this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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Death to NATO
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800k is not all combat personnel. General estimates of actual soldiers tend to be around 100-150k. And 400k number is for actual combat troops in Russia. Again, it can't be a stalemate when Russia has artillery superiority, because Ukraine is losing more troops than Russia is on daily basis. The estimates for the losses are around ten to one in favor of Russia as this article from Mearsheimer explains. This is simply not a sustainable situation for Ukraine. The core of Ukrainian army is nothing like the Red army. Conscripts literally have weeks of training before being thrown into combat. There are plenty of western publications admitting this now.
You can read these three recent articles to see how well NATO-sponsored reforms are actually working
And the only western source that has any methodology tracking Russian casualties puts them at around 38k now. The volunteer recruits are very much growing the army as opposed to replacing losses. https://en.zona.media/article/2022/05/20/casualties_eng
I agree that Ukrainian regime doesn't really have any plan for what to do when western support runs out though. I think most likely scenario is that Russia will take significant territory in the east and create a land bridge to Transnistria. Western Ukraine will end up being a dysfunctional rump state that the west will either have to keep pouring money into or risk a refugee crisis from.
400k is all of the Russian troops in Ukraine, as far as I know. Granted, there are also troops in Russia along the border, but I don't think there are that many. Given recent enlargement plan of Russian Armed Forces to 2.2 million people with 1.3 million military personnel out of them, I think it is a reasonable estimate.
10 to 1 losses are probably overblown, even with disastrous losses during Ukrainian offensive.
It is a stalemate from tactical and operational point of view. Neither side currently can achieve decisive breakthrough, although attrition warfare is more advantageous for Russia.
Total size of Russian military currently is around 1.9 million, which is the number that should be compared to the 800 thousand figure for Ukraine. A lot of the military is logistics support for the active troops, intelligence, and so on. They don't need to be located on the ground in Ukraine.
I don't see why you'd say that given that Russia fires around 10x more artillery and most losses come from artillery fire.
Again, the notion that this is a stalemate is simply not supported by the evidence. Even Stoltenberg is now saying that NATO should be prepared for bad news, which is as close to an admission as we're going to get that Ukrainian army is collapsing.
Also, Russian assault at Avdiivka shows that they are not yet able to achieve breakthrough.
As I've noted, Russia hasn't committed most of their forces yet, but Avdievka is already mostly captured. Russia managed to take a town of around 30k people before the war in about a month. That's far more progress than Ukraine managed to achieve in six months of their offensive already. Now consider what will happen when Russia does commit significant forces to an offensive.
Yes, but Russia still have to guard its borders with with NATO, it limits available troops.
Ukrainian offensive power is almost nonexistent at this point, but taking a month to take one town is too slow to have strategic impact, Ukraine gets enough time to build another defensive line slightly farther.
NATO has already sent all they've got to Ukraine. NATO is in no position to mount any sort of attack on Russia at this time. This is openly admitted in western media I might add https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/europes-weak-armed-forces-could-be-washed-away-by-russia-bmxbc22gc
I don't see what you base the statement that taking a month to take a heavily fortified town is slow. It's completely absurd to claim that Ukraine can just build another Avdievka in a month. These fortifications took eight years to build. And it's not like Ukraine has any meaningful industrial capacity at this point either. For one, Ukrainian energy grid is on its last legs. You can't do any manufacturing, such as concrete production, without electricity.
The number includes civilian personnel.
As does Ukrainian 800k number.
800k is military personnel, there are about 400k civilian personnel too.
do you have a source?
Saw somewhere earlier, couldn't find now.