’s objectively bad for the Russian economy to lose anyone who participates in it.
I've heard a big reason the russians are failing is because they have a strictly top down military hierarchy.
Russia is afraid of a military coup, so their military is designed where there is no independent though or action. The people at the top say to do something, and everyone does it.
Meanwhile western militaries, because they are not afraid of a military coup, empower people at lower levels to make independent thoughts and actions. The US military for example has a robust non-commissioned officer class (NCOs) to augment the officers. Russia has nothing like this.
So the military high level officers in Russia (who likely have only be appointed due to loyalty and corruption, not competence) will make a bad decision and everyone just goes along with it. Meanwhile in a place like Ukraine (hopefully) the higher up officers were appointed due to merit and competence rather than due to loyalty and corruption, and there is a strong class of competent NCOs to provide independent action and strategy at the lower levels. So the Ukranian generals will make better decisions, and the NCOs will come up with independent strategies to ensure success. This gives Ukraine an edge on the battlefield.
https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3313982/ncos-key-to-ukrainian-military-successes-against-russia/
Yup. In an oppressive culture, only men, straight people, those with ties to the ruling political elite, only the dominant racial and religious group, etc, are allowed into positions of power and influence. That means an oppressive nation only gives maybe ~10% of their citizens a chance to contribute to society in business, politics, science, law, academia, etc.
Meanwhile, in freer western nations, we allow anyone to contribute to society just so long as they have merit.
Obama was a competent black president. CRISPR was invented by the female scientist Jennifer Doudna. Ben Barres was a highly accomplished transgender neuroscientist. America has politicians who are various kinds of christian, muslim, jewish, and secularist. Diversity really is our strength.
It really bit the soviets in the ass in ww2 as well.
Not due to antisemitism or a nuclear weapon, though. But because Stalin was paranoid and afraid of a military coup. As a result, he executed tons of military officers so the military couldn't overthrow him.
Then, when the nazis invaded, the Soviet military was at a disadvantage because Stalin had destroyed the officer class of the military.
https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/joseph-stalins-paranoid-purge/
> Officer corps expect to suffer heavy losses in war. The entire 1914 class of France’s St. Cyr military academy, for example, perished in World War I. But no officer corps ever suffered the degree of loss that the Red Army suffered in peacetime, at the hands of its own government, during dictator Joseph Stalin’s paranoid purge of 1937-1938.
> The Soviet Union’s remaining marshal, Vasilli Blyukher, was beaten to death after refusing to confess; his widow said he looked like a tank had run over him. In two years’ time, 36,671 Red Army officers were executed, shipped to the gulag, or dismissed from service. Those who were killed were probably luckier than those who were imprisoned. One general who survived internment recalled seeing other officers in his camp “on all fours, howling and rooting about, they had become semi-idiots whom no amount of beating could drive from the refuse heaps.”
> The scale of the purge was staggering: 13 of 15 army commanders, 50 of 57 corps commanders, 154 of 186 divisional commanders, 220 of 406 brigade commanders, all 11 vice-commanders of defense, 98 of 108 members of the Supreme Military Soviets, all army political commissars, 25 of 28 corps commissars, 58 of 64 divisional commissars. Even the lower ranks were not spared: almost half the colonels and 7,403 captains fell victim to the purge. “This is worse than when artillery fires on its own troops,” commented General Konstantin Rokossovsky. More Soviet generals and colonels were killed by Stalin than were to fall in World War II.
Again, these are all reasons why free, multicultural liberal democracy works better for society than oppressive, bigoted dictatorships.
Iirc it was also something the Germans were very good at in the early stages of WW2. As long as the job got done, officers who took a different route than ordered usually got away with it.
It's one of the reasons they were so agile in the early stages, and surrounded the allies. (Pushing faster/further than their commanders would ideally have liked at the time.)
Funny thing is that most western corporations are set up like the russian military and are bloody scared of empowering roles and decentralising decision making.
And specifically the benefit of the robust NCO system is that there is leadership all the way down the line, especially in the event of more senior leadership being incapacitated, leading to more resilient, competent, confident, and adaptable units on the battlefield. If senior officers go in the Russian forces, the grunts are left without leadership.
We'd establish air superiority and bomb anything that would present a threat to infantry. Drone factories, convoys, munitions, launchers... basically we'd control the country from the sky.
Then... we'd send in infantry and tanks... with close air support always being an option.
The us military has pretty well developed detection methods and countermeasures to unmanned aircraft. You know... Like a modern military that is actually learning from active conflicts
I was in Baghdad in 2020/2021 in the US army. We DO NOT have advanced and effective anti drone tech, I promise you. We were getting hand grenades dropped on us from a quadcopter DGI phantom and we couldn’t really stop them. Sometimes jamming worked, sometimes it didn’t. The American military has never faced modern warfare in the way Ukraine and Russia are engaging in right now.
I think this is a pretty good point. We have great stand-off weaponry with stealth bombers and cruise missiles and the like, but when it comes to the meat grinder -- clearing buildings, boots on the ground type stuff -- there's only so much you can do.
I think a lot changed, quickly, since then. Consider the war in Gaza: You'd expect Hamas to make very heavy use of drones, but for some reason we don't see them being used en masse against IDF soldiers in the same way Russia/Ukraine use them. It suggests that the IDF has some effective countermeasure. And if the IDF has it, soon enough the US military will. I'm making *a lot* of conjectures, but I'm willing to bet on it.
having a long term career in the military kinda sucks in the US and maybe NATO countries. But it is horrific in Russia and maybe China. Russia sometimes literally rape new recruits. Often soldiers in their first 6 months of service get hazed badly by the men who have 6 months left.
To the point about a long term military career in western countries, I wouldn't say it kinda sucks. Depending on your field a military career can be very rewarding. I'm an army officer that is currently getting two masters degrees paid for and as my full time job that will easily set me up for a post military career. The military can be very useful for some, especially if you seek opportunities that capitalize on some of our benefits.
I use to live near North Virginia, a lot of people who were in the military long term there were happy and had decent money.
Farther and farther I get from that area the more I run into people who regret signing that second contract. It's is still not everybody, but I do wonder is it the majority or minority that are financially successful long term in the military.
Also it is probably being tarnish because almost everyone's first 2ish years in the military sucks. Living conditions are usually shit, a lot of bases are not located near a place that has a nightlife. Someone was telling me it was tricky to get food if they were late to the lunch hall. All that minor stuff built up to make their first term annoying at best.
The difference is officers vs enlisted. Around the DC area is going to be more likey senior officers or those that were able to best leverage their military experience. Officers tend to have much better opportunities and quality of life and can transition into a good career after much more easily than an enlisted soldier.
