Sad story.
Russian invasion of Ukraine | Fewer tweets, more discussion
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If the reports are true, big if, then how is Russia sustaining these loses without mobilization? The numbers are higher then their losses in Afghanistan and starting to get close to American losses in nearly a decade of Vietnam.
If I recall correctly, they are mobilizing new recruits all the time. But it's on a smaller scale and it tends to be enough to feed the war machine for now. In other words, no need for Putin to go public about it or involve bigger parts of the Russian population. And there are also volunteers who sign up for the money, including foreign (Nepali).
So it's just an ongoing thing. Though some experts have said that a 2nd public mobilization wave might come after the March elections.
- https://jamestown.org/?post_type=program&p=97243
- https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-gru-...any-ukraine-redut-investigation/32630705.html
- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67175566
- https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023...uit-400k-new-contract-soldiers-in-2024-a83509
The losses are big but so is their amount of troops.
https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-re...-objectives-and-capacity-ukraine-through-2024
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Ukr Air Force doing incredible work lately.
I live in St Petersburg and all over the city there are recruitment ads offering (for Russia) an extremely good salary to sign a contract with the army. Ads also play in buses and on the metro. Lots of guys actually are signing up. And if that's the case in a European city like Petersburg it'll be replicated many times over in other cities. Assuming you survive a couple of years, the salary being offered can buy a very decent apartment in the smaller towns and cities. Owning an apartment as opposed to renting one is a big thing here, it's a big 'draw'.
I also know of 4 guys who were conscripted in September 2022 (the mobilisation) who still haven't even been sent to Ukraine, let alone to the frontlines. They're at home with their families in Orenburg. They were initially put on a bus to a training camp in a nearby city (Perm) before being sent back because they weren't needed yet. That was almost 18 months ago.
My point being, I'll be very surprised if another mobilisation is enacted, because it seems to me Russia is getting more than enough men signing up of their own volition, especially now that (as it's presented in the media here) the worst of the fighting is now over as far as the Russian forces are concerned.
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Cheers, thanks for the info.
I still find the numbers hard to believe. Some reports place lethal casualties at close to 100k. In comparison the US only had about 70k lethal casualties in nearly a decade of Vietnam
Thanks. It's very informative to hear the prospective of someone in Russia but why do people think the worst is over after something like Avdiyivka?
It's hard to comprehend, yes. But I think it's fair to say the Russians fight with a lot more recklessness than the US and the US was always technologically much stronger than the Vietnamese. In Ukraine on the other hand, Western weapons systems wreck havoc on the Russians.
Also, the Russian invasion was extremely poorly planned. Just convoy after convoy getting wrecked by artillery, Bayrakters and whatnot. Casualties rise quick that way
Regardless, we don't know the exact figures. Estimates are 315000 casualties but how many of those are KIA we don't know. I think it's in the range of 60k to 100k.
Precisely because of Avdiivka. I'm not saying it's necessarily correct (though my own opinion is that it broadly is), I'm saying it's the narrative being put out, namely that the guys who've served the first 2 years have done the bulk of the hard work and 'broken Ukraine's spine' (colloquialism) and anyone signing up now will have an easier job of it but for the same high salary, especially if the Americans continue to delay weapons.
@owlo
We talked about this case briefly, if you remember. They caught a Moldovan couple months ago, who said they were paid to do it by a Russian guy, I don't know if the article is just referring to that or if they have more to go on.
I thought it was weird, and not how I'd expect antisemitic messaging to look, but to be fair even if it's some agent provocateur stuff the method is still weird to me.
Incidentally, Joe Buccino (former communications director at U.S. Central Command and communications director for NATO's support mission in Europe during the first year of this war) wrote an opinion piece for The Hill yesterday:
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4481154-ukraine-can-no-longer-win/
"There is no path for Ukraine to win this war. American support will not change this reality".
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4481154-ukraine-can-no-longer-win/
"There is no path for Ukraine to win this war. American support will not change this reality".
