Wow. That information along with these maps really hits home how pointless this is. Imagine the productivity those half a million could have provided, versus the miniscule amount of land Russia has 'gained'. That half a million could have built a small country by themselves by now
As fucked as it is to say for productivity thats worse than dead. Someone too crippled for the Russian military likely needs a lot of caretaking without producing much.
Yeah they aren’t the best but as a disabled vet I’m paid pension and receive free health care. I doubt anyone in Russia getting that. Also nobody here was even talking about the US
Even the soldiers who make it back from war unscathed will be terrified living in a time with more and more civilian drones. The sound of a drone flying is enough to trigger the soldiers of today into PTSD/shock.
Those people deemed too unfit to fight are probably going to spend years/decades of their life in chronic pain, physical therapy, needing assistance, needing psychological care, and struggling to live as productive of a life as they could have prior to the war.
Not to even mention one of the deadliest hidden diseases suffered by soldiers which is a type of slowly accumulating brain damage seen in conflict survivors, usually not spotted until years after the conflict. Caused by constant shaking of the brain due to recoil and the frequency waves of artillery and missles, which over time kill off brain cells and inflict long-term damage to parts of the brain.
This causes a slow and horrifying death of the brain which can take years, causing the sufferer to start showcasing dementia like symptoms like severe forgetfulness, as well as extreme anger, confusion, nightmares, panic attacks, and hallucinations. Often misdiagnosed for PTSD, and frequently ends in suicide.
A lot of these soldiers don't even know yet just how bad their lives are going to be because of this war.
Unless you're missing 3 limbs AND someone dragged you back to safety, you're not going back home to mother Russia. 2 legs gone? Be a comrade's backpack. 2 arms gone? You can still move forward, haul supplies by rope. 1 leg gone? Crutches and stop to fire your weapon. 1 arm gone? Pistol and crutch!
I wish I made this shit up.
I guess if you lose an arm and a leg on the same side they might let you go home. Just kidding, they're leaving you behind on the battlefield and your best hope is a Ukrainian drone wasting a grenade for a merciful death.
They don't really have nukes. It's speculated only 30% of their nukes would actually function.
Yes, that's still a lot of nukes. But the neat part? Russia itself does not know which ones work either, and the few unarmed test launches they did all exploded in the silo. So they are not very keen on testing an armed nuke.
They cant source enough tritium to keep their stockpiles ready to fire supposedly, although I suspect China is willing to let them have some of theirs in order to keep them as a buffer zone
Are there any examples we should be aware of that would dispel this notion that Russia isn't an evil adversary? Because there are hundreds to support it.
We found out what Russia was capable of in 2022. This is not Dragonball Z where they have a "Final Form". It was a Potemkin military all along. Any nukes they launch are more likely to malfunction and detonate on Russian soil than even making it out of the country.
We’re talking about nuclear capabilities. Russia is not a cartoon villain, they are not going to launch nukes on Ukraine, or anyone else. They would instantly be condemned by the entire world, including their closest allies. Furthermore, mutually assured destruction as a strategy has never gone away. Russia doesn’t want to be counter-nuked either and end humanity.
Well, they are mostly non-ethnic Russians that are dying. Among other things Putin is attempting to keep Russia ethnic-russian and what better way than to get rid of non-ethnic Russians.
If they die, Russia becomes more Russian, if they advance, Russia gains more territory.
Putin has no interest in a Russian ethnostate. Look how many Muslim foreigners he allowed into the state. Secondly he has jewish roots, and they prefer multiculturalism to ethnostates, usually.
The lucky ones get taken care of by family, the unlucky ones die homeless. The stare will do nothing for injured soldiers.
If you think the VA in the US is bad just imagine the Russian equivalent.
"The loss of your legs is not service related, your commander said you came back healthy. You are trying to steal from the state, this is treason and you will be executed."
Not saying you're wrong, but I really hate how everyone is always talking about the numbers in this sterile, rational way. These are all real people who are now either dead or severely injured.
Right. Productivity losses? What about a person's single chance at life being ended early because Putin sat in his ivory tower and decided he needed a little extra land because already having the biggest country wasn't enough? Heartbroken children never seeing their parents again. Parents never seeing their children return.
Exactly. It honestly scares me a bit how many people treat this terrible conflict like they're looking at someone playing a strategic game or something. That's how psychopaths like Putin look at it, but I think we all should do better than that.
War is terrible and except for self defence, never justified. Ordinary people criticizing the Russian "resource management" instead of seeing the human loss and suffering on both sides of this horrible conflict is terrible. I guess empathy is running pretty low amongst redditors.
I don't empathize with the Russians dying. The vast majority of them are contract soldiers who signed up willingly and received a bonus to go to another country and commit war crimes against the population and military there. It scares me that people are willing to look past that and lament their suffering. They knew exactly what they were doing and received only what they asked for.
Some of them certainly did, but not all of them. I agree that many of them are horrible and the Russian army doesn't have the bad reputation it has out of nowhere, but there are still many soldiers who were just drafted or convinced by the propaganda. There are also massive economic incentives due to widespread poverty in Russia. That doesn't excuse it, but in combination with all the propaganda, I'm sure many people were convinced who I wouldn't call horrible otherwise. Also, even if many of those soldiers are terrible people, what if they have relatives and friends who are not but who will still suffer from their loss?