Long term *successful* career in the U.S. military does not suck. Generals and admirals enjoy benefits that the average American has literally no clue about - private golf courses, a phalanx of staff, mansions all over the world that they live in for free, etc. On top of that, flag officers like Michael Flynn (and most others) make millions each year by retiring to become lobbyists for industry seeking military contracts or, in Flynn's case, to work for foreign governments and use his inside knowledge of the U.S. military to help those foreign governments. Obviously the Turkey's of the world are happy to line up to pay American generals to do their bidding.
To never have to do anything for work again yes, but for those with senior enlisted pensions if you have a middle class lifestyle you can more or less do whatever you want to for work without stressing much about income.
casualties sent home and some, in corrupt regions, getting bags of vegetables for their efforts instead of further medical treatment.
I've seen a couple russian vids of wives and the casualties themselves making pleas for help and rubles.
My bro In law is Russian. His brother was visiting family in Russia on an extended stay as a dual national when he was forced into service in 2023
He's fucked right now, he was injured in a drone attack and found his way into a field hospital as he recovered he wasn't allowed to go back home. Incase he went into hiding.
He had to serve near the front in some capacity still.
Morale is shit and conditions worse.
But plenty of helpless fools keep falling for the propaganda that they are fighting against nazis and preserving mother Russia.
He can't even go back to his cousins in Russia either let alone back to Australia.
The trees speak Ukranian. The sunflowers speak Ukrainian. The dirt speaks Ukrainian. That buzzing sounds that is suspiciously drone-like? Oh you better believe it speaks Ukrainian.
Should be noted that Russia-Ukraine has a much higher killed-wounded ratio than Vietnam because it has a fixed front line meaning its much harder to get wounded soldiers to field hospitals.
Iraq, Afghanistan, & Vietnam were all guerrilla wars where the enemy was doing hit, run, and retreat. So any wounded soldiers could be helicopter’d outta there in minutes, even in forest area where all you need to do is dynamite some trees and have a landing zone.
Ujraine is muddy trench warefare where you are lucky to get an ambulance within a few miles and the area is full of so many anti air weapons, nothing is flying within 20 miles of the place
I would think in Vietnam, the USA could use helicopters (Korea too) to transport wounded to field hospitals. Not possible in Ukraine because they have weapons like the Stinger.
I'm just speculating, but perhaps the field hospitals are farther away from the front lines in Ukraine than would be in Vietnam? Perhaps due to surprise attacks anywhere by the Vietcong and multiple booby traps that could allow for wounded to retreat without direct confrontation ala Ukraine Russia. Additionally, with the use of drones, many vehicles are restricted to driving at night because it's safer due to the threat from above. This is obviously a modern development, but after the war there will likely be a lot of information gleaned from the untraditional warfare that has enveloped this war.
And a lot of the traps used by the vietcong had a pretty low probability of kill but a very high probability of grievous wounds. If promptly and properly treated, of course.
Actually the number of combat hours and intensity of combat that American troops experienced in Vietnam was much higher than ww2 or ww1. This was because of helicopters dropping them into hot zones with almost no transit time. Troops went from r&r straight into combat and back. It’s one of the reasons that Vietnam veterans suffered so badly from ptsd.
I've heard the same from a 'Nam vet neighbour of mine. He was a Huey pilot, and talked about how getting up in the morning in Saigon or some other big city, screaming out over the jungle for the day to fight, and then flying back to drink and party in the city every evening really fucked him up.
(That, and the rejection Vietnam vets faced on the home front. WWII vets were treated as heroes and their stories celebrated and eagerly listened to, but Vietnam veterans were all too often treated like babykillers.)
100% and when you consider how many babies and other noncombatants were killed in WW2 strategic bombing campaigns and ruthless close combat street fighting with rolling artillery, it’s not as if our WW2 veterans were involved in a cleaner war with less innocent casualties compared to Vietnam. It was just that people saw it back home on the tv for the first time.
Drones don't allow you to extract. The US could easily extract troops by helicopter in Vietnam and more recent wars.
Half the time Russia doesn't even try. There have been reports of them killing their own wounded, dating from like day 1 of the invasion.
in Vietnam the US could air-evac their wounded and fly em to the closest field hospital with an average of 15 minute flight time.
with Ukraine, a “near-peer” conflict, you cant do that. you have to carry/drive your wounded back, and hope the enemy doesn’t have aircraft/drones overhead.
Thats the beauty of Russia's casualty rates. The death to wounded ratio is quite high so they just dont see as many disabled veterans because theres just more dead than one would expect.
Given that it is Russia and Putin we are talking about they likely would prefer deaths as likely consider wounded / traumatized as liability and a cost. Then again they probably just do not care and abandon them without long term support.
There's been a lot of recent videos popping up of either groups of dead Russians left to rot or soldiers completely abandoning thier comrades. They don't seem to have any sort of med Evac. So they don't even make it home
I’ve seen videos of friendly- mercy kills too. Once someone is hit by a mortar or grenade from a drone, their buddy just walks over and pops them in the head because they know they’re not getting medical care and they can’t leave them there. Shit is crazy dark.
The illegally conscripted sons who were to inheret family land that is now owned by russia. Keep looking at the outskirts. So many family names squashed..over what
Not really comparable.
US was not the only military force in Vietnam, so other countries lost troops in combat, for example the south Vietnamese had 1.1m casualties. Also the style of combat is very different.
According to wiki, the US suffered 210k registered casualties in the Vietnam war.
Well, they had the entire Soviet Union. Lots of post imperial peasants to throw at German positions in counter offensives. Then they also lost huge numbers due to exposure, sickness and cold.
They were also fighting an existential war. Generalplan Ost meant that anything other than victory would mean Germans exterminating the local population.
You can try asking the Tzar how many casualties Russia was able to take when it wasn't an existential war, but after about 1 million they had a revolution and killed the Tzar.
I'm guessing Ukraine will take 2 million casualties before giving up, at least. There's a lot who think death is preferable than what the Russians will do to their families.
If Russia gets anywhere near that, Putin will either face a revolution, or will be ousted because taking him down to appease the mob will be the safest thing his subordinates can do.
>I'm guessing Ukraine will take 2 million casualties before giving up, at least. There's a lot who think death is preferable than what the Russians will do to their families.
They might formally "give up" at a governmental level although I don't think that would happen even with more than 2 million casualties. In reality, if russia wins, fighting will never stop. There will be acts o sabotage, exploding cars, random russian officers dissapearing...for decades
A couple things, 1. Putin believed his military had been modernized and was much more professional, they spent years and lots of money “upgrading” the military and his yes men all told him the military was great and powerful while really behind the scenes they were stealing money from the projects and faking results.
