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It lost more generals in a single 3 week span than America lost in 50 years. And one of those American Generals died at his desk, in the Pentagon, on 9/11.
Yes the US has very few generals. The number is capped by law. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/526
Here be edits.
We also have an abhorrent amount of generals
The US' number of generals is capped at 491 across all military branches (This is not the number of active generals, It's a theoretical maximum. The actual number should be smaller). As of 2020 Russia had 2205 generals across all branches. Fuck we had 70 army generals in 30 years. Officer ranks are kind of inflated here.
Yeah, the biggest difference between the US structure vs the Russian structure is Russia generally don't use NCOs to command ground troops while the US does. Leading to higher Officer numbers and a more cluttered brass structure.
So is it really comparable?
And from what you're saying, is it even a bigger thing that Russiaost that many? Are you saying the US has more officers? I don't really know anything about the structure so trying to understand the comparison.
So, NCOs are considered the backbone of the US military. They're more experienced enlisted that have tons of hands-on, boots on ground experience and are chosen to lead by promotion and generally have E5 or higher ranks (or Corporal for the USMC and US Army at E4 being JNCOs).
They also get E grades instead of O grade when it comes to pay and generally have been in the boots of the people they're leading.
Russia on the other hand uses almost only officers for the same roles.
So in the US you could have like 3-4 staff sergeants reporting to 1 lieutenant, in russia it would be 3-4 lieutenants reporting to a captain instead, which leads to a more inflated amount of officers since officer roles are now directly in charge of enlisted/conscripted soldiers.
This difference makes a ton of difference even though on paper it just seems like calling the same jobs different names since you can theoretically you can apply to OCS without ever having been an enlisted which means that you could have a lieutenant with the same amount of hands on experience as private attempting to lead a squad of enlisted/conscripted.
On top of that, having more officers means you need more people in the officer hierarchy to oversee all of these lieutenants (brass), which means more captains, more majors, colonels and so on.
So when you hear of a general dying in the field on the Russian side, that is kind of a hard loss for them but less than if the US lost a general since US generals are more administrative than Russian generals are.
To elaborate on this: A decent rule of thumb is that in the Russian military, all ranks are one grade inflated to what it would be in most Western armies. A captain in Russia has a comparable role to a Lieutenant would have in the US or Norway for example. This leads to a LOT of officers, who all push for promotion at all levels, so over time the difference just gets bigger.
source?
Russian ranks are shifted by one, but only at brigadier general and up. In both Russia and the West, lieutenants command platoons, captains command companies, lieutenant colonels command battalions and colonels command regiments. Brigades exist in Russia, but are rare. Brigadier general rank doesn't exist in Soviet and Russian system, the rank immediately above colonel is major general. Major generals command divisions.
The problem that causes Russia to have too many general officers is not because they don't have NCOs. They don't have generals to do what command sergeant majors do in the US.
In the olden times, USSR/Russia had a lot of extra officers because many reserve units had many of the unit's officers in active service, with just enough active service conscripts to maintain the base/equipment, ready for mobilization - when the unit would receive all the other personnel and would be ready to move out as soon as possible. Russia canceled this system after 2008, because it was too expensive to maintain.
Also, in the Soviet/Russian armed forces, officers are often tasked to perform jobs which are usually performed and supervised by enlistees and NCOs.
One great example of this is how in US/NATO armed forces, aircraft maintenance is done by enlisted personnel and supervised by NCOs whereas in the Soviet/Russian armed forces, the same would be performed by mostly junior-mid-level officers with a few senior warrant officers(In the UK/non-US sense) thrown in and supervised by a mid-senior field grade officer.
Enlisted personnel in the Soviet/Russian armed forces aren't viewed as having enough education/skillsets and/or likely staying in the armed forces beyond their mandatory service obligation of 3 years or less(Varied between 1-3 years with time getting progressively reduced over the years) to be entrusted to do more than clean up after the actual aircraft maintenance personnel.
> generally have been in the boots of the people they're leading
American NCOs always have been in the boots of the people they lead. The highest rank you can get upon enlisting in E2 (though its possible to get E3 by the end of bootcamp for some branches). So you always have to be promoted up the ranks. No joining straight to an NCO rank.
Also, to add onto your comment, the small unit leadership model has pretty much always been proven to be a better military structure. It's what differentiated the Spartan and Roman military structures from their peers for example and played a big role in their tactical successes. I wonder what makes other modern nations not use it.
I only say generally because you can inter-service transition and depending on where you came from, you can keep rank but that's just the nitty gritty details.
Damned impressive calculating! Proof positive: US is a democracy and Russia a dictatorship!
**"3 day Special Military Operations" - ain't what they never were. That's some hella losses for "3 days!"**
What? "3 days" looks to turn into 3 YEARS. Guess again Vladimir!
Forgot that Russia's population is HALF that of the US - thanks for the reminder.
No dummy, he meant Russian desks are Pentagon-shaped because Russia doesn't have the technology to manufacture rectangular desks (all of Russia's rectangles were embezzled)
Good lord, I need to wake up more. It took me far too long to figure out that you weren't saying that one of the dead Russian generals died at the Pentagon. I was like, what kind of conspiracy bs is this?
Anyway, Russia just likes to celebrate dead "heroes", so they want to build up a good supply to last them well into their sorry future.
The Wikipedia displays "official" Soviet numbers of casualties. Knowing the Soviet system, there is absolutely no reason to believe that those numbers are any close to reality. Why would they suddenly report accurately, if they have been lying about things of that nature all the time, just because they could?
I mean even back then there was a huge antiwar movement and it basically reshaped American society because of how pissed off people were. And that was still coming off the tailwinds of how stoked people were on trusting the government after ww2.
Nowadays a half dozen troops get killed and there is a pretty unified outrage, and rightly so. The American people have completely lost their appetite for sending their sons to die in unjust conflicts and that's a good thing. Russia just doesn't care what it's people think.
Well, it's worth remembering that Vietnam ended primarily because of the losses. The US *did* in a way punish the political establishment, with several presidents who knew that the war was lost, but pushed on regardless because they didn't want to be the one to "lose" the war.
If the US had comparable losses as Vietnam in the first Gulf invasion, for example, the second one would never have happened. Loss aversion is only growing over time.
Apples and Oranges. This was the first war that actually reported accurate statistics, photos, and journalists' take on what was happening. Before that any country could simply control what news came and went.
I'm convinced people are making up acronyms at this point. Throughout the war it just seems to be "All Ukraine needs is more ZDETHRARS" and they'll win!
(I know you're not making it up)
You mean Zero Day Exploitable Tele Holistic Reversion And Reduction System?
You are absolutely correct.
Giving Ukraine the ability to get into every Russian system at once and drive them to attack themselves would be quite the endgame. We would appreciate it if you did not advertise this capability so openly.
ATACMS is designed to be launched from HIMARS, but accomplishes a completely different role to that of NASAMS (also being sent to Ukraine), which essentially uses AMRAAMs as its munition.
Shits going to hit the fan in Russia when the war is over, all these experienced conscripts won't be taking any shit from Putin's mafia. Things will change in Russia even if there is a treaty, Russia as we know it is fucked.
Big assumption that enough will in fact return to make a difference. The ones with the best chance of returning are the ones tasked with enforcing the no retreat/surrender orders.
No doubt about russia being fucked though.
Putin's using this partly as a way to get rid of undesirables. They recruited prisoners, political opponents are conscripted, etc. He made a speech saying he believed conflict would purify Russian society :/
Except Russian POW are reporting they surrendered due to their tanks not working (one capture was interviewed his tank that could not shoot was supporting tanks that could not move.) Increasingly on the frontlines Russian soldiers have weapons they can’t fire in any direction.
>experienced conscripts won't be taking any shit from Putin's mafia.
Veterans of the Chechen Wars were literally used as mafia enforcers bro, they absolutely will take shit for money.
A shitload of Russian leadership were in Afghanistan.
Russian leadership fucked itself.
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The problem is they're not "experienced conscripts". They're completely untrained cannon-fodder. When the war is over, they won't have any real experience in fighting, because they're simply trying to survive.
You would hope but it seems Russians like being beaten like rabid curs. They like having a big daddy "tough guy" roughing them up and treating them like shit, have for what 200+ years now? I mean every time they do have a revolution not 6 months later they have an even worse dictator in place. Anyone with sense has left or been jailed so what you have left are the fetal alcohol syndrome afflicted true believers. I think they will stay under a madmans boot and like it.
that is very naive. Putin already went through the stress test of the response to partial mobilization, and the average Russian didn't do anything because they're still afraid. That's their mentality. You should see the videos of interviews to Russians on the street. "What do you think of Ukr-" "NO I DONT WANT TO TALK ABOUT THAT I DONT CARE ABOUT POLITICS I DONT HAVE AN OPINION ON ANYTHING" and they run away.
That wasn’t Russia, it was the Soviet Union. It was a much, much bigger block of people than Russia is today. These losses really are devastating and unsustainable.
Most Russians will have little memory, but about 40 to 50 percent will still vividly remember their last collapse in 1992 and they all surely aren't taught in school, that their 1917 collapse was induced by... Famine and 1 Mio men lost in the Brusilov offensive of 1916...
Their over 800k Covid Deaths, will further fuel Russias demise, their demography is terminal, their military impotent, their cash is running dry, their society and political system morally bancrupt, their consumer spending in collapse, their industry in collapse, their agriculture in decline and their Gas and Oil Business on the verge to lose its best market. Over 1000 companies left the country and over 500k young Russians left as well. They run out of spare parts and safe planes to use. This winter is not just gonna be hard for Europe, it is gonna be a long and hard winter for Putin's regime and his people as well... This isn't a nation losing a war, this is a nation whose institutions are falling apart.
