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Also I think there's a lot of burnout taking hold in people who were professionally or otherwise reporting/following the war, which I think has compounded with Ukraine really getting their messaging locked down.
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Jan 1, 2023 21:37
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Herstory Begins Now posted:I specifically don't find it that hard to believe that the kia/wia numbers are incredibly high in this war. I wouldn't claim to have any number in mind, but the scale and scope of this war has been incredibly destructive relative to any other war fought in the last couple of decades. OTOH these small mobik probes are also wasteful in a scale that is really hard to overstate- since they are continuous and only coordinated in the lightest sense of the word the mobiks could literally be wearing star trek red shirts for all intents and purposes bc their role is literally ”seek and be destroyed.” So even if Its a dribble straight to grinder rather than a firehose Its still desperate waste of manpower.
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Jan 1, 2023 21:41
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Valtonen posted:OTOH these small mobik probes are also wasteful in a scale that is really hard to overstate- since they are continuous and only coordinated in the lightest sense of the word the mobiks could literally be wearing star trek red shirts for all intents and purposes bc their role is literally ”seek and be destroyed.” It's not a waste if it is assigned as valueless.
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Jan 1, 2023 21:42
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I'm avab
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Jan 1, 2023 21:49
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Yeah, to be clear I'm only calling out the weird messaging on it. The scale of human destruction around Bakhmut is huge and horrific and has been this way for, what, almost the better part of a year? While there's no evidence of the most extreme claims, there's virtually endless evidence of failed small Russian attacks
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Jan 1, 2023 21:50
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For better or worse, the only accurate casualty numbers at this point are only known to the organizations least likely to be transparent about that. Ukraine and Russia are both inflating enemy casualty numbers and downplaying their own and the numbers coming from each side are pretty far apart to just split the difference.
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Jan 1, 2023 21:57
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RFC2324 posted:statements that should not have to be said outloud No it has to be said VERY OUT LOUD Herstory Begins Now posted:I specifically don't find it that hard to believe that the kia/wia numbers are incredibly high in this war. I wouldn't claim to have any number in mind, but the scale and scope of this war has been incredibly destructive relative to any other war fought in the last couple of decades. I specifically referenced the style of attacks in WWI. Those were a type of human wave attack.
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Jan 1, 2023 23:15
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:For better or worse, the only accurate casualty numbers at this point are only known to the organizations least likely to be transparent about that. Ukraine and Russia are both inflating enemy casualty numbers and downplaying their own and the numbers coming from each side are pretty far apart to just split the difference. The Russians leaving their dead behind in the streets early on, and Ukraine calling the Red Cross to say “could you help us send these back, they’re starting to smell” makes me think that Ukraine had some accurate-ish numbers for certain timeframes and areas.
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Jan 1, 2023 23:18
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A lot of the official Ukraine MOD estimates have been broadly in line with other western analyst reports. That's not to say that Ukraine doesn't engage in inflation and propaganda, but they tend to keep it lower key on the main official mouthpieces.
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Jan 1, 2023 23:21
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Icon Of Sin posted:The Russians leaving their dead behind in the streets early on, and Ukraine calling the Red Cross to say “could you help us send these back, they’re starting to smell” makes me think that Ukraine had some accurate-ish numbers for certain timeframes and areas. Part of the discrepancy can be traced to how various actors are counting the dead. Ukraine lumps Russian Army, LNR/DNR, and PMCs together, while the LNR/DNR and PMC numbers may be excluded from other body counts.
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Jan 1, 2023 23:30
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A.o.D. posted:No it has to be said VERY OUT LOUD Despite the proximity in thread, I'm not complaining about your posting or anything said in this thread, I'm complaining about pro-ukraine poo poo I see in the wild. The most extreme end of which is, and I'm not using hyperbole or exaggeration, claiming that shambling hordes of russians are walking into ukrainian machine guns. Some of that poo poo gets repeated by people who haven't even historically been trash sources and it's bizarre seeing it get repeated and otherwise amplified a bunch. I wish I'd saved the most extreme stuff like that I've seen to actually ground my complaining in something tangible. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Jan 2, 2023 |
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Jan 1, 2023 23:44
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 Russia’s gonna have a lost generation.
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Jan 2, 2023 00:37
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MrYenko posted:
That's just the dead or wounded, they "lost" a poo poo TON of people who had the resources/capability to flee the country.