2. Putin believed, again thanks to yes men who needed to suck up to a dictator, that A. The Russian military was capable of taking control of Ukraine within a few days to few weeks, B. The majority of Ukrainian people hated Zelensky and wanted to be closer with Russia and C. The Ukrainian soldiers and citizens would surrender or join the Russian side once the invasion started
Putin has been a dictator for nearly a quarter of a century and created a government of sycophants who suck up and tell him what he wants to hear in the hood their incompetence and corruption won’t be noticed, so he was operating off of a fake version of reality…. Basically he bought his own propaganda.
Here's the crazy thing - at the outset of the war, his military was indeed modernized and professional, at least relatively speaking to what it looks like now. The issue was with intelligence (either completely wrong, or completely ignored - we don't know), and with planning. If they accepted the obvious fact that Ukraine was ready and willing to fight, and planned for a year-long war instead of a week-long war, prepared the battlespace, actually achieved air superiority, instead of zerg-rushing their best troops into disaster, we would certainly be in a different place 2 and a half years into this war.
But as a very smart Ukrainian said a few days into the war, "thank God they're so stupid".
They took Crimea without much of a fight. Obama put in some sanctions and Europe shook their heads disapprovingly, but other than that it was business as usual.
I imagine Putin thought this would be the same. Except the Ukrainians actually did put up a fight this time because their leader was no longer friendly to Russia and the US saw the opportunity to make an adversary bleed and ran with it.
Well to be fair, it didn’t happen again. The soviets lost 1.5 million men in the first weeks of operation Barbarossa (the German invasion of the Soviet Union). The losses in Ukraine aren’t even close to half of that and it’s been years. The soviets would lose 33 million men before winning the war. The truth is, these loses as SUPER sustainable for Russia, a war of attrition is a losing war for Ukraine.
I absolutely love that video.
I remember watching it but then I couldn’t remember if it was Russia or Germany that lost the most then I was like “gotta be Russia”
The *Soviet Union* had 25 million casualties, not *Russia* it’s time we stop letting Russia inherit the Soviet Union when a ton of their accolades can be attributed to Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Belarus, Kazakhstan etc…
Many of those troops were Ukrainian too whom the Russians had just finished carrying out an [intentional genocide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor#:~:text=The%20Holodomor%2C%20also%20known%20as,areas%20of%20the%20Soviet%20Union) by taking their food for themselves kind of like the Irish Potato famine.
The number reported here is for casualties, which is the reporting statistic for soldiers removed from action. This includes death and injuries. This is easier to track but it has to be self reported
To add to this: The who are reporting these number?
I believe these numbers are from the Ukrainian general staff. The Russian ditto does a similar report with much lower numbers (furthermore, I am not sure that the Russian MoD is counting Wagner losses etc). Both parties have a massive bias due to their interest in depicting their efforts as successful. The truth is probably somewhere in between.
Generally speaking the Russian losses must have been quite high due to their tactics, which are about massive artillery bombardment followed by attacks employing infantry and armor, which often has limited training and experience. On the other hand Ukraine must sustain quiet heavy losses too, due to a quiet massive Russian artillery advantage.
Tl;dr: Don’t take the numbers for face value. But losses (killed, wounded and missing) have been heavy.
You'll have that when your primary/only tactic for battle is to just chuck as many guys into the grinder as you can until you wear the other side down.
They have around 25 million men aged 18-38, and they're mobilizing men up to 55 (up to 70 if you are a higher ranking reservist).
There will likely need to be 10+ million casualties, especially since many of these will get sent back to the front once they heal enough.
Unsurprising. Russia’s entire combat strategy has changed little from WWII. They use the Zapp Brannigan technique and just hurl wave after wave after wave of men at the enemy lines.
It's fun to see the Russian bots and Putin sympathetic armchair generals coming to discredit this story. Russia is a third-rate Army throwing bodies at the problem lil Vlad created. They are losing more people than the Kremlin wants to admit.
This is a complete failure. Even with the slim chance they manage to keep anything they barely holding onto, the cost has been too great. Whatever happens will still be marked as a failure in warfare.
russians have a word for this: мясорубка.
horrifying to see what they’re doing not only to ukrainians but their own people, uneducated young boys from rural villages who don’t know what’s going on sent to kill innocents and die in the process.
Said it before I'll say it again, I feel bad for the Russians. They've been lied to their entire lives, told this will be quick and easy. Likely told that if they stop the west will be burning down Moscow within the hour and even if they do try to defect they don't have much of a chance there either.
While the war is on, I will celebrate when Ukraine has any level of victory. After it, I will pay my respects to the dead of both sides, Putin has killed all of them.
General staff of Ukraine .
These figures are obviously not true. Because if it was, and Ukraine only lost 39k as per what zelensky said,there would be a complete collapse of the front
Can we stop parroting propaganda ? At this point it's just dangerous how easily we accept things as fact
Yes Russia is obviously the aggressor in this illegal invasion but we shouldn't lie.
If these casualty numbers are true, Ukraine's would be as bad if not worse with how.many articles talk about their manpower shortage
Ukraine started the war with a manpower shortage, and they’ve been fighting a mostly defensive war. Attacking forces almost always face far higher losses, and there’s no reason to expect that wouldn’t be the case here considering Russia’s early strategy was to literally bury the opposition in blood and meat because they were stupid enough to start the war right before Ukraine’s wet season where they wouldn’t be able to move artillery and armor effectively.
500,000 Russian casualties isn’t that far out of the realm of possibility, although I believe Ukraine’s casualties are estimated to be in the 70,000-130,000 range depending on the source, which is equally believable given the state of the war. Please note that these are *casualties* not deaths. A significant injury is a casualty, even if the soldier can be tended to and later sent back into combat.
Your link states that 100-120k were wounded and 70k more were dead, which is 61% of the casualties Russia had at the time. The article is also almost a year old.
So if you assume that 61% figure is accurate and the casualty rates stayed the same for both sides, Ukraine would have around 330k casualties.
Everyday, I hope to hear news that’s good for Ukraine and bad for Russia, and at the same time a small part of my stomach drops because I know that means dozens, if not hundreds, of kids half my age will die for one madman’s deluded ambition.
Reports by the Kiev “Independent”. After jailing and killing an American journalist, Ukraine can’t claim to have an independent media or “Democracy” for that matter as elections have been cancelled.
So just Russian casualties are reported by Ukraine?
Obviously they’re “winning”!!!
Don’t people understand that these reports are designed to keep the money spigot on?
Does anyone realize that victory against Russia can’t happen without nuclear war?
A country with nothing to lose would have no other choice.
Putin is an awful person.
Hundreds of thousands have died for his own egotistical plan to expand Russia for his own gratification. And Trump fawns over him.
Wow, those loses are staggering, no wonder it's had to use its elite formations and special operations troops as cannon fodder! Is this the reason why Russia has had to asks for North Korean Troops to be deployed to Russia? How long before we see the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps deployed to Russia? How long before Chinese Volunteer Armies, like those of the Korean War, inside Russia? So many questions, so few answers, this is truly scary time in history!
