In a desperate bid to replenish its manpower, Moscow is sending injured (Sometimes amputated) soldiers back into battle.
Ouch. Everyone but Putin felt that one.
The latest figures posted by the Ministry of Defence do not include the Wagner Group nor their prisoner battalions that fought in Bakhmut.
Hundreds of thousands of mercenaries and prisoners died in that meat grind. If they did include them, they'd have to put the casualty number much higher.
Oh, and they are now kidnapping civilian immigrant workers, in an effort to bolster their numbers. They will not count either.
Article cites UK Ministry of Defence wrong, it's actually total of 240,000 to 290,000 killed + permamently or temporarily wounded. Still staggering figures, though.
I don’t know how they could not notice that their men aren’t coming back, or are coming back in boxes when they do. These loss numbers can’t be swept under a rug, they’ll be felt for generations and we’ll see smaller generations every few cycles in Russia that can be directly pointed at this war similar to how there are small population numbers every few generations in Europe overall due to the world wars
I remember thinking one benefit of the pandemic would be to show conservatives the truth vs what their propaganda says.
Unlike all the other garbage policies they push that take decades before consequences are noticeable, not wearing a mask and not getting vaccinated provided a quick shot of reality as they watched loved ones lose their lives to the disease.
So many more conservatives died because they did not take it seriously. Yet still nobody seemed to learn from it. Propaganda is powerful.
They're deliberately drafting troops from rural areas as much as possible to minimise the number of angry parents in the major cities who might actually mount a visible complaint.
There's a difference between noticing it and being angry and actually being able to functionally do anything about it, which is the real challenge. I'm sure there are a non-trivial amount of people extremely angry about this whole disaster, but actually organizing and trying to create some change would be extremely dangerous. I'm honestly not sure where a path forward comes from until Putin eventually dies.
Edit: apologies - this actually isn’t a very good comparison. The chart I linked is actually just deaths, not total casualties.
According to this wiki page, the MoD’s numbers would put Russia’s military casualties alone roughly on par with total military and civilian casualties deaths on all sides from the US War on Terror (which lasted about two decades, compared to about 20 months for this newest active phase of the Ukrainian War).
That’s… impressive. And extremely unsustainable.
(Note: not here to litigate the war on terror or whatever you want to call it. This is simply a comparison point.)
It's also roughly 5.5 % of the total Soviet military losses during WW2. Pretty insane to think about all these lives being wasted to steal a stretch of land.
Russia has the man power, but their command structure and tactics suck ass. Their soldiers have little freedom to adjust when and where they attack and it shows. If Russian troops on the ground were given an objective, and not direction orders directly from generals, we might see a much worse outcome for Ukraine.
If you look at the recent videos from Avdiivka, destroyed Russian armor is piling up in the same spots. There is no adjustment and there is no learning from mistakes, just mass being thrown at a spot where their leadership wants to get political wins.
These are the same tactics from WW2 and they are resulting in the same scale of losses, comparatively. Leadership doesn't think of their soldiers as people and it's gross. If anything, this war is not just an attack on Ukraine, but it's genocide being committed on Russians by the Russian government.
Imagine being so goddamn emotional that you knowingly commit a country of what, 140 million I think, to demographic suicide. Blyat is handing the West another century of dominance.
Ahhhh but they're going to use their money and what's left of their men to confuse the west into picking bad leaders so really who's winning World War 2.5 now