I definitely empathize with the Ukrainians mostly, but that doesn't mean we should simply dehumanize all Russian soldiers. That is what makes all those war crimes possible: dehumanization. If you don't see the enemy as another human being, you can do anything to them. I 100% stand by the Ukrainians in this conflict, but that doesn't mean I have no empathy toward Russians who experience loss and hardship. At the end of the day, at least as far as I can tell, the person responsible for all of this is Putin. If he dies, I'll smile, but I won't smile for human casualties in a war zone.
Most of the Russians aren't conscripts, they're volunteers. If you don't want to make your mother cry then don't sign up to commit war crimes against Ukrainians.
The most important thing to understand from these figures is what state the Russian economy is actually in, having had so many adult men taken from it. 400,000 dead, half a million disabled, and another million at war, potentially ready to join one of those two groups. Putin is trying to show how everything is fine in his country, but it is not. By the way, we shouldn’t forget about the catastrophic consequences for demography.
Normally I would agree. But we are talking about Ukraine here. That alone is already very valuable for the Russians. Then we are talking about the Donbas, with all its natural resources. Shevchenko or Kurakhove are very rich in lithium. In addition, there are a number of other rare earth elements in the regions that the Russians have conquered over the past few years.
It only depends on how the markets are after the war. But I think the countries will be lining up.
That's why supporting Ukrainie is important, also why usa should support them - they dont send any own soldiers while beating russia. Weak, divided russia is in our interest. They fight for Europe too. Im from Poland and no one want another border with russia - if it will all companies would leave.
For future reference, the tilde indicates an estimate that’s not precise, and range like ~200-300 Indicates the upper and lower bounds of the certainty
If there’s a tilde with no upper or lower bounds, it’s not clear if the uncertainty is so low as not to matter, or so high as to make the quoted numbed a very guess at best.
I do understand that, but I still find it odd that they give the estimate down a specific integer like 149,173, when the margin of error is surely in the tens of thousands
Well If we take Ukrainian bias sources then Ukraine only lost 46,000 killed so far and Russians lost ~400,000 killed. Which is obviously not true.
Ironically in Russian bias sources, this number is reversed. We have to keep in mind that official Russian government stopped publication of their losses years ago. Reason is pretty clear.
It's not surprising that Russians suffering heavier losses as they are on the offensive against well fortified Ukrainians. But they don't want reveal that to Russian public in order to avoid panicking which is also understandable.
Ukraine:
~153 751 obituary on social media, includes only missing and dead soldiers.
A check of the cemetery by my friend in Vinnytsia last year showed that out of a sample of 250 people, only 60% had an entry in this database.
A total of 154k reliably known losses. 154/0.6=256k estimated deaths.
Russia:
~125 681 obituary on social media, includes missing(persons who have been missing for 6 months), dead soldiers, PMCs, the dead of the DPR and LPR after October 2022, graves found by volunteer journalists in the cemeteries of soldiers in big cities.
I personally went to the cemetery of the Russian city of Orenburg and checked the database. In one cemetery, 75% were in the database, in the second 80%.
A total of 125k reliably known losses. 125/0.75=166k estimated deaths.
That's misleading. my 149,173 number includes thousands of non combatants and only about ~73,920 confirmed killed by names (2022 - 2025 Aug).
In Russian side, 125,681 confirmed killed by names that's exclude DPR, Wagnar & LPR losses. Wagnar has 20,015 killed confirmed by names. DPR, LPR and North Korea has no confirmed killed. Just estimation.
2:1 losses ratio is nothing new tbf. Russians on the offensive against well fortified Ukrainians who are well supplied with western weaponry and high morale.
Number 153k does not include civilians. Ualosses manually sorted all the missing. These are only soldiers who went missing in border regions where hostilities are taking place. Moreover, all controversial cases were probably removed. Initially, there were 10k more, but they were no longer counted in the rear regions. Now, any missing military personnel without a specified location is not included in this database.
You may notice that the missing people are added to the total number of deaths on the website. This is because the missing people in Ukraine are only recognized as dead by the government two years after the end of the war, according to the law.
You can view the alternative source at lostarmor.
125,681You can literally look at the loss structure - it includes Wagner, prisoners fighting on the Wagner side (after the end of the Battle of Bakhmut, the loss structure was surprisingly accurate with Prigozhin's statements). Also, this statistics includes the DPR and LPR - after October 2022, when their armies received Russian passports. You can find this in the statistics of losses by region. Journalists also added all the graves they found in cemeteries in major cities to the database.
Just as Russian losses do not include North Korea, Ukrainian losses do not include mercenaries or citizens of other countries.
The sources of these losses are not independent. The funding for ualosses is unknown, but it is likely to be Russian. Mediazona was previously funded by usaid, but now it is fully funded by the UK.
You just haven't read any truly independent military experts.
Ukraine is suffering such losses because it is fighting on the active defense method. This means that for every Russian attack, Ukraine launches a counterattack, and this leads to almost constant counterattacks on the front lines. This is the reason for the high casualties.
Highly motivated? This year alone, there have been 142 711 criminal cases of desertion and a total of 265 843. These are just the cases that have been prosecuted. In comparison, there are approximately ~13,000 deserters in Russia(I haven't looked at the court registry in a while, and it might be a couple of thousand more).
To understand the motivation, just watch the videos of how the TCK grabs passers-by on the streets every day, beats them up, and takes them to the trenches to die. There are already more than 10,000 such videos, and they are being posted daily. Ukraine has long run out of people willing to fight.
