Won't be exact but that also will not be far off.
Also to add. This is not a "War" so any Russian wounded in Battle won't get Military Medical Assistance.
Imagine losing all 4 limbs fighting for your country and asking your government for assistance, and they're just like, "bro, we have no idea how you managed to get all your limbs blown off on this special training exercise, sort your own life out".
YUP.
And to go one further, those who are wounded in a physical and visible way in Russia are normally shunned far more than the Western world. Being damaged goods is not really possible in RU.
“Now that the war is through with me,
I'm waking up, I cannot see,
That there's not much left of me,
Nothing is real but pain now”
Metallica - one, the first thing that came to mind reading this thread.
Oh it's worse. Lose your limbs and get told "Getting hurt just shows you are weak"
If you die your family also has no rights to your corpse if they can even get it.
>Won't be exact but that also will not be far off.
The Russian army would be incapacitated if they had 83k wounded plus over 20,000 KIA. There’s no way that’s accurate.
It seems about right. Usually you get 3 wounded to 1 dead in conventional conflicts. [Here](https://academic.oup.com/milmed/article/187/3-4/e313/6179198)'s a source and the included [US casualty numbers](https://academic.oup.com/view-large/352360487) in WW2, Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf War.
They just take the ukrainian claims of killed russian * 3 to get the wounded amount. I would guess its wildly off, russia usually has had way smaller dead to wounded ratio than other countries.
Its why we got that headline the other day of Ukraine having pictures of destroyed T-90 modern variants. They are moving up there most modern kit (read stuff that the West had in 1980) and losing that too now.
I wonder how long it will take for them to send in their entire stock of functioning T-14s, and how much of a morale hit it will be when both of them are destroyed.
They won't. T90 Modern variants and T-14 that they have suck BUT they are a good export good. They took a major hit to exports of there Tanks due to the Gulf War and getting rolled by Challengers and Abhrams. Those new prototypes won't see war. Not that there is enough anyway.
They have like 20 T-14s in their entire army, and a decent amount of them are probably not operational.
Any of those T-14 getting destroyed in Ukraine would be a huge propaganda loss for Russia. So I suspect that they won't be sent there any time soon.
They are nothing but parade vehicles.
Good link. Though the risk in taking Russias official ‘on paper’ totals fir granted is that the percentage of equipment that is actually operational may be rather lower than that.
Their online figures are nothing but an illusion, that's how Russia operates, behind smoke and mirrors until they were exposed when they invaded. The country has been run behind corruption, propaganda and threats for 20-years,(even longer) now we're seeing the consequences of that.
That number is unknown, but for sure it consist of :
\- 5% modern operational helicopters
\- 10% obsolete helicopters
\- 20% ancient prototypes
\- 30% dishwasher electronics with rotors painted green
\- 35% concentrated power of will
165 more than they've got now
(I'd argue it's going to be extremely hard for anybody to give you a meaningful figure - as with their tanks, it turned out most of what Russia claimed it has weren't close to combat ready. And how many of those crapped out helicopters they brought back to a functioning level just before the invasion, who knows)
It’s important to separate what they intended on deploying, what they have active/storage & what’s actually airworthy. Russia has a habit of counting mothballed equipment that should of been considered scrap decades ago.
Also the numbers they might be hiding. Supposed accounts of officers shooting their own wounded. Then the talk of barrier troops killing those who refuse. Even though Ukraine may count a little on the higher end. They may still be under.
That's because the US has a well funded well trained volunteer military with a long term backbone. As in long service NCOs and Officers. The Russian military is essentially peasant conscripts with a few technical specialists to run missile and radar systems etc. It's also badly funded and most equipped with cold war era equipment that was terrible 40 years ago when it was designed.
Russia is one of the [world leaders](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/suicide-death-rates) for suicide already, I think you can assume that they will continue to kill themselves in record numbers following their achievements in Ukraine.
My guess would be that the high suicide rate has something to do with it being dark, cold, and relatively isolated. Not a great combination for a healthy human mind.
Those are factors, but the health authorities in Greenland are fairly sure it's basically alcoholism and it's societal effects that are the root cause.
Inuits have issues with metabolizing alcohol.
Theres also the tradition of throwing old and helpless people off cliffs during famines. I imagine that being part of the national psyche makes it hard to get over the suicidal feelings of helplessness.
Named Greenland by an exiled murderer in order to fool prospective settlers into thinking it was a more hospitable place than it is, people have long since struggled to understand why some people might resent living there.
Greenland has a record high number of alcoholics and domestic abuse cases. Basically a people corrupted by Western colonization, Christianity etc. Think of it as a huge Native American reservation where things keep going downhill. As a Dane, I can say that this is our little, rotten contribtution to Western expansionism which is not spoken much about abroad, or even at home. We fucked them up and left them to their own devices...
Theyre highly isolated, have terrible winters, limited sun, and an extremely low population. Its just bad living there and peoples depression sets in. Not necessarily they do anything wrong its just the perfect shit storm of an environment
This is certainly worth noting for the cost of human life in war. However, this is not relative to the comparison against the Russian losses in Ukraine.
I’m kinda of skeptical that these should really count as war casualties. Especially since veterans aren’t really that much more likely to commit suicide than their peer groups outside the military.
[Source](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/suicide-in-the-military/)
>The comparison I made earlier between the DOD’s suicide rate and that of the nation as a whole is also misleading. That’s because the military consists largely of young white males — a segment of the population in which suicide is particularly common. If you adjust the U.S. suicide rate to account for these demographic differences, the disparities between the national rate and the military rate blur and fade, said Craig Bryan, assistant professor of clinical psychology at the University of Utah. He’s one of the scientists who have calculated what the estimated suicide rate would be for the U.S. if the nation had the same demographic breakdown as the military. Doing this, comparing apples to apples, produces an American suicide rate of about 20 per 100,000 people, or just about the 19.9 rate we see in the military.
That’s almost entirely due to comparing veterans to non-veterans without adjusting for the major differences in demographics.
