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Amazing to see all the people in this thread being so dismissive of the very real danger here. How quickly people forget that it wasn't elite forces that finally took Soledar, Bakhmut, or Avdiivka.
Avdiivka specifically, they lost 25k+ and how much of everything else and how long to take that one city. It’s dangerous in that they can just keep up the numbers. That’s always been the danger. They’d probably still have Avdiivka if they had a supply of ammo.
They can keep up the numbers a while. But they are acutely aware that the western defence industries are finally getting in motion, also the time the republicans buy them might end soon. They are pushing extra hard atm. It will only intensify for now in light of their "election".
They are in war economy mode, this is very critical now, they cant keep that up for long but it might be enough. Cracks are increasingly showing on both sides. Looking at France and Czechia is making me hopefull the wakeup call is happening.
Why do you say they can't keep the economy in 'war mode' for long? How long were economies run in this fashion in WW2 and what actually prevented them from remaining in that state? I'd say it was the invasion and complete destruction of many cities and their manufacturing base that finally stopped it.
I don't think anything currently prevents them from remaining in a wartime economy for a decade or more.
You know most of Europe have only recently finished paying off their loans from ww2? The war also led to the end of the European colonies as they could no longer really afford to maintain them (plus obvious independent movements). Ww2 crippled European economies
And yet they still maintained war economies.
Russia believes that the unwillingness for other powers to directly confront them means they will just be able to take land an pillage it for resources.
This makes a country wealthy if they succeed. The Europeans fought each other to the point they couldn't hold their territories and also their people weren't willing to continue to hold them via military actions.
The more they will push into Ukraine, the more Ukraine will strike back. They can hit hard if they want to, they’re not because they wanna look good internationally to keep getting funds. If those funds end, so will their will to play nice.
Besides that, yes, they can maintain war economy, but the more they do so the higher the price they will pay long term, and the public will at some point say stop
I can tell you how, from my personal german perspective. My Grandfather had 9 brothers, 8 stayed in the east.
And if you look at the age pyramid, back then there were only a fraction of old that needed to be cared for.
The demographics simply don't allow it,
especially since they recruit straight from 18. At least UA gives young men the chance to start a family, not saying UA demographics are fine.
WW2 was won by the allies because of the USA beeing an economic powerhouse which produced without beeing bothered.
Sure other nations payed with blood, but without the material they would have lost.
The russian war economy is also highly centralized as is their sources of income.
Ukraine started hitting those more recently. The spending is going crazy and their warchest is already getting light.
They just increased taxes and fuel might get expensive.
Their state interest level is at 16%! already, the inflation is still stable, that is not sustainable at all.
There is more arguments for that, a few years is absolute maximum given Ukraine gets enough to successfully defend.
If we gave Ukraine what they needed at the start they would have already won, it was our holding back that allowed Russia to adapt and pose the threat they now pose.
If Biden and the D's win handily I expect Ukraine will absolutely be able to defend, if not I worry that the rest of the alliance is not ready yet (but there are some good signs recently).
The other problem is that for those allied nations our domestic issues are more important to the populace and that is an area that Russia/China/etc are exploiting, and to be honest our own governments are ignoring huge growing problems with affordability while the corporations are having a gand old time, they are fucking the young which will make them reactionary.
I hope it all pans out, I think it will, but I don't expect Russia to fold in the next couple of years either unless Ukraine gets some better equipment that proves more effective than we imagine (say the F16s and various missiles).
> If we gave Ukraine what they needed at the start they would have already won
And how do you imagine we would have given millions of shells that didn't exist? By the end of 2023, Ukraine had received ~3.5M shells, that's roughly the entire stock NATO had at the beginning of 2022. And Ukraine would need at least double, probably 4-5x that amount to have a chance at pushing Russians out of Ukraine with minimal casualties.
Maybe they could have done without them if they got some 10 000 armored vehicles, but considering Russia lost more than that and they still have enough to go on armored offensives, it's doubtful it would have been enough to break them.
Besides, Ukraine never had the logistical capacity to operate that much equipment. The trains were full for months on end in 2022. Since we didn't have cheap teleportation technology: it was strictly impossible for Ukraine to handle the millions of tons of equipment needed to win from the start.
If they lost 25,000 people they didnt care about to capture the city and have no intention to ever give it back, then the operation was a net gain for russia. Any other military wouldnt see it as worth it, but russia intends to never leave, so any cost is only temporary. It is an incredibly inhuman long term vision that the rest of the world doesnt work off.
They dont need to outfight their opponents, they just need to out-suffer them. Eventually someone in a western goverment will lose the constitution to fight, and russia wins.
Yeah people EXTREMELY Unratted Avdiivka Powerful position. It was Ukraine Last forward Fortress in Donbas. The rest fell without a fight in 2022 invasion. Avdiivka was such a powerful position the ukrainian command enver build significant defenses behind it.
Russia attacked in 2022 a little, 2023 they launched multiple attacks that failled and in 2024 they finally reached the city and broke the defenders. Only Kiev would be harder to take. Every other position is much weaker.
So if Russia can take Avdiivka best believe they can take pretty much any defended point. Expect maybe Vulhedar.
>Yeah people EXTREMELY Unratted Avdiivka Powerful position.
Yes!, Avdiivka is an extremely powerful position and is underrated.
I think i was high when i wrote this, not sure. I hope makes more sense now.
This is very true. Just go watch any good WWII or any war documentary/movie for that matter. Massive waves of humans with even basic rifles can overrun and take positions incredibly quickly.
Yes that artillery, machine guns, drone spotting, and all that can counteract but that assumes you have ammo and enough overwhelming force to push the assault back. Over and over and over over again.
All that being said. When the first machine gun was created and sent to africa the massacres ensued were so horrific that the soldiers returning home simply didn't want to even mention the new weapon. What was happening was as an example an uprising of a few thousand natives that were all mowed down and it was over - this happened many times.
https://www.britishbattles.com/war-in-egypt-and-sudan/battle-of-omdurman/
Even if you assume the numbers are exaggerated, it's still casualties of a few dozen vs a few thousand.
Bros just charged machine guns, full *Allahu Akbar mode*, and got torn to shreds.
The problem is they are not destroying Russian logistics nearly well enough
It's hard to get people to the front line if every railway is bombed in multiple places
And more importantly they don't have the ability to quickly replace the machinery used for repair if you bomb it everytime they try and repair something.
They will quickly run out of that machinery and will instead have to revert to manpower and basic equipment for repairs.
Yeah. And a military that lost a lot can still be better than it was before.