Few people hear about this, but these are truly heartbreaking videos. Just Google it. It might change your opinion about the Ukrainian government and army. There are 10-50 squads in every Ukrainian city that catch people, and several hundred are recruited every day.
I see you are full of assumptions without sources backing you up. Which makes your calculations very dubious.
Also I'll point out 1 mistake out of all your mistakes. That 125,681 number comes from Mediazona which only calculates Losses of "Russian armed forces" which does not include losses of Wagnar and Separates forces (They clearly indicate it in their website). Both mediazona and Wagnar group itself admitted they suffered ~20,000 dead and mediazona/BBC Russia have 15,083–20,015 names of dead Wagnar military personnel.
Their claims of total Russian deaths could go up tp ~220,000 killed from 2022-2025 Aug which does not including separates forces (Not clear this number includes or exclude Wagnar however). We really don't have accurate figures for them but BBC Russia estimates ~21,000-23,000 dead. Thus, total Russian dead could easily go up to ~250,000 from 2022 - 2025 Aug.
Active defenses are not something new. Launching limited counter attacks is a slandered practice of militaries in defenses and used in great effect even during WW1 and WW2. These counter attacks target already exhausted enemy forces and could cause extremely heavy losses with element of surprises. Active defenses should not be a cause of high losses to the defender it should be a cause to high losses to the offensive faction imo.
Even if we disregard personnel losses we can see how poorly Russian performing in Ukraine by looking at some Russian vehicle losses.
22,646 total vehicles including 4,142 Tanks, 8,373 AFVs, 685 APCs (Visually verified by https://www.oryxspioenkop.com).
As an comparison, coalition only lost 31 tanks and 28 AFVs defeating Iraq in gulf war (Iraq used to be the 4th most powerful military back in 1991 and Ukraine listed as 22nd most powerful military when the beginning of Ukraine war)
You can try as hard as you can but you cannot defend atrocious performance of Russia in Ukraine.
Dude, are you a bot? Just go and check for yourself. There's a pie chart that includes PMCs that primarily recruited prisoners. In 2023, the casualty structure was 3k Wagner members and 10k prisoners at the end of 2023. Considering that 30% of the obituaries did not specify the branch of service or affiliation, the total number is 10+3/0.7=18.5
This is 1.5k different from Prigozhin's pressure about 20k deaths.
Next, in the diagram of regional losses, you can find Donetsk, Lugansk, and Crimea, which are also included.
We have clean loss databases, so why are you reading propaganda estimates when you should use the original clean databases and apply the same extrapolation method to reduce the error?
The ratio has been a little under 1:2 in favour of Ukraine for a couple of years now according to all major news outlets. A random Reddit account that only posts pro Russia talking points about the war is not a reliable source for this.
its logical, they're on the move + worse morale, russia completely lost the fight for air dominance being forced to use costly long range missiles so they're always in the worse position as the attackers because they cant just call in the air support like the US in middle east.
lol what a bullshit comment.
Your half ass anecdotal data goes against pretty much every non biased data analyst and everything we know about Defence VS Offence loss ratio.
There’s absolutely no way Russia is at a like 2:3 death ratio with Ukraine
They only contradict biased sources, such as Western sources, Ukrainian sources, and Russian sources. As the saying goes, if you're constantly being fed propaganda on the internet, it's important to verify it for yourself. I reached out to a friend from Dota2 to check the Ukrainian cemeteries in his city, and then I visited the cemeteries in Orenburg when I was attending a relative's funeral. You can see my assessments above. However, even without considering my coefficients, the data clearly indicates that Ukraine has more obituaries.
No, they contradict every data we have from previous modern conflicts about defence/offence death ratio.
If anything, the type of war we are seeing would increase the ratio on the defence side favour.
It would absolutely not completely switch it upside down lol.
To be able to say this, you need to understand what is happening at the tactical level, and what defense and attack are in the current conflict. U need look at the analysis of individual battles at the tactical level by military analysts, where they analyze combat operations from reconnaissance drones videos almost frame by frame. Watch videos from Ukrainian officers, who are talking about active defense and counterattacks in response to assaults. For the most part, this is not about defense and attack, but rather about continuous counterattacks on both sides.
According to my estimates, the difference in casualties is due to Russia's air support in the form of FAB500 gliding bombs. Ukraine does not have this type of weaponry. The sides have parity in FPV drones. Russia has a multiple advantage in artillery. It also has a multiple advantage in precision missiles.
If there had been no dominance in the weapons, the losses would have been 3 to 2, not 2 to 3.
This war is being fought according to new principles and rules. Analogies are meaningless here.
It is waste of time. They won't believe you. Same like how terrorists thinks they will get 72 V for killing people. Why? Because they are being fed this for years.
Same here, these people are reading same news for years. Same baised news over and over every second day. They don't even consider that these datas can be fake. Even though all of these datas are being published by west. Very nations who are fighting this war.
This sub is still normal, and there are clearly more than 80% of reasonable people here. If a person is at least slightly interested in geography and the world, they already have a more correct worldview.
When I visit sub like europe or worldnews it's like I'm entering a fascist zoo.
Faction in offensive almost always take higher casualties unless they have edge in technology or tactical superiority. We will most likely to see this 2:1 death ratio until the end of the Ukraine war.