Even if they can't win I think it's in the US' interest to keep supporting them for as long as they want to fight. Can imagine the long term damage to Russia if they are bogged down in Ukraine losing men at this rate for 4 or 5 years?
This is never going to last this long. At this rate and without significantly more western support, Ukraine is going to lose. It needs a win and it needs it fast.
The economic weight of this war in Europe is also taking its toll, inflation and high energy bills are pissing people off and the far-right is having a field day. The US is the main beneficiary because, aside from weakening the enemy, European countries are now mainly getting their gas (at a much higher price) and new military equipment for their rearmament from them.
You're daydreaming if you think that Europe is going to put up with 4-5 more years of this muddled shit with no endgame. You either give Ukraine the means to win or you negociate. No in-between.
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Gosh, how terrible do you have to be to lose a second AWACS in just a few months, in a war?
This isn't as true as it immediately sounds. The North Vietnamese Army was a very modern, well equipped army. Obviously it couldn't compare with the American one in sheer firepower, but it's not like with Iraq or Afghanistan, for example.
I'd put much more stock in your other reasons, like the poor planning and execution. Russia seemingly truly believed that they would capture Kyiv and Ukraine would immediately collapse.
On this I agree (because the key phrase is 'as long as Ukraine wants to continue fighting' ). There is no world in which it is not in America's interests to continue funding Ukraine's military for as long as Ukraine wants to keep fighting. McConnell is right insofar as America has never been presented with an opportunity like this and never will be again. A war in which 2 of America's strategic aims are being fulfilled (weakening Russia militarily and the EU economically), and - as their senators keep reminding everyone - with not one loss of an American life.
Where I disagree is on your timescale. Neither Europe nor Ukraine can sustain this for 5 years. In the event of the victory defined by Putin, Russia will sustain no long-term damage from this war (my opinion). Ukraine on the other hand is already finished as an independent state. Even today they can't draft enough soldiers to hold the frontlines, never mind 4 or 5 years from now, and the debts they've accrued mean that whatever survives as a 'sovereign' state will take generations to pay off.
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If you factor in the current aid package in Congress (which will pass sooner or later) and the $300b in frozen Russian central bank reserves that are mostly controlled by European nations, it could easily keep things going for another 4-5 years, during which Putin will almost certainly run out of resources to keep going. Don't forget, the Russians currently earn about $500 million per day in oil revenue by selling it abroad. That can also be turned off. Collectively, all three will make a massive dent in Putin's aspirations, particularly the confiscation of the 300b that would be using Putin's money to fund the Ukrainian defense against his own invasion.
Even if the 300 billion in frozen Russian assets could be confiscated (it can't and won't be, only the interest on the principle will be set aside), it cannot be used to fund the purchase of weapons. It can only be used for reconstruction after the war is over.
That's first. 2nd is that the half a billion dollars a day in oil revenue can't be "turned off", as you say. What do you imagine will happen to European oil prices if you suddenly have (as a single example) a country like India, with over a billion people, competing for the same finite oil reserves that Europe is currently struggling to pay for? You'd be looking at 300 dollars a barrel. Jaishankar made this point at the Munich Security Conference this week, sharing a stage with Blinken and Baerbock and asked about this very issue.
And 3rd, an issue you constantly ignore: Ukraine does not have enough soldiers to "easily keep things going for another 4-5 years".
It's already been two years, is another two years that unthinkable? Especially if the November elections go in Ukraines favor.
I'll ask the same question: Is another two years that unthinkable?
Each of these issues can be easily navigated around in times of existential crisis. For instance, there is increasing momentum to get the 300b into the mix and any previous laws and regulations regarding how it could be used will be changed. The US/NATO/EU can also strike deals with Opec and the Saudis to address any shortages. As for the Ukraine running out of fighters bit, highly unlikely given they are a nation of 43m people with approximately 40% of fighting age. The Ukrainians are also losing people at a far slower rate than the Russian side, which is evidenced by Putin needing to use everything from prisoners to mercenaries just to barely stay afloat in territories he already controls.