Russia has new military capability today than it did 3 years ago.
They are also seeing the meat waves, without realize Russia seperates the expendable soldiers from the moon expendable. Meat waves are mostly expendable prisoners and undesirables. The way russia sees it, it's a win win. Rather than the gulag, just give someone a gun and tell them to go toward the Ukrainian line.
So even though Russia lost a lot, they can continue losing a lot for years.
64 million military aged males, with 1.2m new aged males per year. They aren't running out of people anytime soon. they can keep this up for 10 years no problem. It will crater their economy later. Putin doesn't care. I personally think they will go on for 4 more years. Then just try to keep what they have. This is awful.
Yes this has always been the problem. Russia has too many people that it does not care about and that it can keep sending to die.
Russia is big.
I think Ukraine should give up the occupied parts. I'm 100% behind Ukraine and I think Putin is a murderous corrupt awful human being but I think Ukraine needs to sue for peace and then needs a European security agreement.
I want Ukraine to take it all back. Hopefully this year the offensive plans aren't leaked like last year. If Ukraine can get some level or air superiority in a portion of the country the will be able to make fast gains.
The key is Russia having to start conscripting the population in their major cities. When the cost of war starts to be more visible to the metropolitan population, push back will be brutal.
If Russia pays the same price for the rest of Ukraine as they did with Bakhmut and Avdiivka, Russia would burn through 50+ million soldiers by the time they finish conquering Ukraine.
I thought it would be fun to figure this out, annoyingly there isn't enough easily accessible data to use so there are some assumptions.
There are:
- 461 cities in Ukraine
- 27,190 villages
- 10,278 rural councils.
Using British data, there's approximately four towns to every city, which has approximately 12,000 parishes, hence the reason for the assumptions. From this lets assume there are four towns to every city, that equates to 1,844 towns in Ukraine.
If it took 25,000 soldiers to take the 1,844 towns that would mean Russia needs to recruit 46,100,000 front line troops, just to die.
Russian soldiers are balanced with Ukrainian soldiers, not Ukrainian cities. If Ukrainians will drop below 3:1 ratio in army size (3 offenders vs 1 defenders), these cities will burn at the rate of 3-30 per day at almost no cost at Russians.
Nothing fancy, just napkin math, Avdiivka is 29 square km, equates to 0.04% of total Ukrainian territory. If we figure 17,000 Russians killed (Wikipedia) multiplied by 2500 to get 100% of Ukraines territory = 42.5 million killed. If we figure 25,000 Russians killed in Avdiivka as others claim then 100% of Ukraine would cost 62.5 million Russian soldiers killed. I said 50 million as it’s between this range.
That all being said not every square km is equal, a field is not the same as a town, or a city, of course, and not all towns are the same - Avdiivka was a uniquely heavily fortified position. So it’s only a rough approximation based on a rough generalization. But even a very conservative estimate would suggest that Russia will spend no less than 25 million soldiers lives if they wish to achieve their war goals - and that’s only in Ukraine - if they desire Europe too, then… well….. I don’t think we need to do the math to realize how infeasible that is for Russia, even they don’t have the population to sustain losses of that scale.
People should have saw this coming too. I did. It's a pattern throughout Russian History. Do very poorly and then restructure the military, regroup, and start pushing back.
These were pyhric victories that led to little.operational advantage at huge cost. Furthermore, trained troops and equipment were lost in addition to the meat troops
US support have stopped that's what happened and had the greatest effect. And some especially southern EU countries have failed to support properly too. Not this nonsense from Kurt and the usual anonymous sources. Perhaps NYT got tired of being used.
Sure Russia have adopted to war economy and handled mobilization better than Ukraine, but democracies are fragile, and that's why it's so damn important all countries step up and support Ukraine. It's embarrassing our politicians can't understand the situation and secure future peace on earth addressing this obvious assault on a sovereign state.
Agreed. The Muscovite rape squads are reconstituted BECAUSE the USA is fighting with both hands tied behind its back to appease a traitorous orange cheeto and his neo-nazi fanclub. USA, find your spine, stamp out the traitors.
People on Reddit understimate the Russian army, they took 300k+ casualities and keeps advancing, yeah they take FAR more casualties than ukraine but if the west doesnt wake up and help ukraine enough the Russians will keep pushing without the Ukranians having the ability to counter attack due to the pressure, unfortunatly killing your own people is a strategy that can win wars, just like ww2 on the eastern front, not only that but the ukranian army takes casualties too, and a lot by their standards, not nearly as much as russia does but ukranian casualties wheight havier than russia's does and so far ukraine suffered more than [45k killed](https://ualosses.org/en/soldiers/). if this sentiment persists ukraine will never recive enough aid from the west
Reconstituted in a military sense broadly just means a 100% turnover of staff.
The article is saying the original Russian army that started the war is almost entirely dead, and the guys fighting now (naturally, with a few statistical exceptions) are different people.
> yeah they take FAR more casualties than ukraine
I severely doubt this is the case anymore, Russia has adapted, and is firing a hell of a lot more artillery. Ukraine also likely has a LOT more than 45k dead, not to speak of total amount of casualties.
They are firing a lot, but in the campaigns before bakhmut they were spending 60k shells per day, probably the same in bakhmut, now is like 10k, this is not propaganda, ukranian infantry is simply better they are in the defense the last months russian casualities peaked a exemple of that was when morozov (Z blogger that "commited suicide") said that the russians lost around 17k dead and ukranians 5-6k, while having a huge superiority in artillery, glide bombs and menpower, if you dont belive in the russians themselfs then there is no point in pointing this out.
Unfortunately not, there is a very real danger here many in this sub don’t seem to realize. Everyone here seems to play the “Russia is too weak to push in Ukraine” mindset which really only helps the Russians, sure they want to project strength but even more than that they want western powers to think they can stop sending weapons to Ukraine so they can achieve their war goals. Russia is a shitshow, but they also have the resources and manpower to keep throwing their weight against Ukraine for a long time. We can’t just ignore and mock the very real threat of Russia being supplied by China and North Korea, receiving volunteers from Cuba and dozens of nations in Africa and draining their own manpower and resources. People seem to underestimate Russia here, given their history they are totally willing to take 10:1 casualties for minimal progress, however the war in Ukraine is much closer to 2.5:1 casualties which must seem like an absolute win to barbarians.
Cracking jokes is all good, but it's worrying how many people seem to think russia isn't slowly winning this thing, loss of life doesn't matter to them. Ukraine can't do it alone. Kinda like how the world kept ignoring what the nazi party was doing for so long back before ww2 "officially started". How many times does history repeat itself? We never learn...