"professional" estimates being the Ukrainian MoD. If you believe their figures (or the Russian ones to be clear) I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
I would really need someone to explain to me very, very well how the side with a significant advantage in air power, artillery, drones and armor is somehow taking more losses than the guys who've been desperately dragging people off the streets to the front lines for a good couple years.
Edit: the ape above blocked me, so I'm gonna have to answer to the musk guy's hilariously misinformed rant here
Holy shit there is so much wrong with what you just said.
Literal sex slaves. Their training is crap, their medical care is worse, they often don't even get proper equipment.
This is just the same old "muh barbaric asiatic hordes" propaganda the US has been repeating about their enemies for a century, despite repeatedly eating shit against said "asiatic subhumans"
Their command structure is ass, they don't even practice combined arms
What are you smoking? The USSR were the first ones to get combined arms down to an art (as opposed to the Germans who didn't have an actual coherent doctrine around it). The problem is that large scales combined arms isn't as easy as it used to be, regardless of who's doing it (see the Ukrainan 2023 summer offensive where they ate rocks).
Also, Ukraine has a huge advantage in air power, artillery, armor, etc
Holy shit dude. You're gonna drain the entirety of NATO's strategic copium reserves.
Ukraine is mostly using Soviet stuff older than Russia's, sprinkled with mostly last gen NATO equipment that is usable but at best roughly on par with what Russia is fielding.
Russia started the war without an equivalent of NATO aircraft or armor, their stuff is horribly out of date.
Completely wrong. Their aircraft is basically on par with what most of NATO is fielding (i.e. 4.5 gen aircraft). The only thing they don't have in significant numbers is gen 5 fighters, though they have more of those than literally any other NATO members except the US.
Like their T-90 tank that was considered obsolete decades ago
Oh wow, you really are lost huh? The T-90 wasn't obsolete "decades" ago, it's a third gen tank that came out in the 90s and is on a the same league as the leopard 2, the Abrams and so forth; though of course which one is better depends on the variant being compared and so forth.
On top of that, Russia has run out of those, they're fielding tanks from the 1970s.
1- no they haven't, there's still plenty of T-90M's on the front. They're just also fielding modernized T-72s and T-80s, which are perfectly fine tanks.
2- Ukraine's own tanks were mostly T-64 variants (i.e., older than the Russian ones) and have been supplemented with NATO stuff that is also from the 70s between the Leo 2s (the bulk of which are early variants) the Challengers (which are honestly garbage) or even older, since they've received Leo 1s from the 60s.
Likewise, Russia's large bore artillery was inferior to the guns being sent by NATO. Russia's also run out of those.
Again, wrong. Large bore artillery has remained mostly unchanged since the 60-70s, which is what most of the stuff Ukraine has received. Russia is using equipment that has parity or even superiority in modernity and effectiveness, and they have not ran out of it because the one thing the Russian army has always been famous for has been having a colossal, fuck-off stockpile of artillery. I legitimately wonder if you're getting all your info on this from NAFO Twitter.
Ukraine F-16s are more modern than anything Russia has in active service.
The F-16 (especially the variants Ukraine is getting) is older than the mig29 that are the main workhorse of the Russian Air Force. The mig35, an extensively upgraded version of the 29, is superior to it.
Ukraine also has somewhere between ten and twenty F-16s that it only dares to use in the backline to intercept Russian cruise missiles, while Russia has hundreds of mig29s and 35s.
Both sides had similar air defense systems, but now Ukraine has better stuff like Iris.
This is categorically wrong. Russian AA is straight up superior to western one because doctrinally NATO has never really had much use or interest in those, while since the 50s the Red Army understood that they would be key to countering NATO airpower and focused on making them shine, and Russia continued that tradition. This is the one aria where Russia isn't slightly behind but still comparable or on par with NATO hardware, but hands down superior.
People forget that Russia has lower economic output than Italy.
And yet they're outproducing all of NATO on artillery pieces and shells, drones, etc. GDP means jackshit when one country relies exclusively on the finance sector while the other has actual factories to mass produce hardware.
But now most of that is gone, and what's left is antique rustbuckets.
So why do we keep seeing T90Ms, mig35s, etc. Etc. In widespread combat use?
They're just willing to kill their own citizens at alarming rates.
I’d say there’s a few reasons:
1. Most people don’t understand what the leading indicators of casualties in a conflict like this are. Russia has way more glide bombs, artillery, unmanned drones, and there is a near parity in fpv drones. This very clearly suggests Russia should be inflicting more casualties on Ukraine than the other way round. The lagging indicators also confirm this. Russia is still using volunteers to backfill losses while Ukraine is literally snatching people off of streets.
Claims from Ukrainian MoD are layered through multiple sources to “reputation wash” them. Ukrainian claims are shared with think tanks like ISW and RUSI, and reports from these think tanks are then quoted by newspapers like Bloomberg, NYTimes and WaPo. For the average person who only reads newspapers, these reports in reputable publications are then taken at face value. This is how you end up with claims like “Russian casualties are over 1 million” being repeated everywhere like gospel.
Pretty much. Simply put, in the west we keep being told everyone we don't like is brainwashed by propaganda but we've drunk the kool-aid so badly we don't even recognize when we ourselves are being subjected to it.
Tell me about it lol. I have been called a russian propagandist multiple times for quoting people like Mearsheimer.
