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Ukraine’s Top Military Leadership: We Are Starting to Win, Russia Is Starting to Lose
(www.kyivpost.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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Russia is going to run out of troops.
IDK when, but they're basically feeding their population into a meat grinder trying to take Ukraine.
That's not too say the Ukraine isn't taking losses.... I've just, seen some numbers that indicate that Russia is going to run out of people to send to their deaths before Ukraine will.
Putin needs to give this up before he doesn't have a military anymore.
Ukraine is taking horrendous losses that we should be more concerned about. Stay focussed on Ukraine succeeding, not just Russia failing
Fair point.
Go Ukraine!
It's not that they will run out of people. They have people, but to keep recruitment levels so high and equipment manufacturing so high they are overcharging their economy. Right now in Russia there are three types of jobs if you want to make money afaik, work in the military complex (arms manufacturing), in the gas extraction industry or directly in the military.
It's Dutch disease x100, if the state at some point stops being able to fund the war machine, their economy collapses.
To add to this, Putin can recruit from the poorest regions for a while, but at some point he needs to get men from the larger cities. The last thing he wants is protests from Moskou etc. The average person from Moskou hadn't had that much negative effects from the war yet. But if you, your son or father is forced to the battlefield it's a different story.
I hope you're right. Because in general the reaction of the Russian population to the war has been so meek, I'm starting to doubt it would be any different once recruitment starts hitting the biggest cities.
It's so meek because of the political stance of "I am not political" that permeats the whole society.
Its main idea is that "I make actively sure to not see or hear what is happening around me, and in return I can live my life reasonably carefree." That's an unspoken contract between the junta leading the country and its populace. If one side breaks the contract, it's null and void.
The funny thing is, the people have not noticed that the contract has been broken, because they are actively avoiding noticing anything that has to do with society!
And the word "actively" is of great significance. Because it's not passivity, it's a stance held up actively by each individual. The situation of the Russia is all the time deeper and deeper "in your face", and eventually it'll be so deep that there's nothing the individual can do to avoid noticing it.
And then they become active in... Well, some other manner.
Im afraid this is happening in America
Why?
People are proudly political here.
We also live very comfortable lives compared to the Russians. Most of us don't want to ruin that.
I do see a lot of of US people saying stuff like "all politicians are always corrupt". That's the thought Putin has been trying to actively cultivate in Russians' minds, because when people don't trust politicians in general, they won't come to think that they could vote in someone who is much less corrupt than Putin.
When people lose their trust in national politics ability to act in the best interest of their nation, they will get proud of being apolitical. After all, for them it's come to mean "not taking part in a corruption scheme".
Also... My impression is that a growing amount of people in USA are NOT living more comfortable lives than rural Russians. Living in an RV and having to work two jobs isn't really very different life from living in a dilapidated and crooked wooden house that's letting the wind in from several places. I don't know how common that kind of living is in the States, but it seems to be an existant phenomenon. Those people do not live in a different comfort than people in the poorest regions of the Russia. Also, I've seen photos of large amounts of people living in kind of streetside villages consisting of camping tents. That is a kind of life that is less comfortable than anything I've seen during my travels in the Russia.
A much smaller share of US people live under such.circumstances than is the case in the Russia, but for those who do, I am absolutely able to fathom why any change is better for them than status quo! There's only one way to go from the rock bottom.
I can tell you straight up, the people living in RVs are not working 2 jobs in the US.
If we want to talk trailer parks, odds are they're still not working 2 jobs and if they are, they are going to have access to way more luxuries than rural Russians. Unfortunately, they're still probably not independent enough to avoid paying for things they can get for free, such as digital media.
There's not much of a comparison to be made, honestly. We have it way better in the US than they have it in Russia.
Might be. I cannot know from over here :) What are the luxuries they have?
Because people are beginning to shut down or ask what someone else will do about this.
Makes sense their leaders would be so buddy-buddy with north korea.
Russians are going to be less willing to die to invade Ukraine than Ukrainians are to defend their homes.
As a person who lives in a place, I would be hard pressed to ever be unwilling to defend the place where I live. I can't even imagine giving up the fight so a foreign government can occupy the land I call home.
I would be surprised if Ukrainians would ever get tired of defending their home land.
I can, however, see Russians being unwilling to sign up to invade a country that clearly doesn't want them there.
All I'm trying to say is: I agree.
Russia is running out of troops but their recruitment numbers are way higher than Ukraine’s. I support the Ukrainian armed forces unconditionally and have donated to them multiple times so believe me that it brings me no pleasure to say this, but there is no way Russia runs out of soldiers before Ukraine does.