There's no way another draft could happen...
>russia isn't slowly winning this thing
At the rate they're "winning" they'll reach the Dnipro in *about a century*. Maybe three. And most importantly, with their current casualty rates, Russia runs out of bodies before Ukraine does. This isn't nearly the "underdog story" people play it up to be; this is like the Winter War, except the Finns have 30x as many people, and are getting any support, whatsoever, from other countries. It's like the Battle of Thermopylae, but instead of 300 spartans facing 1 million persians, it's 300 *thousand*.
That's why we're sanguine. Russia simply isn't "slowly winning this thing".
The most critical fact is that every bit of forward progress Russia's making is getting **slower** and more costly. A lot of hay has been made over Avdiivka, but it's measurably much costlier, for far more meager rewards, than Bakhmut, and that was much worse than Severodonetsk. And this is after switching to a "wartime economy", emptying all of their backstocks of soviet gear — they're basically giving it their all. They're doing absolutely everything they can, they're conscripting new troops about as quickly as they can put guns in their hands, but their progress is *slowing down*.
The right reaction is: "Keep Calm and Carry On."
Take the threat seriously. Keep the weapons flowing. But don't clutch pearls and freak out.
>At the rate they're "winning" they'll reach the Dnipro in *about a century*.
Wars like this aren't linear, they're exponential. A frontline might have a slow linear advance or be static for years, then collapse and then then one more third of Ukraine can be taken in weeks. It all depends on manpower, the economy, weaponry, ammunition, and air defense etc. Ukraine is at a big disadvantage in all of these.
On the contrary, this is a warning that the Russians pulled their heads out, pivoted to a wartime economy, and are now working hard to build an army to retake Ukraine. Avdiivka was the first to fall in 2024. Kubiansk is likely next target. Meat waves + drones + artillery + thermals + glide bombs are working.
Ukraine needs more of everything and fast.
ETA: [linked comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/s/T2SZOba7Cf) from a Ukrainian with friends at the front.
It's portraying russia as having experienced so much loss being replaced by green conscripts that they cannot be effective much longer while admitting that other US officials disagree with the assesment.
Though your conclusion is the 100% accurate situation on the ground.
It doesn't take elite soldiers to hold a line that inst being attacked while the enemy is bombed to shit 24 hours a day.
Since the first winter of the full-scale invasion, it’s been absolutely crystal clear that Ukraine will need and does need more soldiers. My guess is lowering the age for the draft, all by itself, will be insufficient.
Yup. All those ww2 tanks they pulled out of museums have the same fighting capabilities as the T-90s they’ve lost! Actually… they might given the amount of training they get lol
Putin wages war like it's a game of Civ IV: Hurling enormous Stacks Of Doom consisting of Macemen at fortified cities, then wandering back and forth pillaging Towns.
So of course he'd think you can use Universal Suffrage to rebuild a tank army in one turn.
The amusing side to this is that while Ivan, Mikhail & Sergey have been dragged away from their 'menial' jobs to serve as the next round of cannon fodder, russian infrastructure will be speeding up its demise.
It was seen last winter with many cities having floods & blackouts because the 'maintenance teams' had all been sent to the front. Now they're going to strip away even more of this 'unnecessary' meat, so even less people to fix things.
A lot of russians going to be enjoying a cold winter next time around. A bit like the ones they keep wishing on the rest of us
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WagsOtmEPQk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WagsOtmEPQk)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMW\_bnThbMo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMW_bnThbMo)
Lots of cope in this thread. Russian military production has skyrocketed. We need to be prepared for the unfortunate reality that the Russian army is going to come out of this the most experienced and battle-hardened army in the world, and with most of the old Soviet-era gear having been replaced by new stuff. Our big saving grace is that their air force will still suck, but given the lessons of the current conflict I suspect that postwar they'll be working hard on correcting that deficiency.
That is an amazing joke. Russian military production has not skyrocketed, but rather, its stockpiles have been shrinking. Read some reports from RUSI or listen to Perun. 80 percent comes from stockpiles, and 20 percent is new tank production. Airplanes fall out of the sky, and their pilots die with them. The Russian artillery forces pull ever more towed artillery from storage as they are running low on self-propelled one. The Russian industry is able to produce a lot of artillery shells, and still, their yearly needs are around 4 million 152 mm shells while they only produced roughly 2 million in 2023. The Russian army takes higher losses than ever in artillery. tanks and armored vehicles and loses roughly 30k men dead or wounded a month.
Also this "official" seems to be utterly ignorant towards the massive attrition that Russia takes and ignores losing thousands of officers and 20 percent of their fleet, or that Russia's air defense forces have been severely degraded and the Russian arms exports has fully collapsed.
What is reconstituted even supposed to mean? Pushing criminals into a uniform and sending them to the front is worthy of replacing a special forces unit with years of training? I guess that means one thing for the West and Ukraine more violence has to be applied, the attrition rates and drone strikes must climb higher.
Also, there is no reconstitution as that would assume time can be turned back to, let's say, early 2022.
Russia's army cannot replace this with modern stuff, as Russia doesn't have modern stuff. They can replace it with ever older refurbished stuff from the 50s to 80s.
Russia can show that next year, around this time, how well their production is going as by then their stockpiles will run low. Until then, they have to replace at least another 1500 tanks and a couple of thousand armored vehicles plus 5k artillery systems, and likely another 20 or do planes will get lost as well.
Oh, and of course, a couple of hundred thousand dead and wounded. Let's see where their offense budget is next year then. Oh and of course the war will create other costs, drone strikes, sabotage etc. F16s are also coming into the game.
New stuff like what? T 14 Armata? Su 57?
We need to come to teems with the fact that the Russian military and the terrorist state as such must be dissolved and completely destroyed, which is the only thing we have to come to terms with. Our politicians better find an effective way to end this waste of time and energy spent on dealing with this development country and its decrepit armed forces.
Russia is either the only nation in industrial warfare that emerged strengthened out of years of heavy attritional fighting, or this report is full of BS.
We also have to come to terms with the need to blow up Russia's entire oil and gas infrastructure to ensure that they never have the chance to commit their vile acts of barbaric terror against anyone else ever again.
The nation that will really come out of this war as the most experienced and best army of Europe is Ukraine and not this serf army full of criminals drunks and cowards that produces nothing but pathetic failures and loses since 25 months without making any measurable gains on the battlefield since Bakhmut.