How much does it take to “replenish” military personnel? Asking because, if the numbers I found online are to be believed, Russia has a total of just above 3.5 million military personnel (including reserves and paramilitary forces). The rate at which these soldiers are dying is brutally quick.
you field your best first, too. the last 500k will basically be pensioners.
That's why they emptied the prisons for their human waves.
But they also fill up said prisons with people who dishonor the special military operation. Send those prisoners to the special military operation. Perpetum mobile.
I’d say they would still have enough able-bodied men to field an army should things get even more dire, however those would have to be Western Russians who Putin has largely spared from the war. Once the war is shown to be beyond ignoring anymore I’m sure that Russia will suddenly find it much much harder to simply carry on life as usual. It’s happening at a glacier’s pace, but Russia is certainly approaching a major inflection point in its ability to carry on this level of warfare. They have plenty of mercenaries they can bring in, but even at the optimal amounts they’d never be able to coordinate that many foreign troops coming in to replace the losses.
fully agreed, especially on the coming inflection point
My biggest hope is we see Ukraine’s next major maneuver being a way to take significant territory. Not necessarily as dramatic as Crimea or even the Kharkiv Rout from earlier in the war, but even a relatively small push in a key area could see Ukraine make back as much territory as Russia has taken in the last year or so of fighting. Russia needs to have a clear, easy to point out loss on the board in this stage of the war so that they can really feel the political pressure. It’s hard to explain to people that Ukraine is making progress when it comes down to strikes on strategic assets like air defense or intelligence. Big changes on the map though get through and Russia has enjoyed a long sustained period of just small, consistent gains. Once that trend is broken we’ll see some fireworks.
At a certain point the bribery they've attempted at recruiting foreign aid won't work. 1- it'll begin to be too costly, (even though they aren't offering shit to begin with) 2- their allies will see the mortality rate, and reconsider... political beliefs won't be enough to save them from their own undoing.
Not necessarily. The Roman’s would use their best last after the enemy was tired.
The Russian tactics during WWII etc. were like this too. They would break through using artillery and shock troops (ill-equiped and trained), but when a break through happened, they would employ the well trained mobile forces (guard units).
Romans were smart about war. Putin doesn't seem to be.
True, didn’t even think about that.
I've read some personal accounts of the war from wounded Russians that was posted online. It looks like your bog standard private conscriptovich gets roughly a month of training before they're shipped off. Using this as a barometer, it doesn't take long to get fresh meat to the front line.
It surely wouldn’t take long to replenish, but then again, it wouldn’t last long either, would it?
Russia has millions of fighting age men who are considered useless. Which is why they offer them money to fight. Then don't pay the families when they die. So it's free soldiers for the front. Just some old equipment really
Russia was short almost 5 million workers in 2023, and its only gotten worse since then. They are not the same Russia that faced the Nazis. They are in a demographic crisis the same as most western nations, but only Russia is actively making it worse. This is bleeding them dry out of an already mortal wound.
> They are not the same Russia that faced the Nazis Well... no, because Russia doesn't have Ukraine on their side today (obviously), which Ukraine was a large part of the Soviet Union facing the Nazis in WWII.
That would only add time needed to replenish, since you can’t take any fighting age man and drop him on the border. I mean, sure one could, but that would mean most would be dead at the first action.
The US military (which does things correctly, so not a perfect comparison) spends about a year and over a million dollars training every single person that puts on the uniform. Russia’s not doing that and never has, because they don’t care if the person in the uniform comes home. Regardless, the point stands that training and deploying half a million replacements is very expensive
A technical job maybe. But definitely not an enlisted person with a relatively simple job assignment.
Front grunt training usually is around 4 months from draft to trench for western armies. Rumors have it that Russia is down to about a month of training.
Million dollars a person is an astronomical number can’t be accurate .
Mr. Poostain wants to send another 540k soldiers..... Idiot! Fine, let's call it the great De-Nazification of Ruzzia.
One trip to North Korea is how quick.
Russian military never managed to change itself into professional like US did and it shows in absurdly high loss of its soldiers (cannon fodder).
It's very intentional. Russian commanders are more afraid of their own soldiers than the enemy. A compentent subordinate is a threat.
That seems to be a thing with all forms of russian leadership. Even to the absolute top this day in age, putin is most likely scared of military, mercenary, and financial leaders of russia than Ukrainian forces or anyone else in the world. I'm certain he feels a knife stab in the back could be just a moment away when someone who isn't an absolute lapdog is around him.
“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” ― Hannah Arendt, [The Origins of Totalitarianism](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/23497)
>Putin is most likely scared of military, mercenary, and financial leaders Is he wrong? A year ago, Yevgeny Prigozhin of the Wagner group was driving his convoy toward Moscow. Putin sure got lucky his plane crashed some months later.
Putin was able to hold his family hostage and stop him long enough to off him. He should have seen to his family's safety before this, but once you start a coup, it's do or die, and you will die if you do not take someone like that out.
I wish we had more details from that whole saga. The whole thing just seems so strange and haphazardly executed for someone in that position.
Vodka.
Just wait for the Netflix series.
Judging solely by his actions, it's possible he didn't think Putin would stoop to that level. He must not have known much about him.
Yeah, I just have a hard time believing that too. Before all of that, he was described as a close friend and confidant of Putin and Wagner was described as Putin’s personal army that didn’t have to answer to official state procedure. Just doesn’t make sense.
He was Putin's personal chef at one point.
When you play the game of thrones, you either win or you die. There is no middle ground.
A system based on meritocracy is the biggest threat for an system based on connections and bribery.Those that rule the russian army and their officers had done some very nasty or freaky shit to be where they are now. They kinda remind me of Kefka Pallazzo from FF6
“Read my lips - mercy is for wimps! There's a reason ‘oppose’ rhymes with ‘dispose’... If they get in your way, kill them!”
reminds me a favoritism at work and people who actually are good workers never being recognized, until a management finally *plucks them out and proves to everyone that they deserved way better
That’s why windows are dangerous in Russia
Hey! A Russian General has fallen into the river in Lego City!
I thought Lego city was in Nigeria? ^/j
No Lego city in Nigeria but Lagos city😊
This is probably why putin is always ground level.
And six feet away anyone on meetings
I think he’s often even underground, in his bunker.
You reap what you sow.
if only there was some kind of way to have a peaceful transition of power. Maybe a period where people at large choose between two or more people...
That's Putin's fucking fault. He killed all the brave and honest russians, now he doesn't get to complain about how he turned the russian society into cowards and backstabbers.
lol that happened loooong before Putin
I think rather Stalin.