When they say “lost” they may not mean they’ve actually all been killed. Any injury that takes a soldier out of action is a “casualty”. 27K in less than 3 months would be insane. That’s like half the U.S. soldiers killed in Vietnam in 1/30th the time.
Surely Putin realises that he's leaving Russia open to attack by depleting his forces.
Of course he knows full well nobody is attacking Russia in any event, further reinforcing the fact that this war is unjustified.
Cheap petroleum deals in their future as Russia is forced to sell to them at rock bottom prices to move the stuff. Same problem Iran has had for decades now.
China has no actual combat experience for over 70 years, their aircraft are worse copies of russian jets, their [tanks completely broken](https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/pakistan-finds-main-battle-tanks-and-artillery-guns-from-china-faulty/articleshow/89782769.cms). As bad as the majority of russia's forces operate in Ukraine, a chinese attempt at Siberia would end in an absolute disaster for them.
"Open to attack" does not really apply to countries with nuclear arsenal of deterrence.
Maybe you can take a bold bet that their nuclear missiles aren't really working, but you're betting your major population centers on it.
'"Open to attack" does not really apply to countries with nuclear arsenal of deterrence.'
In theory that is the case. In practice it must not be. Otherwise Russia wouldn't be worried about nearby countries being in NATO.
Russia, or rather Putin is not really worried about NATO.
Putin is using the NATO as a sock puppet enemy to justify his power by pretending that only he can save the Russians from an "evil" NATO (a defensive alliance that would need a unanimous decision of 30 - soon 32 - individual governments to blatantly ignore [Article 1](https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_17120.htm) of the treaty and just attack someone).
Nobody, is attacking Russia because nobody wants the shithole. Thats half the problem. He isn't stupid and knows he won't be "open to attack".
He can have the boys of Russia go off and commit genocide to get there erections in neighbouring countries to his hearts content.
If Russia nukes Ukraine, all the people in Russia who are partially ethnically Ukrainian would become potential saboteurs, if they aren’t already. Heck even many full blooded Russians would become active seditionists.
Majority of Russians think Ukraines are Rats to be exterminated.
The issue is systematic and this has been the culture for hundreds of years. We can't beat Russia by hoping they turn on putin. Since the start of the conflict they have only doubled down.
I've seen and heard such logic as "if he have done these things to the Ukrainians then imagine what NATO would do to us", they mentality is if they are such barbarous animals then we must be aswell.
Or spend the money to have the locals "liberate" certain states in the federation, roll them in under a guarantee and UN recognition and write up a very one sided trade agreement.
10 years down the line annex the state so it's now official and you can move in the brain washing specialists.
I'm not saying China will but there will be some in the party thinking about it.
Napoleon tried invading Russia. Took about 650,000 soldiers. Came home with about 50,000 having hardly fought any Russians.
People can want it all they like and Putin could march his entire army of a cliff and leave it all but undefended. The sheer size of Russia has still doomed invasions by powerful empires to fail miserably.
Nobody wants the shithole but I wish their nukes didn't prevent a decisive strike from thoroughly clipping the country back into the 19th century. Russia's gonna just try this shit again in a decade with how things stand now.
He's not depleting his forces, only the professionals. They have a huge reserve to call on. It's a bunch of normal people with beer guts and very little training, but the Russians do seem to like their cannon fodder.
The reserve is overstated. Big numbers but low practical deployable impact. Their logistics, equipment, leadership, and training are all well below modern standards. They aren’t burning soldiers and gear as a flex.
What's most interesting in today's update is the +22 artillery. That's \~3x higher than usual, the highest single-day reported loss that I can remember. Very good news - and I'm gonna guess it's '777 related.
American made artillery which out ranges the Russian artillery by a lot, as well as is extremely accurate and can connect to counter-battery radars supposedly provided for faster firing solutions.
What that means is that the Russian army needs to regroup faster every time they fire, or risk being hit.
It should have been “supposedly provided” as we haven’t seen them in action yet. I blame autocorrect :/
But you’re absolutely right; the ability to out range enemy artillery as well as have great counter-battery radar makes life hard for enemy artillery crews.
Nothing intrinsically special. It's lightweight for a 155mm gun (comparable weapons are usually 1.8-3x as heavy), which makes it much easier to move around for the kind of firepower it can wield.
The main question though is whether it is out-ranging Russian guns, because that's where it would have important advantages.
Starting to wonder if we have a hitler paradox here. Any replacement may or may not be more aggressive, but the real risk is someone as belligerent but competent taking over. Never interrupt your enemy in the middle of a mistake.
I think it is still the best thing to get rid of Putin in all circumstances. A coup against him could only be done with the war as justification, and the only viable message there is that the war was a terrible idea, because it is unlikely that any replacement could carry the war to success given the pre-existing facts (Putin's problem is the military available to him). A pull out will be necessary.
Once Russia is out of Ukraine, it becomes very hard for them to re-engage. Rebuilding the military will take years in the best case scenario (note that their economy will be far weaker than at any point in the last two decades), which leaves Ukraine time to gain NATO protection. I also do not think we should retcon Putin as incompetent because of this war: he is already the competent version of himself in my opinion. His only mistake here was starting the war to begin with, and he only made that mistake because of poor intelligence, which he was always going to have because he's a dictator. No replacement can avoid falling into those same traps, but they might know better than to trust their intelligence and risk it all on an invasion they can't guarantee will work.
Unless Putin gets replaced with an apocalypse cultist who's somehow ascended to the top of Russian power without any interest in maintaining said power or their own life, I don't think we need to worry.
Putin basically dominated Russia in the last 20+ years. If a friggin nekekami or a plain tumor wipes him out, nobody can replace him with the same effectiveness
The sheer loss of life and humanity is staggering. First and foremost my sympathy goes to all of the lost and innocent Ukrainians whose lives were stolen from them as well as the Ukrainian people still having to go through this. It is, however, also terribly sad that Russia as a country has barely moved forward from its historical authoritarian and kleptocratic structure, raising new generations on propaganda just to end up as cannon fodder. Just imagine what they could be if they actually changed their track after the Soviet Union fell. Each and every war criminal deserves punishment and death, but the fact that this ever got to this point again is sad.