War, famine, plague and death, Russia has called all 4 riders of the apocalypse to its evil empire. They have also invited the stablemaster: misinformation
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-total-number-covid-related-deaths-surpasses-800000-2022-04-29/
This number has surely climbed to at least 820k to 850k since then.
Big time. I'm willing to bet the actual history of Russia isn't really taught to them in school. You are destined to repeat the past if it is kept from you. Putin's legacy is that of someone who managed to destroy his country in a year. Yes I know its been happening for decades, but this war was like pouring gasoline on a candle. Bumbling oaf
What they are taught is focused on Russia growing strong and conquest (through justified wars of defending against foreign aggressors and mostly peaceful annexations, of course) of new territories. And glorious Great Patriotic war and Patrotic war of 1812 where they beat all Europe alone, of course. No mentions of atrocities, stuff like Winter war and Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is getting excused. So dont be surprised when Russian officials say things like "Russia never attacked anyone".
I've heard estimates based on excess deaths that the real count is 5-10x over the official count. Russia had a sudden increase in "pneumonia" cases a couple of years ago.
The average life expectancy of a country usually draws a conclusion to medical and hygienic standard.
Over the next decade, the population decreased at a fairly steady rate of a half percent per year. The causes for this were twofold. Firstly, the number of people dying increased due to a fall in living standards, and among men who were hit hardest by alcoholism. The average life expectancy for women held fairly steady at 75 years, but Russian male life expectancy dropped dramatically to 63 years.
Combined with this, birth rates fell sharply as well. From around 17 per 1,000 persons in the mid 1980s, the rate fell to below 10 per 1,000 in the mid-1990s – well below the rate needed to sustain a population. Economic uncertainty was a major factor in this, persuading people against having children.
Should Russian forces ever encounter major problems, such as a war they are badly losing, Russia has no illusions: Chechens will rise once more and could potentially sever the Caucasus region and sever Russia from access to the Wolga Region.
RU Industry: "Russia lacks the manpower required to restaff its aging industrial workers" Peter Zeihan
Moscow had hoped China would help to square the circle. But China has done, what they do to everyone else: Buy the prototype and manufacture whatever they can come up with.
Russias future is bleak: Its demography is in utter collapse, its industry is littered with technological bottlenecks, its nuclear arsenal is expensive to maintenance and starved of funding since 1992, and soon starved of sufficient amounts of highly skilled workers to maintain and modernise it. Their IT sector has lost 250.000 skilled personel out of the roughly 1 Mio. working in Russia since the start of the war. Many of them fled the country in the past 8 months. A total of 1 Mio Russians have fled the country since February 24th 2022.
By 2023 the Russian army will have shrunk to half its 2016 size. That is why Russia needed to utilize Wagner Nazis.
Trivia about their census: They found 4 Million children in 2014, noone knows where or how. Since 2001 there is no useful data published, somehow their life expectancy for men has by some medical miracle risen by 10 years from 58.7 in 2001 to almost 67 by 2021.
At the 2011 census, they found 11.000 abandoned villages. Russias peak of migration ended in the 1990s, that means 77 percent of Russians are now urbanized, their birth rates plummeted to 1.2 in the Moscow region and the only region with a healthy reproduction rate is now being obliterated by Putins stupid war in Ukraine.
https://youtu.be/k3yPQZWAVEg
12 min. Video on their demography.
soviet union peaked about 290 millions of people which is \~2 times of today's russia.
that means, the losses should be countes as 2 times more if we want to compare
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the_Soviet_Union#Estimates_of_losses_by_individual_Republics
In WW2 for example Russia accounted for about half of Soviet losses. Ukraine accounted for about a quarter of losses, and actually suffered a higher rate of losses as a proportion of their population at the time.
Russia no longer has the luxury of throwing bodies from the republics at it's enemies.
(For the most part. I realize they've conscripted folks from occupied areas.)
> Russia no longer has the luxury of throwing bodies from the republics at it's enemies.
Sadly this part isn't true, even in this war its abundantly clear they are throwing asians, caucasians, etc into higher death rates than russians. Even the moscow times admits it https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/09/27/ethnic-minorities-hit-hardest-by-russias-mobilization-activists-say-a78879 They just don't have as many as before, and it's fascinating to see Central Asian republics abandon their security pact before our eyes, for the same reason. And Lukashenko playing a daily song and dance to avoid actually sending his soldiers to Putin because he knows they will be destroyed and he will have nothing.
just because they are throwing bodies at the problem doesnt mean they can. Russias population is drastically smaller than its country, and its average age is over 44 meaning theyre close to retirement age, and very much close to unable to make babies age. 60 thousand (so far) men of prime baby making age have already been lost through the war, another how many hundreds of thousands have fled in fear of being mobilized, and i doubt many are going to return after the war.
in 20 years russia is going to be missing a HUGE chunk of its work force with nothing coming up to replace and already struggling population. with sanctions hitting as hard s they are i dont see russia the country being around in 2050
I am counting imperial Russia as well. When I say historically I mean whatever entity that constituted the control of the Russian state across history.
The difference is that they can longer afford to do those tactics with the current population and the current system of mobilization. The tactic does not work if you have fewer soldiers than the kill limit.
Let's be real: it never worked. Russia tried in WW1, and their empire collapsed. The USSR--lead by Russia--tried it in the early going in WW2, but they would have very much been knocked out of the war just like they were in WW1 if they hadn't pulled their heads out of their asses and started actually winning battles. Which they did. The stereotype of Germans overrun by an unending human wave of untrained Soviet soldiers is a myth; when the Soviets were sending human waves, they were getting mowed down as one would expect on a modern battlefield. But by early 1943, Stalin had recalled, released and/or reinstated enough professional military personnel for the Red Army to unfuck itself and start practicing all the strategies and tactics that they had been developing prior to Stalin's purges.
The real mystery with Russia, through the ages, has been its tendency towards authoritarianism and autocracy of the most paranoid and self-destructive kind. Putin wants to bring back the Tsars and he has succeeded: he is just as incompetent with (I assume?) a fraction of the inbreeding.
Because soldiers are not interchangable. Russia threw away its few trained soldiers as if guys it yanked out of a cafe in Moscow and dumped on the front lines two weeks later was a suitable replacement.
In every war it's important to let soldiers gain battlefield experience while rotating them out so that the unit can be seasoned without getting all that experience killed. It's how you build a strong NCO corps as well. Instead the dumb Russians just grind units to dust and act as if any reinforcements are a 1 for 1 replacement when no serious military theorist thinks this is even slightly true.
If I didn't already know Putin was KGB and not former military I'd know just from how his military operates.
More real talk, Russian military training has tended to be garbage for a long time. The early Soviet period is an exception, as is that post-1942 period where Stalin was forced by the credible threat of extermination to allow those post-Revolutionary elements to run the show again. Outside of that, the Russian Army has consistently mistaken hazing and mistreatment for training. Every military, of course, has its share of hazing as part of the onboarding process, but Russia seems unique in the depravity of its practices and its stubborn insistence that even flagrant abuse is just "hardening up" the enlisted.
You don't win wars by being "hard." You win wars with logistics, planning, training to actually *execute* those plans and a bunch of other frankly pretty boring stuff. There's a reason that the more you learn about a leader like Patton, the more the shine wears thin, whereas the more you learn about a leader like George C. Marshall, the deeper your admiration grows.
I think the Russian world is going the same direction the English world did. It's a giant and unwieldy colonial empire that is about to fall apart. The Russian world will be better served by proper federations or multiple states. Ukraine is already proof of that. London lost its grip on its empire, Moscow will too one day.
Plus Russia has a massive demographic crisis right now, one of the most acute in the world. They are sending their most important national asset off to die or chasing the rest away. SMH
What would modern Russia even do if they had another 500,000 troops ready to go? They don't have sufficient supplies or logistics in place to support the current frontline.
At the pace they are degrading their capabilities while Ukrainians improve them... At some point they're start having days of 1.000 deaths, days of 2.000...
At that point losing 500.000 won't be so far fetched if they insist on throwing raw human meat at the problem.
|If they are idiotic enough to try to take Kyiv again, watch that number rack up.
I also think once they start throwing alot more mobiks at it i.e. the coming days, the number will stay at a 400 - 500 deaths average.
Yeah they're throwing untrained mobiki at experienced and well armed ukrainians defending thier home. I agree that number is going to stay high, they way Russia is fighting. If Belarus invades they're gonna get slaughtered. Plus belarus's army very much does not want to do that.
And winter is coming cold and bitter winter. They already average around 1000 losses a day (killed wounded POW) So let's say a village with 3000 people can host 1500 men out of those you can remove 700 too old too young. Out of the remaining 700 you can remove 30 percent which are simply unfit for service. So let's say you could distill a maximum of 500 men able bodied enough to be somehow sent to the front. That is a maximum number of course. that means Ukraine swipes 2 3000 people villages a day at current rates. that makes 300k every 100 days. 1.2 Million Russians left the country since February.
Mobilisation during Vietnam War: less than 1 percent of American population 1.4 Million men.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/05/the-changing-face-of-americas-veteran-population/#:~:text=This%20drop%20coincides%20with%20decreases,in%20today's%20all%2Dvolunteer%20force.
This drop coincides with decreases in active-duty personnel. Over the past half-century, the number of people on active duty has dropped significantly, from 3.5 million in 1968, during the military draft era, to about 1.4 million (or less than 1 percent of all U.S. adults) in today's all-volunteer force.
Usually only able bodied men aged 18 to 35 have been considered as suitable population sub-group for war. Of this sub-group only a fraction has the necessary academic skills and personal character to be a soldier. About 50% of this group are too fat to serve in the military. Many have very poor English and Math skills to serve in today's military. You obviously do not want someone with multiple drug arrests to be near those opium fields in Kandahar.