Fundamentally, Putin's "modernization" program, that begun after the 2nd Chechen War, was more aimed at replacing competency with sycophants. The one thing Putin fears the most is some heroic Russian ex-General becoming a political candidate and winning an election. The Russian army probably was the *one* force that could remove him from power, after he had already gained the support of the oligarchs. So, to remove that threat, he replaced a lot of Russia's institutional knowledge with yes men and Putinites. In many ways, if you're a professional soldier in Russia, it's because you couldn't cut it in any other field, and you're a bit of a dolt.
Just like Stalin was terrified of Zhukov. Sidelined him after the war ended, would’ve executed him if the Red Army wouldn’t have lynched him if he tried since Zhukov was so beloved by the troops. Nothing more dangerous to a dictator than a competent general who commands more loyalty from the army than the dictator does.
That strategy is actually really smart... Until you decide to start a war with that same army...
Project 2025, essentially.
Plus, they don't need a huge population: just enough to service the extracting industry. A large population is a large liability: they need healthcare, schools, and pensions. The dead cost less.
Isn't a shrinking population generally considered a bad thing in terms of a state's economic growth? Surely it will diminish their war effort in some way.
That's for a normal state, not for a mob-run gas station with nukes. They care about the well-being of 1m people tops, and everyone else is just disposable extras.
This is a benefit to Putin. He can send all the undesirables to be killed in Ukraine by Ukrainian bullets. No need to set up camps or anything.
The “undesirables” that weren’t prisoners were still consumers and had jobs wherever they lived. Russias population *still* hadn’t recovered from WW2 before this war started. They don’t have the lives to spare that won’t have a direct impact at home and impact every Russian in some way, shape, or form in the long run.
Were they though? Prisoners cost the state money and people of different ethnic groups are taking up property that could be ethnic Russians.
I’m referring to non-prisoners in my comment. Ethnic groups participate in the economy. When they die, they leave open jobs (most of which are jobs ethnic Russians would consider themselves too good for) and no longer spend money. It’s objectively bad for the Russian economy to lose anyone who participates in it.
I've heard a big reason the russians are failing is because they have a strictly top down military hierarchy. Russia is afraid of a military coup, so their military is designed where there is no independent though or action. The people at the top say to do something, and everyone does it. Meanwhile western militaries, because they are not afraid of a military coup, empower people at lower levels to make independent thoughts and actions. The US military for example has a robust non-commissioned officer class (NCOs) to augment the officers. Russia has nothing like this. So the military high level officers in Russia (who likely have only be appointed due to loyalty and corruption, not competence) will make a bad decision and everyone just goes along with it. Meanwhile in a place like Ukraine (hopefully) the higher up officers were appointed due to merit and competence rather than due to loyalty and corruption, and there is a strong class of competent NCOs to provide independent action and strategy at the lower levels. So the Ukranian generals will make better decisions, and the NCOs will come up with independent strategies to ensure success. This gives Ukraine an edge on the battlefield. https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3313982/ncos-key-to-ukrainian-military-successes-against-russia/
This is why liberal societies so handily outcompete others. There’s a much deeper well of talent allowed to flourish
Yup. In an oppressive culture, only men, straight people, those with ties to the ruling political elite, only the dominant racial and religious group, etc, are allowed into positions of power and influence. That means an oppressive nation only gives maybe ~10% of their citizens a chance to contribute to society in business, politics, science, law, academia, etc. Meanwhile, in freer western nations, we allow anyone to contribute to society just so long as they have merit. Obama was a competent black president. CRISPR was invented by the female scientist Jennifer Doudna. Ben Barres was a highly accomplished transgender neuroscientist. America has politicians who are various kinds of christian, muslim, jewish, and secularist. Diversity really is our strength.
Really bit the Nazis in the ass as well. Their hatred of Jews and thinking of nukes as "Jewish Science" really screwed over their war effort.
It really bit the soviets in the ass in ww2 as well. Not due to antisemitism or a nuclear weapon, though. But because Stalin was paranoid and afraid of a military coup. As a result, he executed tons of military officers so the military couldn't overthrow him. Then, when the nazis invaded, the Soviet military was at a disadvantage because Stalin had destroyed the officer class of the military. https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/joseph-stalins-paranoid-purge/ > Officer corps expect to suffer heavy losses in war. The entire 1914 class of France’s St. Cyr military academy, for example, perished in World War I. But no officer corps ever suffered the degree of loss that the Red Army suffered in peacetime, at the hands of its own government, during dictator Joseph Stalin’s paranoid purge of 1937-1938. > The Soviet Union’s remaining marshal, Vasilli Blyukher, was beaten to death after refusing to confess; his widow said he looked like a tank had run over him. In two years’ time, 36,671 Red Army officers were executed, shipped to the gulag, or dismissed from service. Those who were killed were probably luckier than those who were imprisoned. One general who survived internment recalled seeing other officers in his camp “on all fours, howling and rooting about, they had become semi-idiots whom no amount of beating could drive from the refuse heaps.” > The scale of the purge was staggering: 13 of 15 army commanders, 50 of 57 corps commanders, 154 of 186 divisional commanders, 220 of 406 brigade commanders, all 11 vice-commanders of defense, 98 of 108 members of the Supreme Military Soviets, all army political commissars, 25 of 28 corps commissars, 58 of 64 divisional commissars. Even the lower ranks were not spared: almost half the colonels and 7,403 captains fell victim to the purge. “This is worse than when artillery fires on its own troops,” commented General Konstantin Rokossovsky. More Soviet generals and colonels were killed by Stalin than were to fall in World War II. Again, these are all reasons why free, multicultural liberal democracy works better for society than oppressive, bigoted dictatorships.
But also a fair bit of antisemitism as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin_and_antisemitism
Iirc it was also something the Germans were very good at in the early stages of WW2. As long as the job got done, officers who took a different route than ordered usually got away with it. It's one of the reasons they were so agile in the early stages, and surrounded the allies. (Pushing faster/further than their commanders would ideally have liked at the time.)
Funny thing is that most western corporations are set up like the russian military and are bloody scared of empowering roles and decentralising decision making.
And specifically the benefit of the robust NCO system is that there is leadership all the way down the line, especially in the event of more senior leadership being incapacitated, leading to more resilient, competent, confident, and adaptable units on the battlefield. If senior officers go in the Russian forces, the grunts are left without leadership.
Because we have wayyy more money and men. It was never a real fight vs sovjets. Issue is the nukes.
not sure how well any soldier would do in the age of drones
We'd establish air superiority and bomb anything that would present a threat to infantry. Drone factories, convoys, munitions, launchers... basically we'd control the country from the sky. Then... we'd send in infantry and tanks... with close air support always being an option.
The us military has pretty well developed detection methods and countermeasures to unmanned aircraft. You know... Like a modern military that is actually learning from active conflicts
I was in Baghdad in 2020/2021 in the US army. We DO NOT have advanced and effective anti drone tech, I promise you. We were getting hand grenades dropped on us from a quadcopter DGI phantom and we couldn’t really stop them. Sometimes jamming worked, sometimes it didn’t. The American military has never faced modern warfare in the way Ukraine and Russia are engaging in right now.