2 years is probably doable if the bill to draft another half a million Ukrainian men finally makes it through the Rada. It's been passed back and forth between parliament and Zelenskiy for months now, with no clear end in sight. It's the twin problem of drafting men who don't want to fight and taking them out of the taxpayer pool. Zelenskiy keeps making the point that he needs 6 Ukrainian taxpayers to finance 1 Ukrainian soldier. It's a complex set of interests he's having to balance.
Next time, I would not be surprised if he orders the mobilizing of single women aged 18-35. The worst in that is the large number of gullible idiots among those women who would answer of the call regardless.
These issues are not "easily navigated". You have a habit of reducing unimaginably complex issues to "this stuff is simple". Case in point, your suggestion that "any previous laws and regulations" can simply be unilaterally re-written by the West whenever it no longer suits their aims. It's hardly 'international law' if you can do that. And if you think Saudi Arabia and OPEC have an interest in doing what you say, recall the last time Biden showed up in Saudi Arabia looking to put pressure on them and came away empty handed.
2ndly, Ukraine is not a nation of 43 million people, they are down to around 32 million. I'd also recommend not taking Ukraine's "Russia has 10 times the firepower but is losing 7 times the soldiers" spiel with a gargantuan grain of salt. As I wrote above I know of soldiers who were drafted in September 2022 who haven't even been sent to Ukraine yet. Emptying prisons and using waves of doped-up Russian convicts to kill Ukrainian special forces in Bakhmut is not desperation, it's the action of an ultra-rational psychopath.
As mentioned above, peace time laws and regulations that appear hard to impinge upon when everything is peaceful, can be easily ignored when a nation's very survival is on the line. No one is going to care about international laws and norms if the US stands behind a country breaking them (see Israel).
On the number of Ukrainians - 32m is still a massive number when you consider the Ukrainians only have about 200k active troops in combat as of 2023. If you extrapolate the previous 40% number of whatever the population is, it still provides many millions of Ukrainian fighting age males who are not currently fighting in the front lines. Putin also faces an inconvenient issue of morale, where most of his troops are literally there at gunpoint under fear of execution or imprisonment if they don't comply.
That doesn't make for a capable fighting force for a protracted period of time, and there will come a tipping point when untrained Russian troops with poor morale will eventually buckle under the pressure. That isn't likely to happen on the Ukrainian side as they are actually fighting for a noble cause - the protection of their own families, the survival of their homeland, and a desire to live in a free country and not under the grip of Putin's totalitarian police state.
Again: no they can't be "easily ignored". Case in point: 2 years in to this "existential war" that supposedly threatens to collapse the entire Western way of life and they haven't been ignored. There are currently ten thousand IMF lawyers desperately trying to figure out if it's even remotely legal to siphon off a fraction of the profits from Russian assets to one day pay for Ukraine's reconstruction.
You say "Nobody is going to care about international laws" if America stands behind someone. Yeah, they will care about it. Russia is not Palestine. Across this thread and the Israel thread, you seem to me to have a massively inflated sense of America's power and influence in the modern world, and it colours a lot of your understanding of geopolitical events. I'll repeat the example: Saudi Arabia telling Biden to get lost back in July 2022, while you're suggesting they and OPEC will fall in line with whatever Washington dictates. As you implied, Israel can kill 30,000 Palestinian civilians and nothing will happen, because America supports it. But at the same time, America is not sending Ukraine long-range ATACM missiles because they're shit-scared of Ukraine hitting Russian territory with them. America is a fearsome ally when it's Palestinian kids being killed by Israel. Ukrainian kids killed by Russia is a different story.