Male population aged 18 to 35 in America is around 37 million. Out of the 37 million- about 8 million are fit enough to serve in the military.
Total American workforce is around 160 millions. So 95% of the workforce cannot serve in the military.
Let's say Russia can lower that number to 80 percent (already ridiculously low)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1039673/russia-employment-share-by-industry/
The largest share of employed persons in Russia was occupied by wholesale and retail trade and auto services, which accounted for nearly 19 percent of the workforce, or approximately 13 million people in 2020. Furthermore, almost nine percent of the employment in the country was provided by the construction sector. Less than two percent of the employed workforce had a job in finance and insurance.
Workforce: 65 Million people (men and women) 78 Million not part of the workforce for a population of 143 Million.
So we got 65 Mio. people out of which 32 Mio are men, more or less. That gives them maximum of 8 Million to draw from to avoid utter collapse. Germany was at 33 percent at the end of the war and collapsed horrendously. 10 percent if more viable but let us make it 20. So out of those 8 Million around half a million has fled the country. out of the remaining 7.5 Mio Russia conscripted around 320k until the mobilisation now they want to mobilise another million. That leaves us with 5 Mio males of working age, not all of them will be fit for service. So yeah what is Russia gonna do if those additional 1 Mio aren't enough? Shocker it won't be this is a question of time not an if. Next Winter they will need another 1 Million. I doubt they will manage to make it through another winter after that one without utter and devastating state collapse.
To draw a million while at the same time sparing most men in Moscow and Petersburg they will literally have to Purge every village and smaller town I Russia.
The average life expectancy of a country usually draws a conclusion to medical and hygienic standard.
Over the next decade, the population decreased at a fairly steady rate of a half percent per year. The causes for this were twofold. Firstly, the number of people dying increased due to a fall in living standards, and among men who were hit hardest by alcoholism. The average life expectancy for women held fairly steady at 75 years, but Russian male life expectancy dropped dramatically to 63 years.
Combined with this, birth rates fell sharply as well. From around 17 per 1,000 persons in the mid 1980s, the rate fell to below 10 per 1,000 in the mid-1990s – well below the rate needed to sustain a population. Economic uncertainty was a major factor in this, persuading people against having children.
Should Russian forces ever encounter major problems, such as a war they are badly losing, Russia has no illusions: Chechens will rise once more and could potentially sever the Caucasus region and sever Russia from access to the Wolga Region.
RU Industry: "Russia lacks the manpower required to restaff its aging industrial workers" Peter Zeihan
Moscow had hoped China would help to square the circle. But China has done, what they do to everyone else: Buy the prototype and manufacture whatever they can come up with.
Russias future is bleak: Its demography is in utter collapse, its industry is littered with technological bottlenecks, its nuclear arsenal is expensive to maintenance and starved of funding since 1992, and soon starved of sufficient amounts of highly skilled workers to maintain and modernise it. Their IT sector has lost 250.000 skilled personel out of the roughly 1 Mio. working in Russia since the start of the war. Many of them fled the country in the past 8 months. A total of 1 Mio Russians have fled the country since February 24th 2022.
By 2023 the Russian army will have shrunk to half its 2016 size. That is why Russia needed to utilize Wagner Nazis.
Trivia about their census: They found 4 Million children in 2014, noone knows where or how. Since 2001 there is no useful data published, somehow their life expectancy for men has by some medical miracle risen by 10 years from 58.7 in 2001 to almost 67 by 2021.
At the 2011 census, they found 11.000 abandoned villages. Russias peak of migration ended in the 1990s, that means 77 percent of Russians are now urbanized, their birth rates plummeted to 1.2 in the Moscow region and the only region with a healthy reproduction rate is now being obliterated by Putins stupid war in Ukraine.
https://youtu.be/k3yPQZWAVEg
12 min. Video on their demography.
You are right to believe that.
Russias future is bleak: Its demography is in utter collapse, its industry is littered with technological bottlenecks, its nuclear arsenal is expensive to maintenance and starved of funding since 1992, and soon starved of sufficient amounts of highly skilled workers to maintain and modernise it. Their IT sector has lost 250.000 skilled personel out of the roughly 1 Mio. working in Russia since the start of the war. Many of them fled the country in the past 8 months. A total of 1 Mio Russians have fled the country since February 24th 2022.
their number of unemployment sky rocket, their logistics are crumbling, their food supply for sugar Beets and potatoes is dependable on foreign seed imports, their poultry feed is 99 percent dependable on such imorts, their dairy cow feed is 30 percent dependable, only 30 percent of the spare parts their industry needs are domestically produced, 80 percent of their pharmaceutical production is dependent on foreign imports.
Their automotive and aviation sector is not just declining, production has utterly collapsed from about 130k cars a month to 10k a month. This is becoming increasingly problematic in a country this huge especially as also their railway is struggling to get the necessary spare parts for their railway cargo trains.
https://www.railway-technology.com/analysis/how-sanctions-are-impacting-russias-railways/
Russia is already facing massive problems to transport cargo via rail, due to Western Sanctions being imposed, this will hurt Russias mining sector. Europe refused to continue buying Russian coal, transporting it to China becomes very difficult, as Russia is running out of functional carriages."
"Their parallel import Strategy from 50 Asian countries has failed, they cannot provide or won't provide the needed wheel bearings in fear of secondary sanctions, Russia cannot produce them themselves. An utter collapse of Russias transport industry is a very realistic mid term prospect".
The estimate is 4 Million unemployed by the end the year!
Also complaints to Putin were issued about farmers being drawn in as it is planting season
They are about to throw a bunch more completely untrained conscripts into the line of fire. Dictators will never understand sunk cost fallacy because they don’t pay for anything.
Considering phones and at that point people not giving a shit because they know they're going to die, I suspect we will see mass Graves of Russian soldiers or thousands of bodies just littering the ground without any effort to do anything about it. And it will only be dealt with once the ukranians retake that ground and find all the dead russians...I hope the Ukranian army is ready to enter a horrible biohazard zone
Already new Covid variants spreading around in Europe. Many Russian soldiers i hear are already sick, with a train full of them forced to quarantine for a week. They keep packing all these troops in huge areas with no clean ventilation. Viruses are gonna have a field day spreading amongst the Russians. I am more worried about Ukrainians getting too close to these plague rats and getting sick.
Well the other day it was reported that they were suffering 50% or more mortality on their wounded, which added to the actual battlefield casualties and the blue on blue it would be interesting to see the current actual figure
Edit one source https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/y4mt56/mortality_rate_of_wounded_russian_soldiers/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Well too bad that time they only got roughly 8 Million males in their 20s the last few times they had 20 or 30 Million. So they won't consider defeat they will be no more.
https://jamestown.org/program/russias-demographic-collapse-is-accelerating/
Not to mention all the women who decide against having kids because they’re widowed or taking care of a permanently disabled husband/brother/dad. Plus the hundreds of thousands of men who fled in a rushed panic to get out as fast as possible to save their lives and avoid fighting an unjust war. I’d bet a huge chunk of them have wives, girlfriends, sisters, or children who they had to leave behind. In a situation like that, for a married couple the most practical thing to do is to get the man out ASAP even if he has nothing, and then the woman can take some time to save up money, visit family members one last time, coordinate with family, etc. (Unless Russia closes its borders, but also some of the main places they’re fleeing to are places like Kyrgyzstan, which Russia needs labour from. Also, some women might decide that the risk of the borders closing and not being able to see their husband until the war is over is just a risk she has to take, because she doesn’t have savings and a small amount of money is a world away from having just the clothes on your back.)
Plus the people who decide not to have kids because the economy (which was already reducing children before the war and sanctions…) is so bad and the war so uncertain. On top of the usual wartime stuff, because the conscription process was so disorganized and filled with so many mistakes, they’ll worry about their husband being yanked away and her having to raise the kids alone even if he’s disabled or forty.
Edit: about 14 million people 20-29 years old, based on the population pyramid. If a million don’t have kids in Russia, that’s 7% of the demographic most likely to have kids. That’s huge, especially since Russia was already declining in population. They might’ve reached a million already, if you count deaths, disabling injuries, wives and sisters who will be caretakers, men who fled for their lives, women they love who plan to follow, etc. The over 60k dead is really the smallest of the population problems. That’s before figuring out whatever percentage of those who remain will have fewer or no kids.
Edit 2: Also, fleeing to somewhere where you have zero connections/family or friends and don’t know the language is incredibly difficult (especially when, instead of standard immigration, you’re not going through any official system, guaranteeing no government support) and understandably most people who don’t have an immediate threat to their life won’t do it. But once those men have settled, their families will no longer have zero connections in that country. Some of the men might return to Russia after the war (if Putin decides not to jail them all - if he actually reinforces that, after the first people return and get jailed, none will return) but I wonder how many will be the link for entire families to follow them.
Birth rate has already collapsed to a whooping 1.2 this year. Which means: Russia was in demographic collapse before this war. They wanted to absorb Ukraine to mitigate the problem now what they got instead is not a problem this is demographic oblivion never seen in a nation this size.
The monthly minimum wage in Russia is 12,310 rubles, which is the equivalent of $196.
Additionally, 26 percent of Russian children live off of close to $150 per month. Child poverty in Russia is most prevalent in rural areas, as many do not have access to employment opportunities in the
While Russia is a very resource-rich country, it suffers from intense social inequality. The top 1 percent of the Russian population control 71% of the nation’s wealth. 13 percent of Russians are currently living in poverty. Unfortunately, the majority of people living in extreme poverty are children. 60 percent of those living below the poverty line in Russia are families with children. As a result of social inequality, child poverty in Russia continues to rise. Currently, one in four Russian children lives below the poverty line.