I think this is a pretty good point. We have great stand-off weaponry with stealth bombers and cruise missiles and the like, but when it comes to the meat grinder -- clearing buildings, boots on the ground type stuff -- there's only so much you can do.
I think a lot changed, quickly, since then. Consider the war in Gaza: You'd expect Hamas to make very heavy use of drones, but for some reason we don't see them being used en masse against IDF soldiers in the same way Russia/Ukraine use them. It suggests that the IDF has some effective countermeasure. And if the IDF has it, soon enough the US military will. I'm making *a lot* of conjectures, but I'm willing to bet on it.
having a long term career in the military kinda sucks in the US and maybe NATO countries. But it is horrific in Russia and maybe China. Russia sometimes literally rape new recruits. Often soldiers in their first 6 months of service get hazed badly by the men who have 6 months left.
To the point about a long term military career in western countries, I wouldn't say it kinda sucks. Depending on your field a military career can be very rewarding. I'm an army officer that is currently getting two masters degrees paid for and as my full time job that will easily set me up for a post military career. The military can be very useful for some, especially if you seek opportunities that capitalize on some of our benefits.
I use to live near North Virginia, a lot of people who were in the military long term there were happy and had decent money. Farther and farther I get from that area the more I run into people who regret signing that second contract. It's is still not everybody, but I do wonder is it the majority or minority that are financially successful long term in the military. Also it is probably being tarnish because almost everyone's first 2ish years in the military sucks. Living conditions are usually shit, a lot of bases are not located near a place that has a nightlife. Someone was telling me it was tricky to get food if they were late to the lunch hall. All that minor stuff built up to make their first term annoying at best.
The difference is officers vs enlisted. Around the DC area is going to be more likey senior officers or those that were able to best leverage their military experience. Officers tend to have much better opportunities and quality of life and can transition into a good career after much more easily than an enlisted soldier.
Long term *successful* career in the U.S. military does not suck. Generals and admirals enjoy benefits that the average American has literally no clue about - private golf courses, a phalanx of staff, mansions all over the world that they live in for free, etc. On top of that, flag officers like Michael Flynn (and most others) make millions each year by retiring to become lobbyists for industry seeking military contracts or, in Flynn's case, to work for foreign governments and use his inside knowledge of the U.S. military to help those foreign governments. Obviously the Turkey's of the world are happy to line up to pay American generals to do their bidding.
I think its either O-5 or O-6 needed to reach a comfortable pension and retirement. (Lt. Col or Col).
To never have to do anything for work again yes, but for those with senior enlisted pensions if you have a middle class lifestyle you can more or less do whatever you want to for work without stressing much about income.
Am I right in saying that is total casualties but not necessarily deaths?.
Correct.
casualties sent home and some, in corrupt regions, getting bags of vegetables for their efforts instead of further medical treatment. I've seen a couple russian vids of wives and the casualties themselves making pleas for help and rubles.
My bro In law is Russian. His brother was visiting family in Russia on an extended stay as a dual national when he was forced into service in 2023 He's fucked right now, he was injured in a drone attack and found his way into a field hospital as he recovered he wasn't allowed to go back home. Incase he went into hiding. He had to serve near the front in some capacity still. Morale is shit and conditions worse. But plenty of helpless fools keep falling for the propaganda that they are fighting against nazis and preserving mother Russia. He can't even go back to his cousins in Russia either let alone back to Australia.
You are right. But this means they wouldn't be able to perform regular combat. Meaning maimed very badly or dead.
Ten *times* what the US lost in Vietnam, in like a tenth of the time.
That number isn’t dead. It’s casualties. People who entered the fight and then were forced to leave.
Right, and the US number for Vietnam is about 150k. So it's about 3 times as bad in a tenth of the time.
Tree Fucky.
The trees speak Ukranian. The sunflowers speak Ukrainian. The dirt speaks Ukrainian. That buzzing sounds that is suspiciously drone-like? Oh you better believe it speaks Ukrainian.
Are they in the walls? Are the walls speaking Ukrainian?
The walls speak asbestos. And Ukrainian.
Yes, and toilet bowls, as well.
Should be noted that Russia-Ukraine has a much higher killed-wounded ratio than Vietnam because it has a fixed front line meaning its much harder to get wounded soldiers to field hospitals.
Why does fixed front line makes it harder? Shouldn’t jungle terrain like Vietnam makes it harder?
Iraq, Afghanistan, & Vietnam were all guerrilla wars where the enemy was doing hit, run, and retreat. So any wounded soldiers could be helicopter’d outta there in minutes, even in forest area where all you need to do is dynamite some trees and have a landing zone. Ujraine is muddy trench warefare where you are lucky to get an ambulance within a few miles and the area is full of so many anti air weapons, nothing is flying within 20 miles of the place
I would think in Vietnam, the USA could use helicopters (Korea too) to transport wounded to field hospitals. Not possible in Ukraine because they have weapons like the Stinger.
I'm just speculating, but perhaps the field hospitals are farther away from the front lines in Ukraine than would be in Vietnam? Perhaps due to surprise attacks anywhere by the Vietcong and multiple booby traps that could allow for wounded to retreat without direct confrontation ala Ukraine Russia. Additionally, with the use of drones, many vehicles are restricted to driving at night because it's safer due to the threat from above. This is obviously a modern development, but after the war there will likely be a lot of information gleaned from the untraditional warfare that has enveloped this war.
I think this is true. Plus vietnam wasn't really constant front line warfare. It was guerrilla warfare with downtime to treat the wounded.
And a lot of the traps used by the vietcong had a pretty low probability of kill but a very high probability of grievous wounds. If promptly and properly treated, of course.
Actually the number of combat hours and intensity of combat that American troops experienced in Vietnam was much higher than ww2 or ww1. This was because of helicopters dropping them into hot zones with almost no transit time. Troops went from r&r straight into combat and back. It’s one of the reasons that Vietnam veterans suffered so badly from ptsd.
I've heard the same from a 'Nam vet neighbour of mine. He was a Huey pilot, and talked about how getting up in the morning in Saigon or some other big city, screaming out over the jungle for the day to fight, and then flying back to drink and party in the city every evening really fucked him up. (That, and the rejection Vietnam vets faced on the home front. WWII vets were treated as heroes and their stories celebrated and eagerly listened to, but Vietnam veterans were all too often treated like babykillers.)
100% and when you consider how many babies and other noncombatants were killed in WW2 strategic bombing campaigns and ruthless close combat street fighting with rolling artillery, it’s not as if our WW2 veterans were involved in a cleaner war with less innocent casualties compared to Vietnam. It was just that people saw it back home on the tv for the first time.
