Libs when a country turns out to be unable to win a war of attrition against an opponent with an army and population that are both 3 and a half times larger (this was completely unthinkable)
Liberals reject the idea that material reality matters. In their mind they just had to win the media narrative and real world have no choice but to adjust itself to the vision they created.
I was trying to sell the idea of Diamat to a liberal and told them about Materialism vs Idealism and they flat out said “Idealism is good” moments after I explained it. To get the ball moving again I used an example explaining why racism was bad using Diamat and their conclusion was “racism isn’t bad” at that point I just gave up before my already plummeting faith in that person hit rock bottom.
Followed up later to understand their reasoning and it turned out the only reason they gave a shit about racism was because “it’s impolite”
At this point I just see liberalism as a cult.
I know you are joking but you are right. A lot of people only believe in principals as opposed to outcomes.
They’ve seen the US fail to win in the same way, so they assumed it must be impossible for everyone.
what is their copium anyway?
are dronies claiming asiatic hordes again?
It’s a brutal but simple calculation: Kyiv is running out of men. US sources have calculated that its armed forces have lost as many as 70,000 killed in action, with another 100,000 injured. While Russian casualties are higher still, the ratio nevertheless favours Moscow, as Ukraine struggles to replace soldiers in the face of a seemingly endless supply of conscripts.
Yep
Pay no attention to the Uke conscription teams snatching people off the street btw
If their losses were that low they wouldn’t need to go to the lengths that they are to scrape the bottom of the barrel for mobilization.
And if Russia’s losses were higher than Ukraine’s we would also know about it, instead we have pro-Ukraine sources like Mediazona quietly admit that Russian losses are fairly low at the moment actually. So they are coping super hard here.
They are rehashing the old “human waves” trope which was not really true in WW2 (it was a cope that the Nazi generals invented to explain away their defeats) and is certainly not true now for Russia, who are going to great lengths to conserve manpower, arguably too much so according to some of the more hardline opinions on the Russian side (i don’t agree with them).
If any side is playing into that trope right now it is Ukraine with its habit of throwing untrained conscripts from the streets into the trenches and use almost exclusively light infantry assaults in order to conserve their precious western-donated equipment.
If their losses were that low they wouldn’t need to go to the lengths that they are to scrape the bottom of the barrel for mobilization.
Do you remember all the apocalyptic visions of endless
zombieorchuman wave attacks by Wagner being mowed down like grass in crossfire spun by the western and Ukrainian propaganda during the battle of Bakhmut? Now Wagner claim 20000 KIA - figure accepted by both NATO and UA, and UA claim their own losses were… also 20000 KIA. So either they admit they were lying or those endlesszombieorchuman wave attacks were in fact more successful (since they won!) than the awesome in depth defence by elite UA brigades armed and trained by the invincible NATO?Bakhmut was probably the only battle of this entire war where the casualties were about equal on both sides. Partly due to the urban nature of the fighting but also partly i suspect due to how Prigozhin used Wagner as an extension of his own ego. In every other engagement on every other front the disparity in casualties has been heavily skewed in Russia’s favor, especially when they are on the defensive. Though Russia having such a disproportionate artillery superiority and being able to employ actual air power leads to higher Ukrainian casualties even when the Russians are technically attacking, like is the case in the new cauldron that has formed around Avdeyevka.
I doubt the losses were equal, Wagner estimate of their own losses seems pretty sus in light of both Ukraine and USA just accepting that figure after previously claiming around fuckzillion. Maybe they used that opportunity to scratch some paper-only soldiers, i never heard about mercenary outfit that didn’t had those.
But regardless, they also claim 50000 UA KIA, which is most likely also overestimated but the proportion of 2:5 seems to be much more consistent with various estimates during the battle.
At this point we’re entering into speculative territory but i would not be surprised if you were right once we count the losses that the Ukrainians took on the flanks, as well as those taken in trying to supply the Bakhmut garrison. I believe that is where the more disproportionate losses were inflicted by Russia: in forcing Ukraine to try and assault the pincers to relieve the semi-encirclement, and in trying to get reinforcements and supplies into the city through roads under Russian fire control. For the block to block fighting inside the city itself i still think it makes more sense for the casualties to be close to equal, but i don’t think we’ll know for sure any time soon. I also suspect you are right that Wagner tend to inflate both sides’ figures.
It really is always projection, isn’t it?
i don’t agree with the last paragraph, i didn’t made much sense, emulating the west because hatred of soviets and them doing what is believed the soviets did.
i do agree that ukraine is trying to emulate the west, so their tactics became a mishmash of soviet tactics and nato tactics, it is on that limbo that is neither and the nature of this war itself, this isn’t ukraine’s war, so the true owners of this conflict has 0 consideration for troop safety, as long russia is being wore out and no westerns lives are put at risk.