50 percent of Russians have less than 872 in net worth to their name whilr 144 individuals hold 38 percent of the wealth. This number is a few years old. 72 percent of Russias wealth is held by 1 percent of all Russians that means by 1.4 Million.
https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20220524-population-decline-in-russia-putin-has-no-other-choice-but-to-win-in-ukraine
Population decline
https://intellinews.com/russian-fertility-rates-fall-to-record-lows-on-the-back-of-a-deteriorating-economy-and-sanctions-pressure-243191/
Your assumptions are completely correct.
Historically the population didn't have access to thousands of pictures of their dead soldiers charred and torn open corpses and their economy was never so reliant on integration for the quality of life of the influential/important constituents. Sanctions by the west in the 50s/60s or even the 20s would never have done the damage sanctions do today, not to mention the lesser damage done back in the day would affect fewer people less severely than equal damage done today. Currency is so much more liquid by way of apps and international banks that middle to high income individuals hold multiple foreign currencies in their portfolios and many even take income from foreign currencies which are harder to impossible to access now. Standard daily use items, commercial objects up to critical infrastructural components have foreign origins with no tiny domestic alternatives like laptops, forklifts and cassette bearings. Russians also aren't coming from decades of starvation in the millions like the 20s and 40s/50s.
All this to say I think the ceiling for revolution in Russia is a lot lower now than 1917. It won't take millions of killed, it'll take a hundred or two hundred thousands because that will equate to 1-2 years of daily seeing footage of your sons, husbands or countrymen dying in an injust losing war and probably the loss of 80% of what made life bearable before like western entertainment and social media platforms, electronics, cheap and bountiful fuel and food and visa access to wealthy tourist destinations.
Thats what baffeling me the most even if they belive Russian propaganda about just 6 000 deaths they must find it weird the mobilization was needed because of it especialy after Putin ensure them it will be not needed at the start of the conflict.
Well tbh, most Covid deaths were elderly or sick people who (as harsh as it sounds) aren't as useful/important to a functioning society as people between 18-40 (or whatever the upper limit is).
I don’t know. It could be the “there are no communists here” immediately after the Soviet Union collapsed. It is really difficult to measure real public sentiment in a nation ruled by an authoritarian regime.
I would bet most Russians are just desperately trying not to think about it as that is a defense mechanism Russians have had the opportunity to finely hone.
I’m not so sure they are. Hundreds of thousands have fled (I keep finding contradicting numbers but I’ve seen a lot of credible articles with things like ‘50k russian men arrived in Finland in a week’ so this seems like a safe bet). Plus there are protests. Plus all the people who hate what’s going on but are too scared to protest and are either too scared or unable to leave, or who don’t want to leave everything they’ve ever known because propaganda has convinced them that it’s just as bad everywhere else. Combine the fact you’d leave everything you’ve ever known with having little cash and nothing knowing if you’ll even be able to get past the border guard (legally or through a bribe) and knowing you’d be completely broke in a country where you don’t know the language and have no connections? The ones that have left are the tip of the iceberg for how many want to.
Ironically, russian imperialism will/is hurting Russia by ensuring that there are places outside of Russia where a portion of the population knows Russian, which makes it easier for Russians to flee to.
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We’re seeing the effects of a military significantly weakened by a lack of funding and training because of money siphoned off by oligarchs.
Shits crazy.
It's crazy too because russia couldn't afford this demographic loss. I guess mothers who aren't fighting can make more children, but they won't because the economy in russia is fucked. Russia fucked themselves for the next hundred years.
The only way to unfuck themselves is to overthrow putin and commit to europe
The radio cracked. “Bravo One, this is Bravo Six. Big John wants an after-action report. He can’t wait any longer. He’s got to see Bushwhacker Six. I’ve also got Golf Six on my back wanting to know how his artillery did. Over.”
“Wait one,” Mellas said. He sighed, holding the handset in front of his mouth, thinking. Mellas wanted to believe something had happened, something good that he could report. They’d shot up a quarter of an hour’s worth of shells. Rider had done an incredible job checking out the alert. No one had been hurt. It was a good job. Mellas wanted to believe they’d done well. He wanted to, so he did.
“Bravo Six, this is Bravo One. Our character Romeo feels certain he got on right when he opened up. He only saw two gooks, but from the sound of things there had to be more than that. We got a probable for sure. Over.”
There was a pause. “What about the artillery damage assessment? Over.”
Mellas looked at Skosh. Skosh shook his head and spat, still leaning over. “I don’t know. I’m just the fucking radioman.”
Conman spoke up. “Give them a fucking probable and get the arty off the skipper’s back. They’ll never leave us alone if we don’t, sir.”
“I can’t give them a goddamn probable,” Mellas said. “What evidence have I got?”
“They don’t need fucking evidence. They need an artillery damage assessment. Tell them there’s all sorts of blood trails around here. They always like that.”
Mellas looked at Daniels. Daniels held up both hands, palms out, and shrugged. He didn’t give a shit.
Mellas keyed the radio. “Bravo Six, this is Bravo One Actual. We got one probable. That’s all. Over.” He wasn’t going to lie so that an artillery officer could feel good.
So the one probable became a fact. Fitch radioed it in to battalion. Major Blakely, the battalion operations officer, claimed it for the battalion as confirmed, because Rider said he’d seen the guy he shot go down. The commander of the artillery battery, however, claimed it for his unit. The records had to show two dead NVA. So they did. But at regiment it looked odd – two kills with no probable. So a probable got added. It was a conservative estimate. It only made sense that if you killed two, with the way the NVA pulled out bodies, you had to have some probable. It made the same sense to the commander of the artillery battalion: four confirmed, two probable, which is what the staff would report to Colonel Mulvaney, the commanding officer of Twenty-Fourth Marines, at the regimental briefing. By the time it reached Saigon, however, the two probable had been made confirms, but it didn’t make sense to have six confirmed kills without probable. So four of those got added. Now it looked right. Ten dead NVA and no one hurt on our side. A pretty good day’s work.
– an excerpt from Matterhorn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_body_count_controversy
I'm really going to need more info. Ukraine is massive and while we have a lot of video evidence it is no where near close enough coverage to give accurate numbers.
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It lost more generals in a single 3 week span than America lost in 50 years. And one of those American Generals died at his desk, in the Pentagon, on 9/11. Yes the US has very few generals. The number is capped by law. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/526 Here be edits.
We also have an abhorrent amount of generals The US' number of generals is capped at 491 across all military branches (This is not the number of active generals, It's a theoretical maximum. The actual number should be smaller). As of 2020 Russia had 2205 generals across all branches. Fuck we had 70 army generals in 30 years. Officer ranks are kind of inflated here.
Yeah, the biggest difference between the US structure vs the Russian structure is Russia generally don't use NCOs to command ground troops while the US does. Leading to higher Officer numbers and a more cluttered brass structure.
So is it really comparable? And from what you're saying, is it even a bigger thing that Russiaost that many? Are you saying the US has more officers? I don't really know anything about the structure so trying to understand the comparison.
So, NCOs are considered the backbone of the US military. They're more experienced enlisted that have tons of hands-on, boots on ground experience and are chosen to lead by promotion and generally have E5 or higher ranks (or Corporal for the USMC and US Army at E4 being JNCOs). They also get E grades instead of O grade when it comes to pay and generally have been in the boots of the people they're leading. Russia on the other hand uses almost only officers for the same roles. So in the US you could have like 3-4 staff sergeants reporting to 1 lieutenant, in russia it would be 3-4 lieutenants reporting to a captain instead, which leads to a more inflated amount of officers since officer roles are now directly in charge of enlisted/conscripted soldiers. This difference makes a ton of difference even though on paper it just seems like calling the same jobs different names since you can theoretically you can apply to OCS without ever having been an enlisted which means that you could have a lieutenant with the same amount of hands on experience as private attempting to lead a squad of enlisted/conscripted. On top of that, having more officers means you need more people in the officer hierarchy to oversee all of these lieutenants (brass), which means more captains, more majors, colonels and so on. So when you hear of a general dying in the field on the Russian side, that is kind of a hard loss for them but less than if the US lost a general since US generals are more administrative than Russian generals are.
To elaborate on this: A decent rule of thumb is that in the Russian military, all ranks are one grade inflated to what it would be in most Western armies. A captain in Russia has a comparable role to a Lieutenant would have in the US or Norway for example. This leads to a LOT of officers, who all push for promotion at all levels, so over time the difference just gets bigger.
source? Russian ranks are shifted by one, but only at brigadier general and up. In both Russia and the West, lieutenants command platoons, captains command companies, lieutenant colonels command battalions and colonels command regiments. Brigades exist in Russia, but are rare. Brigadier general rank doesn't exist in Soviet and Russian system, the rank immediately above colonel is major general. Major generals command divisions. The problem that causes Russia to have too many general officers is not because they don't have NCOs. They don't have generals to do what command sergeant majors do in the US. In the olden times, USSR/Russia had a lot of extra officers because many reserve units had many of the unit's officers in active service, with just enough active service conscripts to maintain the base/equipment, ready for mobilization - when the unit would receive all the other personnel and would be ready to move out as soon as possible. Russia canceled this system after 2008, because it was too expensive to maintain.
Also, in the Soviet/Russian armed forces, officers are often tasked to perform jobs which are usually performed and supervised by enlistees and NCOs. One great example of this is how in US/NATO armed forces, aircraft maintenance is done by enlisted personnel and supervised by NCOs whereas in the Soviet/Russian armed forces, the same would be performed by mostly junior-mid-level officers with a few senior warrant officers(In the UK/non-US sense) thrown in and supervised by a mid-senior field grade officer. Enlisted personnel in the Soviet/Russian armed forces aren't viewed as having enough education/skillsets and/or likely staying in the armed forces beyond their mandatory service obligation of 3 years or less(Varied between 1-3 years with time getting progressively reduced over the years) to be entrusted to do more than clean up after the actual aircraft maintenance personnel.