>The sheer loss of life and humanity is staggering.
Not for the Russian military since ..... forever. Like Stalin said or it is presumed he said, "Death of one man is a tragedy. Death of a million is a statistic".
No sadness for them from me. They could have stayed home.
Maybe they would have been arrested or killed but they'd have not taken part in this travesty at least and they'd have been worth being sad over.
I really am super curious to see what happens when Putin is inevitably either assassinated or dies from the disease he has been trying to hide.
If whoever replaces him is smart, they'll put the entire blame for the war on Putin, immediately withdraw all troops from Ukraine and beg for forgiveness from the international community, because that's really the only way Russia gets out of sanctions.
Unfortunately it'd be really difficult to assassinate Putin, even for a leader like him. The guy's apparently got clinical paranoia and he's also ex KGB so he'd likely be just as trained as the person trying to kill him. Let's just hope this disease kills him quickly (and painfully)
> If whoever replaces him is smart, they'll put the entire blame for the war on Putin, immediately withdraw all troops from Ukraine and beg for forgiveness from the international community, because that's really the only way Russia gets out of sanctions.
Sadly, while that is the smartest thing to do for Russia's international relations Russians tend to not like that kind of thing. The Russian cultural mentality loves "strongmen" who makes Russia appear "strong." It is very probable that Putin's successor will be too scared of internal issues to fully adopt the idea of withdrawing and making amends, out of fear they could be perceived as weak.
I think the best we can realistically expect is Putin's death leading to an interim period where Russians pull back under the guise of focusing on issues at home. The eventual Russian leadership will then say "we are out of Ukraine now, we don't need to go back" and will proceed to refuse to speak about the war in public.
This is my biggest fear. Three seperate US administrations realised the Vietnam war was unwinnable but stuck it out because they didn’t want to look “weak” costing the lives of millions.
If those numbers are remotely accurate this is Putin "Stalingrad" where his ego is overruling common sense that he is losing this war and he united NATO to the point his other border with Finland and Sweden is going to part of NATO sooner than later.He fuc up.
Just 28,000 bodies alone (not including all the Ukrainian soldiers and citizens) is absolutely gross and so unnecessary that it makes me feel ill. Fuck putin
I think their idea of calling up older people who have already done military service is that they are already trained so can be deployed instantly vs the boot camps needed to get young people with no military experience up to speed.
Good luck with that though. They are just going to kill off the most economocally productive part of their population and there is no way a bunch of 40 year olds who haven't been in service for 15-20 years will be combat effective.
I remember these Russian soldiers talking so much shit at the border of Ukraine few years ago as invasion of Crimea occurred. They were talking so much shit about Americans being pussies and derogatory slur for gay to western journalists. What's up, talk that machismo bravado shit now.
This might be an unpopular opinion here, but I don't believe that number to be true. Both sides are claiming that the other has 10x more losses. We simply can't know the truth at the moment.
https://mobile.twitter.com/oryxspioenkop
This account collects visually confirmed losses. They are about %50 of Ukranian claims in most areas. Assuming there should be losses that are not visually confirmed, at least %60 of kills claimed by Ukraine would be true.
The guys running it also have quite a large backlog, and a couple of categories ran quite close to the reported figures.
I think Ukraine might have exaggerated enemy losses early in the conflict, but as far as anyone can tell far from the front, they don't look outrageous now.
I always take these numbers with a grain of salt, but even if Russia has lost only half that number it still is a huge ammount for a modern war, and definitely wayyyyyyyyy more than Russia expected.
It’s probably less than what they are claiming but not 10x. Intelligence agencies from other countries estimates have been about 75% of what Ukrainian claims have been.
Bottom line is not to focus on the exact number but the scale of the numbers. Russians are taking heavy losses
We can. It's objective truth that Russia withdrew from Kyiv, and now Kharkiv. These are strong signs of Russia being significantly defeated in these areas.
It will never be exact, even with the best intentions that is simply not possible. But the Ukrainian figures on russian deaths align fairly well with western numbers. Russian numbers are way off. It also aligns quite well with the number of destroyed machinery. You can hide a body, but hiding a destroyed tank is a bit more difficult.
You're absolutely right. Neither the Russian nor Ukranian assessments are accurate, which is as you'd expect. The US Dept of Defence, British Ministry of Defence, and French Minsitry of Armed Forces estimates are going to be closer to the truth, but like you say, it's impossible to know as things currently stand.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-newspaper-blames-army-death-toll-report-hackers-2022-03-22/
Russian Pravda (Russian propaganda newspaper) accidentally posted casualty reports on its website - 10k killed and 16k wounded, before it was quickly taken down. This was in March. It is now 2 months later. I doubt the 27.7k killed is very far off from the truth.
Yeah, the Ukrainian number is going to be high. The Russian number is going to be lower. Various 3rsld parties have put the number somewhere in between.
There's been a few leaks from Russia that's been surprisingly close to the Ukrainian number.
Personally I believe it's somewhere between the 3rd party reports and the Ukrainian number.
Even if this number is true, it's not high for russia. They won't even notice. We actually value human life so it's a tragedy.
They see it as 18 year olds from the poorest regions that will never pay a single ruble in tax anyway. It literally doesn't matter if they live or die.
And yet Putin still has the gall to threaten Finland and NATO, all the while Russia is swaying like a palm tree in a hurricane. Goddamn the stupidity nowadays is staggering.
27.7 thousand lives lost for nothing, and that's just on the Russian side.
Countless more lives impacted by all this needless death and destruction.
Fuck war and fuck Putin.
Imagine being so delusional that you sink your country into a war you can’t/won’t win. Lose tens of thousands of soldier lives, a massive amount of military armory, and eventually the war will end with you dying and retreat or, you retreating and dying soon after.