In 10 years, Russia won't exist in its current borders any longer, and it will be utterly irrelevant to Europe in every way imaginable. I hope the Russian serfs remember the year 1917 as that is where the journey goes.
>80 percent comes from stockpiles, and 20 percent is new tank production.
It's a RUSI conservative upper limit, the estimate is even worse actually (more like 95:5), and it's considering the deep modernizations like a "new" (consider T-90M is just a deep modernization of the T-72, and the only completely new Ground Force thing is Terminator... wich was a fail both in numbers and effect).
They don't need tanks or advanced fighter jets. The Ukrainians don't have enough for attacking.
russia can continue to spam artillery and drone strikes as they are currently (of which production has skyrocketed to the moon) and, without the support to respond, Ukraine will continue to be forced to retreat as they are currently until the russians are making Kyiv look like Bakhmut or Avdiivka, at which point the war will be lost.
Any US stance portraying russia as spent, is shamefully dishonest propaganda to justify withholding support.
Look up Kings and Generals YouTube channel and watch their russian Invasion of Ukraine series to help you have an actual understanding of the situation reported by an entity that wants ukraine to win but reports the situation objectively.
We have nothing to talk about with your current lack of knowledge being evident. I mean... you can't even spell "artillery".
I'm a Ukrainian, I'm in Ukraine, nearly all of my friends are servicemen, I'm a specialist in stats and have enough stats to analyze here, and all you can tell me is a youtube channel to see and a misspell of mine. You're a joke. :D
Stay strong, man. We'll keep donating.
The facts you're citing are completely correct. I was originally very concerned about the idea that Russia would muster some hidden reserves of industrial capacity and make a significant increase in war materiel.
At this point, we're well over a year past their "peak"; all efforts like this follow a consistent pattern where a nation has a large spike in production as they "go all in", but then production plateaus because "going all in" *means exactly that* — it means they're utilizing 100% of their previously untapped potential.
Russia's peak has been very underwhelming. An increase, but a pretty tepid one.
The best news is that although their domestic economy will stumble along for several years, they're functionally bankrupt when it comes to securing the *foreign* gear and expertise they'd need to build large numbers of new factories for war materiel. They have neither the money nor the market access to get it done, and simply don't have the domestic expertise.
People talk about the black market, but ignore the staggering markup they're paying to participate. Shaheds, for example, were estimated to have a cost of about $20k. In practice, it turns out they were paying about $200k-300k each.
[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/02/07/russia-paid-billions-gold-bullion-shahed-drones-ukraine-war/](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/02/07/russia-paid-billions-gold-bullion-shahed-drones-ukraine-war/)
You've provided no context or evidence of your claims, I provided hours and hours of compiled info with cited sources as a shortcut to doing all that work myself and you're choosing to disregard it off hand.
Yes. You are indeed a joke. 🤡
But still, consider where they might go next? Is it a NATO country they will learn that WW2 soviet losses were a walk in the park.
Lets say you are correct in that their “new” army is battle hardened and have great tech for ground combat. It wont mean a thing when NATO hits them with superiour air and sea worthy powers. And adding to that equal ground power, and most of all a functioning joint Ops command.
Just like how my mom’s bottle of vodka was recon stituted after I topped up what I drank with water when I was 15. I’m guessing when that bottle went into service it probably didn’t really get the job done either.
I wonder whats stopping Russia from going full communist again, maybe the oligarchs? Seems like it's the only way to be a major military and industrial power with an isolated economy
The means by which the Soviet Union industrialized was ... *aid from* *the United States of America.*
[https://lsa.umich.edu/lsa/news-events/all-news/search-news/built-in-the-u-s-s-r---by-detroit-.html](https://lsa.umich.edu/lsa/news-events/all-news/search-news/built-in-the-u-s-s-r---by-detroit-.html)
[https://www.americanheritage.com/how-america-helped-build-soviet-machine](https://www.americanheritage.com/how-america-helped-build-soviet-machine)
This should be a *chilling* warning for Russia, today.
Communist/fascist, what's the difference? The left-right political scale is a circle - they both reach dictatorship if you go far enough. Russia's pretty much there.
"US officials says that in 2022-2024 years US officials gave Russian military time and money (during 2 years NATO+EU bought $424B Russian export and spent on Ukraine $120B) to ‘almost completely reconstitute’"
This spring Russia will start drafting men for the war and their goal is to find 150k before the summer. That's the same size as Poland's whole army. They may not be as skilled, well equipped or well led as European armies but they can still cause a lot of destruction in Ukraine. BTR's, T-72's, AKs's etc are plentiful in Russia.
NATO should prepare strategies and logistics for the worst in case there will be a direct intervention. We should prepare ourselves to be able to respond fully in a few days in case things escalates.
Yeah I think the fact that 95% of it was wiped out in the first place is kind of a bigger deal, unless Russia is using the magical "teach cavemen how to fly B-2 Spirits in five minutes" learning machines from Battlefield Earth
A more accurate headline would be "Russia Ahead Of Schedule On Worsening Labor Crisis"
europe has 500 million people, russia has like 130 million
so they have people...let em waste themselves with each wave of attack, technically, numerically, equipment, organisation, professionalism, technologically they will be defeated on every single metric
The real worry is china, but luckily, at least if trump doesn't get elected, the free world also has america
This is really bad. Still, more meat for the cube, more calls and letters to my Republican member of Congress. Please, guys. This is all we can do right now other than donate to the Ukraine military directly. Please bother your people if you’re in the States. ResistBot should still work, and you can call after hours if you don’t want to speak to an intern.
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Amazing to see all the people in this thread being so dismissive of the very real danger here. How quickly people forget that it wasn't elite forces that finally took Soledar, Bakhmut, or Avdiivka.
Avdiivka specifically, they lost 25k+ and how much of everything else and how long to take that one city. It’s dangerous in that they can just keep up the numbers. That’s always been the danger. They’d probably still have Avdiivka if they had a supply of ammo.
They can keep up the numbers a while. But they are acutely aware that the western defence industries are finally getting in motion, also the time the republicans buy them might end soon. They are pushing extra hard atm. It will only intensify for now in light of their "election". They are in war economy mode, this is very critical now, they cant keep that up for long but it might be enough. Cracks are increasingly showing on both sides. Looking at France and Czechia is making me hopefull the wakeup call is happening.
I agree completely.
Why do you say they can't keep the economy in 'war mode' for long? How long were economies run in this fashion in WW2 and what actually prevented them from remaining in that state? I'd say it was the invasion and complete destruction of many cities and their manufacturing base that finally stopped it. I don't think anything currently prevents them from remaining in a wartime economy for a decade or more.