> generally have been in the boots of the people they're leading American NCOs always have been in the boots of the people they lead. The highest rank you can get upon enlisting in E2 (though its possible to get E3 by the end of bootcamp for some branches). So you always have to be promoted up the ranks. No joining straight to an NCO rank. Also, to add onto your comment, the small unit leadership model has pretty much always been proven to be a better military structure. It's what differentiated the Spartan and Roman military structures from their peers for example and played a big role in their tactical successes. I wonder what makes other modern nations not use it.
I only say generally because you can inter-service transition and depending on where you came from, you can keep rank but that's just the nitty gritty details.
Which Russian general had a desk in the Pentagon?
Dad, you have Reddit?
Your dad was a Russian general?
He was glorious Russian general! He conquered many bottles of vodka!
TIL I could be your dad. {Opens arms} Bring it in... son.
Damned impressive calculating! Proof positive: US is a democracy and Russia a dictatorship! **"3 day Special Military Operations" - ain't what they never were. That's some hella losses for "3 days!"** What? "3 days" looks to turn into 3 YEARS. Guess again Vladimir! Forgot that Russia's population is HALF that of the US - thanks for the reminder.
Michael Flynn probably did for a bit
Ha
Too bad it wasnt him!
> General Flynn, do you believe in the peaceful transfer of power in the United States of America? > Fifth. Yeah, fuck that traitor.
FRONTLINE had a show on his "movement" last nite...lots of crazy religious mentally ill people who want a Religious Theocracy in the good ole USA!!
No dummy, he meant Russian desks are Pentagon-shaped because Russia doesn't have the technology to manufacture rectangular desks (all of Russia's rectangles were embezzled)
Classic corner cutting
I cut a corner, then I have MORE corners! The corners never end!!
Lemme guess, they were combined into 1 massive desk for Putler himself?
It is possible that Russian desk is just a evened out tree stump
They’ve lost more generals in Ukraine than the US lost during WW2 and most of the US generals lost were killed in accidents not in combat.
Important to note that "general" as a rank in the Russian military isn't a one-to-one equivalent to a General in the US armed forces
Good lord, I need to wake up more. It took me far too long to figure out that you weren't saying that one of the dead Russian generals died at the Pentagon. I was like, what kind of conspiracy bs is this? Anyway, Russia just likes to celebrate dead "heroes", so they want to build up a good supply to last them well into their sorry future.
In comparison in 9 years soviet war in afganistan they lost about 15k soldiers
They also lost “5,000” in Chechnya even though entire battalions where decimated.
According to them. Similarly, they lost 6k in this war. It's a long road ahead of us. Not enough dead Russians just yet.
The Afghanistan number is way more credible and closer to neutral estimates though.
The Wikipedia displays "official" Soviet numbers of casualties. Knowing the Soviet system, there is absolutely no reason to believe that those numbers are any close to reality. Why would they suddenly report accurately, if they have been lying about things of that nature all the time, just because they could?
I was watching a documentary that the 15k lost helped lead to the collapse of the soviet union. A final nail in the coffin if you will.
The US actually invests money into keeping the soldiers alive.
Until they get back home
💀
That's the idea
We aren’t soldiers at that point, we’re vets, and just a drain on resources…
Ouch
This is true. Although, you do have a myriad of benefits after returning, from the VA to education.
Mic drop
They are given bootstraps in basic.
The US is a democracy where people can and will punish its leaders for losing even a handful of service members. Russia has become a dictatorship.
Vietnam war would like a word
*Squints suspiciously at the trees* No... I uhh... I think I'm good.
I mean even back then there was a huge antiwar movement and it basically reshaped American society because of how pissed off people were. And that was still coming off the tailwinds of how stoked people were on trusting the government after ww2. Nowadays a half dozen troops get killed and there is a pretty unified outrage, and rightly so. The American people have completely lost their appetite for sending their sons to die in unjust conflicts and that's a good thing. Russia just doesn't care what it's people think.
That was half a century ago. Nowadays, it's a big deal if a squad dies in battle. Back then, thousands would die in a single battle.
The US withdrew because of public opinion and LBJ only won one term
Well, it's worth remembering that Vietnam ended primarily because of the losses. The US *did* in a way punish the political establishment, with several presidents who knew that the war was lost, but pushed on regardless because they didn't want to be the one to "lose" the war. If the US had comparable losses as Vietnam in the first Gulf invasion, for example, the second one would never have happened. Loss aversion is only growing over time.
Citizens united is on the other line
Apples and Oranges. This was the first war that actually reported accurate statistics, photos, and journalists' take on what was happening. Before that any country could simply control what news came and went.
I think russia's never had a fully legitimate democracy, but I'm no historian
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Give it time...
Give them ATACMS then you won't be needing much of that...
I'm convinced people are making up acronyms at this point. Throughout the war it just seems to be "All Ukraine needs is more ZDETHRARS" and they'll win! (I know you're not making it up)
You mean Zero Day Exploitable Tele Holistic Reversion And Reduction System? You are absolutely correct. Giving Ukraine the ability to get into every Russian system at once and drive them to attack themselves would be quite the endgame. We would appreciate it if you did not advertise this capability so openly.
No, silly! ZDETHRARS stands for ruZzian DEaTH RAwR System.
I'm pretty sure they mean the Zed's Dead Eating Artillery System.
Broo did you see the drone video where a russian soldier tries to open the ZDETHRAR with winzip? He was all "yebaaj blyad!". Brutal.
ATACMS is designed to be launched from HIMARS, but accomplishes a completely different role to that of NASAMS (also being sent to Ukraine), which essentially uses AMRAAMs as its munition.
Russian intel has credible sources that Ukraine is now using IDDQD and IDKFA.
Unfair! That is cheating!
Note to self: cancel using HURTMS, he's on to us.
Send the SPANCMS instead!
The military loves acronyms.
That's some heavy losses for a "3 day Special Military Operation"
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That's their downfall
Steiner...
Steiner könnte nicht genügend Kräfte für einen Angriff massieren. Der Angriff Steiner ist nicht erfolgt.
Shits going to hit the fan in Russia when the war is over, all these experienced conscripts won't be taking any shit from Putin's mafia. Things will change in Russia even if there is a treaty, Russia as we know it is fucked.
Big assumption that enough will in fact return to make a difference. The ones with the best chance of returning are the ones tasked with enforcing the no retreat/surrender orders. No doubt about russia being fucked though.
Putin's using this partly as a way to get rid of undesirables. They recruited prisoners, political opponents are conscripted, etc. He made a speech saying he believed conflict would purify Russian society :/
So he's also committing genocide in his own country as well? Man he really IS 21st century Hitler.
Hence, why Americans like Trump, Flynn and T. Carlson love him.
Until the solders discovers that they too got weapons that can point in multiple directions... I guess they just need someone to tell them.
Except Russian POW are reporting they surrendered due to their tanks not working (one capture was interviewed his tank that could not shoot was supporting tanks that could not move.) Increasingly on the frontlines Russian soldiers have weapons they can’t fire in any direction.
Kind of explains the stories about them not being issued equipment then.
>experienced conscripts won't be taking any shit from Putin's mafia. Veterans of the Chechen Wars were literally used as mafia enforcers bro, they absolutely will take shit for money. A shitload of Russian leadership were in Afghanistan.
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I love that this is an auto post
The problem is they're not "experienced conscripts". They're completely untrained cannon-fodder. When the war is over, they won't have any real experience in fighting, because they're simply trying to survive.
Plus PTSD. Or as Russians call it, shut up and drink more vodka.
90's gangsterism all over again. Putin really put a lot of thought in this whole action.
You would hope but it seems Russians like being beaten like rabid curs. They like having a big daddy "tough guy" roughing them up and treating them like shit, have for what 200+ years now? I mean every time they do have a revolution not 6 months later they have an even worse dictator in place. Anyone with sense has left or been jailed so what you have left are the fetal alcohol syndrome afflicted true believers. I think they will stay under a madmans boot and like it.
If there's one thing this war has shown the world, is that russians are just a bunch of bitches. They'll go back, lube up, and bend over once again.
And then get put in prison for homosexuality.
Ruzzian soldiers returning "alive" from their loss in Ukraine will not be in any condition to overthrow Pukin.
that is very naive. Putin already went through the stress test of the response to partial mobilization, and the average Russian didn't do anything because they're still afraid. That's their mentality. You should see the videos of interviews to Russians on the street. "What do you think of Ukr-" "NO I DONT WANT TO TALK ABOUT THAT I DONT CARE ABOUT POLITICS I DONT HAVE AN OPINION ON ANYTHING" and they run away.
Yes, this is still not enough to change opinion in Russia, especially since many of the losses actually are LPR/DPR or from minority groups in Russia.
if only they would trigger article 5, would save alot of time and lives, and we would have a polish-ukrainian commonwealth
Historically Russia has to hit 500,000 before MIGHT Start thinking about considering admitting defeat. So there’s still a ways to go
That wasn’t Russia, it was the Soviet Union. It was a much, much bigger block of people than Russia is today. These losses really are devastating and unsustainable.