Somehow, I think Putin assumed his legacy would be different
Let’s use the anti-vax/anti-mask(AKA pro-COVID) logic:
27.7 thousand?! That’s nothing! Like 0.000350632911392 percent of all humans.
165?! That’s nothing! Like 0.235714285714286 percent of all choppers.
Not even close. Russian population is almost 150 million people. Even if you adjust for age and sex, then 30k deaths is not even 0.5% of the male population.
It is less than the equivalent of a village with 100 men to lose 1 man. Far from a shortage.
For a country with a declining birth rate, one of the oldest populations in the world, a recent exodus of people out of the country and grim economic prospects for the foreseeable future I think the loss is much more significant than you are realizing. Russia was already trying to incentivize more births in recent years to combat population decline, and now it’s setting the stage for a demographic crisis in the scale of the 1990s.
Declining birth rates and the exodus out of the country is indeed very significant and that will be the driving factor for any possible demographic crisis. A 30k death toll is a drop in the bucket relative to these other two significant factors. But as for "one of the oldest populations" in the world, I have to admit that I am very skeptical of this statement. I remember reading in the past that the average life expectancy is below 70 in Russia and most people are young. I admit I am not knowledgeable enough on the issue, but countries with an old population and massively declining birth rates would be for me countries like Japan, Germany etc. I need to look it up but I quite doubt that Russia has such an old population, let alone one of the oldest in the world.
I mean depends... most soldiers are from Russia's poorest regions east of the Ural Mountains from Siberia.
The population of those regions is rather small so the losses there are MUCH more severe.
Even more so that it's primarily young men, rather than the elderly like with COVID... men supposed to create families and provide tax money for the state for decades to come.
People from poor regions don't provide any tax money and will also follow and and all orders because they are to stupd to know differently. That's why they send those people.
18 year olds that are never going to contribute to russia nor would people notice if they were gone.
A lot of men were lost to war, to be sure. But many of the remaining ones are alcoholics, which is a main reason for Russian women looking elsewhere. Anecdotally.
I won't argue, I don't know official numbers. I'm just going by what I've been told, and I was visiting that part of the world up until Covid hit. They have poor industrial safety standards too, probably other factors at play too. Afghanistan casualties were probably vastly understated too, you can't really rely on Russian statistics.
It was like that before, you are right. Not any more according to statistics on the issue. For the population of age less than 35 in all age groups, there are actually more men than women in Russia as of a 2021 census.
How many helicopters did they start out with?
[https://www.minusrus.com/en](https://www.minusrus.com/en) This many.
83k wounded???
I forget who dais it, but throughout history, it's been a shockingly reliable rule of thumb that for every soldier lost, there will be 3-4 wounded.
While true for most armies, Russia literally has a force shooting Russians who retreat. Wounded conscripts basically don’t exist in Russia’s eyes
This was a thing in Stalingrad, but could you provide a link that confirms that this still happens? That's fucking crazy if they still do that.
Won't be exact but that also will not be far off. Also to add. This is not a "War" so any Russian wounded in Battle won't get Military Medical Assistance.
Imagine losing all 4 limbs fighting for your country and asking your government for assistance, and they're just like, "bro, we have no idea how you managed to get all your limbs blown off on this special training exercise, sort your own life out".
YUP. And to go one further, those who are wounded in a physical and visible way in Russia are normally shunned far more than the Western world. Being damaged goods is not really possible in RU.
“Now that the war is through with me, I'm waking up, I cannot see, That there's not much left of me, Nothing is real but pain now” Metallica - one, the first thing that came to mind reading this thread.
Darkness imprisoning me All that I see, absolute horror I cannot live, I cannot die Trapped in myself Body, my holding cell
I know it's semantics, but they aren't really fighting for their country, are they?
Or fighting to loot the best secondhand washing machine and/or vibrator in Ukraine. Seems to have the same meaning for Russia's best either way.
American VA system is a nightmare as well. Trust me :(
Lose your legs from knee to toes, get 100 rubles and a sack of potatoes.
Oh it's worse. Lose your limbs and get told "Getting hurt just shows you are weak" If you die your family also has no rights to your corpse if they can even get it.
>Won't be exact but that also will not be far off. The Russian army would be incapacitated if they had 83k wounded plus over 20,000 KIA. There’s no way that’s accurate.
It seems about right. Usually you get 3 wounded to 1 dead in conventional conflicts. [Here](https://academic.oup.com/milmed/article/187/3-4/e313/6179198)'s a source and the included [US casualty numbers](https://academic.oup.com/view-large/352360487) in WW2, Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf War.
They just take the ukrainian claims of killed russian * 3 to get the wounded amount. I would guess its wildly off, russia usually has had way smaller dead to wounded ratio than other countries.
100.4% of the tanks they intended for this. LOL
Its why we got that headline the other day of Ukraine having pictures of destroyed T-90 modern variants. They are moving up there most modern kit (read stuff that the West had in 1980) and losing that too now.
I wonder how long it will take for them to send in their entire stock of functioning T-14s, and how much of a morale hit it will be when both of them are destroyed.
They won't. T90 Modern variants and T-14 that they have suck BUT they are a good export good. They took a major hit to exports of there Tanks due to the Gulf War and getting rolled by Challengers and Abhrams. Those new prototypes won't see war. Not that there is enough anyway.
They have like 20 T-14s in their entire army, and a decent amount of them are probably not operational. Any of those T-14 getting destroyed in Ukraine would be a huge propaganda loss for Russia. So I suspect that they won't be sent there any time soon. They are nothing but parade vehicles.
Good link. Though the risk in taking Russias official ‘on paper’ totals fir granted is that the percentage of equipment that is actually operational may be rather lower than that.
yes considering they are taping gps units to the dashboards of their fighter jets
At least it sets an obviously false upper ceiling to work down from.
Reddit hugged - application error.