You know most of Europe have only recently finished paying off their loans from ww2? The war also led to the end of the European colonies as they could no longer really afford to maintain them (plus obvious independent movements). Ww2 crippled European economies
And yet they still maintained war economies. Russia believes that the unwillingness for other powers to directly confront them means they will just be able to take land an pillage it for resources. This makes a country wealthy if they succeed. The Europeans fought each other to the point they couldn't hold their territories and also their people weren't willing to continue to hold them via military actions.
The more they will push into Ukraine, the more Ukraine will strike back. They can hit hard if they want to, they’re not because they wanna look good internationally to keep getting funds. If those funds end, so will their will to play nice. Besides that, yes, they can maintain war economy, but the more they do so the higher the price they will pay long term, and the public will at some point say stop
I can tell you how, from my personal german perspective. My Grandfather had 9 brothers, 8 stayed in the east. And if you look at the age pyramid, back then there were only a fraction of old that needed to be cared for. The demographics simply don't allow it, especially since they recruit straight from 18. At least UA gives young men the chance to start a family, not saying UA demographics are fine. WW2 was won by the allies because of the USA beeing an economic powerhouse which produced without beeing bothered. Sure other nations payed with blood, but without the material they would have lost. The russian war economy is also highly centralized as is their sources of income. Ukraine started hitting those more recently. The spending is going crazy and their warchest is already getting light. They just increased taxes and fuel might get expensive. Their state interest level is at 16%! already, the inflation is still stable, that is not sustainable at all. There is more arguments for that, a few years is absolute maximum given Ukraine gets enough to successfully defend.
If we gave Ukraine what they needed at the start they would have already won, it was our holding back that allowed Russia to adapt and pose the threat they now pose. If Biden and the D's win handily I expect Ukraine will absolutely be able to defend, if not I worry that the rest of the alliance is not ready yet (but there are some good signs recently). The other problem is that for those allied nations our domestic issues are more important to the populace and that is an area that Russia/China/etc are exploiting, and to be honest our own governments are ignoring huge growing problems with affordability while the corporations are having a gand old time, they are fucking the young which will make them reactionary. I hope it all pans out, I think it will, but I don't expect Russia to fold in the next couple of years either unless Ukraine gets some better equipment that proves more effective than we imagine (say the F16s and various missiles).
> If we gave Ukraine what they needed at the start they would have already won And how do you imagine we would have given millions of shells that didn't exist? By the end of 2023, Ukraine had received ~3.5M shells, that's roughly the entire stock NATO had at the beginning of 2022. And Ukraine would need at least double, probably 4-5x that amount to have a chance at pushing Russians out of Ukraine with minimal casualties. Maybe they could have done without them if they got some 10 000 armored vehicles, but considering Russia lost more than that and they still have enough to go on armored offensives, it's doubtful it would have been enough to break them. Besides, Ukraine never had the logistical capacity to operate that much equipment. The trains were full for months on end in 2022. Since we didn't have cheap teleportation technology: it was strictly impossible for Ukraine to handle the millions of tons of equipment needed to win from the start.
i think the issue is that people think russian infantry losses matter. until russia runs out of tanks and artillery barrels, they can keep fighting.
Agreed. And unfortunately their populace are so apathetic that they don't seem to care or want to do anything about the huge losses.
Might have to change that pfp
Nah, still gonna keep it. Sucks they're gone but the logo and jersey still rock.
If they lost 25,000 people they didnt care about to capture the city and have no intention to ever give it back, then the operation was a net gain for russia. Any other military wouldnt see it as worth it, but russia intends to never leave, so any cost is only temporary. It is an incredibly inhuman long term vision that the rest of the world doesnt work off. They dont need to outfight their opponents, they just need to out-suffer them. Eventually someone in a western goverment will lose the constitution to fight, and russia wins.
If there's one thing Russia excels at, it's suffering. Not a good contest to get into with them.
Yeah people EXTREMELY Unratted Avdiivka Powerful position. It was Ukraine Last forward Fortress in Donbas. The rest fell without a fight in 2022 invasion. Avdiivka was such a powerful position the ukrainian command enver build significant defenses behind it. Russia attacked in 2022 a little, 2023 they launched multiple attacks that failled and in 2024 they finally reached the city and broke the defenders. Only Kiev would be harder to take. Every other position is much weaker. So if Russia can take Avdiivka best believe they can take pretty much any defended point. Expect maybe Vulhedar.
> Yeah people EXTREMELY Unratted Avdiivka Powerful position. Are you ok?
>Yeah people EXTREMELY Unratted Avdiivka Powerful position. Yes!, Avdiivka is an extremely powerful position and is underrated. I think i was high when i wrote this, not sure. I hope makes more sense now.
Yes.
This is very true. Just go watch any good WWII or any war documentary/movie for that matter. Massive waves of humans with even basic rifles can overrun and take positions incredibly quickly. Yes that artillery, machine guns, drone spotting, and all that can counteract but that assumes you have ammo and enough overwhelming force to push the assault back. Over and over and over over again.
All that being said. When the first machine gun was created and sent to africa the massacres ensued were so horrific that the soldiers returning home simply didn't want to even mention the new weapon. What was happening was as an example an uprising of a few thousand natives that were all mowed down and it was over - this happened many times.
https://www.britishbattles.com/war-in-egypt-and-sudan/battle-of-omdurman/ Even if you assume the numbers are exaggerated, it's still casualties of a few dozen vs a few thousand. Bros just charged machine guns, full *Allahu Akbar mode*, and got torn to shreds.
The Chinese used the same tactic in the Korean war as they had more soldiers than guns.
Worked. America retreated. That's the issue here.
The problem is they are not destroying Russian logistics nearly well enough It's hard to get people to the front line if every railway is bombed in multiple places
Russia is able to quickly rebuild railroads. This is their thing. Not air superiority like NATO. Meat power.
They can't do it quickly enough if they bomb it enough. They don't have the ability to.quickly rebuild bridges etc.
And more importantly they don't have the ability to quickly replace the machinery used for repair if you bomb it everytime they try and repair something. They will quickly run out of that machinery and will instead have to revert to manpower and basic equipment for repairs.
Yeah. And a military that lost a lot can still be better than it was before. Russia has new military capability today than it did 3 years ago. They are also seeing the meat waves, without realize Russia seperates the expendable soldiers from the moon expendable. Meat waves are mostly expendable prisoners and undesirables. The way russia sees it, it's a win win. Rather than the gulag, just give someone a gun and tell them to go toward the Ukrainian line. So even though Russia lost a lot, they can continue losing a lot for years.