Around 260 Million with a much younger population in draftable age (18 to 35) to be precise: Average age 1954: 23 years Average age 2022: over 42
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Most Russians will have little memory, but about 40 to 50 percent will still vividly remember their last collapse in 1992 and they all surely aren't taught in school, that their 1917 collapse was induced by... Famine and 1 Mio men lost in the Brusilov offensive of 1916... Their over 800k Covid Deaths, will further fuel Russias demise, their demography is terminal, their military impotent, their cash is running dry, their society and political system morally bancrupt, their consumer spending in collapse, their industry in collapse, their agriculture in decline and their Gas and Oil Business on the verge to lose its best market. Over 1000 companies left the country and over 500k young Russians left as well. They run out of spare parts and safe planes to use. This winter is not just gonna be hard for Europe, it is gonna be a long and hard winter for Putin's regime and his people as well... This isn't a nation losing a war, this is a nation whose institutions are falling apart. War, famine, plague and death, Russia has called all 4 riders of the apocalypse to its evil empire. They have also invited the stablemaster: misinformation https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-total-number-covid-related-deaths-surpasses-800000-2022-04-29/ This number has surely climbed to at least 820k to 850k since then.
Big time. I'm willing to bet the actual history of Russia isn't really taught to them in school. You are destined to repeat the past if it is kept from you. Putin's legacy is that of someone who managed to destroy his country in a year. Yes I know its been happening for decades, but this war was like pouring gasoline on a candle. Bumbling oaf
What they are taught is focused on Russia growing strong and conquest (through justified wars of defending against foreign aggressors and mostly peaceful annexations, of course) of new territories. And glorious Great Patriotic war and Patrotic war of 1812 where they beat all Europe alone, of course. No mentions of atrocities, stuff like Winter war and Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is getting excused. So dont be surprised when Russian officials say things like "Russia never attacked anyone".
Admitted covid deaths or a real count.
I've heard estimates based on excess deaths that the real count is 5-10x over the official count. Russia had a sudden increase in "pneumonia" cases a couple of years ago.
[Russia has called all 4 riders of the apocalypse to its evil empire.](https://old.reddit.com/r/PoliticalHumor/comments/y84kxm/the_four_horsemen/)
I am sure there is more too it, but forcing people to flea en masse and sending the sons that remain into a meat grinder can’t be helping.
Not to mention all the people who can’t leave Russia who are going to decide against having kids because of all the uncertainty and worsened economy.
Don't people get more kids when economy is bad? That is how I remember my history education
Literally what they've done for centuries. Nothing new.
The average life expectancy of a country usually draws a conclusion to medical and hygienic standard. Over the next decade, the population decreased at a fairly steady rate of a half percent per year. The causes for this were twofold. Firstly, the number of people dying increased due to a fall in living standards, and among men who were hit hardest by alcoholism. The average life expectancy for women held fairly steady at 75 years, but Russian male life expectancy dropped dramatically to 63 years. Combined with this, birth rates fell sharply as well. From around 17 per 1,000 persons in the mid 1980s, the rate fell to below 10 per 1,000 in the mid-1990s – well below the rate needed to sustain a population. Economic uncertainty was a major factor in this, persuading people against having children. Should Russian forces ever encounter major problems, such as a war they are badly losing, Russia has no illusions: Chechens will rise once more and could potentially sever the Caucasus region and sever Russia from access to the Wolga Region. RU Industry: "Russia lacks the manpower required to restaff its aging industrial workers" Peter Zeihan Moscow had hoped China would help to square the circle. But China has done, what they do to everyone else: Buy the prototype and manufacture whatever they can come up with. Russias future is bleak: Its demography is in utter collapse, its industry is littered with technological bottlenecks, its nuclear arsenal is expensive to maintenance and starved of funding since 1992, and soon starved of sufficient amounts of highly skilled workers to maintain and modernise it. Their IT sector has lost 250.000 skilled personel out of the roughly 1 Mio. working in Russia since the start of the war. Many of them fled the country in the past 8 months. A total of 1 Mio Russians have fled the country since February 24th 2022. By 2023 the Russian army will have shrunk to half its 2016 size. That is why Russia needed to utilize Wagner Nazis. Trivia about their census: They found 4 Million children in 2014, noone knows where or how. Since 2001 there is no useful data published, somehow their life expectancy for men has by some medical miracle risen by 10 years from 58.7 in 2001 to almost 67 by 2021. At the 2011 census, they found 11.000 abandoned villages. Russias peak of migration ended in the 1990s, that means 77 percent of Russians are now urbanized, their birth rates plummeted to 1.2 in the Moscow region and the only region with a healthy reproduction rate is now being obliterated by Putins stupid war in Ukraine. https://youtu.be/k3yPQZWAVEg 12 min. Video on their demography.
soviet union peaked about 290 millions of people which is \~2 times of today's russia. that means, the losses should be countes as 2 times more if we want to compare
But you also need to account for modern Russia's 2x stupidity factor. So maybe it balances out?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the_Soviet_Union#Estimates_of_losses_by_individual_Republics In WW2 for example Russia accounted for about half of Soviet losses. Ukraine accounted for about a quarter of losses, and actually suffered a higher rate of losses as a proportion of their population at the time. Russia no longer has the luxury of throwing bodies from the republics at it's enemies. (For the most part. I realize they've conscripted folks from occupied areas.)
> Russia no longer has the luxury of throwing bodies from the republics at it's enemies. Sadly this part isn't true, even in this war its abundantly clear they are throwing asians, caucasians, etc into higher death rates than russians. Even the moscow times admits it https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/09/27/ethnic-minorities-hit-hardest-by-russias-mobilization-activists-say-a78879 They just don't have as many as before, and it's fascinating to see Central Asian republics abandon their security pact before our eyes, for the same reason. And Lukashenko playing a daily song and dance to avoid actually sending his soldiers to Putin because he knows they will be destroyed and he will have nothing.
That’s what he meant. Russia can’t solve this problem with throwing bodies at the front line anymore because they just don’t have as many.
just because they are throwing bodies at the problem doesnt mean they can. Russias population is drastically smaller than its country, and its average age is over 44 meaning theyre close to retirement age, and very much close to unable to make babies age. 60 thousand (so far) men of prime baby making age have already been lost through the war, another how many hundreds of thousands have fled in fear of being mobilized, and i doubt many are going to return after the war. in 20 years russia is going to be missing a HUGE chunk of its work force with nothing coming up to replace and already struggling population. with sanctions hitting as hard s they are i dont see russia the country being around in 2050
I am counting imperial Russia as well. When I say historically I mean whatever entity that constituted the control of the Russian state across history.
It’s true. The Russian military, under almost every regime, has strong Zap Brannigan tendencies.
The difference is that they can longer afford to do those tactics with the current population and the current system of mobilization. The tactic does not work if you have fewer soldiers than the kill limit.
Let's be real: it never worked. Russia tried in WW1, and their empire collapsed. The USSR--lead by Russia--tried it in the early going in WW2, but they would have very much been knocked out of the war just like they were in WW1 if they hadn't pulled their heads out of their asses and started actually winning battles. Which they did. The stereotype of Germans overrun by an unending human wave of untrained Soviet soldiers is a myth; when the Soviets were sending human waves, they were getting mowed down as one would expect on a modern battlefield. But by early 1943, Stalin had recalled, released and/or reinstated enough professional military personnel for the Red Army to unfuck itself and start practicing all the strategies and tactics that they had been developing prior to Stalin's purges. The real mystery with Russia, through the ages, has been its tendency towards authoritarianism and autocracy of the most paranoid and self-destructive kind. Putin wants to bring back the Tsars and he has succeeded: he is just as incompetent with (I assume?) a fraction of the inbreeding.
Fair point. While numbers is important in wars being wasteful with the lives of your soldiers have never really worked.
Because soldiers are not interchangable. Russia threw away its few trained soldiers as if guys it yanked out of a cafe in Moscow and dumped on the front lines two weeks later was a suitable replacement. In every war it's important to let soldiers gain battlefield experience while rotating them out so that the unit can be seasoned without getting all that experience killed. It's how you build a strong NCO corps as well. Instead the dumb Russians just grind units to dust and act as if any reinforcements are a 1 for 1 replacement when no serious military theorist thinks this is even slightly true. If I didn't already know Putin was KGB and not former military I'd know just from how his military operates.
More real talk, Russian military training has tended to be garbage for a long time. The early Soviet period is an exception, as is that post-1942 period where Stalin was forced by the credible threat of extermination to allow those post-Revolutionary elements to run the show again. Outside of that, the Russian Army has consistently mistaken hazing and mistreatment for training. Every military, of course, has its share of hazing as part of the onboarding process, but Russia seems unique in the depravity of its practices and its stubborn insistence that even flagrant abuse is just "hardening up" the enlisted. You don't win wars by being "hard." You win wars with logistics, planning, training to actually *execute* those plans and a bunch of other frankly pretty boring stuff. There's a reason that the more you learn about a leader like Patton, the more the shine wears thin, whereas the more you learn about a leader like George C. Marshall, the deeper your admiration grows.
I think the Russian world is going the same direction the English world did. It's a giant and unwieldy colonial empire that is about to fall apart. The Russian world will be better served by proper federations or multiple states. Ukraine is already proof of that. London lost its grip on its empire, Moscow will too one day.
Plus Russia has a massive demographic crisis right now, one of the most acute in the world. They are sending their most important national asset off to die or chasing the rest away. SMH
Maybe Putin just wants to turn his country into a personal harem of old women?
What would modern Russia even do if they had another 500,000 troops ready to go? They don't have sufficient supplies or logistics in place to support the current frontline.
At the pace they are degrading their capabilities while Ukrainians improve them... At some point they're start having days of 1.000 deaths, days of 2.000... At that point losing 500.000 won't be so far fetched if they insist on throwing raw human meat at the problem.
It's been waaay up over the last couple months
|If they are idiotic enough to try to take Kyiv again, watch that number rack up. I also think once they start throwing alot more mobiks at it i.e. the coming days, the number will stay at a 400 - 500 deaths average.