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Jan 2, 2023 00:45
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MrYenko posted:
Both sides are using a lot of, no offense to my fellow late GenX / elder millenial goons, pretty "seasoned" manpower in all kinds of roles. I haven't really seen the classic horde of 19yolds with 25yo Sgts type units. I'd be really curious to see an age breakdown of the KIAs but I don't think that there's gonna be enough losses to make a noticeable dent in any given age cohort. 18-50yo male pool in Russia is in the dozens of millions.
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Jan 2, 2023 01:01
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bird food bathtub posted:That's just the dead or wounded, they "lost" a poo poo TON of people who had the resources/capability to flee the country. Yeah, I’m no expert but it seems at the start of the war massive numbers of young skilled citizens left and are unlikely to return, and those are exactly the folk a country would want to have part of their economy not be energy extraction. Aren’t a large number of the Russian forces from poorer minority groups who are less likely to be able to evade service?
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Jan 2, 2023 01:13
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aphid_licker posted:Both sides are using a lot of, no offense to my fellow late GenX / elder millenial goons, pretty "seasoned" manpower in all kinds of roles. I haven't really seen the classic horde of 19yolds with 25yo Sgts type units. I'd be really curious to see an age breakdown of the KIAs but I don't think that there's gonna be enough losses to make a noticeable dent in any given age cohort. 18-50yo male pool in Russia is in the dozens of millions. My shoulder, my knees, and my gut are all combat ready by Russian standards.
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Jan 2, 2023 01:15
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beer dad demographic on both sides taking a big hit  Hyrax Attack! posted:Yeah, I’m no expert but it seems at the start of the war massive numbers of young skilled citizens left and are unlikely to return, and those are exactly the folk a country would want to have part of their economy not be energy extraction. generally yes, albeit it's less of an absolute post-mobilization.
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Jan 2, 2023 01:20
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aphid_licker posted:Both sides are using a lot of, no offense to my fellow late GenX / elder millenial goons, pretty "seasoned" manpower in all kinds of roles. I haven't really seen the classic horde of 19yolds with 25yo Sgts type units. I'd be really curious to see an age breakdown of the KIAs but I don't think that there's gonna be enough losses to make a noticeable dent in any given age cohort. 18-50yo male pool in Russia is in the dozens of millions. They stripped out the working age male population. The system has been pretty nebulous about whether or not the last round of conscription is finished and thres still the annual round to go. Along with this, the promised money and benefits aren't showing up, and there is next to no support being provided to return veterans to the population when they are through. Theres a good segment of the population that will drag on the economy and society for awhile would be my guess but I have no idea how this will play out.
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Jan 2, 2023 01:27
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I can't see hundreds of thousands of people being conscripted into the Russian military to fight in Ukraine and then get shafted at literally every single opportunity coming home and being all that happy with the government and the status quo either. Russia is setting itself up for some real pain in the long-term I think.
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Jan 2, 2023 04:34
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Valtonen posted:OTOH these small mobik probes are also wasteful in a scale that is really hard to overstate- since they are continuous and only coordinated in the lightest sense of the word the mobiks could literally be wearing star trek red shirts for all intents and purposes bc their role is literally ”seek and be destroyed.” Reconnaissance by sacrifice. Ugly.
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Jan 2, 2023 05:30
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Yeah, I’m no expert but it seems at the start of the war massive numbers of young skilled citizens left and are unlikely to return, and those are exactly the folk a country would want to have part of their economy not be energy extraction. Yes and no. Apparently, the overall force composition skews slightly toward ethnic minorities, but combat deaths among each ethnic group (including white Russians) have been about proportional to their overall population makeup. https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-december-9
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Jan 2, 2023 09:29
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psydude posted:Yes and no. Apparently, the overall force composition skews slightly toward ethnic minorities, but combat deaths among each ethnic group (including white Russians) have been about proportional to their overall population makeup. The study doesn't indicate whether or not it includes Donbass separatists with the ethnic Russian count.
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Jan 2, 2023 13:52
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A.o.D. posted:The study doesn't indicate whether or not it includes Donbass separatists with the ethnic Russian count. The report explicitly states that the figures do not include LNR/DNR forces. It's entirely based upon mobilized RF military losses. quote:This figure does not include those who fought on the side of Russia as part of the "people's militias" of Donetsk and Lugansk. https://www.bbc.com/russian/features-63917502 The study is not perfect, because they're working purely with OSINT, but it's probably the best picture so far available to normal people. psydude fucked around with this message at 15:00 on Jan 2, 2023 |
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Jan 2, 2023 14:56
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psydude posted:The report explicitly states that the figures do not include LNR/DNR forces. It's entirely based upon mobilized RF military losses. welp. Missed the hell out of that.
