Mfs gonna waste entire population
While I agree with the overall sentiment, that thread as too many data scientist moments. You can’t just look at a single war in history with very different dynamics and go “the threshold must be around 3%” and expect to be taken seriously. There are some good points (such as the Ukrainian society being overall comprised of older people), but the stacking of speculations to make bold predictions doesn’t help those good points.
Supplementary reading: https://imetatronink.substack.com/p/the-jig-is-up a summary of where the broader picture of the conflict is currently at
It’s an interesting read. But the nearly complete lack of citations makes it difficult to take seriously. The media reporting on this war has been so incredibly bad that I have no idea what’s going on there. He makes a tonne of claims about details of the war with complete self assuredness. I would be very interested in his sources of facts so that I could vet them for myself.
Yeah that’s a fair criticism. Still this is not supposed to be that kind of rigorous analysis, it’s just a blog post, an opinion piece if you will, but i would say from what i’ve observed so far that it’s pretty accurate, at least in presenting what has happened so far and where we are at. Where i am a bit more skeptical is with the predictions which may perhaps turn out to be a bit too optimistic, but i don’t know, we’ll have to wait and see.
Is it? We’ve been hearing the same “AFU is gonna collapse by spring/summer/next year” since the bloody thing had begun. Still there. And is also getting propped up by foreign “mercenaries” and “volunteers”.
That’s why I’m almost certain that the Ukraine War is mostly NATO troops undercover vs Russia.
If that were the case, wouldn’t the constituent member states have an uptick in deaths? This would be noticeable. Even if it were hidden in the numbers, the families of those who died would be informed, and there’s no way to keep that under wraps at that point.
That’s true. I’ve been wrong before. I spent the first couple months of all this thinking the war wasn’t kinetic at all because nothing was making sense about casualties and troop movements.
Counterpoint of sorts: the now infamous Wagner PMC (mercenaries) have been operating in Africa for several years, close to a decade AFAIK. There’s been plenty of claims regarding their casualties, some likely exaggerated, some likely true. And yet their activities remained mostly hidden from the public eye. Mind you, Russia doesn’t have that big of a population nowadays, maybe half that of USA. And most of it is elderly, so losing a significant amount of “fighting age” men would surely be noticeable. With NATO, you get casualties spread thin across multiple countries. A hundred from France here, a couple hundred from Germany there. That’s basically traffic accident statistics
I see what you’re saying but I would think the families in NATO countries would either be more vocal or be more likely to be picked up in the press. Especially when the world’s eye is already on the Ukraine situation, news about direct NATO involvement proved by deaths would be much more likely to be picked up than a (formerly barely known or talked about) group operating in a place that the Western press doesn’t care about or cover.
There are also people from a several (NATO included) countries who have volunteered to go to Ukraine to fight in a non-official capacity, some of whom have died, and this gets widely circulated in the press when it happens, normally with involvement from the surviving family. If these families think their child has died fighting for good, they’re not going to keep their mouths shut about it. Even if they think their child wasn’t fighting for good, they won’t keep their mouths shut about it.
Difficult, they will send anyone who can carry a rifle, before thinking about negotiating a peace, the government of Ukraine has no qualms about sending its own population to its death.
Interesting. Of course Russia will have the advantage in the long run. 140 vs 40 million people is just too big of a difference. (and then you need to remember that a lot of people flet Ukraine).
However, if Ukraine really gives everyone guns to fight, Russia needs more soldiers at the front.
What are the current news on conscription? Are there more Russian soldiers to be expected at the front soon?
Russia has been undergoing a constant expansion of its armed forces since last autumn. The government says they don’t expect to need to implement any kind of conscription because they get thousands of new volunteer contract soldiers signing up every day. Plus there are always more reservists that could be called up if the need should arise. That being said this is still, even now, an economy of force operation.
Ukraine most certainly does not have 40 million people, it did not even have that many before 2014. I would be surprised if they even have half that. They lost a big chunk when Crimea, the DPR and LPR split, and yet another last year from the new oblasts that were incorporated into Russia. The eastern regions were not only the most industrialized but also the most populated with the exception of Kiev itself.
Okay. Thousands of new soldiers a day (so ~1 million a year) is more than enough.
There’s some hyperbole there, it’s probably more like a thousand, some days maybe more, some days less. They already called up 300k reservists and with another 300k from new volunteer professional contract soldiers they will probably get to a million by the end of the year. That is not to say that all or even most of those will be deployed to Ukraine. As i said, Russia is still conducting an economy of force operation, i would be surprised if they have more than 300k in the entire theater right now, and as long as they don’t want to make any big spectacular pushes that is more than enough to continue demilitarizing Ukraine (and NATO) and slowly grinding forward. The rest of the newly constituted forces will be deployed to reinforce other sectors where there is a risk of direct conflict with NATO, Belarus, the Finnish border, Kaliningrad, Pskov, etc. Don’t expect to see WWII style big arrow offensives and mass assaults from Russia.