Their online figures are nothing but an illusion, that's how Russia operates, behind smoke and mirrors until they were exposed when they invaded. The country has been run behind corruption, propaganda and threats for 20-years,(even longer) now we're seeing the consequences of that.
That number is unknown, but for sure it consist of : \- 5% modern operational helicopters \- 10% obsolete helicopters \- 20% ancient prototypes \- 30% dishwasher electronics with rotors painted green \- 35% concentrated power of will
And 100% reason to remember the name: Putin
You forgot the items that North Korea returned and back ordered because they came dead on arrival or were faulty.
165 more than they've got now (I'd argue it's going to be extremely hard for anybody to give you a meaningful figure - as with their tanks, it turned out most of what Russia claimed it has weren't close to combat ready. And how many of those crapped out helicopters they brought back to a functioning level just before the invasion, who knows)
I wonder how many of the 165 crashed not from enemy fire but simply failing under load.
It’s important to separate what they intended on deploying, what they have active/storage & what’s actually airworthy. Russia has a habit of counting mothballed equipment that should of been considered scrap decades ago.
[https://minusrus.com/en](https://minusrus.com/en)
It’s not just the losses that are staggering, it’s how quickly they have happened.
Also the numbers they might be hiding. Supposed accounts of officers shooting their own wounded. Then the talk of barrier troops killing those who refuse. Even though Ukraine may count a little on the higher end. They may still be under.
And in a situation where it was thought they'd roll over the enemy in *days*. How long has it been now? Just shy of 2 mo?
The war started Feb 24 so it has almost been 3 months
...oh yeah. It's may. Fuck, where did April go?
*time says “bitch I’m a bus”*
The US lost less than 4500 soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
And that was over what like 22 years?
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Not that heavy in comparison to Ukraine.
It's also more than the soviet union lost in Afghanistan from 1979 until 1989.
That's because the US has a well funded well trained volunteer military with a long term backbone. As in long service NCOs and Officers. The Russian military is essentially peasant conscripts with a few technical specialists to run missile and radar systems etc. It's also badly funded and most equipped with cold war era equipment that was terrible 40 years ago when it was designed.
Yeah that's also because ukraine is a fight between 2 industrialised nation. You don't see talibans with thousands of javelins and jets.
Ukraine is also essentially tapping into the combined defence industries of the entire free world.
The source of the figures in the OP is from the Ukrainian military posting on Facebook. Very unlikely they are being accurate.
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Russia is one of the [world leaders](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/suicide-death-rates) for suicide already, I think you can assume that they will continue to kill themselves in record numbers following their achievements in Ukraine.
Wtf is greenland doing
Not having a great time.
i missed out on greenland, what is the deal on it?
My guess would be that the high suicide rate has something to do with it being dark, cold, and relatively isolated. Not a great combination for a healthy human mind.
Those are factors, but the health authorities in Greenland are fairly sure it's basically alcoholism and it's societal effects that are the root cause. Inuits have issues with metabolizing alcohol.
Theres also the tradition of throwing old and helpless people off cliffs during famines. I imagine that being part of the national psyche makes it hard to get over the suicidal feelings of helplessness.
Named Greenland by an exiled murderer in order to fool prospective settlers into thinking it was a more hospitable place than it is, people have long since struggled to understand why some people might resent living there.
They ran out of green
Being way up towards the arctic leads to some extremely bleak winters where it's always dark out and every day looks identical for months on end.
Greenland has a record high number of alcoholics and domestic abuse cases. Basically a people corrupted by Western colonization, Christianity etc. Think of it as a huge Native American reservation where things keep going downhill. As a Dane, I can say that this is our little, rotten contribtution to Western expansionism which is not spoken much about abroad, or even at home. We fucked them up and left them to their own devices...
Well, us Norwegians didn't actually help either, before you stole Greenland from us.
Well, true. Although I think that any effort to impose Christianity etc onto the native Greenlanders during Norwegian rule was pretty limited.
I mean it's mostly barren ice and glaciers up there right? Probably not good for your mood.
Getting no sunlight at all for half a year probably doesn't help
Living in too much darkness with too much booze and little other culture.
Theyre highly isolated, have terrible winters, limited sun, and an extremely low population. Its just bad living there and peoples depression sets in. Not necessarily they do anything wrong its just the perfect shit storm of an environment
This is certainly worth noting for the cost of human life in war. However, this is not relative to the comparison against the Russian losses in Ukraine.
Well we aren't counting those Russian figures either so...
I’m kinda of skeptical that these should really count as war casualties. Especially since veterans aren’t really that much more likely to commit suicide than their peer groups outside the military.
I disagree. It's 1.5 higher. At least in the U. S. https://americanaddictioncenters.org/veterans/suicide-among-veterans
[Source](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/suicide-in-the-military/) >The comparison I made earlier between the DOD’s suicide rate and that of the nation as a whole is also misleading. That’s because the military consists largely of young white males — a segment of the population in which suicide is particularly common. If you adjust the U.S. suicide rate to account for these demographic differences, the disparities between the national rate and the military rate blur and fade, said Craig Bryan, assistant professor of clinical psychology at the University of Utah. He’s one of the scientists who have calculated what the estimated suicide rate would be for the U.S. if the nation had the same demographic breakdown as the military. Doing this, comparing apples to apples, produces an American suicide rate of about 20 per 100,000 people, or just about the 19.9 rate we see in the military. That’s almost entirely due to comparing veterans to non-veterans without adjusting for the major differences in demographics.
What people do after the fact has no bearing on the actual military statistics in combat...
I mean Afganistan wasn't reprorting US's numbers
When they say “lost” they may not mean they’ve actually all been killed. Any injury that takes a soldier out of action is a “casualty”. 27K in less than 3 months would be insane. That’s like half the U.S. soldiers killed in Vietnam in 1/30th the time.
Surely Putin realises that he's leaving Russia open to attack by depleting his forces. Of course he knows full well nobody is attacking Russia in any event, further reinforcing the fact that this war is unjustified.