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Jan 2, 2023 15:45
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Fearless posted:I can't see hundreds of thousands of people being conscripted into the Russian military to fight in Ukraine and then get shafted at literally every single opportunity coming home and being all that happy with the government and the status quo either. Russia is setting itself up for some real pain in the long-term I think. They did that in every war and nothing happened. Chechnya, Afghanistan. They built a population that seems to expect to be treated like that.
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Jan 2, 2023 20:33
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It’s politics. I stay out of it. They know what they’re doing.
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Jan 2, 2023 20:40
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aphid_licker posted:They did that in every war and nothing happened. Chechnya, Afghanistan. They built a population that seems to expect to be treated like that. Hmm, remember that Russia is the country that collapsed the Soviet Union and it did so in a large part because the people looked around at all the blood they had shed and treasure they were spending on propping up an Empire that hated them and said 'gently caress this' in enough numbers that the security state was unwilling to pay the costs of suppressing the desire for change. Now Putin is obviously not Gorbachev and so is almost certainly willing to pay significantly higher costs to keep the security state around (and there is no obvious Yeltsin in the wings... unless Medvedev takes over, secures power, then reverts back to being 2008 Medvedev once he feels secure) so the cracking point is probably significantly higher, but life for the ordinary person in Russia has always been comparatively grim and that hasn't stopped multiple revolutions.
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Jan 2, 2023 21:03
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aphid_licker posted:They did that in every war and nothing happened. Chechnya, Afghanistan. They built a population that seems to expect to be treated like that. you can add up all soviet/russian deaths in both Chechnya wars and Afghanistan (multiple decades of conflict...) and it comes to what, perhaps half of their deaths to date in Ukraine? at some point that should be relevant, right?
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Jan 2, 2023 21:57
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pmchem posted:you can add up all soviet/russian deaths in both Chechnya wars and Afghanistan (multiple decades of conflict...) and it comes to what, perhaps half of their deaths to date in Ukraine? at some point that should be relevant, right? Afghanistan coincided with Perestroika, and so you had the double whammy of everyone realizing they were fighting a stupid war AND that they'd been missing out on the economic boom in the West. The average Russian still isn't feeling a lot of pain. Western sanctions have stopped short of sending them back to the dark ages by cutting off stuff like utility equipment and medical supplies.
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Jan 2, 2023 22:34
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aphid_licker posted:They did that in every war and nothing happened. Chechnya, Afghanistan. They built a population that seems to expect to be treated like that. Since we're revisiting old stuff, doesn't this one sound familiar? Alexander Rabinowich posted:"The February 1917 revolution ... grew out of pre-war political and economic instability, technological backwardness, and fundamental social divisions, coupled with gross mismanagement of the war effort, continuing military defeats, domestic economic dislocation, and outrageous scandals surrounding the monarchy."
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Jan 3, 2023 00:04
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Alchenar posted:Hmm, remember that Russia is the country that collapsed the Soviet Union and it did so in a large part because the people looked around at all the blood they had shed and treasure they were spending on propping up an Empire that hated them and said 'gently caress this' in enough numbers that the security state was unwilling to pay the costs of suppressing the desire for change. Wasn't glasnost an important part of the "everyone looking around" part of things, though? I.E. It helped that the man in charge was a reformer actively encouraging free speech and expression, as opposed to someone firmly dedicated to keeping control of the narrative. That might raise the boiling point a couple of degrees higher than was the case back then.
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Jan 3, 2023 00:22
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pmchem posted:you can add up all soviet/russian deaths in both Chechnya wars and Afghanistan (multiple decades of conflict...) and it comes to what, perhaps half of their deaths to date in Ukraine? at some point that should be relevant, right? yeah but otoh there are historic examples of nations being able to drag hundreds of thousands or millions of people into fighting and dying in wars of aggression or wars with rather abstract political goals
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Jan 3, 2023 00:30
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Tomn posted:Wasn't glasnost an important part of the "everyone looking around" part of things, though? I.E. It helped that the man in charge was a reformer actively encouraging free speech and expression, as opposed to someone firmly dedicated to keeping control of the narrative. That might raise the boiling point a couple of degrees higher than was the case back then. Different starting points. Russia today still isn't close to as bad as the USSR was pre-Gorbachev in terms of the ability to dissent (Girkin would be long in a gulag by now). There's a reason Putin waited so long to pull the trigger on mobilisation, there's a reason hundreds of thousands were allowed to leave the country rather than the borders being frozen - those decisions only make sense if Putin is trying hard to continue to give ordinary Russians the option to ignore everything that's going on.