As for the rest of what you wrote, we're in danger of going round in circles so I won't add more to it beyond the links that follow. In my very strong opinion your understanding of the situation regarding soldiers is simply not grounded in reality. Only one country is self-admittedly running critically short of soldiers and it's Ukraine. Here, take your pick from the last month alone:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/08/ukraine-soldiers-shortage-infantry-russia/
https://www.reuters.com/world/europ...-ground-down-by-relentless-russia-2024-02-21/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...aine-running-out-of-arms-as-us-eu-aid-delayed
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/31/1226251649/ukraine-russia-war-conscription-military
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/20/...ing-troops-supreme-court-race-admissions.html
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Yes it is, if things keep on going this way.
Let's not kid ourselves, Ukraine would've lost this war months ago if not for the US and European help.
The half-hearted support giving Ukraine enough to resist but not enough to win, is leading nowhere and achieves the opposite of what it's supposed to do. It bleeds out more Ukraine than Russia and domestically weakens the European and US governments. Trump will ditch Ukraine without a second thought, and a Biden win doesn't matter if he's constantly hampered by the GOP.
Ukraine needs a massive and unprecedented foreign help to force Russia to back off and currently faces a shortage in manpower, at the worst moment. People are not willing to undefinitely back a war that's drilling massive holes in their wallet without an endgame. We are not talking about Korea, Vietnam or Afghanistan, where war had little consequence on the daily life of your average Joe, William, Hans or Pierre. It's a factor that people here massively underestimate.
You either show that you have a plan or you sharpen your pencil.
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Again, I would point out the opinion of General Miley stating that UKR should have tried to negotiate with Putin after Kherson was recaptured while they had the upper-hand. Sure, you can't trust Putin but nothing would've stopped the West and Ukraine from beefing up their military to NATO standards afterward to keep Putin in check. It's way better to build up your army in peacetime than in the middle of a war, as Ukraine's finding out now. Chances are, their military might have soon more disadvantage fighting the Russians than before the invasion, with U.S. support dwindling or potentially stopping completely. We are not even talking about the consequences of it for the UKR.
But yeah, hindsight is always 20:20.
But yeah, hindsight is always 20:20.
Not a slight on you personally but I wish people would be specific on what concessions they want Ukraine to give to Russia. Even yesterday I was watching a local talk show and it was all about how Ukraine must negotiate but never actually explaining what the concessions should be.
It's alright to just say you want Ukraine to concede Crimea, and potentially Donbas too. And neutrality. Don't hide it.
I don't even know how that deal would work out in terms of what UKR would lose. But they might be better than what they are finding now. It is not that people could not foresee it given the U.S. political situation. People just chose to believe in a more positive outlook for it. I am all for UKR. It does not mean I am illogical, given the circumstances. If anything, my country right now is in sh*t partly because of Putin. I am sure you have read what I said in those threads already.
That's a large part of why Putin invaded in the first place and would/will be the swiftest way to tanking any future peace deal and plunging Ukrainians right back into this mess.
By the way anyone wishing to contribute a few bucks / quid to Ukrainian fpv drone effort please reach out to me via PM. Currently they’re running low on artillery due to US/EU impotence and drones are their lifeline at the moment. Drones (and other equipment) are delivered to the guys on the zero line directly by a small Lithuanian charity organization (approved by Lithuanian parliament) members of which are also fighting in Ukraine as volunteers, thus there’s no red tape involved and drones get to the front very quickly. The drones are assembled and programmed locally in Lithuania by team members themselves who are drone experts. Let me know if you can donate and I’ll provide you all the information around the organization (link to the website, etc.) and their past accomplishments. We in Lithuania do a lot in terms of donations but we’re only so big hence I decided to turn here as well for some extra exposure and donations.
What do you propose?
This will sound flippant but I'm being perfectly serious: today is the 2nd anniversary of the invasion. On this day many Western leaders (minus Biden) will do what they love to do more than anything else in the world - they will gather together in Kyiv, get their photo taken with Zelenskiy, and give the exact same speeches they've been giving for 2 years. They will talk about "Russia's brutal and unprovoked aggression". They will talk about "freedom and democracy themselves" being at stake. And, their beloved catchphrase: they will talk about standing with Ukraine "for as long as it takes".