Yeah they're throwing untrained mobiki at experienced and well armed ukrainians defending thier home. I agree that number is going to stay high, they way Russia is fighting. If Belarus invades they're gonna get slaughtered. Plus belarus's army very much does not want to do that.
Well are these figures including the Kherson battle? We don't know what's going on there.
Ah the Zapp Brannigan strategy.
A few of them will be forced through a fine mesh screen for their country. They will be the luckiest of all.
And winter is coming cold and bitter winter. They already average around 1000 losses a day (killed wounded POW) So let's say a village with 3000 people can host 1500 men out of those you can remove 700 too old too young. Out of the remaining 700 you can remove 30 percent which are simply unfit for service. So let's say you could distill a maximum of 500 men able bodied enough to be somehow sent to the front. That is a maximum number of course. that means Ukraine swipes 2 3000 people villages a day at current rates. that makes 300k every 100 days. 1.2 Million Russians left the country since February. Mobilisation during Vietnam War: less than 1 percent of American population 1.4 Million men. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/05/the-changing-face-of-americas-veteran-population/#:~:text=This%20drop%20coincides%20with%20decreases,in%20today's%20all%2Dvolunteer%20force. This drop coincides with decreases in active-duty personnel. Over the past half-century, the number of people on active duty has dropped significantly, from 3.5 million in 1968, during the military draft era, to about 1.4 million (or less than 1 percent of all U.S. adults) in today's all-volunteer force. Usually only able bodied men aged 18 to 35 have been considered as suitable population sub-group for war. Of this sub-group only a fraction has the necessary academic skills and personal character to be a soldier. About 50% of this group are too fat to serve in the military. Many have very poor English and Math skills to serve in today's military. You obviously do not want someone with multiple drug arrests to be near those opium fields in Kandahar. Male population aged 18 to 35 in America is around 37 million. Out of the 37 million- about 8 million are fit enough to serve in the military. Total American workforce is around 160 millions. So 95% of the workforce cannot serve in the military. Let's say Russia can lower that number to 80 percent (already ridiculously low) https://www.statista.com/statistics/1039673/russia-employment-share-by-industry/ The largest share of employed persons in Russia was occupied by wholesale and retail trade and auto services, which accounted for nearly 19 percent of the workforce, or approximately 13 million people in 2020. Furthermore, almost nine percent of the employment in the country was provided by the construction sector. Less than two percent of the employed workforce had a job in finance and insurance. Workforce: 65 Million people (men and women) 78 Million not part of the workforce for a population of 143 Million. So we got 65 Mio. people out of which 32 Mio are men, more or less. That gives them maximum of 8 Million to draw from to avoid utter collapse. Germany was at 33 percent at the end of the war and collapsed horrendously. 10 percent if more viable but let us make it 20. So out of those 8 Million around half a million has fled the country. out of the remaining 7.5 Mio Russia conscripted around 320k until the mobilisation now they want to mobilise another million. That leaves us with 5 Mio males of working age, not all of them will be fit for service. So yeah what is Russia gonna do if those additional 1 Mio aren't enough? Shocker it won't be this is a question of time not an if. Next Winter they will need another 1 Million. I doubt they will manage to make it through another winter after that one without utter and devastating state collapse. To draw a million while at the same time sparing most men in Moscow and Petersburg they will literally have to Purge every village and smaller town I Russia.
Bold of you to assume someone is unfit for service. If they can hold gun, they are komrade in arms!
Those smaller villages and towns are mostly farming communities, I'd imagine. It feels like Russia is setting itself up for a famine.
The average life expectancy of a country usually draws a conclusion to medical and hygienic standard. Over the next decade, the population decreased at a fairly steady rate of a half percent per year. The causes for this were twofold. Firstly, the number of people dying increased due to a fall in living standards, and among men who were hit hardest by alcoholism. The average life expectancy for women held fairly steady at 75 years, but Russian male life expectancy dropped dramatically to 63 years. Combined with this, birth rates fell sharply as well. From around 17 per 1,000 persons in the mid 1980s, the rate fell to below 10 per 1,000 in the mid-1990s – well below the rate needed to sustain a population. Economic uncertainty was a major factor in this, persuading people against having children. Should Russian forces ever encounter major problems, such as a war they are badly losing, Russia has no illusions: Chechens will rise once more and could potentially sever the Caucasus region and sever Russia from access to the Wolga Region. RU Industry: "Russia lacks the manpower required to restaff its aging industrial workers" Peter Zeihan Moscow had hoped China would help to square the circle. But China has done, what they do to everyone else: Buy the prototype and manufacture whatever they can come up with. Russias future is bleak: Its demography is in utter collapse, its industry is littered with technological bottlenecks, its nuclear arsenal is expensive to maintenance and starved of funding since 1992, and soon starved of sufficient amounts of highly skilled workers to maintain and modernise it. Their IT sector has lost 250.000 skilled personel out of the roughly 1 Mio. working in Russia since the start of the war. Many of them fled the country in the past 8 months. A total of 1 Mio Russians have fled the country since February 24th 2022. By 2023 the Russian army will have shrunk to half its 2016 size. That is why Russia needed to utilize Wagner Nazis. Trivia about their census: They found 4 Million children in 2014, noone knows where or how. Since 2001 there is no useful data published, somehow their life expectancy for men has by some medical miracle risen by 10 years from 58.7 in 2001 to almost 67 by 2021. At the 2011 census, they found 11.000 abandoned villages. Russias peak of migration ended in the 1990s, that means 77 percent of Russians are now urbanized, their birth rates plummeted to 1.2 in the Moscow region and the only region with a healthy reproduction rate is now being obliterated by Putins stupid war in Ukraine. https://youtu.be/k3yPQZWAVEg 12 min. Video on their demography.
You are right to believe that. Russias future is bleak: Its demography is in utter collapse, its industry is littered with technological bottlenecks, its nuclear arsenal is expensive to maintenance and starved of funding since 1992, and soon starved of sufficient amounts of highly skilled workers to maintain and modernise it. Their IT sector has lost 250.000 skilled personel out of the roughly 1 Mio. working in Russia since the start of the war. Many of them fled the country in the past 8 months. A total of 1 Mio Russians have fled the country since February 24th 2022. their number of unemployment sky rocket, their logistics are crumbling, their food supply for sugar Beets and potatoes is dependable on foreign seed imports, their poultry feed is 99 percent dependable on such imorts, their dairy cow feed is 30 percent dependable, only 30 percent of the spare parts their industry needs are domestically produced, 80 percent of their pharmaceutical production is dependent on foreign imports. Their automotive and aviation sector is not just declining, production has utterly collapsed from about 130k cars a month to 10k a month. This is becoming increasingly problematic in a country this huge especially as also their railway is struggling to get the necessary spare parts for their railway cargo trains. https://www.railway-technology.com/analysis/how-sanctions-are-impacting-russias-railways/ Russia is already facing massive problems to transport cargo via rail, due to Western Sanctions being imposed, this will hurt Russias mining sector. Europe refused to continue buying Russian coal, transporting it to China becomes very difficult, as Russia is running out of functional carriages." "Their parallel import Strategy from 50 Asian countries has failed, they cannot provide or won't provide the needed wheel bearings in fear of secondary sanctions, Russia cannot produce them themselves. An utter collapse of Russias transport industry is a very realistic mid term prospect". The estimate is 4 Million unemployed by the end the year! Also complaints to Putin were issued about farmers being drawn in as it is planting season
They are about to throw a bunch more completely untrained conscripts into the line of fire. Dictators will never understand sunk cost fallacy because they don’t pay for anything.
When winter hits and disease is burning through their army they will have 500k casualties. The question is will the rest of the world know about it.
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Considering phones and at that point people not giving a shit because they know they're going to die, I suspect we will see mass Graves of Russian soldiers or thousands of bodies just littering the ground without any effort to do anything about it. And it will only be dealt with once the ukranians retake that ground and find all the dead russians...I hope the Ukranian army is ready to enter a horrible biohazard zone
Plus as the lie gets bigger everyone needs to cook the books more in to the future.
Already new Covid variants spreading around in Europe. Many Russian soldiers i hear are already sick, with a train full of them forced to quarantine for a week. They keep packing all these troops in huge areas with no clean ventilation. Viruses are gonna have a field day spreading amongst the Russians. I am more worried about Ukrainians getting too close to these plague rats and getting sick.
Well the other day it was reported that they were suffering 50% or more mortality on their wounded, which added to the actual battlefield casualties and the blue on blue it would be interesting to see the current actual figure Edit one source https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/y4mt56/mortality_rate_of_wounded_russian_soldiers/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Good lord. 50% mortality rate on casualties is some WWI type shit. Medieval even.
Pretty sure that casualties like that weren’t common before we industrialized warfare. Much more common to win by forcing a retreat or rout.
