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The Duality of Russia
(lemmygrad.ml)
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this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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That one took a few months to do a 180, CNN is publishing contradictory shit concurrently. It's a choose your own adventure style news reporting.
N I C E
I'm stealing that.
Shit, I thought they were just over a year apart not two days apart lol. Mayhem.
This isn't contradictory reporting though (in this case). Both statements could easily be true.
The conflict has been mostly immobile trench warfare for the last year, and casualties have been resultantly high across the board. Both countries have gone through multiple rounds of conscription.
Wagner alone self reported 60,000 combined deaths and casualties, and they're a small fraction of the total fighting, though probably the worst hit.
Ukraine's not any better off though, and Russia has a far greater capacity to replace their dead, so even with those numbers, Russia is probably eventually going to win.
It's a war of attrition where most casualties come from artillery and Russia enjoys a massive artillery advantage. The only western source that provides any methodology puts overall Russian casualties at 39k. If Russia actually lost 87% of troops than the army would be collapsing now the way Ukrainian army is. You can't just replace your trained and experienced troops with untrained people and continue to have an effective fighting force.
I remember Ukraine propagandists on reddit putting Russian casualties in the 100ks, dont remember the exact number they gave but i think it was ~300k and I am fairly certain it was above 100k at least.
I've seen 100-300k thrown around a lot. I think 300k got more popular recently, presumably the number will keep getting inflated as things keep getting worse. The narrative is going to be sure Russia is now taking territory and it's not a stalemate, but they're taking massive casualties so it's money well spent.
All that said, around 120k wounded is a plausible number if we go with the standard 3:1 ratio of wounded vs dead. It's hard to know how many end up seriously wounded where they're not rotated back in though. Given that Ukraine is suffering higher casualties due to their artillery disadvantage though, this gives us a hint at just how catastrophic things must be for their army at this point. Ukraine had a lower population to start with, and a lot of people fled early on. So, if Ukraine lost a significant portion of the initial army, they don't really have the people to replace that effectively. And we're starting to see western media slowly admitting this problem. I saw one article where Ukrainians were quoted saying that even if they got more weapons, they wouldn't have the troops to use them at this point.
Your link does not estimate overall casualties, only deaths that can be expressly confirmed through Russian social media. It provides a good minimum, but it's important to consider that a large number of those conscripted are from extremely rural communities and remote ethnic minorities within Russia who do not have access to social media, and so wouldn't be represented in those statistics at all.
Your same source mentions that their investigations suggested 47000-50000 deaths as of May 2023, and a great deal of the more intense fighting has happened since then.
Assuming Russia has a better death-to-casualty ratio than the average WWII army thanks to modern medicine, we're looking and anywhere from 1:6 to 1:10, which would put casualties as of May at 300,000-500,000.
Every Russian adult male has served in the armed forces as part of the compulsory year of national service, so their conscription pool can be assumed to have some experience already, and seeing a near total replacement of fighting men about two years into the conflict is consistent with historical armies in trench warfare. Britain and France in 1916 had exhausted essentially all of their pre-war trained soldiers by 20 months into the war and were relying on conscripts.
It's not just social media, it's official published data such as funerals, obituaries, and so on. It probably doesn't account for all the losses, but it's definitely a good representation.
Again, most of the fighting that happened since then favored Russia because it was the Ukraine on the offensive against heavily mined and heavily fortified positions.
Not sure where these numbers are coming from since Ukraine doesn't publish their numbers anywhere. But, the casualties that are generally attributed to Ukraine are anywhere from 100,000-300,000. And Ukrainians are the ones losing 6-10x more troops because of their artillery disadvantage. This is explained in detail by Mearsheimer here with sources and references.
I'm sorry, but this is the kind of arm chair general tactics that NATO pushed Ukraine into and we see the results. Ukraine was part of USSR, and adults were also conscripted there. Pretty clearly that doesn't translated into an effective fighting force on the battlefield.
This is not what's happening today in Ukraine.
The headlines you posted only become contradictory when you have a 1-bit resolution for analyzing statements.
Extremely low resolution views of the world produce apparent contradictions in things that don’t contradict one another.
They always contradict.