Russia won't run out of troops, but they will run out of capable troops: Russian Casualties & Force Generation - Losses, Recruitment & Sustaining the war in Ukraine
Honest question, what makes Ukraine troops that much better trained?
In addition to all the other valid arguments I want to also mention the rotation principle of the ukrainians. They deploy for six months to the Frontline and then rotate between the dugouts and a safehouse for two weeks at a time. So their soldiers have time to relax and eat good food even while deployed which keeps morale high.
Russia used to just keep their common troops on the frontline until they were exhausted. If I recall correctly they changed this in the last months, but they most likely lost almost all of their pre war trained troops.
"Capable" in this context doesn't just refer to training alone.
As laid out in the video, Russian recruits are getting older and older (as in: have sometimes even fought in Soviet era conflicts) and recruitment standards are dropped more and more (apparently having Schizophrenia is OK for a Russian soldier) to keep a steady influx of warm bodies. Next, Russian recruits appear to be broadly separated into two groups: The meat shields who are rushed to the front with minimal training to plug the biggest holes in the units (stark examples include only multiple days between reported recruitment and death). The second group is going through a more traditional training regiment but also shortened. This shortening also applies to officer candidates.
In short: Recruits are getting less physically capable due to the average age increasing drastically over time, and militarily less capable due to shortened or basically nonexistent training.
As for the Ukrainians: I expect the video with analysis on their casualties and recruitment to drop this week.
Well the Ukrainians are at least trying to train their troops while Russia has been caught shoving raw recruits into the front line after literally no training. Those reports are obviously magnified by each side's information ops but we do know the Russians have a survivability problem. The two biggest things you learn in basic are what to do when someone starts shooting, and how to hit things with your rifle. Everything else is extra that's meant to make you able to use specialized equipment. The real learning environment has always been combat itself. And in this arena the Ukrainians are absolutely dominant.
Because Ukranian troops have 2 things Russian troops will never have.
Also
The motivation of russian soldiers is about as sound as was the motivation of US troops in Vietnam. "Protect the free world from communism by attacking another country". Yeah, ok.
The US had an active force of half a million troops at the height of that attempted occupation and a total of more than 3 million troops had been deployed in Vietnam over the course of the 6 years of war. The US committed various terrorist acts and warcrimes. By the numbers, they had superiority in pretty much every way. At some point it looked like there were doing fine, and they utterly lost. They lost 58k soldiers.
Sounds vaguely familiar to me.
Unfortunate slight difference, The US was unwilling to go full scorched earth, the potential effect of the US bomber fleet using just conventional munitions was described as having the potential to do almost as much devastation as a nuclear strike, despite the warcrimes the US still held back. I doubt Putin would bat an eye at such a policy we're simply fortunate the russian military simply isn't capable of that kind of attack.
Look I want to live in a universe with a version of the US without Henry Kissinger too, but this just doesn't seem like an honest view of the history here.
I don't understand in what sense the U.S. held back from bombing. Fuck, one of the major criticisms of U.S. military strategy in the Vietnam war was the idea that if they just bombed them hard enough, over and over and over again carpet bombing with B-52s loaded to the brim with conventional bombs, than that would magically win the war all by itself.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rolling_Thunder
https://renewvn.org/the-most-bombed-place-on-earth/
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/2eae918ca40a4bd7a55390bba4735cdb#%3A%7E%3Atext=Between+1965+and+1975%2C+the%2Caerial+bombardment+in+human+history.
https://www.maginternational.org/what-we-do/where-we-work/laos/
To be clear, I don't think this makes the illegal Russian invasion and war in Ukraine okay. I am against the war and support arming Ukrainians, fuck Putin, but I think it is important to be realistic about things as we discuss this. I am not even sure the Russian military could even approach a conventional bombing campaign on the same scale, I certainly don't think they could do it without getting absolutely chewed up by AA since most of the munitions would have to be likely delivered by ground attack aircraft like the su-25 or even more vulnerable strategic bombers.
A bombing campaign of that size is essentially impossible to do in a near peer conflict like the war in Ukraine which is an environment where both sides have extensive missiles armaments, radar and electronic warfare capabilities.
Do you even realize that Ukrainian terrorism via the SBU (CIA) happens around once every two weeks?
The thousands of ethnic Russians killed by banderists?
It's good to remember that a small subset of Ukrainian commanders do see soldiers as mere cannon fodder. Mere 11 years ago, the Ukrainian military was run almost precisely the same way as the Russian one. And many commanders are from before 2014. Many of them have converted to the new ways since 2014, but some haven't. That's a problem that severely hampers Ukraine's recruitment capacity. Still, Ukrainians are a nation that will flex when it needs to. If the Russia starts advancing faster than the 0.7 % of Ukraine's total area in year like they did in 2024, people get more afraid of what is going on and get motivated to join the armed forces.