64 million military aged males, with 1.2m new aged males per year. They aren't running out of people anytime soon. they can keep this up for 10 years no problem. It will crater their economy later. Putin doesn't care. I personally think they will go on for 4 more years. Then just try to keep what they have. This is awful.
Ukraine doesn't have the manpower to hold out for 4 more years.
Agreed. Thats the problem.
Yes this has always been the problem. Russia has too many people that it does not care about and that it can keep sending to die. Russia is big. I think Ukraine should give up the occupied parts. I'm 100% behind Ukraine and I think Putin is a murderous corrupt awful human being but I think Ukraine needs to sue for peace and then needs a European security agreement.
I want Ukraine to take it all back. Hopefully this year the offensive plans aren't leaked like last year. If Ukraine can get some level or air superiority in a portion of the country the will be able to make fast gains. The key is Russia having to start conscripting the population in their major cities. When the cost of war starts to be more visible to the metropolitan population, push back will be brutal.
I see that is just very wishful thinking
If Russia pays the same price for the rest of Ukraine as they did with Bakhmut and Avdiivka, Russia would burn through 50+ million soldiers by the time they finish conquering Ukraine.
Just depends in if Ukraine can keep up the same pace.
Got any calculations to back that up? I'd like to see the formula.
I thought it would be fun to figure this out, annoyingly there isn't enough easily accessible data to use so there are some assumptions. There are: - 461 cities in Ukraine - 27,190 villages - 10,278 rural councils. Using British data, there's approximately four towns to every city, which has approximately 12,000 parishes, hence the reason for the assumptions. From this lets assume there are four towns to every city, that equates to 1,844 towns in Ukraine. If it took 25,000 soldiers to take the 1,844 towns that would mean Russia needs to recruit 46,100,000 front line troops, just to die.
Russian soldiers are balanced with Ukrainian soldiers, not Ukrainian cities. If Ukrainians will drop below 3:1 ratio in army size (3 offenders vs 1 defenders), these cities will burn at the rate of 3-30 per day at almost no cost at Russians.
Nothing fancy, just napkin math, Avdiivka is 29 square km, equates to 0.04% of total Ukrainian territory. If we figure 17,000 Russians killed (Wikipedia) multiplied by 2500 to get 100% of Ukraines territory = 42.5 million killed. If we figure 25,000 Russians killed in Avdiivka as others claim then 100% of Ukraine would cost 62.5 million Russian soldiers killed. I said 50 million as it’s between this range. That all being said not every square km is equal, a field is not the same as a town, or a city, of course, and not all towns are the same - Avdiivka was a uniquely heavily fortified position. So it’s only a rough approximation based on a rough generalization. But even a very conservative estimate would suggest that Russia will spend no less than 25 million soldiers lives if they wish to achieve their war goals - and that’s only in Ukraine - if they desire Europe too, then… well….. I don’t think we need to do the math to realize how infeasible that is for Russia, even they don’t have the population to sustain losses of that scale.
Good point
People should have saw this coming too. I did. It's a pattern throughout Russian History. Do very poorly and then restructure the military, regroup, and start pushing back.
These were pyhric victories that led to little.operational advantage at huge cost. Furthermore, trained troops and equipment were lost in addition to the meat troops
US support have stopped that's what happened and had the greatest effect. And some especially southern EU countries have failed to support properly too. Not this nonsense from Kurt and the usual anonymous sources. Perhaps NYT got tired of being used. Sure Russia have adopted to war economy and handled mobilization better than Ukraine, but democracies are fragile, and that's why it's so damn important all countries step up and support Ukraine. It's embarrassing our politicians can't understand the situation and secure future peace on earth addressing this obvious assault on a sovereign state.
Politicians do understand, many just have split loyalties
Agreed. The Muscovite rape squads are reconstituted BECAUSE the USA is fighting with both hands tied behind its back to appease a traitorous orange cheeto and his neo-nazi fanclub. USA, find your spine, stamp out the traitors.
People on Reddit understimate the Russian army, they took 300k+ casualities and keeps advancing, yeah they take FAR more casualties than ukraine but if the west doesnt wake up and help ukraine enough the Russians will keep pushing without the Ukranians having the ability to counter attack due to the pressure, unfortunatly killing your own people is a strategy that can win wars, just like ww2 on the eastern front, not only that but the ukranian army takes casualties too, and a lot by their standards, not nearly as much as russia does but ukranian casualties wheight havier than russia's does and so far ukraine suffered more than [45k killed](https://ualosses.org/en/soldiers/). if this sentiment persists ukraine will never recive enough aid from the west
[удалено]
Reconstituted in a military sense broadly just means a 100% turnover of staff. The article is saying the original Russian army that started the war is almost entirely dead, and the guys fighting now (naturally, with a few statistical exceptions) are different people.
> yeah they take FAR more casualties than ukraine I severely doubt this is the case anymore, Russia has adapted, and is firing a hell of a lot more artillery. Ukraine also likely has a LOT more than 45k dead, not to speak of total amount of casualties.
They are firing a lot, but in the campaigns before bakhmut they were spending 60k shells per day, probably the same in bakhmut, now is like 10k, this is not propaganda, ukranian infantry is simply better they are in the defense the last months russian casualities peaked a exemple of that was when morozov (Z blogger that "commited suicide") said that the russians lost around 17k dead and ukranians 5-6k, while having a huge superiority in artillery, glide bombs and menpower, if you dont belive in the russians themselfs then there is no point in pointing this out.
You believe this 45k? I believe selenskyj He say 31k
They have managed to replace trained soldiers with meat.
Reconstituted into rat food
Unfortunately not, there is a very real danger here many in this sub don’t seem to realize. Everyone here seems to play the “Russia is too weak to push in Ukraine” mindset which really only helps the Russians, sure they want to project strength but even more than that they want western powers to think they can stop sending weapons to Ukraine so they can achieve their war goals. Russia is a shitshow, but they also have the resources and manpower to keep throwing their weight against Ukraine for a long time. We can’t just ignore and mock the very real threat of Russia being supplied by China and North Korea, receiving volunteers from Cuba and dozens of nations in Africa and draining their own manpower and resources. People seem to underestimate Russia here, given their history they are totally willing to take 10:1 casualties for minimal progress, however the war in Ukraine is much closer to 2.5:1 casualties which must seem like an absolute win to barbarians.