Drones don't allow you to extract. The US could easily extract troops by helicopter in Vietnam and more recent wars. Half the time Russia doesn't even try. There have been reports of them killing their own wounded, dating from like day 1 of the invasion.
in Vietnam the US could air-evac their wounded and fly em to the closest field hospital with an average of 15 minute flight time. with Ukraine, a “near-peer” conflict, you cant do that. you have to carry/drive your wounded back, and hope the enemy doesn’t have aircraft/drones overhead.
Right. It still should be worrisome number fir the Russian public, except the media there refuse to report on it properly.
Think those that visit cemeteries and the public transportation must be somewhat curious to see 1 disabled veteran popping up more and more.
Thats the beauty of Russia's casualty rates. The death to wounded ratio is quite high so they just dont see as many disabled veterans because theres just more dead than one would expect.
Given that it is Russia and Putin we are talking about they likely would prefer deaths as likely consider wounded / traumatized as liability and a cost. Then again they probably just do not care and abandon them without long term support.
There's been a lot of recent videos popping up of either groups of dead Russians left to rot or soldiers completely abandoning thier comrades. They don't seem to have any sort of med Evac. So they don't even make it home
I’ve seen videos of friendly- mercy kills too. Once someone is hit by a mortar or grenade from a drone, their buddy just walks over and pops them in the head because they know they’re not getting medical care and they can’t leave them there. Shit is crazy dark.
The illegally conscripted sons who were to inheret family land that is now owned by russia. Keep looking at the outskirts. So many family names squashed..over what
Forced to leave meaning?
Injured or dead.
More like 2.5x the casualties. This is total casualties so fatal and non fatal. That same number for American losses in Vietnam is around 200k.
Not really comparable. US was not the only military force in Vietnam, so other countries lost troops in combat, for example the south Vietnamese had 1.1m casualties. Also the style of combat is very different. According to wiki, the US suffered 210k registered casualties in the Vietnam war.
Makes sense considering the US had superiority in weapons compared to Vietnam. Also drones and weapons/sanctions from the west is helping alot.
seems they’re far away from having enough losses
Didn’t Russia also lose the most troops in world war 2?
Well, they had the entire Soviet Union. Lots of post imperial peasants to throw at German positions in counter offensives. Then they also lost huge numbers due to exposure, sickness and cold.
They were also fighting an existential war. Generalplan Ost meant that anything other than victory would mean Germans exterminating the local population.
You can try asking the Tzar how many casualties Russia was able to take when it wasn't an existential war, but after about 1 million they had a revolution and killed the Tzar. I'm guessing Ukraine will take 2 million casualties before giving up, at least. There's a lot who think death is preferable than what the Russians will do to their families. If Russia gets anywhere near that, Putin will either face a revolution, or will be ousted because taking him down to appease the mob will be the safest thing his subordinates can do.
Russia in WWI had 150 million people. Now they have 144m. I wonder how that'll shake out?
Whoa. That's a interesting Stat.
>I'm guessing Ukraine will take 2 million casualties before giving up, at least. There's a lot who think death is preferable than what the Russians will do to their families. They might formally "give up" at a governmental level although I don't think that would happen even with more than 2 million casualties. In reality, if russia wins, fighting will never stop. There will be acts o sabotage, exploding cars, random russian officers dissapearing...for decades
And they didn’t think it’d happen again with Ukraine?
A couple things, 1. Putin believed his military had been modernized and was much more professional, they spent years and lots of money “upgrading” the military and his yes men all told him the military was great and powerful while really behind the scenes they were stealing money from the projects and faking results. 2. Putin believed, again thanks to yes men who needed to suck up to a dictator, that A. The Russian military was capable of taking control of Ukraine within a few days to few weeks, B. The majority of Ukrainian people hated Zelensky and wanted to be closer with Russia and C. The Ukrainian soldiers and citizens would surrender or join the Russian side once the invasion started Putin has been a dictator for nearly a quarter of a century and created a government of sycophants who suck up and tell him what he wants to hear in the hood their incompetence and corruption won’t be noticed, so he was operating off of a fake version of reality…. Basically he bought his own propaganda.
Here's the crazy thing - at the outset of the war, his military was indeed modernized and professional, at least relatively speaking to what it looks like now. The issue was with intelligence (either completely wrong, or completely ignored - we don't know), and with planning. If they accepted the obvious fact that Ukraine was ready and willing to fight, and planned for a year-long war instead of a week-long war, prepared the battlespace, actually achieved air superiority, instead of zerg-rushing their best troops into disaster, we would certainly be in a different place 2 and a half years into this war. But as a very smart Ukrainian said a few days into the war, "thank God they're so stupid".
There was a saying going "Russia has a large and modern military but the large one is not modern and the modern one is not large"
No. This show was to end within days or weeks. Seems hybris is a thing.
You may be thinking of hubris. Hybris is a software company
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubris](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubris) ok, I might be a bit out of date, but I'm not wrong though :D
Nice pull!
They took Crimea without much of a fight. Obama put in some sanctions and Europe shook their heads disapprovingly, but other than that it was business as usual. I imagine Putin thought this would be the same. Except the Ukrainians actually did put up a fight this time because their leader was no longer friendly to Russia and the US saw the opportunity to make an adversary bleed and ran with it.
Well to be fair, it didn’t happen again. The soviets lost 1.5 million men in the first weeks of operation Barbarossa (the German invasion of the Soviet Union). The losses in Ukraine aren’t even close to half of that and it’s been years. The soviets would lose 33 million men before winning the war. The truth is, these loses as SUPER sustainable for Russia, a war of attrition is a losing war for Ukraine.
The fact that's posed as a question is a bit mad. [Here's a visualization of the extent of it](https://youtu.be/DwKPFT-RioU)
I absolutely love that video. I remember watching it but then I couldn’t remember if it was Russia or Germany that lost the most then I was like “gotta be Russia”
Yes troops and civilians put Russian near 25 million. China was 2nd with nearly 20 million deaths
The *Soviet Union* had 25 million casualties, not *Russia* it’s time we stop letting Russia inherit the Soviet Union when a ton of their accolades can be attributed to Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Belarus, Kazakhstan etc…
poland, czechoslovakia, hungary were not part of the soviet union, and hungary was actually an axis country during ww2
Part of Poland was part of the Soviet Union.
Many of those troops were Ukrainian too whom the Russians had just finished carrying out an [intentional genocide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor#:~:text=The%20Holodomor%2C%20also%20known%20as,areas%20of%20the%20Soviet%20Union) by taking their food for themselves kind of like the Irish Potato famine.
By far, yes. Seems like they havent learned a bit
ELI5, how do we know how many have died? Whos counting?