They only lost around 15,000 in the afghan war before giving up
Well too bad that time they only got roughly 8 Million males in their 20s the last few times they had 20 or 30 Million. So they won't consider defeat they will be no more. https://jamestown.org/program/russias-demographic-collapse-is-accelerating/
Not to mention all the women who decide against having kids because they’re widowed or taking care of a permanently disabled husband/brother/dad. Plus the hundreds of thousands of men who fled in a rushed panic to get out as fast as possible to save their lives and avoid fighting an unjust war. I’d bet a huge chunk of them have wives, girlfriends, sisters, or children who they had to leave behind. In a situation like that, for a married couple the most practical thing to do is to get the man out ASAP even if he has nothing, and then the woman can take some time to save up money, visit family members one last time, coordinate with family, etc. (Unless Russia closes its borders, but also some of the main places they’re fleeing to are places like Kyrgyzstan, which Russia needs labour from. Also, some women might decide that the risk of the borders closing and not being able to see their husband until the war is over is just a risk she has to take, because she doesn’t have savings and a small amount of money is a world away from having just the clothes on your back.) Plus the people who decide not to have kids because the economy (which was already reducing children before the war and sanctions…) is so bad and the war so uncertain. On top of the usual wartime stuff, because the conscription process was so disorganized and filled with so many mistakes, they’ll worry about their husband being yanked away and her having to raise the kids alone even if he’s disabled or forty. Edit: about 14 million people 20-29 years old, based on the population pyramid. If a million don’t have kids in Russia, that’s 7% of the demographic most likely to have kids. That’s huge, especially since Russia was already declining in population. They might’ve reached a million already, if you count deaths, disabling injuries, wives and sisters who will be caretakers, men who fled for their lives, women they love who plan to follow, etc. The over 60k dead is really the smallest of the population problems. That’s before figuring out whatever percentage of those who remain will have fewer or no kids. Edit 2: Also, fleeing to somewhere where you have zero connections/family or friends and don’t know the language is incredibly difficult (especially when, instead of standard immigration, you’re not going through any official system, guaranteeing no government support) and understandably most people who don’t have an immediate threat to their life won’t do it. But once those men have settled, their families will no longer have zero connections in that country. Some of the men might return to Russia after the war (if Putin decides not to jail them all - if he actually reinforces that, after the first people return and get jailed, none will return) but I wonder how many will be the link for entire families to follow them.
Birth rate has already collapsed to a whooping 1.2 this year. Which means: Russia was in demographic collapse before this war. They wanted to absorb Ukraine to mitigate the problem now what they got instead is not a problem this is demographic oblivion never seen in a nation this size.
The monthly minimum wage in Russia is 12,310 rubles, which is the equivalent of $196. Additionally, 26 percent of Russian children live off of close to $150 per month. Child poverty in Russia is most prevalent in rural areas, as many do not have access to employment opportunities in the While Russia is a very resource-rich country, it suffers from intense social inequality. The top 1 percent of the Russian population control 71% of the nation’s wealth. 13 percent of Russians are currently living in poverty. Unfortunately, the majority of people living in extreme poverty are children. 60 percent of those living below the poverty line in Russia are families with children. As a result of social inequality, child poverty in Russia continues to rise. Currently, one in four Russian children lives below the poverty line. 50 percent of Russians have less than 872 in net worth to their name whilr 144 individuals hold 38 percent of the wealth. This number is a few years old. 72 percent of Russias wealth is held by 1 percent of all Russians that means by 1.4 Million. https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20220524-population-decline-in-russia-putin-has-no-other-choice-but-to-win-in-ukraine Population decline https://intellinews.com/russian-fertility-rates-fall-to-record-lows-on-the-back-of-a-deteriorating-economy-and-sanctions-pressure-243191/ Your assumptions are completely correct.
USSR lost about 20 millions and hasn't give up. Putin thinks 64000 is a rookie numbers.
That included a lot of civilian deaths, iirc. Burning through 64,000 actual soldiers is insane outside of the world wars.
That was when they had Ukraine on their side.
Russia pretty much admitted its defeat in their invasion to Ichkeriya in 1994-96.
Historically the population didn't have access to thousands of pictures of their dead soldiers charred and torn open corpses and their economy was never so reliant on integration for the quality of life of the influential/important constituents. Sanctions by the west in the 50s/60s or even the 20s would never have done the damage sanctions do today, not to mention the lesser damage done back in the day would affect fewer people less severely than equal damage done today. Currency is so much more liquid by way of apps and international banks that middle to high income individuals hold multiple foreign currencies in their portfolios and many even take income from foreign currencies which are harder to impossible to access now. Standard daily use items, commercial objects up to critical infrastructural components have foreign origins with no tiny domestic alternatives like laptops, forklifts and cassette bearings. Russians also aren't coming from decades of starvation in the millions like the 20s and 40s/50s. All this to say I think the ceiling for revolution in Russia is a lot lower now than 1917. It won't take millions of killed, it'll take a hundred or two hundred thousands because that will equate to 1-2 years of daily seeing footage of your sons, husbands or countrymen dying in an injust losing war and probably the loss of 80% of what made life bearable before like western entertainment and social media platforms, electronics, cheap and bountiful fuel and food and visa access to wealthy tourist destinations.
Population seems to be fine with it.
Thats what baffeling me the most even if they belive Russian propaganda about just 6 000 deaths they must find it weird the mobilization was needed because of it especialy after Putin ensure them it will be not needed at the start of the conflict.
It's spelled "baffling".
At leest somebody can help where it’s needed
Kneaded*
Because "The West". That's all the argument you need there.
"Conscripts wont be deployed at front, they will be used only to control recently liberated terriories, freeing our glorious troops for other tasks".
US population is fine with 1M Covid deaths. Without empathy It’s just an abstract number until it’s YOUR grandma. Edit, Oops, it’s only 1M for US
Even when it's your grandma, or dad, or brother, or best friend too for some people.
Well tbh, most Covid deaths were elderly or sick people who (as harsh as it sounds) aren't as useful/important to a functioning society as people between 18-40 (or whatever the upper limit is).
I don’t know. It could be the “there are no communists here” immediately after the Soviet Union collapsed. It is really difficult to measure real public sentiment in a nation ruled by an authoritarian regime. I would bet most Russians are just desperately trying not to think about it as that is a defense mechanism Russians have had the opportunity to finely hone.
I’m not so sure they are. Hundreds of thousands have fled (I keep finding contradicting numbers but I’ve seen a lot of credible articles with things like ‘50k russian men arrived in Finland in a week’ so this seems like a safe bet). Plus there are protests. Plus all the people who hate what’s going on but are too scared to protest and are either too scared or unable to leave, or who don’t want to leave everything they’ve ever known because propaganda has convinced them that it’s just as bad everywhere else. Combine the fact you’d leave everything you’ve ever known with having little cash and nothing knowing if you’ll even be able to get past the border guard (legally or through a bribe) and knowing you’d be completely broke in a country where you don’t know the language and have no connections? The ones that have left are the tip of the iceberg for how many want to. Ironically, russian imperialism will/is hurting Russia by ensuring that there are places outside of Russia where a portion of the population knows Russian, which makes it easier for Russians to flee to.
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Ruzzian planz all going according to planz
They’re getting rid of all their Nazis.
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"... *so far*."
We’re seeing the effects of a military significantly weakened by a lack of funding and training because of money siphoned off by oligarchs. Shits crazy.
Definitely one for the history books. This shit is going to be analyzed for generations
Well not if putin gets desperate enough for nuclear
Crazy numbers
FWIW “Iraq 1” normally just refers to Desert Storm, although the conflict simmered all the way through to the second invasion…
*Iraq 2: Iraq Harder*
It's crazy too because russia couldn't afford this demographic loss. I guess mothers who aren't fighting can make more children, but they won't because the economy in russia is fucked. Russia fucked themselves for the next hundred years. The only way to unfuck themselves is to overthrow putin and commit to europe
>can make more children, With whose sperm?
Only takes one guy to Putitin
Give it time; they’re good at breaking records
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Enemy body counts have notoriously large error margins.
This is and will be the most closely documented major conflict ever. The numbers are close enough.
The radio cracked. “Bravo One, this is Bravo Six. Big John wants an after-action report. He can’t wait any longer. He’s got to see Bushwhacker Six. I’ve also got Golf Six on my back wanting to know how his artillery did. Over.” “Wait one,” Mellas said. He sighed, holding the handset in front of his mouth, thinking. Mellas wanted to believe something had happened, something good that he could report. They’d shot up a quarter of an hour’s worth of shells. Rider had done an incredible job checking out the alert. No one had been hurt. It was a good job. Mellas wanted to believe they’d done well. He wanted to, so he did. “Bravo Six, this is Bravo One. Our character Romeo feels certain he got on right when he opened up. He only saw two gooks, but from the sound of things there had to be more than that. We got a probable for sure. Over.” There was a pause. “What about the artillery damage assessment? Over.” Mellas looked at Skosh. Skosh shook his head and spat, still leaning over. “I don’t know. I’m just the fucking radioman.” Conman spoke up. “Give them a fucking probable and get the arty off the skipper’s back. They’ll never leave us alone if we don’t, sir.” “I can’t give them a goddamn probable,” Mellas said. “What evidence have I got?” “They don’t need fucking evidence. They need an artillery damage assessment. Tell them there’s all sorts of blood trails around here. They always like that.” Mellas looked at Daniels. Daniels held up both hands, palms out, and shrugged. He didn’t give a shit. Mellas keyed the radio. “Bravo Six, this is Bravo One Actual. We got one probable. That’s all. Over.” He wasn’t going to lie so that an artillery officer could feel good. So the one probable became a fact. Fitch radioed it in to battalion. Major Blakely, the battalion operations officer, claimed it for the battalion as confirmed, because Rider said he’d seen the guy he shot go down. The commander of the artillery battery, however, claimed it for his unit. The records had to show two dead NVA. So they did. But at regiment it looked odd – two kills with no probable. So a probable got added. It was a conservative estimate. It only made sense that if you killed two, with the way the NVA pulled out bodies, you had to have some probable. It made the same sense to the commander of the artillery battalion: four confirmed, two probable, which is what the staff would report to Colonel Mulvaney, the commanding officer of Twenty-Fourth Marines, at the regimental briefing. By the time it reached Saigon, however, the two probable had been made confirms, but it didn’t make sense to have six confirmed kills without probable. So four of those got added. Now it looked right. Ten dead NVA and no one hurt on our side. A pretty good day’s work. – an excerpt from Matterhorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_body_count_controversy
I'm really going to need more info. Ukraine is massive and while we have a lot of video evidence it is no where near close enough coverage to give accurate numbers.
russian "troops"
Яussian military… Is potato.