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Jan 3, 2023 00:45
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Alchenar posted:unless Medvedev takes over, secures power, then reverts back to being 2008 Medvedev once he feels secure Medvedev was a Western-style reformer in exactly the same way Yuri Andropov was. (When Andropov took over as General Secretary there were a few blissfully hopeful pieces in Western media about how he was secretly a Western music lover and Scotch drinker who would reform the Soviet Union despite his history in the KGB of crushing other regimes that tried to do exactly that.) He's been Putin's right hand man ever since his days taking bribes in St. Petersburg, is involved in corruption up to his eyeballs (he was Navalny's highest profile target for anti-corruption exposes outside of Putin himself) and his Western leanings were strictly limited to knowing how to use the Internet, wearing dad jeans and liking Deep Purple. Navalny's video, "Don't Call Him Dimon", is a pro view. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrwlk7_GF9g
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Jan 3, 2023 01:30
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Speaking of Navalny, hilariously, Wagner tried to recruit him. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/navalny-says-mercenary-boss-visited-his-jail-recruit-ukraine-campaign-2022-12-21/ Also worth noting he founded an anti-immigrant nationalist party in 2007 and in general his beefs with the handling of Ukraine have been with the execution and not the long-term goal of bringing them back under the thumb. He've very upset that going kinetic has destroyed all of the soft power options to do that forever. Looking at the long sweep of his career, his main goal seems to be not destruction of the great boot that has been on the average Russian's windpipe for centuries but distributing that boot across a much more equitable number of feet.
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Jan 3, 2023 03:30
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shame on an IGA posted:Looking at the long sweep of his career, his main goal seems to be not destruction of the great boot that has been on the average Russian's windpipe for centuries but distributing that boot across a much more equitable number of feet. Yeah, Navalny is not some ~progressive reformer~, and he's *not* well-liked . With regards to gay and trans Russians, it seems the 'left-wing' opinion is 'well, maybe beat them up, but don't kill them or anything.'  Nemtsov was the closest thing to a "moderate" that might've had a chance and Putin had him whacked in Red loving Square.
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Jan 3, 2023 04:32
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Navalny was also fine and cool with Crimea being annexed in 2014.
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Jan 3, 2023 04:41
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Yeah, I wasn't nominating him for Last Best Hope For Peace or anything. He's definitely a Russian nationalist although his views have moderated some -- in Russia and specifically Navalny's case it literally means moderating from "outright racist" to "well-spoken nationalist". He's long aspired to high office which is impossible in Russia unless you're part of the ruling mafia, so his approach was to try to go over the mafia's head to the people, Russia at the time still being technically a democracy. His Youtube videos have, for Russia, spectacular production values and communicate his core message "everyone in power is corrupt as hell" very well, which is why he's currently in a gulag. On a more amusing note, literally no one left in Russian state TV has ever seen "The Producers", because their New Year's Bash did a pretty good job of re-enacting Springtime for Hitler. https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1609719192596381696 Lum_ fucked around with this message at 04:54 on Jan 3, 2023 |
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Jan 3, 2023 04:49
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Lum_ posted:On a more amusing note, literally no one left in Russian state TV has ever seen "The Producers", because their New Year's Bash did a pretty good job of re-enacting Springtime for Hitler. 10, 9, 8...3, 2, 1...HAPPY 1988!
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Jan 3, 2023 05:15
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Lum_ posted:Medvedev was a Western-style reformer in exactly the same way Yuri Andropov was. (When Andropov took over as General Secretary there were a few blissfully hopeful pieces in Western media about how he was secretly a Western music lover and Scotch drinker who would reform the Soviet Union despite his history in the KGB of crushing other regimes that tried to do exactly that.) He's been Putin's right hand man ever since his days taking bribes in St. Petersburg, is involved in corruption up to his eyeballs (he was Navalny's highest profile target for anti-corruption exposes outside of Putin himself) and his Western leanings were strictly limited to knowing how to use the Internet, wearing dad jeans and liking Deep Purple. Oh Medvedev absolutely wasn't a Western-style reformer, but he clearly wanted a stable and peaceful relationship with the West and seemed to be willing to liberalise Russia (at least as far as could be done without threatening everyone's money funnels). Something like Medvedev's Presidency is probably the best possible low-probability outcome we could hope from a Putin successor.
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Jan 3, 2023 10:24
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