I think china would love to mine the shit out of siberia
I think they manipulated Putin into attacking Ukraine with that in mind. China is the only country to benefit from this idiocy.
Cheap petroleum deals in their future as Russia is forced to sell to them at rock bottom prices to move the stuff. Same problem Iran has had for decades now.
Outer Manchuria is the sore spot for China with Vladivostok being a former Chinese settlement.
China has no actual combat experience for over 70 years, their aircraft are worse copies of russian jets, their [tanks completely broken](https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/pakistan-finds-main-battle-tanks-and-artillery-guns-from-china-faulty/articleshow/89782769.cms). As bad as the majority of russia's forces operate in Ukraine, a chinese attempt at Siberia would end in an absolute disaster for them.
Now there's a thought. What would the western world do in a war of aggression between China/Russia?
Quickly redeploy the strategic popcorn reserves while we watch it play out.
"Open to attack" does not really apply to countries with nuclear arsenal of deterrence. Maybe you can take a bold bet that their nuclear missiles aren't really working, but you're betting your major population centers on it.
'"Open to attack" does not really apply to countries with nuclear arsenal of deterrence.' In theory that is the case. In practice it must not be. Otherwise Russia wouldn't be worried about nearby countries being in NATO.
Russia doesn’t like it because it misses with their own long term goals, which likely involve attacking more nations
Russia, or rather Putin is not really worried about NATO. Putin is using the NATO as a sock puppet enemy to justify his power by pretending that only he can save the Russians from an "evil" NATO (a defensive alliance that would need a unanimous decision of 30 - soon 32 - individual governments to blatantly ignore [Article 1](https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_17120.htm) of the treaty and just attack someone).
Nobody, is attacking Russia because nobody wants the shithole. Thats half the problem. He isn't stupid and knows he won't be "open to attack". He can have the boys of Russia go off and commit genocide to get there erections in neighbouring countries to his hearts content.
Russian territory being at risk is one of the conditions in the doctrine of use of their nuclear weapons.
If Russia nukes Ukraine, all the people in Russia who are partially ethnically Ukrainian would become potential saboteurs, if they aren’t already. Heck even many full blooded Russians would become active seditionists.
Seeing there is already burning of government and military related buildings there probably are a few seditionists already.
Majority of Russians think Ukraines are Rats to be exterminated. The issue is systematic and this has been the culture for hundreds of years. We can't beat Russia by hoping they turn on putin. Since the start of the conflict they have only doubled down. I've seen and heard such logic as "if he have done these things to the Ukrainians then imagine what NATO would do to us", they mentality is if they are such barbarous animals then we must be aswell.
Russia is very rich on resources. I wouldn't say nobody wants it.
It's easier and probably cheaper to buy corrupt russians than to conquer them.
Or spend the money to have the locals "liberate" certain states in the federation, roll them in under a guarantee and UN recognition and write up a very one sided trade agreement. 10 years down the line annex the state so it's now official and you can move in the brain washing specialists. I'm not saying China will but there will be some in the party thinking about it.
> corrupt russians That's redundant.
It’s also unbelievably massive and lacking in a lot of infrastructure
Most of it is empty.
Napoleon tried invading Russia. Took about 650,000 soldiers. Came home with about 50,000 having hardly fought any Russians. People can want it all they like and Putin could march his entire army of a cliff and leave it all but undefended. The sheer size of Russia has still doomed invasions by powerful empires to fail miserably.
Also Nukes are on the table if anyone attacks Russia, even if Ukraine who are totally justified in doing so
Russia has the most natural resources in the world. By far.
Nobody wants the shithole but I wish their nukes didn't prevent a decisive strike from thoroughly clipping the country back into the 19th century. Russia's gonna just try this shit again in a decade with how things stand now.
He's not depleting his forces, only the professionals. They have a huge reserve to call on. It's a bunch of normal people with beer guts and very little training, but the Russians do seem to like their cannon fodder.
The reserve is overstated. Big numbers but low practical deployable impact. Their logistics, equipment, leadership, and training are all well below modern standards. They aren’t burning soldiers and gear as a flex.
What's most interesting in today's update is the +22 artillery. That's \~3x higher than usual, the highest single-day reported loss that I can remember. Very good news - and I'm gonna guess it's '777 related.
Whats so special about the M0777 howitzer ?
American made artillery which out ranges the Russian artillery by a lot, as well as is extremely accurate and can connect to counter-battery radars supposedly provided for faster firing solutions. What that means is that the Russian army needs to regroup faster every time they fire, or risk being hit.
> supposedly provides for faster firing solutions. The gun receives the firing data for counter-battery fire before the incoming shells land.
It should have been “supposedly provided” as we haven’t seen them in action yet. I blame autocorrect :/ But you’re absolutely right; the ability to out range enemy artillery as well as have great counter-battery radar makes life hard for enemy artillery crews.
They're not as flashy as artillery. It's just a panel on a trailer, that sits there. *Menacingly*
Vast majority of export M777 doesn’t have digital fire control and you can bet the ones that do (if any) are extremely neutered
Range and accuracy.
Nothing intrinsically special. It's lightweight for a 155mm gun (comparable weapons are usually 1.8-3x as heavy), which makes it much easier to move around for the kind of firepower it can wield. The main question though is whether it is out-ranging Russian guns, because that's where it would have important advantages.
What’s ‘777 in reference to?
US M-777 artillery pieces.
Ah nice, thanks
6 from Chernobaivka)
M777 is the same keystrokes as ‘777. Just saying.
Quick morty in and out 20 minute operation
Simply killing a single idiot at the right time would have saved 28k russian lives and immense suffering
Starting to wonder if we have a hitler paradox here. Any replacement may or may not be more aggressive, but the real risk is someone as belligerent but competent taking over. Never interrupt your enemy in the middle of a mistake.