My proposal is this: President Biden gives a live interview, this evening, to Ukraine's main news channel. During this interview he is asked the questions that no American network or newspaper will ever, ever ask him:
1. President Biden, your Administration has said that if Ukraine loses this war, Putin will go on to invade NATO countries such as the Baltics and/or Poland and American soldiers will have to fight Russia. Yes or no, do you seriously believe this?
2. Yes or no: is America's aim in this conflict for Ukraine to win the war and Russia to lose the war? If yes, clearly define "win" and "lose" in this context. If your definition is "That's for Ukraine to decide", then...
3. Any time you are asked what the ultimate aim is in this conflict, you always say: "That's for Ukraine to decide". But we've already decided: our aim is to reclaim all our territory according to 1991 borders. So, yes or no: is America's aim for Ukraine to reclaim all of its territory to 1991 borders?
4. You have said that the 61 billion dollars in aid being held up in Congress will lead to Ukrainian "success" - define "success" in this context. What will 61 billion dollars do this year that 113 billion dollars didn't do over the last 2 years?
5. You have said that Ukraine must secure "a just and lasting peace" - define "a just and lasting peace". If your answer is "That's for Ukraine to decide", please refer back to question #3.
6. Three different reporters asked John Kirby yesterday why your administration continues to say you "haven't taken the long-range ATACMs off the table". Ukraine continues to beg you for them. Why will you only commit to "not taking them off the table", and not simply send them to us now when we're asking for them? If you genuinely believe this is an existential fight for the West, why aren't you giving us everything we need to fight it for you now, when we need it?
Russia asks North Korea and Iran for weapons and they receive a million artillery shells literally the following weak. You mock Putin for this and tell us it is indicative of Russia's "weakness". Ukraine begs a coalition of the world's 54 wealthiest countries to supply us with anything you have, and we're told: "Maaaybe we can get you 300,000 shells by March". This, you tell us, is Ukraine's "strength". Russia's allies are giving Russia what it needs to win the war. Ukraine's allies are not giving Ukraine what it needs to win the war. So which alliance is "weak" here?
7. Yes or no: do you seriously believe Ukraine can win this war - as defined in question #3 - without any NATO boots on the ground AND without Ukraine striking anywhere on Russian territory?
8. Last and most important: you are on record as saying, approximately thirteen thousand times, "we will support Ukraine for as long as it takes". Clearly say now: for as long as it takes to do WHAT? What is the West's strategy here, beyond meaningless prattle about "as long as it takes for a just and lasting peace"?
If Biden does not clearly answer any of those questions, my proposal is that Ukraine unconditionally surrenders to Russia tomorrow morning. The rationale should be: you're asking us to "defend the entire Western world" from Russia but you're not providing us with the means to do it, even though you have these means. And so rather than asking us to fight Russia on your behalf, you can now fight Russia on ours, as you suggested you would in question #1. It makes more sense for us to do this rather than than be slowly murdered as a country in a war we literally cannot win due to your inaction and indecision. The Palestinians are already facing the propsect of Donald Trump being the one to negotiate their fate. We're not waiting to go down the same path.
I wrote earlier in this thread that Ukraine is going to lose this war, and the primary reason is that Russia is absolutely laser-focused on its goals, whereas the West has no idea what it wants out of this conflict. It cannot define "success" for Ukraine and it cannot define "victory" for Ukraine. The West's strategy can be summed up as: "Let's just keep Ukraine in the fight for as long as possible and kind of hope something miraculous happens in Russia to change the situation". That is why it's going to be nauseating today watching all those 'foreign leaders' in Ukraine droning on about how "we will stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes to achieve victory", and not one member of the carefully selected media will press them to define what any of it means.
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TLDR, your solution is a scenario is where Ukraine surrender to prove a point?