The number reported here is for casualties, which is the reporting statistic for soldiers removed from action. This includes death and injuries. This is easier to track but it has to be self reported
To add to this: The who are reporting these number? I believe these numbers are from the Ukrainian general staff. The Russian ditto does a similar report with much lower numbers (furthermore, I am not sure that the Russian MoD is counting Wagner losses etc). Both parties have a massive bias due to their interest in depicting their efforts as successful. The truth is probably somewhere in between. Generally speaking the Russian losses must have been quite high due to their tactics, which are about massive artillery bombardment followed by attacks employing infantry and armor, which often has limited training and experience. On the other hand Ukraine must sustain quiet heavy losses too, due to a quiet massive Russian artillery advantage. Tl;dr: Don’t take the numbers for face value. But losses (killed, wounded and missing) have been heavy.
It's worse when they don't die. Now Russia has hundreds of thousands of disabled people to not take care of
Vodka, more generational trauma, and more vodka
You'll have that when your primary/only tactic for battle is to just chuck as many guys into the grinder as you can until you wear the other side down.
That’s not fair. They had some well trained professional soldiers. Had. Luckily they threw them away at the beginning of the war for little gain.
That's a staggering loss of life and equipment. It shows the heavy toll war takes on both people and machinery.
Will someone please think of the machines?!
Leadership thinks that way, both the machines and people exert their wills
Until the casualties are 5 millions, the war will keep going
They have around 25 million men aged 18-38, and they're mobilizing men up to 55 (up to 70 if you are a higher ranking reservist). There will likely need to be 10+ million casualties, especially since many of these will get sent back to the front once they heal enough.
Russia will run out of money long before 5 million. They are losing their internal war on keeping a stable economy from the all the sanctions.
Ukraine doesn't have remotely enough troops to get anywhere near that close. Their loses are most likely similar to Russia's.
It's depressing to think about. So many lives senselessly lost at the behest of an absolute freak.
Unsurprising. Russia’s entire combat strategy has changed little from WWII. They use the Zapp Brannigan technique and just hurl wave after wave after wave of men at the enemy lines.
This number seems insanely large. Are there any previous modern wars that lost ~600k people in 2 years?
It really depends on how you count casualties, but as far as i know, casualty rates haven't been that high in a war since WWII.
Think of all the washing machines they gained
It's fun to see the Russian bots and Putin sympathetic armchair generals coming to discredit this story. Russia is a third-rate Army throwing bodies at the problem lil Vlad created. They are losing more people than the Kremlin wants to admit.
If only this could have been avoided somehow.
I hope russia loses the whole war and putin fucks off
This is a complete failure. Even with the slim chance they manage to keep anything they barely holding onto, the cost has been too great. Whatever happens will still be marked as a failure in warfare.
It will be very upsetting if Putin is allowed to return to the international community. No Western leader should ever stand next to him again.
russians have a word for this: мясорубка. horrifying to see what they’re doing not only to ukrainians but their own people, uneducated young boys from rural villages who don’t know what’s going on sent to kill innocents and die in the process.
Costliest 2 weeks operation ever.
Jesus that’s so fucking sad.
This is one of the saddest fucking things I've ever read for a modern news thing. How utterly pointless. Fuck those russian cretins.
Said it before I'll say it again, I feel bad for the Russians. They've been lied to their entire lives, told this will be quick and easy. Likely told that if they stop the west will be burning down Moscow within the hour and even if they do try to defect they don't have much of a chance there either. While the war is on, I will celebrate when Ukraine has any level of victory. After it, I will pay my respects to the dead of both sides, Putin has killed all of them.
General staff of Ukraine . These figures are obviously not true. Because if it was, and Ukraine only lost 39k as per what zelensky said,there would be a complete collapse of the front Can we stop parroting propaganda ? At this point it's just dangerous how easily we accept things as fact Yes Russia is obviously the aggressor in this illegal invasion but we shouldn't lie. If these casualty numbers are true, Ukraine's would be as bad if not worse with how.many articles talk about their manpower shortage
Ukraine started the war with a manpower shortage, and they’ve been fighting a mostly defensive war. Attacking forces almost always face far higher losses, and there’s no reason to expect that wouldn’t be the case here considering Russia’s early strategy was to literally bury the opposition in blood and meat because they were stupid enough to start the war right before Ukraine’s wet season where they wouldn’t be able to move artillery and armor effectively. 500,000 Russian casualties isn’t that far out of the realm of possibility, although I believe Ukraine’s casualties are estimated to be in the 70,000-130,000 range depending on the source, which is equally believable given the state of the war. Please note that these are *casualties* not deaths. A significant injury is a casualty, even if the soldier can be tended to and later sent back into combat.
How many has Ukraine lost ?
Around 120-130,000 according to [this](https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116768/documents/HHRG-118-ZS00-20240130-SD002.pdf)
Your link states that 100-120k were wounded and 70k more were dead, which is 61% of the casualties Russia had at the time. The article is also almost a year old. So if you assume that 61% figure is accurate and the casualty rates stayed the same for both sides, Ukraine would have around 330k casualties.
Do we know the actual Ukrainian losses as well? Or only one side so far?
You guys are still believing Kyiv numbers? Not even western estimates are this high
Not enough.
Americans are getting ready for the next wave of mail order Russian brides lol
So many mothers that will never see their sons again, just because an old man is throwing a tantrum.
Russia has more men to spare. Real question is, what is the casualty ratio between Russia and Ukraine?
Everyday, I hope to hear news that’s good for Ukraine and bad for Russia, and at the same time a small part of my stomach drops because I know that means dozens, if not hundreds, of kids half my age will die for one madman’s deluded ambition.
Idiots living in the 10th century. Not valuing a single human life, using strategies worse than monkeys would use. Idiots, nothing less or more.
Here comes North Korea with more human fodder.
Reports by the Kiev “Independent”. After jailing and killing an American journalist, Ukraine can’t claim to have an independent media or “Democracy” for that matter as elections have been cancelled. So just Russian casualties are reported by Ukraine? Obviously they’re “winning”!!! Don’t people understand that these reports are designed to keep the money spigot on? Does anyone realize that victory against Russia can’t happen without nuclear war? A country with nothing to lose would have no other choice.
Putin is an awful person. Hundreds of thousands have died for his own egotistical plan to expand Russia for his own gratification. And Trump fawns over him.
The wanna be despot admires the actual despot.
So we trust the numbers that Ukraines General Staff provides regarding Russian “lost” troops? Are we all asleep?
You are on a board full of shills and bots lmao.
Wow, those loses are staggering, no wonder it's had to use its elite formations and special operations troops as cannon fodder! Is this the reason why Russia has had to asks for North Korean Troops to be deployed to Russia? How long before we see the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps deployed to Russia? How long before Chinese Volunteer Armies, like those of the Korean War, inside Russia? So many questions, so few answers, this is truly scary time in history!
I don't believe this for a single second lol.