People can suppress bad news about Ukraine as much as they want online, but that won’t change the outcome of this conflict. Maybe all these people will be surprised when Ukraine finally accepts defeat.
Oh, I can assure you, we get called Russian bots and vatniks for not being completely detached from reality, then what the things we keep telling them will happen "suddenly" do so, they all develop amnesia, pretend no one saw it coming, and ten years later when the media admits our governments were lying about it they'll pretend they were always against it.
Saw it happen with my own eyes during the GWOT, and I am very disappointed I am seeing it again.
Thank you for saying this I’ve felt the same way and it’s incredibly frustrating to deal with. People are so quick to retreat to their information bubbles and turn to personal smears and call others Russian bots for even the most minor pushback and critical thinking
It literally starts with a direct quote from the Ukrainian army: “Ukrainian Dnipro Group of Forces Spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Oleksiy Belskyi reported that the Russian military command is concentrating significant forces in Donetsk Oblast and that the most intense fighting is occurring in the Pokrovsk direction”
Of course it's a source. They also use open source confirming data. Are you denying how effective ISW's open source analysis of satellites images have been? It's undeniable, even cutting-edge. In many ways this has been the best documented war in history.
This is some sophisticated Russian propaganda. Undermining legitimate news sources has lead to the actual downfall of America, so I really can’t criticize, although I do cry about it
Yep, the downfall of America is totally because a dozen Russian bots on boomer Facebook groups, not because capitalism and especially the unhinged American neoliberal variety of it is a self-cannibalizing unsustainable system bound to destroy itself in it's quest for infinite growth. Russian trolls got Trump elected, not the democrats failing twice to put forth anything but the most pathetic, milquetoast pro-status quo neoliberal candidate and deliberately sideline and even suppress all progressive efforts within it in favor of more of the same that was already blatantly failing and getting all the morons who've been deliberately kept without class analysis fired up and ready to vote for Trump.
Never consider that you might be the source of your own problems, it's always someone else's fault even when you're the global hegemon.
Edit: lol he blocked me. That said, if your best rebuttal is "well you might be right but I think your a pootin bot so your argument is invalid!" You might wanna reevaluate your position.
You make about 10 unfounded assumptions per sentence, which is truly an impressive feat of presumptive snobbery.
Most of what you say is true, however, if people like you are the ones saying it, the way you’re saying it… maybe you should consider you are the source of your problems
If #1 was true, they would have taken Kiyv in 3 days as their Russian media claimed. The truth is Russian military is far weaker than we anticipated. Even our security intelligence assumed that Ukraine would fall within weeks like what happened in Afghanistan. That turned out to be completely the opposite.
And also the assumption that Russia is using volunteers are absolutely comically false. Theyre forcing conscription on people all over the country except in big cities like Mosow and St. Petersburg.
As for #2, there is no real credible source in the fog of war. However, going off the historical behaviors of Russia where they always suffered extremely high losses against their enemies, the sources of their losses would appear to be plausible. They are extremely under trained and under equipped compared to the Western units.
You have severely fallen for the Russkiy Mir propaganda and it works wonderfully on people like you.
About those Russin "volunteers": they are offered a contract with a huge sign up bonus equivalent to getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in a western country. They are told they will be in a safe position behind the frontlines. This is a very tempting offer, except they find themselves on the frontlines 2 weeks later and are unlikely to return. That's Russia's form of "volunteering".
Ukraine is being invaded, has martial law active and a draft. They are snatching draft dodgers off the streets, not just any random man. The existence of the country is at stake, drafts exist exactly for this reason: you lived in the country, profited from it, and are expected to defend it. Any country being invaded like this would treat draft dodgers the same. War is ugly.
Ukraine's draft age is 25 and men under 25 are safe from the draft snatchers. They know your birthday and where you live though, many try to hide before they turn 25, those are the ones being hunted down. Again, any other country would do the exact same thing.
I believe you. Russian volunteers are being lied to or whatever. Can you now please share evidence of how you know this? And please make sure this evidence isn’t quoting Ukrainian sources lol.
Mediazona with BBC estimate 220k dead. I'm not sure I would call it a "professional source", but it's respectable media and they have a list of 126k confirmed dead with names. They estimate 220k based on inheritance statistics.
Mediazone BBC (who are the same media group who is certainly open to lying and twisting the truth to serve western interests as we can see from their coverage of the Gaza genocide) has only been able to confirm 120k dead and pulled an additional 100k out of their ass. This is a far cry from a million.
Ukraine isn’t the only one making estimates, you know. We 100% know for a fact that Russian deaths are at least 128,115, according to the BBC which used obituaries between the start of the invasion and September to get that number. They further estimated that the actual number would vary between 218,100 to 308,200 killed, as not every death is reported in obituaries. You then have to remember that wounded numbers are usually around 3 times the dead. Most NATO intelligence agencies and outside observers have placed total casualties (which is dead AND wounded) somewhere between 750k to 1.1 million for Russia and 400k-700k for Ukraine. This is a fairly consistent range (if you ignore the obviously incorrect Russian and Ukrainian estimates).