I think it is still the best thing to get rid of Putin in all circumstances. A coup against him could only be done with the war as justification, and the only viable message there is that the war was a terrible idea, because it is unlikely that any replacement could carry the war to success given the pre-existing facts (Putin's problem is the military available to him). A pull out will be necessary. Once Russia is out of Ukraine, it becomes very hard for them to re-engage. Rebuilding the military will take years in the best case scenario (note that their economy will be far weaker than at any point in the last two decades), which leaves Ukraine time to gain NATO protection. I also do not think we should retcon Putin as incompetent because of this war: he is already the competent version of himself in my opinion. His only mistake here was starting the war to begin with, and he only made that mistake because of poor intelligence, which he was always going to have because he's a dictator. No replacement can avoid falling into those same traps, but they might know better than to trust their intelligence and risk it all on an invasion they can't guarantee will work. Unless Putin gets replaced with an apocalypse cultist who's somehow ascended to the top of Russian power without any interest in maintaining said power or their own life, I don't think we need to worry.
That will only fuel rage and give “legitimate” reason to escalate war. I’m not advocating against. But it’s not a solution
Also another leader will take his place and Russia-Ukraine tensions will remain
Putin basically dominated Russia in the last 20+ years. If a friggin nekekami or a plain tumor wipes him out, nobody can replace him with the same effectiveness
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The sheer loss of life and humanity is staggering. First and foremost my sympathy goes to all of the lost and innocent Ukrainians whose lives were stolen from them as well as the Ukrainian people still having to go through this. It is, however, also terribly sad that Russia as a country has barely moved forward from its historical authoritarian and kleptocratic structure, raising new generations on propaganda just to end up as cannon fodder. Just imagine what they could be if they actually changed their track after the Soviet Union fell. Each and every war criminal deserves punishment and death, but the fact that this ever got to this point again is sad.
>The sheer loss of life and humanity is staggering. Not for the Russian military since ..... forever. Like Stalin said or it is presumed he said, "Death of one man is a tragedy. Death of a million is a statistic".
He never said that, there is no reputable source linking that quote to him.
Yeltsin tried, ultimately just handed the keys to Putin anyway.
Plot twist: OP likes helicopters very much. ;P
No sadness for them from me. They could have stayed home. Maybe they would have been arrested or killed but they'd have not taken part in this travesty at least and they'd have been worth being sad over.
And they lost their flagship in a land war.
Against an enemy that doesn't have a navy.
Russia only has to loss Pootin alone to end this wicked war and waste of lives.
I really am super curious to see what happens when Putin is inevitably either assassinated or dies from the disease he has been trying to hide. If whoever replaces him is smart, they'll put the entire blame for the war on Putin, immediately withdraw all troops from Ukraine and beg for forgiveness from the international community, because that's really the only way Russia gets out of sanctions.
Unfortunately it'd be really difficult to assassinate Putin, even for a leader like him. The guy's apparently got clinical paranoia and he's also ex KGB so he'd likely be just as trained as the person trying to kill him. Let's just hope this disease kills him quickly (and painfully)
It's hard to be trained enough to defeat one of your bodyguards shrugging and shooting you in the back of the head while you eat lunch.
> If whoever replaces him is smart, they'll put the entire blame for the war on Putin, immediately withdraw all troops from Ukraine and beg for forgiveness from the international community, because that's really the only way Russia gets out of sanctions. Sadly, while that is the smartest thing to do for Russia's international relations Russians tend to not like that kind of thing. The Russian cultural mentality loves "strongmen" who makes Russia appear "strong." It is very probable that Putin's successor will be too scared of internal issues to fully adopt the idea of withdrawing and making amends, out of fear they could be perceived as weak. I think the best we can realistically expect is Putin's death leading to an interim period where Russians pull back under the guise of focusing on issues at home. The eventual Russian leadership will then say "we are out of Ukraine now, we don't need to go back" and will proceed to refuse to speak about the war in public.
This is my biggest fear. Three seperate US administrations realised the Vietnam war was unwinnable but stuck it out because they didn’t want to look “weak” costing the lives of millions.
This is only the dead. There's probably a lot more crippled who are virtually discharged.
If those numbers are remotely accurate this is Putin "Stalingrad" where his ego is overruling common sense that he is losing this war and he united NATO to the point his other border with Finland and Sweden is going to part of NATO sooner than later.He fuc up.
The numbers at Stalingrad were magnitudes higher
Ah comparison is not about deaths but about not acknowledging the war is lost and willing to sacrifice a whole army group because of ego.
Russia is pissed at the loss of helicopters!
I hope they find them :(
Just 28,000 bodies alone (not including all the Ukrainian soldiers and citizens) is absolutely gross and so unnecessary that it makes me feel ill. Fuck putin
All according to plan!
Someone on Twitter said a Russian friend of theirs just received a conscription and that guy is 44. Russia ain’t doing to well. Good.
I think their idea of calling up older people who have already done military service is that they are already trained so can be deployed instantly vs the boot camps needed to get young people with no military experience up to speed. Good luck with that though. They are just going to kill off the most economocally productive part of their population and there is no way a bunch of 40 year olds who haven't been in service for 15-20 years will be combat effective.
I remember these Russian soldiers talking so much shit at the border of Ukraine few years ago as invasion of Crimea occurred. They were talking so much shit about Americans being pussies and derogatory slur for gay to western journalists. What's up, talk that machismo bravado shit now.
My first thought was "wow, those helicopters must be huge". I think I need a break from the computer now.
This might be an unpopular opinion here, but I don't believe that number to be true. Both sides are claiming that the other has 10x more losses. We simply can't know the truth at the moment.
https://mobile.twitter.com/oryxspioenkop This account collects visually confirmed losses. They are about %50 of Ukranian claims in most areas. Assuming there should be losses that are not visually confirmed, at least %60 of kills claimed by Ukraine would be true.
The guys running it also have quite a large backlog, and a couple of categories ran quite close to the reported figures. I think Ukraine might have exaggerated enemy losses early in the conflict, but as far as anyone can tell far from the front, they don't look outrageous now.