Yeah you’re probably right.
I saw something about the Russians losing 20 - 60 people a day on average compared to what Ukraine has been saying about 1000 or whatever stupid shit.
https://en.zona.media/article/2022/05/20/casualties_eng
(casualty map has a little slider thing)
What’s absolutely hilarious is that BBC and Mediazona are actually tracking Russian casualties using publicly available data such as obituaries, and they’ve only managed to come up with 37k so far. So, a western funded organization is providing plausible numbers that western media simply ignores in favor of making up these insane casualty figures
Any estimate using a methodology like that of Mediazona (assuming they are not cheating and fudging the numbers or introducing some serious systemic errors) is bound to fall short of the actual number, probably by something in the ballpark of 15-30% since publicly available information will always only be a subset of the whole (not every death gets an obituary for instance). That still means that you end up somewhere in the vicinity of 50-60k at most with perhaps again as many wounded. This coincides with estimates from analysts on the Russian side as well which means this is more or less the best estimate that can be reasonably made at the moment with publicly available data.
The more interesting question here is: what would a study using the same methodology for Ukrainian losses reveal? Bearing in mind that the Ukrainian side has the unfortunate habit of not reporting its KIAs as such for months and months, often marking them as simply MIA in order to not have to pay out benefits to the families, and frequently leaving the bodies unrecovered. Meaning that the disparity between reality and the number that an obituary based methodology would output would be significantly larger in the Ukrainian case. According to estimates i’ve seen from the sources who follow the fighting closely i wouldn’t be surprised to find once we include desertions and captures that we are looking at an easy 500k, with again as many injured, maybe more.
Here the baseline for comparison would be the cumulative numbers that the Russian MOD has put out so far, as they have generally tended to be more or less confirmed by independent observers in the case of equipment losses at least. In fact i even suspect that they are lowballing the manpower casualties on the Ukrainian side since there are always bound to be a certain number of losses which happen but can’t be visually or otherwise confirmed and thus the MOD can’t count them. So i would take this number as a minimal floor. I’m sure someone out there has taken the time to tally up all the MOD reports but i’m too lazy to look for it.
Exactly, it’s pretty telling that they’re doing this analysis for Russia and not Ukraine. Given that Ukraine continues to have to do forced mobilization, and that they’ve expanded the age now, and are conscripting women, are all indicators of very significant losses.
It’s also worth pointing out that even if losses were equal, even though all evidence suggests not being the case, Russia is still in a better position because Russia has a much bigger population. In order to win a war of attrition Ukraine would have to inflict proportionally more significant casualties on Russia, which they cannot do.
Hm…i don’t think i agree with the second part though. If casualties were equal i think Ukraine would be effectively winning because its mobilization potential is bigger than Russia’s. This sounds counter-intuitive since it obviously has a much smaller population especially now having lost millions of people who fled the country or live in territories annexed by Russia, but the amount of people you can mobilize is not always proportional to population size.
Some societies can mobilize a much higher percentage of their population than others, and in this regard fascist states like Ukraine do have an advantage (as do communist states due to central planning and being better able to ideologically motivate people as opposed to liberal democracies like today’s Russia). Russia firstly has not spent a decade or more indoctrinating its people with ultra-nationalist ideas and absolute hatred for the other side, and secondly they can’t implement the same kind of total war policies that Ukraine is and start dragging people off the streets.
Ukraine also does not need to reserve people for its civilian industries, or in fact for its economy at all, it does not need an economy since it is wholly financially propped up by the West, and it also does not need its people to work in the military industries since it doesn’t have any anymore - it gets all its supplies from the West. It’s not quite on the level of being a militarized garrison state like the neocolony in Palestine but it is getting there. Russia on the other hand is trying (and succeeding so far) to maintain a sense of normalcy and not have to put its entire society on a war footing. Because of these factors i do think that Russia needs to continue to preserve its manpower resources much more than Ukraine.
To be fair though, a major factor counter-acting Ukraine’s advantages is the endemic corruption in Ukraine which is a constant wrench in their mobilization machine. And the other good news is that i don’t see anything that can change the current balance of forces, and in fact the longer that Russia keeps cautiously degrading and attriting Ukraine’s capabilities the more the disparity in casualties will increase, as untrained and unwilling Ukrainian conscripts are simply not going to make for very good soldiers. Also the material aid from the West has likely plateaued and they will only be able to keep a barebones trickle of ammunition and equipment flowing.
Where Russia can afford to absorb higher losses is in equipment and munitions since it has now kicked its military industrial complex into high gear and by all accounts is outproducing the West. For them it makes sense to heavily expend one-time-use weapons like drones, glide bombs and cruise missiles because they can replace them. They can also saturate the battlefield with reconnaissance drones and artillery fire in volumes that Ukraine simply cannot match.
