Russia has lost over 400,000 soldiers in Ukraine

Now tell Putin that.

Consequences for their families/friends. It's not a choice I'd ever want to have to make.

Never put the blame on the people. Imagine you are a being forcefully recruited to fight in war. You have family at home. You have hope. And therefore you stay passive. There are 8 billion people on earth, including you, who could try and take action. After all, why try if you can at least try to survive?

My words are a bit scattered, sorry for that, but I cannot stay calm when I see someone blame the people instead of the system. A revolution does not rise just because it seems fit. A revolution rises because oppression wasn't fully successful somewhere. That's my opinion at least. And if you look at history you will probably see the same patterns.

Also being sent to the western front isn't automatically a death sentence. You could be wounded and be taken to hospital, you could be captured and be put in prison, you could also simply try and survive.

I'm not going to pretend there aren't people that deserved their death there, but I'm positive there were also plenty of people that were just part of the machine and saw no way out.

Any country's biggest military asset is the poor populace that is promised a better life and then ground down into the tool or sacrifice that the leaders decide they need. Call it brainwashed or just "stupid", plenty of the deaths even on Russia's side were just normal people caught in a terrible conflict.

And to be clear, I'm in no way suggesting Ukraine shouldn't have defended itself, I just put the blame in Putin's hands, not on the peons he throws into the grinder for his own vanity project.

I think the people who are truly against this war or putin are a minority in russia. Most of the people their are in line with Putins course and have been so for decades.

How is it gruesome to say a defending force against an invader must kill the invaders?
The gruesome part lies solely on the invaders trying to oppress, invade and take over a peaceful neighboring country by force.

To be fair, other ways for Ukraine to win might include things like assassinating Putin or taking territory.

Unfortunately, Russian has a lot more people to throw into the meat grinder. Sure, their society is probably going to collapse completey due to this in a few decades, but that's something Putin couldn't care less about about. He really seems to think he can will remembered as a great conqueror instead of a pathetic failed Stalin wannabe.

This is somewhat misleading. According to that Wikipedia page, just using the US estimates, Ukraine has had 70k deaths and Russia has had 120k+. While these are similar in that they both round to 100k perhaps, Russia has almost double the Ukrainian military personnel losses.

War is miserable, but I don’t think Ukraine is losing military personnel by nearly the same clip that Russia is.

Hollywood presents fighting war in this heroic way. After seeing enough videos of soldiers getting blown to bits by randomly passing drones, I think it’s more bleak than that. You likely are going to get killed in the least heroic way… lying in the dirt.

Based on these casualty numbers there is just about a 99% chance you will be killed or severely maimed. Unless you have a legitimate higher purpose for fighting, which I believe the Ukrainians do, it would be best to avoid it all together.

Of course they are, why would you keep looking once you found them?

The pressure on Russia's manpower is not the plain old number of humans in the country, it's the amount that they can commit to this war without having so much of a domestic impact that public opinion turns against the government too much. Ukraine has a quarter of the population but has the domestic support to be able to call up everyone that can fight. Russia doesn't want to do this, so it uses the likes of Wagner and prison conscripts that won't be missed by much of the general populace.

Where did you get that idea? The Soviet Union didn't even lose one dozen-million in all of WWII. Ya know, the war famously won with "British intelligence, American steel, and Russian blood." The Ukraine war has been devastating, but it's nowhere near the scope of the largest war of the twentieth century.

Edit: to be crystal clear because for some reason my fact-based post (see: Wikipedia's WWII fatality records) is getting down voted, Russia bad, slava Ukraini.