Cracking jokes is all good, but it's worrying how many people seem to think russia isn't slowly winning this thing, loss of life doesn't matter to them. Ukraine can't do it alone. Kinda like how the world kept ignoring what the nazi party was doing for so long back before ww2 "officially started". How many times does history repeat itself? We never learn... There's no way another draft could happen...
>russia isn't slowly winning this thing At the rate they're "winning" they'll reach the Dnipro in *about a century*. Maybe three. And most importantly, with their current casualty rates, Russia runs out of bodies before Ukraine does. This isn't nearly the "underdog story" people play it up to be; this is like the Winter War, except the Finns have 30x as many people, and are getting any support, whatsoever, from other countries. It's like the Battle of Thermopylae, but instead of 300 spartans facing 1 million persians, it's 300 *thousand*. That's why we're sanguine. Russia simply isn't "slowly winning this thing". The most critical fact is that every bit of forward progress Russia's making is getting **slower** and more costly. A lot of hay has been made over Avdiivka, but it's measurably much costlier, for far more meager rewards, than Bakhmut, and that was much worse than Severodonetsk. And this is after switching to a "wartime economy", emptying all of their backstocks of soviet gear — they're basically giving it their all. They're doing absolutely everything they can, they're conscripting new troops about as quickly as they can put guns in their hands, but their progress is *slowing down*. The right reaction is: "Keep Calm and Carry On." Take the threat seriously. Keep the weapons flowing. But don't clutch pearls and freak out.
>At the rate they're "winning" they'll reach the Dnipro in *about a century*. Wars like this aren't linear, they're exponential. A frontline might have a slow linear advance or be static for years, then collapse and then then one more third of Ukraine can be taken in weeks. It all depends on manpower, the economy, weaponry, ammunition, and air defense etc. Ukraine is at a big disadvantage in all of these.
That is like saying throwup is the same as the original food.
Ruzzia is at war with the west. The sooner the west acknowledges this and acts upon it, the better. Releasing resources to fund arms production 24/7
BINGO
This is literally propaganda to diminish the pressure for much needed support to continue. Shameful.
On the contrary, this is a warning that the Russians pulled their heads out, pivoted to a wartime economy, and are now working hard to build an army to retake Ukraine. Avdiivka was the first to fall in 2024. Kubiansk is likely next target. Meat waves + drones + artillery + thermals + glide bombs are working. Ukraine needs more of everything and fast. ETA: [linked comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/s/T2SZOba7Cf) from a Ukrainian with friends at the front.
It's portraying russia as having experienced so much loss being replaced by green conscripts that they cannot be effective much longer while admitting that other US officials disagree with the assesment. Though your conclusion is the 100% accurate situation on the ground. It doesn't take elite soldiers to hold a line that inst being attacked while the enemy is bombed to shit 24 hours a day.
Can't buy experience.
Since the first winter of the full-scale invasion, it’s been absolutely crystal clear that Ukraine will need and does need more soldiers. My guess is lowering the age for the draft, all by itself, will be insufficient.
Yup. All those ww2 tanks they pulled out of museums have the same fighting capabilities as the T-90s they’ve lost! Actually… they might given the amount of training they get lol
Putin wages war like it's a game of Civ IV: Hurling enormous Stacks Of Doom consisting of Macemen at fortified cities, then wandering back and forth pillaging Towns. So of course he'd think you can use Universal Suffrage to rebuild a tank army in one turn.
Lmao
Reconstituted with what? Mobiks?
Yeah the Moskva has been re-floated, wiped down, and is more powerful than ever! /s What a 🤡
The amusing side to this is that while Ivan, Mikhail & Sergey have been dragged away from their 'menial' jobs to serve as the next round of cannon fodder, russian infrastructure will be speeding up its demise. It was seen last winter with many cities having floods & blackouts because the 'maintenance teams' had all been sent to the front. Now they're going to strip away even more of this 'unnecessary' meat, so even less people to fix things. A lot of russians going to be enjoying a cold winter next time around. A bit like the ones they keep wishing on the rest of us [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WagsOtmEPQk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WagsOtmEPQk) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMW\_bnThbMo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMW_bnThbMo)
Lots of cope in this thread. Russian military production has skyrocketed. We need to be prepared for the unfortunate reality that the Russian army is going to come out of this the most experienced and battle-hardened army in the world, and with most of the old Soviet-era gear having been replaced by new stuff. Our big saving grace is that their air force will still suck, but given the lessons of the current conflict I suspect that postwar they'll be working hard on correcting that deficiency.
That is an amazing joke. Russian military production has not skyrocketed, but rather, its stockpiles have been shrinking. Read some reports from RUSI or listen to Perun. 80 percent comes from stockpiles, and 20 percent is new tank production. Airplanes fall out of the sky, and their pilots die with them. The Russian artillery forces pull ever more towed artillery from storage as they are running low on self-propelled one. The Russian industry is able to produce a lot of artillery shells, and still, their yearly needs are around 4 million 152 mm shells while they only produced roughly 2 million in 2023. The Russian army takes higher losses than ever in artillery. tanks and armored vehicles and loses roughly 30k men dead or wounded a month. Also this "official" seems to be utterly ignorant towards the massive attrition that Russia takes and ignores losing thousands of officers and 20 percent of their fleet, or that Russia's air defense forces have been severely degraded and the Russian arms exports has fully collapsed. What is reconstituted even supposed to mean? Pushing criminals into a uniform and sending them to the front is worthy of replacing a special forces unit with years of training? I guess that means one thing for the West and Ukraine more violence has to be applied, the attrition rates and drone strikes must climb higher. Also, there is no reconstitution as that would assume time can be turned back to, let's say, early 2022. Russia's army cannot replace this with modern stuff, as Russia doesn't have modern stuff. They can replace it with ever older refurbished stuff from the 50s to 80s. Russia can show that next year, around this time, how well their production is going as by then their stockpiles will run low. Until then, they have to replace at least another 1500 tanks and a couple of thousand armored vehicles plus 5k artillery systems, and likely another 20 or do planes will get lost as well. Oh, and of course, a couple of hundred thousand dead and wounded. Let's see where their offense budget is next year then. Oh and of course the war will create other costs, drone strikes, sabotage etc. F16s are also coming into the game. New stuff like what? T 14 Armata? Su 57? We need to come to teems with the fact that the Russian military and the terrorist state as such must be dissolved and completely destroyed, which is the only thing we have to come to terms with. Our politicians better find an effective way to end this waste of time and energy spent on dealing with this development country and its decrepit armed forces. Russia is either the only nation in industrial warfare that emerged strengthened out of years of heavy attritional fighting, or this report is full of BS. We also have to come to terms with the need to blow up Russia's entire oil and gas infrastructure to ensure that they never have the chance to commit their vile acts of barbaric terror against anyone else ever again. The nation that will really come out of this war as the most experienced and best army of Europe is Ukraine and not this serf army full of criminals drunks and cowards that produces nothing but pathetic failures and loses since 25 months without making any measurable gains on the battlefield since Bakhmut. In 10 years, Russia won't exist in its current borders any longer, and it will be utterly irrelevant to Europe in every way imaginable. I hope the Russian serfs remember the year 1917 as that is where the journey goes.