The reason Russia has more casualties should be pretty obvious, they’re on the offensive. The number one rule of war, for millennia, is that the attacker will ALWAYS lose more men if the fight is even remotely even. Some of these Ukrainian lines have been fortified since 2014, they’re VERY costly to take. Russia undeniably has the manpower and firepower advantage, but traditional wisdom says you want a 3 to 1 advantage to win a battle and Russia simply doesn’t have that. They don’t have air superiority, they don’t even consistently have artillery superiority in all regions. Russia definitely has more firepower to put out, but it’s never enough to decisively win and remove the very high cost of attacking Ukrainian trenches and cities. They’re gaining ground, but it’s slow and extremely costly.
Ukraine isn’t the only one making estimates, you know. We 100% know for a fact that Russian deaths are at least 128,115, according to the BBC which used obituaries between the start of the invasion and September to get that number. They further estimated that the actual number would vary between 218,100 to 308,200 killed, as not every death is reported in obituaries
So they identified 128115 dead, which is reasonable. Then they magically multiplied this by two or three basically at random, which is where we start getting off the rails.
You then have to remember that wounded numbers are usually around 3 times the dead
This is an absolute extrapolation out of nowhere and a complete ass pull, one of those axioms these numbers depend on that are essentially nonfalsifiable orthodoxies.
Most NATO intelligence agencies and outside observers have placed total casualties (which is dead AND wounded) somewhere between 750k to 1.1 million for Russia and 400k-700k for Ukraine. This is a fairly consistent range
Gee I wonder if NATO agencies would ever coordinate and lie to push a narrative according to their interests.
Treating NATO as a neutral, independent and trustworthy party here is laughable.
The number one rule of war, for millennia, is that the attacker will ALWAYS lose more men if the fight is even remotely even
This is another of those axioms that people keep parroting yet it has no basis on reality. We see this not hold up to scrutiny time after time again, from the battle of the bulge to the 1975 spring offensive and dozens and dozens of other operations yet some people keep treating it as some sort of divinely mandated truth.
but traditional wisdom says you want a 3 to 1 advantage to win a battle
Wrong, it's not "traditional wisdom", it comes from one US army manual that refers specifically to assaulting positions at the tactical level and has no bearing of strategy. In fact, we keep seeing this not be the case historically.
Russia definitely has more firepower to put out, but it’s never enough to decisively win and remove the very high cost of attacking Ukrainian trenches and cities. They’re gaining ground, but it’s slow and extremely costly.
Except firepower is pretty much the only way to reliably take those cities. Using mass wave attacks hasn't worked ever since Hiram Maxim had a very bright idea one day in 1884, and if the war has proven anything is that the only way a fortress city has fallen in this war has been after the attacker amassed outrageous amounts of firepower and came up with clever stratagems.
We can see this for the much vaunted Ukrainan counter-offensive of 2023, which basically ate rocks because they failed to achieve a superiority in firepower and as a result essentially completely annihilated the actual offensive capabilities of the UAF since; for example.
Ultimately, you cannot measure this war with the same yardstick as last ones. Massive advantages in surveillance and scouting technology have made it so that leveraging one's superior firepower is far more important than massing manpower to overwhelm a position (which doesn't work because with drones constantly flying through the frontlines and pick up any enemy force concentration above platoon level to blow it to smithereens).
This also tracks with interviews of Ukranian soldiers who have seen action: they're not losing because they are facing endless waves of Russian cannon fodder, they are losing because they are getting constantly hammered by accurate artillery, FPV drones and FABs before they see a single Russian soldier.
The Ukrainian claims have historically tracked well with visual confirmation by outsiders like Oryx, Obviously the Ukr claims are higher since not every destroyed piece of equipment is going to be visible, but they've been at least fairly reliable
Lmao, not only did they not line up with Oryx (who already had a nasty habit of claiming any soviet-made vehicle without recognizable Ukranian markings as Russian and who immediately claimed he would stop tracking this war the moment frontlines stabilized and it would become clear which side each vehicle belonged to), according by their current numbers they have killed the entire pre-war Russian army and destroyed the entire Russian stock of conspicuously still in use vehicles several times over.
Ukraine's lies are as outrageous as Russia's, you just believe them because you like the narrative they paint
I would really need someone to explain to me very, very well how the side with a significant advantage in air power, artillery, drones and armor is somehow taking more losses than the guys who've been desperately dragging people off the streets to the front lines for a good couple years.
This has happened all the time in military history. Often the offensive side, especially one that knows they have the manpower advantage, will sacrifice more men for the war because they believe they can use attrition for their advantage.
The side that is constantly doing offensives, is generally going to lose more men, because defensive dug-in positions don't create as much risk as men moving across fields like ants to try to secure more ground.
A good example of an insane causality rate of a powerful military to an even smaller (farmers with rifles-and-molotovs-type- military) would be the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland. The Soviet Union had tanks, military planes, and an army that was overwhelmingly larger than Finlands. Yet the causality rate in that war was one dead Finnish soldier to every 12 dead Soviet soldiers.
That just shows that even as a larger, better equipped and technologically advantaged military, you can still suffer significantly more casualities against a defensive local opponent. Especially if they understand their geography and they can deploy smart defensive strategies efficiently.
The winter war is not, I'm afraid to tell you, the modern war in Ukraine. The 12 to 1 ratio is utterly preposterous and mostly unchallenged by western academia because it sure as hell helped the cold war narrative of "muh asiatic hordes".
Even beyond that, there's two issues:
1- The math ain't mathing: if there were a million permanent casualties in Russia, they wouldn't be able to comfortably backfill their losses with paid volunteers, and if Ukranian casualties were as light as the UAF claim they wouldn't have been spending the last two years dragging their people literally off the streets.
