Declassified US Intelligence Reveals Massive Russian Losses in Ukraine
Declassified US Intelligence Reveals Massive Russian Losses in Ukraine
An assessment, declassified as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged US lawmakers to back additional funding, describes Moscow’s setbacks during its most recent offensive as ‘severe’
This is why we need continued/more support for Ukraine. I want this to be over for them as soon as possible, but the US/NATO should see the strategic advantage of russia continuing to exhaust their resources and military/prison population being thrown into the meat grinder in Ukraine. The longer russia wages war with Ukraine, the more definitively impossible it becomes for them to invade any NATO nations.
I mean, let's be real.. it's already an impossibility for russia to wage war with the US or European NATO countries alone... But it doesn't make any strategic sense to stop supporting Ukraine in a fight against our greatest enemy, who continues to threaten their neighbors with invasion. Let them further erode their military, munitions, and resources. Then maybe they won't be able to commit/assist in genocides like they have in Syria.
The Republicans fighting aid bills for Ukraine are just traitors. It's in the world's best interest to support Ukraine.
it’s already an impossibility for russia to wage war with the US or European NATO countries alone
Some (!!!) EU NATO members have underinvested in defence for decades and now severely depleted their stocks to help Ukraine.
If Russia wins in Ukraine and if Trump withdraws from NATO or implies he won't intervene in Europe again, then Russia is not unlikely to invade one of the Baltics. Putin's allies say as much on a regular basis. The Suwalki Gap is basically indefensible by NATO allies anyway.
Even if Putin doesn't actually invade, he'll do constant military provocations, troop buildups, military exercises near the border, just to fuck with Europe and the US. A constant stream of shit, basically. That increases the likelihood of mistakes, and without the US nuclear umbrella, and even without Russia deliberately invading a (former) NATO country, that actually increases the chance of an all out war in Europe. The reason to have a strong conventional military, is so that you're less likely to be existentially threatened and need to use unconventional(nuclear) weapons. The best case scenario is that Europe will be perpetually distracted. We'll have to triple or even quadruple defense spending.
Of course, as a European, I can confidently predict what will actually happen in that case: with Russian support right wing populists will gain even more ground. "Our people first! Why are we spending so much on defense?" The EU project will die, a divided Europe will end up kowtowing to Beijing (even more), the US will lose market share in one of the world's most important markets, and the likelihood of de-dollarisation will increase significantly. Beijing will also be far likelier to invade Taiwan. And no that wouldn't be a cakewalk for the US.
Obviously, this is just me regurgitating stuff, but I don't think anyone can argue that the stakes aren't infinitely higher than Afghanistan or Iraq. If the US was able to spend thousands of billions fighting and dying in those wars, it's a no brainer to spend tens of billions so that Ukrainians can have the 'privilege' of dying in a war against Russia and fighting to further European and US interests.
It's not just the moral thing to do. You don't need to care about war crimes. You don't need to care about democracy or whatever. It's in the west's interests.
Trump won't be able to withdraw from NATO; Congress is currently revoking the Presidents ability to unilaterally leave the alliance specifically in case Trump or another like him is elected.
Leaving NATO will now require an act of Congress, which makes it much more difficult for any president to do so.
Massive is right. And Russia has still never recovered the population losses from WWI (at least 1.7 million), WWII (27,000,000), Stalin's purges, believed to be 20-30,000,000) the living exodus from Soviet break up, or the 4,585,000 covid deaths, and now has less than half this place's population, which limits is status as any kind of global power.
Russia ought to be begging for emigration, right now. But, they are a pariah.
Don't forget the brain drain once they officially declared war (special military operation) against Ukraine. There was a mass exodus of scholars and intellectuals not wanting to be trapped in russia.
And it's not only the population, but its GDP is tiny. Back when Russia first invaded Ukraine, I wondered how big Russia would be if it were a US state. I compared the GDP per Capita of all US states to Russia's.
Mississippi's GDP per Capita was almost 4 times larger than Russia's. Mississippi! I finally went into the US territories to find one that Russia could top (American Samoa).
And, in case you're thinking "well, that's GDP per Capita, they'd dwarf all US states in GDP," they'd be the third largest state behind California and Texas and just ahead of New York. The US as a whole has a GDP over 10 times larger than Russia.
Russia's only strenght was its oil reserves, but Putin had to realize he can't blackmail with that forever.
