It's not countless, it's just an offensively high number.
Ukraine
- Thread starter Silvanus
- Start date
There's also the factor is Russia probably wants to keep some of it's ammo in reserve. Sure, NATO is supplying Ukraine but NATO is not directly fighting Russia ATM and Russia would probably not want to be at dangerously low stockpiles of ammo in case that actually were to happen.
And ironically, the long this conflict drags on, the more degraded Russian forces become. At this point, it's gonna be years if not a decade before Russian forces are back to pre-war levels and their losing forces/ammo faster then they can replenish them.
So as mentioned, Russia won't run out but it'll eventually reach the point the stockpiles are getting dangerously low and at some point will have to decide how low they're willing to live with and how old those remaining stockpiles are.
While I don't have numbers right now, apparently Russia makes a lot of money from arms exports to the rest of the world and it's hard to export arms when those arms are currently being purchased by the government to go to Ukraine. Russia is losing a notable cash flow source because there aren't enough weapons to supply the Ukraine war and sell to countries outside of Russia, so of course foreign exports(which are the ones that make the profit) are getting the shaft here, so it's probably hurting the Russian Economy more then sanctions are. Basically, the War is a net loss for Russia as long as it drags on since it can't replenish stocks, it can't sell oil at the price it wants to(Countries that are buying are apparently buying at hefty discounts) and there's little excess arms to sell for profit. Which begs the question how long Russia thinks this is worth it.
An interesting article on the matter, though not exactly what I was going for. Apparently the Russian Arms industry operates at a loss most of the time despite Russia being the 2nd largest arms dealer on earth(guess who's number 1? It's the US).
Doomed to Failure — Russia’s Efforts to Restore its Military Muscle
After almost nine months of aggression against Ukraine, Russia has burned through enormous stocks of arms and munitions.
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I wonder if Russia knew how this would play out and wanted to cause enough civilian deaths and suffering for them to pressure the government into surrender early on. If that's the case, they severely underestimated Ukrainian resolve.
For "Russia" read "Putin" and for "this is worth it" read "he can keep his job".
I think Vlad is a Cold War dinosaur, romantic about the might of the USSR, and motivated to some degree with a dream of imperial restoration. Behind its geographical size Russia is actually quite weak: adding 50 million people from Ukraine and Belarus (increasing its population by a third or so) would make it much more of a player again.
But mostly I think he's a low-grade bully that likes being in charge. Regimes like Russia don't run on sentiment: Putin could go in the blink of an eyelid in a palace coup. All it takes is enough damage to his authority, and a serious enough failure in Ukraine could do enough damage to undo him. So he'll send his country into the mire up until the point that causes him even more damage, and Russians' tolerance to endure heaps of shit (helped by stranglingly tight media control) is probably quite high.
I would not be surprised if the war doesn't end until Putin goes, with Russia just grimly squatting on as much of Ukraine's land as it can hold indefinitely.
My gut instinct is to say that the Kremlin cannot possibly have imagined a civilian bombing campaign would work, because history shows they never do.
Russia, ideally, wants to control Ukraine so that Ukraine's power is effectively added to its own. The initial aim was therefore to behead the Ukrainian government and install a puppet whilst causing a minimum of damage, because if they wrecked Ukraine in the process of capturing it, they'd also end up paying to rebuild it afterwards. They only started to dedicatedly trash the civilian infrastructure after they were checked, by which point they must have realised they faced a country dead set on resisting them that would not be cowed by bombing.
So I think there are only two reasons they would do it: the first is desperation, that they were out of options and had literally nothing else to try but see if they could do enough damage to put Ukraine off. The second is malice, smashing up Ukraine either as a punishment for disobedience to Moscow or a scorched earth strategy for anywhere they could not take.
The irony is that Putin is old enough to remember the USSR's Afghanistan campaign and while it didn't doom the USSR, it sure as hell probably didn't do it any favors either. And lets face it, the USSR was arguably more capable then Russia is now and probably was taking fewer loses over a smaller period of time.