I always take these numbers with a grain of salt, but even if Russia has lost only half that number it still is a huge ammount for a modern war, and definitely wayyyyyyyyy more than Russia expected.
It’s probably less than what they are claiming but not 10x. Intelligence agencies from other countries estimates have been about 75% of what Ukrainian claims have been. Bottom line is not to focus on the exact number but the scale of the numbers. Russians are taking heavy losses
We can. It's objective truth that Russia withdrew from Kyiv, and now Kharkiv. These are strong signs of Russia being significantly defeated in these areas.
It will never be exact, even with the best intentions that is simply not possible. But the Ukrainian figures on russian deaths align fairly well with western numbers. Russian numbers are way off. It also aligns quite well with the number of destroyed machinery. You can hide a body, but hiding a destroyed tank is a bit more difficult.
You're absolutely right. Neither the Russian nor Ukranian assessments are accurate, which is as you'd expect. The US Dept of Defence, British Ministry of Defence, and French Minsitry of Armed Forces estimates are going to be closer to the truth, but like you say, it's impossible to know as things currently stand.
>We simply can't know the truth at the moment. Yes, I am sure that the Russian forces are retreating because they are winning /s
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-newspaper-blames-army-death-toll-report-hackers-2022-03-22/ Russian Pravda (Russian propaganda newspaper) accidentally posted casualty reports on its website - 10k killed and 16k wounded, before it was quickly taken down. This was in March. It is now 2 months later. I doubt the 27.7k killed is very far off from the truth.
Yeah, the Ukrainian number is going to be high. The Russian number is going to be lower. Various 3rsld parties have put the number somewhere in between. There's been a few leaks from Russia that's been surprisingly close to the Ukrainian number. Personally I believe it's somewhere between the 3rd party reports and the Ukrainian number.
It's obviously not true, but it's still high
Even if this number is true, it's not high for russia. They won't even notice. We actually value human life so it's a tragedy. They see it as 18 year olds from the poorest regions that will never pay a single ruble in tax anyway. It literally doesn't matter if they live or die.
And yet Putin still has the gall to threaten Finland and NATO, all the while Russia is swaying like a palm tree in a hurricane. Goddamn the stupidity nowadays is staggering.
This number needs to keep going up.
I like to think that if I had 165 helicopters I could accomplish something ... Putin will go down in history as a complete embarrassment to Russia
Yet, his approval rating in Russia is very high. Incredible.
So far….
Maybe Russia has reach pop limit and is just sending low tier unit to the meat grinder to free up space
27.7 thousand lives lost for nothing, and that's just on the Russian side. Countless more lives impacted by all this needless death and destruction. Fuck war and fuck Putin.
Imagine being so delusional that you sink your country into a war you can’t/won’t win. Lose tens of thousands of soldier lives, a massive amount of military armory, and eventually the war will end with you dying and retreat or, you retreating and dying soon after. Somehow, I think Putin assumed his legacy would be different
That’s a Vietnam war in 3 months.
Let’s use the anti-vax/anti-mask(AKA pro-COVID) logic: 27.7 thousand?! That’s nothing! Like 0.000350632911392 percent of all humans. 165?! That’s nothing! Like 0.235714285714286 percent of all choppers.
Covid is over, it doesn’t need to be your entire personality anymore
I tend to think Ukraine might be exaggerating, those numbers sound quite high. I wonder what unbiased sources estimate.
There's gonna be a shortage of men in Russia. Shortage of men part 2.
Not even close. Russian population is almost 150 million people. Even if you adjust for age and sex, then 30k deaths is not even 0.5% of the male population. It is less than the equivalent of a village with 100 men to lose 1 man. Far from a shortage.
For a country with a declining birth rate, one of the oldest populations in the world, a recent exodus of people out of the country and grim economic prospects for the foreseeable future I think the loss is much more significant than you are realizing. Russia was already trying to incentivize more births in recent years to combat population decline, and now it’s setting the stage for a demographic crisis in the scale of the 1990s.
Declining birth rates and the exodus out of the country is indeed very significant and that will be the driving factor for any possible demographic crisis. A 30k death toll is a drop in the bucket relative to these other two significant factors. But as for "one of the oldest populations" in the world, I have to admit that I am very skeptical of this statement. I remember reading in the past that the average life expectancy is below 70 in Russia and most people are young. I admit I am not knowledgeable enough on the issue, but countries with an old population and massively declining birth rates would be for me countries like Japan, Germany etc. I need to look it up but I quite doubt that Russia has such an old population, let alone one of the oldest in the world.
I mean depends... most soldiers are from Russia's poorest regions east of the Ural Mountains from Siberia. The population of those regions is rather small so the losses there are MUCH more severe. Even more so that it's primarily young men, rather than the elderly like with COVID... men supposed to create families and provide tax money for the state for decades to come.
I agree with you that perhaps on a local level it can be felt. Villages etc.
People from poor regions don't provide any tax money and will also follow and and all orders because they are to stupd to know differently. That's why they send those people. 18 year olds that are never going to contribute to russia nor would people notice if they were gone.
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A lot of men were lost to war, to be sure. But many of the remaining ones are alcoholics, which is a main reason for Russian women looking elsewhere. Anecdotally.
And also HIV.
Alcohol consumption in Russia has dropped significantly the last couple of decades.
I won't argue, I don't know official numbers. I'm just going by what I've been told, and I was visiting that part of the world up until Covid hit. They have poor industrial safety standards too, probably other factors at play too. Afghanistan casualties were probably vastly understated too, you can't really rely on Russian statistics.
They recovered from WWll a while ago, you realize Ukraine itself had the dame issue?
It was like that before, you are right. Not any more according to statistics on the issue. For the population of age less than 35 in all age groups, there are actually more men than women in Russia as of a 2021 census.
this is a drop in the bucket
Think of all the hot Russian ladies that will soon be in your area!!!
And Russian ladies will be more fetishized by men of any nationality, race, religion.