https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-likely-suffered-480-000-164004634.html
In a desperate bid to replenish its manpower, Moscow is sending injured soldiers back into battle against Ukraine.
Yeah, but then one guy wouldn't have as much power and control as he had before. Why doesn't anyone ever consider the people on top?
Speed running demographic collapse. Things weren't good before this, and they'll be a ton worse now.
At this point Putin must know he's leaving the Kremlin in a box one way or another, that's a problem for the guy who has to clean up his mess
In a desperate bid to replenish its manpower, Moscow is sending injured (Sometimes amputated) soldiers back into battle.
Ouch. Everyone but Putin felt that one.
The latest figures posted by the Ministry of Defence do not include the Wagner Group nor their prisoner battalions that fought in Bakhmut.
Hundreds of thousands of mercenaries and prisoners died in that meat grind. If they did include them, they'd have to put the casualty number much higher.
Oh, and they are now kidnapping civilian immigrant workers, in an effort to bolster their numbers. They will not count either.
That's some Warhammer 40k stuff right there.
In future Russia, there is only war. Under the watchful eye of the carion emperor Putin.
I think one of the scariest things about Warhammer 40k, is we have the mindset, just not the technology.
https://twitter.com/defencehq/status/1715968466501472576?s=61&t=mrc6rlMU5ame1QTCGpMbCg
Article cites UK Ministry of Defence wrong, it's actually total of 240,000 to 290,000 killed + permamently or temporarily wounded. Still staggering figures, though.
They've lost over twice their original standing army.
If the average Russian knew what was going on they would rip Putin from his mansion.
I don’t know how they could not notice that their men aren’t coming back, or are coming back in boxes when they do. These loss numbers can’t be swept under a rug, they’ll be felt for generations and we’ll see smaller generations every few cycles in Russia that can be directly pointed at this war similar to how there are small population numbers every few generations in Europe overall due to the world wars
I remember thinking one benefit of the pandemic would be to show conservatives the truth vs what their propaganda says.
Unlike all the other garbage policies they push that take decades before consequences are noticeable, not wearing a mask and not getting vaccinated provided a quick shot of reality as they watched loved ones lose their lives to the disease.
So many more conservatives died because they did not take it seriously. Yet still nobody seemed to learn from it. Propaganda is powerful.
Persuasive arguments against your point of view often entrench beliefs that were not examined critically in the first place.
If your beliefs are structured around oppositional, contrarian reactionary thinking to protect some aspect of your ego you are not considering other ideas that don't reinforce you.
True. You can't use reason to get somebody out of a mindset they did not reason themselves into.
They're deliberately drafting troops from rural areas as much as possible to minimise the number of angry parents in the major cities who might actually mount a visible complaint.
There's a difference between noticing it and being angry and actually being able to functionally do anything about it, which is the real challenge. I'm sure there are a non-trivial amount of people extremely angry about this whole disaster, but actually organizing and trying to create some change would be extremely dangerous. I'm honestly not sure where a path forward comes from until Putin eventually dies.
Yeah there absolutely plenty of Russians who never wanted this war, and some of those Russians died on the front line fighting a war they didn’t agree with. Unfortunately when Putin’s mafia is murdering foreign journalists and carefully controlling the messaging the rest of the world sees, it’s hard to see just how many of them there are. It’s the byproduct of a fascist dictator state pretending to be a democracy, something that some people from my nation (the United States) are all too happy to try and get into power
Edit: apologies - this actually isn’t a very good comparison. The chart I linked is actually just deaths, not total casualties.
According to this wiki page, the MoD’s numbers would put Russia’s military casualties alone roughly on par with total military and civilian casualties deaths on all sides from the US War on Terror (which lasted about two decades, compared to about 20 months for this newest active phase of the Ukrainian War).
That’s… impressive. And extremely unsustainable.
(Note: not here to litigate the war on terror or whatever you want to call it. This is simply a comparison point.)
It's also roughly 5.5 % of the total Soviet military losses during WW2. Pretty insane to think about all these lives being wasted to steal a stretch of land.
Russia has the man power, but their command structure and tactics suck ass. Their soldiers have little freedom to adjust when and where they attack and it shows. If Russian troops on the ground were given an objective, and not direction orders directly from generals, we might see a much worse outcome for Ukraine.
If you look at the recent videos from Avdiivka, destroyed Russian armor is piling up in the same spots. There is no adjustment and there is no learning from mistakes, just mass being thrown at a spot where their leadership wants to get political wins.
These are the same tactics from WW2 and they are resulting in the same scale of losses, comparatively. Leadership doesn't think of their soldiers as people and it's gross. If anything, this war is not just an attack on Ukraine, but it's genocide being committed on Russians by the Russian government.
I'm not intending to say any war crime, especially committed towards civilian victims, which any army at war has and will keep committing with varying scales, can be acceptable, but consider the average Russian soldier's mental health at this point in this war.
Now that the saner, civilian population who lived their lives in comparable civic environments and acted mostly accordingly are conscripted into a known meat grinder, being dogged on higher-ups every day and waiting to be thrown into the next meat grinder in a few months at maximum, how can they keep their sanity?
This is not just one man's doing, though. Such sinister governing organizations need a lot of similarly-thinking inhuman piece of shits to get together to have such influence on millions of lives and keep their heads, let alone positions of power. This includes all powers of legislation and justice departments, financial bodies, media, local instigators and more. The total number of these people would still amount to a fraction of the normally-peacefully-living population affected, but their power to manipulate the outspoken minds the latter is to big to overcome by the latter population that usually minds its own business and is naturally disorganized.
Most governments these are still run by criminal syndicates, or feudal lords that play tag-team with their seemingly-competitors, that give the population a facade of voting them in willingly. Of course except for a few select people that actually worked mostly in favour of the general population in most democracies' histories. Not even gonna talk about failed "democracies'" like Russia or Turkey.
So yeah, I agree that this war is Russian government committing genocide on Russian people. Average Ukrainian civilians or soldiers at least know that the people of the world sympathize with them when they are at risk of losing everything. Average conscripted Russian is all alone in the mud and blood. Overall a war without any silver lining for either party, wagen on undeserving people of Ukraine and waged with unwilling people of Russia.
You don’t appear to be interested in participating in a nuanced conversation on this topic
That is not at all what I was saying.
And I don’t think I’m interested in your opinion.
Imagine being so goddamn emotional that you knowingly commit a country of what, 140 million I think, to demographic suicide. Blyat is handing the West another century of dominance.
Ahhhh but they're going to use their money and what's left of their men to confuse the west into picking bad leaders so really who's winning World War 2.5 now
it's like they're trying to set a record for the number of their own people they can watch get ground up into mud.. Russians must be fabulous people..
I read articles like this, and it makes me feel slightly bad about the Russian deaths.... then I remember the war crimes, and it all disappeared.
oh well good, i guess they can just keep sending Russians to die and nobody will notice.. all the Russians who noticed have been murdered by Putin..