I think you've got the wrong tense there, comrade.
How manu are is still left of well trained VDV and guards units?
To be clear: The Russia's losses are increasing month after month, but their recruitment capacity is not. They are recruiting about 1000 soldiers every day, maybe a bit less. And the number seems to be going down, not growing. They are losing 1300 to 1800 each day now meaning a net loss of something like 400 to 900 soldiers per day!
They won't run out of population anytime soon, but they will run out of soldiers.
That only means they will have to scale back offensive operations and switch to a defensive posture.
Yup. And that means the Russia will be losing huge amounts of troops and equipment without gaining anything from it. The Ukrainian economy is very small, I think about the size of Slovakia's economy. The EU can hold Ukraine's economy up as long as it wants to. Nobody is doing the same for the Russia.
If the Russia had to switch to defending territory without gaining anything more, how would it push for a victory before its economy collapsing?
Russia has been steadily and slowly gaining territory over the last year.
The current attempt is Trump. It's doubtful the Russian economy will collapse any time soon. They still have some slack and the Russian population could suffer far more. Their strategy after the first couple of months was to outlast Ukraine and its supporters. The moaning about costs in the countries supporting Ukraine is only growing. Russia has a firm lid on all opposition.
China
the Russia has been steadily and slowly gaining territory over the last year with a speed of 0.7 % of Ukraine's territory per year. Which is not strategically relevant. Strategically seen, the Russia has not advanced.
I don't really see China starting to actively cover the Russian budget. That would jeopardize China's trade with Europe.
The Russia's strategy has been to outlast Ukraine's supporters will to support Ukraine. That will never happen, unless the voices making the fake claims about time being on the Russia's side are given too much space. Helping Ukraine is so much cheaper than the costs that incur if the Russia takes over Ukraine that there is no logical reason for the EU to end Ukraine's support ever. Even if some countries were to withdraw their support, enough will retain it to keep Ukraine's head over water.
The Russian economy will collapse, sooner or later.
I agree, but think it's later. Russia needs to lose on the battlefield as well before they stop the war.
If it's a year later, then it is. The Russia won't be able to recruit soldiers after its economy collapses. They are in for salary and death compensation that is defined in Rubles. Once the Ruble compensation loses its value, relatives get less motivated for letting their sons go to the front. And when the 2000$ salary becones a 100 $ salary, nobody goes to war for that money.
Without soldiers the front cannot be kept.
Russia is losing up to half a million men per year? What's your source for this? It seems outlandish
Ukraine publishes daily statistics about Russia's manpower losses. One would think those numbers are simply propaganda and any army would "of course" exaggerate such numbers.
But, firstly: The numbers reported by Ukraine rise and fall hand-in-hand with the numbers given by Oryx. There is something of an almost fixed multiplier between Oryx numbers and official data provided by Ukraine. And the Oryx numbers are always published later than Ukraine publishes its own, so Ukraine cannot be just copying Oryx's numbers and multiplying them. And it's logical that Oryx shows only a fraction of the real number, because for most Russian combat losses there is no photo proof, and Oryx only counts what has photo proof.
So, at least the Ukrainian numbers rise and drop without fake data added. Then the question is whether the scale of the numbers is correct, or if Ukraine intentionally inflates them with some static multiplier. Since there is data about the Russia's recruitment capacity and the whole size of the Russia's army, it's visible that by recruiting about 1000 per day they can keep their army's size constant. That shows that the losses must be around the same ballpark. And it coincides with the numbers published by Ukraine.
But yes, now that Russians mostly do not have tanks to use in their attacks, they are really using pure meat wave attacks, and that costs a LOT of men. There's a reason Putin is trying to convince Trump to force Ukraine into an armistice. Losing that many soldiers – indeed almost half a million per year! – is extremely unsustainable, no matter what image Putin is trying to give.
And remember: these numbers are about irrecoverable losses, of which only a fraction are deaths. The number of deaths is far lower.
It's roughly 1 death for 3-4 injured and out of combat
For the Russia it's about 1:2½, and getting worse, for Ukraine it is currently around 1:4 or 1:5.
I wouldn't really mind him not having a military anymore...
Not true. Ukraine is the one with the manpower shortage.
Wow, what an incredible take with zero supporting information, either information I've seen published, ever, or information provided by you, the poster.
Thanks for this, DrDickHandler, it's really helping this conversation evolve into something better!
(/s for anyone too tired to see it)
It's also possible they will stop the zapp Brannigan tactics and dig in to wait for the west to lose interest.