And i believe this explains perfectly the way we have seen Russia approach this conflict: very conservative of manpower and playing to their strengths in artillery and long range fires. Retreating out of unfavorable situations and managing time and time again to let the Ukrainians get themselves into fire bags and cauldrons where Russia can maximize its advantages, meanwhile straining Ukrainian logistics by keeping the front close to the Russian border.
I’d argue that western reaction to the war made it clear to most Russians that this is an existential war for them. Russians realize that this isn’t a war between Russia and Ukraine, but one between Russia and a proxy of NATO. We’re seeing that Russian army has no trouble doing recruitment right now without even a need for mobilization. So, the population difference is already playing a role here.
I disagree regarding Ukraine not needing industry. The reality is that the amount of material support the west is able to provide is quite limited. Simply throwing money at Ukraine isn’t actually solving any problems that Ukraine has. For example, EU pledged to deliver a million shells to Ukraine. However, EU lacks the industrial capacity to do this and now they’ve admitted that they can only deliver around a third of that. Meanwhile, all they managed to do was to raise the price of shells:
US isn’t doing much better in this regard either. US steel production is comparable to Russia’s, and despite all the talk the actual increase in shell production has been meagre so far.
The other huge risk for Ukraine being entirely reliant on western support is that it’s not going to be indefinite. Western economies are going into a recession, and public support for continuing to dump money into Ukraine is fizzling now. Given that Ukraine has reorganized its economy around western support, this rug getting pulled out from under them will be catastrophic.
I do agree with your assessment of Russian approach. They’re being very conservative, and are basically relying on attrition to deplete Ukrainian army. Mearsheimer makes an important point that most casualties are caused by artillery, and Russia has something like 10:1 advantage in artillery in Ukraine. So, as you note, the strategy has largely been to force Ukraine into artillery battles where Russia has a huge advantage.
I wonder how effective any deal with the current ukrainian government (or a continuiation of it) would be. It’s not like they have blatantly broken previous agreements. Since Russia isn’t looking to just annex the whole of Ukraine, I wonder what end goal Putin is planning to this war.
There can be no deals made with the current regime in Kiev and the Russians know this. They are not even looking for a deal with the Europeans anymore because most these current governments we have in Europe are basically agreement incapable as well. Plus none of them really have any sovereignty. Russia is looking for a deal with the only real decision maker on the other side which is the US. I also wouldn’t exclude anymore the possibility of Russia deciding to do away with Ukraine entirely, but that depends on how obstinate the Americans decide to be. If they insist on continuing to refuse to negotiate in earnest over the European security arrangements (and one of the Russian conditions will likely be a NATO pullback to 1998 positions), then Russia may go all the way and place a huge force right on the Polish border, which it can now do as it is in the process of massively expanding its armed forces and turning their huge military industrial complex back on. Then the US will have a choice: either to try and match the Russian buildup like in the cold war even though what they really want is to confront China in the Pacific, all this while the West sinks deeper into economic crisis and deindustrialization (how will they afford to pay for a massive army in Europe, who will produce their armaments and ammunition?)…or to finally make a deal with Russia. The Europeans being only vassals will have to bear whatever the two big powers decide.
Huh. Tankies posting questionable far-right sources. Shocking.
That so-called “bias fact check” website lists imperial propaganda machine CNN as “mostly factual” and “left biased”. You’d have to be terminally lib-brained to trust any of their media assessments after knowing that.
CNN is mostly factual, and is left-biased. It’s not a great site or channel. If you want minimal bias and highly factual reporting, you have to go with independent groups like Reuters.
Lol, “lib brained”. I’m an anarchist, and have been for decades.
Reuters
Lol, you are really just digging your hole deeper and deeper aren’t you? What next are you going to say VoA and RFA are credible sources? Are you going to cite EUvsDisinfo to show how we tankies are all secretly right wing Putin loving conspiracy theorists?
You are embarrassing yourself. Maybe try reading the article linked in this post and you will see it actually cites sources such as the New York Times, the Economist, Business Insider and the Telegraph, since you like “reputable” mainstream media outlets so much.
I’m an anarchist
Is anarchist just another word for larpy liberal?
Calling Reuters an “independent group” is absolutely hilarious, seeing as it is a known tool of the Anglo-American intelligence agencies for spreading disinformation and facilitating regime change operations. It doesn’t get much more in bed with CIA and MI6 short of literally being a direct cutout. Oh and would you look at that, they are even funded by the NED, just like Bellingcat.
Crazy how the fingerprints of the US deep state are all over the media sources that you consider “minimally biased and highly factual”, huh?