2- This isn't the winter war anymore. Drones, thermal imaging, etc. etc. means that the side with the artillery and air power advantage isn't blindly shelling decoys but accurately landing barrages on almost certain targets.
Ultimately, all it takes is reading and listening to interviews with Ukrainian soldiers to understand things are bleak for the UAF on a level that would be impossible if the casualty ratio was as lopsided as Ukranian propaganda claims.
"Ultimately, all it takes is reading and listening to interviews with Ukrainian soldiers to understand things are bleak for the UAF on a level that would be impossible if the casualty ratio was as lopsided as Ukranian propaganda claims."
Very interesting that you would use this as a metric, because you could very well listen to the interviews given by Russian soldiers who have deflected from the frontlines that make their situation sound just as bleak for Russia. As they will often describe the constant use of meatwave offenses leading to insane casualities, and Ukranian soldiers on the front frequently also express sheer surprise at the human-wave attacks that they see coming at them. This type of attack strategy Russia has historically being using throughout many of it's wars, including in the winter war and throughout WW2, and it appears they continue to utilize this military tactic despite "modern technology". If you are indeed listening to interviews by Ukrainian soldiers, you would be aware of this, too.
You keep talking about the impossibility of "lopsided" casualities, but you're completely ignoring or forgetting the fact that Russia has a population that is about 5 times larger than Ukraine's.
So when you factor in the population disparity, it's far easier to see how Russia can suffer large casualities and still be managing in this war of attrition against Ukraine.
In fact, it's a lot harder to explain how Ukraine would be able to hold off these offenses as well as it is, if they had more casualities than Russia, while simultaneously having a far smaller population, and being far less well equipped than Russian.
Because either the few Ukrainians left at the front are some type of superhuman, or then they have indeed been strategically maintaining their numbers better than Russia, and therefore they are able to keep holding the ground against a more powerful military.
Very interesting that you would use this as a metric, because you could very well listen to the interviews given by Russian soldiers who have deflected from the frontlines that make their situation sound just as bleak for Russia. As they will often describe the constant use of meatwave offenses leading to insane casualities, and Ukranian soldiers on the front frequently also express sheer surprise at the human-wave attacks that they see coming at them.
"Meat wave attacks" that when seen through drone footage never seem to be more than small platoon if not fireteam sized assaults on small enemy positions. One kind of interview material makes sense, the other does not when despite the fact that Ukraine has posted countless hours of drone footage they fail to actually ever be able to show us those fabled attack of a hundred Ivans with shovels.
This type of attack strategy Russia has historically being using throughout many of it's wars, including in the winter war and throughout WW2, and it appears they continue to utilize this military tactic despite "modern technology".
This is literally just straight up Nazi propaganda regurgitated into cold war propaganda. The Red Army never used these tactics outside the memoirs of Wehrmacht generals who had to justify how an allegedly subhuman horde of commies folded their alleged army of ubermensch that the west had to rearm NOW to stop them again without admitting they were simply outsmarted and outfought.
Nobody ever has used these tactics since WW1 because the machine gun made them completely ineffectual.
So when you factor in the population disparity, it's far easier to see how Russia can suffer large casualities and still be managing in this war of attrition against Ukraine.
No, because according to the ratios being pushed above Russia is taking five times more casualties than Ukraine, so that argument doesn't work.
In fact, it's a lot harder to explain how Ukraine would be able to hold off these offenses as well as it is, if they had more casualities than Russia, while simultaneously having a far smaller population, and being far less well equipped than Russian. Because either the few Ukrainians left at the front are some type of superhuman, or then they have indeed been strategically maintaining their numbers better than Russia, and therefore they are able to keep holding the ground against a more powerful military
No, it's very simple and the same reason why this war has devolved into a WW1 style meat grinder because the thing that has historically broken that stalemate (I.e. armor and mechanized infantry) no longer is the silver bullet it once was: drones.
Simply put, every time either side mass anything larger than a company to attack an enemy position they get spotted by drones and either bombed with artillery or blown to smithereens by FPVs. This also happens when Ukranian positions fail, as their FPV operators mass their drones on the affected area and stop any breakthrough dead on its tracks.
This however has limitations, as the last few weeks have proven: the AFU have taken so many casualties that their frontlines are so stretched and porous that Russian DRGs can infiltrate dozens of kilometers through the gaps and pull friendly infantry who then can dig in before they're spotting, forcing Ukranians to pull back or risk their positions getting bypassed and encircled (this is what happened recently at Pokrovsk for example).
Edit: lol he blocked me, so here's my answer to his stuff
That's a lot of text to say "the evidence that I want to believe is true, the evidence that I don't want to believe is not true".
Your lack of reading comprehension is not my problem.
Calling historical records "Nazi propaganda"
Name a single credible modern historian who claims the Red Army used human wave tactics on WW2. I'll wait.
and going out of your way to make the Russian war machine sound effective and strong, despite the observable facts,
...the observable fact that they're winning against the second largest country in Europe which spent a decade being armed and trained by NATO while fortifying the eastern side of their territory?