I did a quick run of the numbers and the USSR's losses in the Soviet-Afghan War(officially) were around 14,000 troops and 53.5 thousand wounded.
Russia's official losses in the last year in Ukraine are 11.6 thousand killed(no mention of wounded). Ukrainian and US estimates are MUCH MUCH higher, like 100K.
Soviet–Afghan War - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Russian invasion of Ukraine - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Like holy shit, Russia has already lost nearly as many troops by their own numbers in one year then the Soviet Union did a decade fighting the Afghanis. And again, those numbers are likely the low end.
I know Putin probably doesn't give a fuck(after all, he doesn't know any of those people) but still.
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Interesting - I'd never checked the casualties for the Soviet-Afghanistan war and assumed they were much higher - more like 200k total.
Although Afghanistan was probably more problematic in a way: at the time the USSR was crumbling politically and economically, and even the Soviet people knew it. A decade-long failure is thus a particularly potent symbol in that circumstance, where a much stronger country could experience worse and shrug it off. For all that modern Russia is in many ways a dump, it's a relatively stable dump which delivered some substantial human development improvements over the last 20 years, and the current regime has successfully manufactured (an illusion of?) strength.
Incidentally, one way I can tell Russian claims about Ukrainian casualties are fantasy is that the ratio of killed:wounded is totally out of whack. For centuries (/millennia), you can assume about 2-3 wounded for every dead ("on the day", some of the wounded surely died a few days-weeks later) for a pretty typical battle. With modern medicine, that can now be expected up to maybe 5:1 or even better. So when Russia claims 60,000 dead Ukrainian servicemen and 40,000 wounded, that's obviously incredibly hot bullshit. The total of 100k might be about right, mind.
I think the business of running a country is almost intrinsically a business of accepting trade-offs that include people dying - even at the level of an extra 100 a year because you're not shoving another few million quid into the health service. In that sense, I suspect top politicians tend to have significant tolerance for casualties, otherwise they couldn't do the job. However, they still tend to have limits, especially in more civilised countries.
But Russia... I think its leaders have carried a certain mindset about the expendability of peasants largely unchanged all the way from the Tsarist era.
For some reason I keep thinking of that apparent Stalin quote: "One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic". I know all countries have a tendency to do this but it feels very Russian, especially in times like these.
(By-the-by, that's widely misattributed, and almost certainly not one of Stalin's. I've also read it attributed to an Imperial German officer).
He's not the first person to have come up with it or something very close. The issue is more that it's unverifiable: hearsay, claimed by some diplomat or politician who had spoken with him.
That said, it may not be the worst potential misattribution. Stalin's record on loss of life is plain, and there are other reports of him expressing indifference to loss of life. One of the reasons it might so potently stick even if unsafe is that it's the sort of thing he very well might have said.
Unfortunately, so much of the best quotes and stories from Stalin may or may not be completely untrue, but there's no real way of knowing either way.
People are usually a lot more careful what they write down or say on camera that may be captured by posterity than what they say in an unrecorded conversation.
Honey, Wake up. Russia's weekly death threat to humanity has dropped.
RESET THE CLOCK!
Just waiting for the resident apologist to tell us how this is our fault, and that Russia should be allowed to do whatever it wants so that we can avoid nuclear armageddon.
Honey, Wake up. Russia's weekly death threat to humanity has dropped.
RESET THE CLOCK!
"You're a slave to history. Even after Calamity, you fight against the only order that can guarantee the safety of your people. You, solely, are responsible for this."-Crimson 1 but also Russia, probably.
"Given the technological superiority of Russian weapons..."
I mean, the Admiral Kuznetsov is perpetually escorted by Tugboats to show how big and awesome and strong it is and totally not because it keeps catching fire at random."Given the technological superiority of Russian weapons..."
Let's be fair now, I think once it was its floating drydock that caught fire and sank.
The more I watch this stuff, the more I'm convinced that Russia is a feudal state that also has nuclear weapons.
Which basically means that DUNE feels surprisingly credible now.