Your comparison is biased because the economy of Russia is quite insular — you're basically saying that if they were to export all they produce and buy all they need from the US, they would reach the wealth of 1/4 Mississippi. But the Russians make a lot of stuff themselves, they just have trouble buying from abroad.
What you want is to compare GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity. Then Russia's economy becomes comparable with California's or Germany's.
However this must be taken with a grain of salt, because GDP-PPP is hard to measure in the first place (because purchasing power is hard to measure), and Russia is undergoing sanctions and running a war economy, and the Russian government is probably fudging the numbers anyway.
If I trade you a car for your truck, congratulations, we've just raised the GDP. Kind of a shit metric just sayin.
peria
"Pariah" might be the word you're looking for.
Indeed, changed
Edited to add. I was in Spanish, in which that spelling is the same word.
Emigration is to leave, I think you mean immigration.
yeah its strange they kidnap the kids when its like. dudes you do not have to go to war. just do foreign adoptions!
Russia lost the ability to do soft power. All it can do is bluster and threaten and attack (with variable likelihood of success). It has no economic opportunities that would attract venturesome migrants, as everything of value happening in Russia belongs to oligarchs who understand that they owe their lives to the Czar, and anybody who gets any ideas about disrupting the incumbents and getting rich is unlikely to live very long. Other than from the poorer ex-SSRs (colloquially known as “the ‘Stans”), very few people were inclined to immigrate to Russia even before the war, and now with foreigners being press-ganged into the frontlines, that isn’t improving.
Another article has an estimate of 315,000 Russia casualties since the beginning of the war.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/12/us/politics/russia-intelligence-assessment.html
The Russian/Afghanistan war estimates (1979-1989) are: 15,000 Soviet soldiers killed, and about 53,000 wounded source
Oh my god, they were there 10 years? Jesus Christ , and under 100k casualties too. Wow.Tripled that in two years.
13,000 russian casualties just since october?! Holy shit
This is what happens when you're an incompetent dictator/military whose only strategies are war crimes/genocide and throwing numbers into the meat grinder.
They try to take entrenched Ukrainain positions by throwing 100s at them to be slaughtered, hoping they will overrun them. If that fails, they try again! They literally have been sending their prison population to the front line to be meat shields for their infantry.
The fact that they have to supplement their infantry with prisoners tells you all you need to know about their incompetency and how dire their situation is.
What usually happens to these bodies? I would assume a lot of them just rot somewhere. It seems insane to me that you find decomposed bodies and guns and shit in the forrest somewhere in 10 years.
Some are lost, buried under collapsed trenches/bunkers or sink into bogs/marshes. The rest, if Ukraine controls the area loads them up into train cars to ship back to russia for identification and burial though russia isn't accepting them last I heard, would look bad for them. Russia controlled areas they leave them on the ground to rot or pile up the corpses and burn them making later identification next to impossible.
that's not a high value at all, just divide the total casualties by the duration of the war and you get to a higher number than that for the average monthly losses. "Since October" is > 1.5 months by now
I love Biden's work on declassifying Russia Intel all along, here. Really he's done a good job at building an international coalition and undermining Putin. Every time. Putin says something, it seems like Biden's got the documents showing it's a lie.
That's a good one and very interesting. Normally, you wouldn't release intel and assessments to the general public to protect sources. But, this time is different from the very start. Why? Are the sources indestructible? In any case, Putin must be constantly looking over his shoulder and wondering where it's coming from. The release of some of this information has stopped planned Russian efforts.
Sources and methods are never compromised in these releases.
Second, one of the things they teach you in intelligence analysis is to not only read the facts that are being reported (and try to measure their accuracy), but to ask why they’re being reported. Not as in “Why is the NYT making this a headline” - that’s not what matters unless you’re doing media studies or sociology. I mean “Why is the government/organization putting this out there?”
In this case, it’s obvious. There’s a current narrative around the Russian war on Ukraine, and it’s being pushed by some American politicians and news agencies as well as foreign actors, and it’s being used for political effect. There’s perfectly justified reasons for skepticism from numbers published by both Ukraine and Russia for both fog of war and propaganda reasons.
The Biden administration has an active interest in maintaining US and international support for the war, and that’s in danger because of a perception of a lack of success. They need to counter that narrative.
I don’t have any reason to believe that these numbers are wrong - I very much suspect they’re largely right - but the political angle is why they’re being reported, while US intelligence estimates of other conflicts currently going on around the world are not.