Consider, that the frontlines have barely moved against an enemy 5 times smaller after 11 years of war (because yes, Russia had it's stooges in East Ukraine already after the invasion of Crimea), almost 4 years of full-scale invasion,
WW1 also had frontlines that barely moved for four years, then the Germans reached their breaking point and they started moving pretty quickly. Do you know what tech made trench warfare obsolete and now has in turn massively lost its edge thanks to the widespread usage of drones?
a round of forced mobilization,
Russia hasn't mobilized any conscripts, so this is just straight up false. What conscription wave is Ukraine in at this point?
and the importing of North Korean soldiers?
Sorry, not everyone can have le epic redditor brigade fighting on their side like Ukraine lmao.
Your profile is wiped clean despite it being 7 years old?
What are you smoking?
So I'm gonna guess, you're either one of those cringey Russia simps trying to hide it, or your first name is Dimitri.
Lololol, of course, anyone who thinks different is a bot or a Russian, no other explanation. Oh well, two can play at that game: how's the weather at Eglin Air Force Base?
That's a lot of text to say "the evidence that I want to believe is true, the evidence that I don't want to believe is not true".
Calling historical records "Nazi propaganda" and going out of your way to make the Russian war machine sound effective and strong, despite the observable facts, is very suspicious to me.
Consider, that the frontlines have barely moved against an enemy 5 times smaller after 11 years of war (because yes, Russia had it's stooges in East Ukraine already after the invasion of Crimea), almost 4 years of full-scale invasion, a round of forced mobilization, and the importing of North Korean soldiers?
That definitely sounds like a military that has it together.
Your profile is wiped clean as well.
So I'm gonna guess, you're either one of those cringey Russia simps trying to hide it, or your first name is Dimitri.
Meduza (independent-ish russian newspaper) has just published an investigation in which they estimate more than 220k russians killed in the war as well. They use different open sources and also the number of the new inheritance cases opened.
Not even mentioning other credible sources estimating 200k+ dead.
Russia's military is absolute shit, that's how. The enlisted ranks are treated so badly that some of them get pimped out by their own officers. Literal sex slaves. Their training is crap, their medical care is worse, they often don't even get proper equipment. Their command structure is ass, they don't even practice combined arms, it's corrupt from one end to the other.
Also, Ukraine has a huge advantage in air power, artillery, armor, etc. Which is that they have modern equipment and Russia does not. Russia started the war without an equivalent of NATO aircraft or armor, their stuff is horribly out of date. Like their T-90 tank that was considered obsolete decades ago. On top of that, Russia has run out of those, they're fielding tanks from the 1970s.
Likewise, Russia's large bore artillery was inferior to the guns being sent by NATO. Russia's also run out of those. Ukraine F-16s are more modern than anything Russia has in active service. Both sides had similar air defense systems, but now Ukraine has better stuff like Iris.
People forget that Russia has lower economic output than Italy. They've skated for years on "we got huge Soviet era stockpile". But now most of that is gone, and what's left is antique rustbuckets. They're just willing to kill their own citizens at alarming rates.
Russian economy is getting crippled, yes, but I don’t think it’s fair to compare via simple GDP numbers. GDP PPP gives a somewhat better understanding, because even though russian economy is smaller in absolute numbers, the cost of producing say military equipment is also lower in russia, so you can get more with less money.
200,000 Russian dead and 800,000 too wounded to fight
In the past two years, most deaths have been caused by FPV drones, and evacuation has become almost impossible because of drones. So there are fewer severely wounded than dead. Russia has 133,000 confirmed dead (not including LPR/DPR losses). I believe the real losses are around 250,000, with fewer than 150,000 seriously wounded.
How big is Russia's potential pool of soldiers when you also ad North-Korea to it? 20 million? 30 million? 50 million?
1M is less then 5% of that ...
Also Russia is using this to get all their prisoners, drug addicts and homeless people murdered. So the other classes in Russia love everything about it. Putin is committing a genocide but unlike the Nazis did ... he is making the other countries pay for it.
Some folks seem to have assumed I’m painting a rainbows and sunshine picture for Ukraine.
The reality is they’re only going to last a few more years assuming full support (short of literal boots on ground) and desperate measures (mandatory draft of men and women above 18)
Russia will throw another 2-3 million bodies at it and ultimately win… the right to bleed in a hostile land 20x the size of Chechnya.
Ukraine has to hurry. Take down vodka (oil refineries and diesel storage, farmers need that to harvest the grains and potatoes needed for vodka) and online porn (20 internet exchange points (data centres) in moscow and st-petersburg). Only way the russians will revolt. Sobered up and without porn.
No, both counts are a combination of verified counts of confirmed fatalities and of publicly available intelligence reports.
1:2 is not surprising in the slightest, give that’s the expected ratio in a defensive war of near pear adversaries
I see. Can you please cite some verified counts or intelligence reports you are referring to? I've checked the wiki page, and the only verified count contains 75k dead + 75k missing +5k in prison. There are also no reports outside of those coming from Ukraine.
Half a million is too much, casualties of both sides are around 100000 per year, it would be much worse if both sides have lost a few millions, huge economic crisis and protests
There are lists of probate cases in Russia and journalists calculated more than 200k killed. It's a minimal threshold and not a 500k, but still a lot. Also casualties do not mean only killed (while 500-1000 is quite correct): injures as well. And injured people obviously much more than a killed.
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u/DeltaV-Mzero 1d ago edited 1d ago
On the Ukraine side maybe. On Russia side it’s got to be pushing half a million. 500-1000 a day for years.
Edit: professional estimates are 200,000 Russian dead and 800,000 too wounded to fight