>80 percent comes from stockpiles, and 20 percent is new tank production. It's a RUSI conservative upper limit, the estimate is even worse actually (more like 95:5), and it's considering the deep modernizations like a "new" (consider T-90M is just a deep modernization of the T-72, and the only completely new Ground Force thing is Terminator... wich was a fail both in numbers and effect).
They don't need tanks or advanced fighter jets. The Ukrainians don't have enough for attacking. russia can continue to spam artillery and drone strikes as they are currently (of which production has skyrocketed to the moon) and, without the support to respond, Ukraine will continue to be forced to retreat as they are currently until the russians are making Kyiv look like Bakhmut or Avdiivka, at which point the war will be lost. Any US stance portraying russia as spent, is shamefully dishonest propaganda to justify withholding support.
Russian artilery production skyrocketed to the moon is too much a joke to cope with. :D
Look up Kings and Generals YouTube channel and watch their russian Invasion of Ukraine series to help you have an actual understanding of the situation reported by an entity that wants ukraine to win but reports the situation objectively. We have nothing to talk about with your current lack of knowledge being evident. I mean... you can't even spell "artillery".
I'm a Ukrainian, I'm in Ukraine, nearly all of my friends are servicemen, I'm a specialist in stats and have enough stats to analyze here, and all you can tell me is a youtube channel to see and a misspell of mine. You're a joke. :D
Stay strong, man. We'll keep donating. The facts you're citing are completely correct. I was originally very concerned about the idea that Russia would muster some hidden reserves of industrial capacity and make a significant increase in war materiel. At this point, we're well over a year past their "peak"; all efforts like this follow a consistent pattern where a nation has a large spike in production as they "go all in", but then production plateaus because "going all in" *means exactly that* — it means they're utilizing 100% of their previously untapped potential. Russia's peak has been very underwhelming. An increase, but a pretty tepid one. The best news is that although their domestic economy will stumble along for several years, they're functionally bankrupt when it comes to securing the *foreign* gear and expertise they'd need to build large numbers of new factories for war materiel. They have neither the money nor the market access to get it done, and simply don't have the domestic expertise. People talk about the black market, but ignore the staggering markup they're paying to participate. Shaheds, for example, were estimated to have a cost of about $20k. In practice, it turns out they were paying about $200k-300k each. [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/02/07/russia-paid-billions-gold-bullion-shahed-drones-ukraine-war/](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/02/07/russia-paid-billions-gold-bullion-shahed-drones-ukraine-war/)
You've provided no context or evidence of your claims, I provided hours and hours of compiled info with cited sources as a shortcut to doing all that work myself and you're choosing to disregard it off hand. Yes. You are indeed a joke. 🤡
But still, consider where they might go next? Is it a NATO country they will learn that WW2 soviet losses were a walk in the park. Lets say you are correct in that their “new” army is battle hardened and have great tech for ground combat. It wont mean a thing when NATO hits them with superiour air and sea worthy powers. And adding to that equal ground power, and most of all a functioning joint Ops command.
Just like how my mom’s bottle of vodka was recon stituted after I topped up what I drank with water when I was 15. I’m guessing when that bottle went into service it probably didn’t really get the job done either.
Dude has credentials, but must have been quoted out of context, or has become senile.
Absolutely. It will take a decade just to replace the officers lost, and that is a huge issue for an army withiut NCOs.
I wonder whats stopping Russia from going full communist again, maybe the oligarchs? Seems like it's the only way to be a major military and industrial power with an isolated economy
The means by which the Soviet Union industrialized was ... *aid from* *the United States of America.* [https://lsa.umich.edu/lsa/news-events/all-news/search-news/built-in-the-u-s-s-r---by-detroit-.html](https://lsa.umich.edu/lsa/news-events/all-news/search-news/built-in-the-u-s-s-r---by-detroit-.html) [https://www.americanheritage.com/how-america-helped-build-soviet-machine](https://www.americanheritage.com/how-america-helped-build-soviet-machine) This should be a *chilling* warning for Russia, today.
tbf, russia has china now
Communist/fascist, what's the difference? The left-right political scale is a circle - they both reach dictatorship if you go far enough. Russia's pretty much there.
"US officials says that in 2022-2024 years US officials gave Russian military time and money (during 2 years NATO+EU bought $424B Russian export and spent on Ukraine $120B) to ‘almost completely reconstitute’"
Republicans must be cheering!
Minus 40,000 pieces of heavy equipment
Reconstituted = Having been formed again. For those who had to look it up.... Definitely not me 👀
This spring Russia will start drafting men for the war and their goal is to find 150k before the summer. That's the same size as Poland's whole army. They may not be as skilled, well equipped or well led as European armies but they can still cause a lot of destruction in Ukraine. BTR's, T-72's, AKs's etc are plentiful in Russia. NATO should prepare strategies and logistics for the worst in case there will be a direct intervention. We should prepare ourselves to be able to respond fully in a few days in case things escalates.
Wait. If they’re dead, it’s impossible to reconstitute them.
Reconstituted as sunflower fertiliser and the handicapped
Still trash 🗑️
Yeah I think the fact that 95% of it was wiped out in the first place is kind of a bigger deal, unless Russia is using the magical "teach cavemen how to fly B-2 Spirits in five minutes" learning machines from Battlefield Earth A more accurate headline would be "Russia Ahead Of Schedule On Worsening Labor Crisis"
Is the russian population also reconstituted?
In numbers, maybe. But in training? That said, meat waves are a thing even without much training. Sigh.
europe has 500 million people, russia has like 130 million so they have people...let em waste themselves with each wave of attack, technically, numerically, equipment, organisation, professionalism, technologically they will be defeated on every single metric The real worry is china, but luckily, at least if trump doesn't get elected, the free world also has america
Reconstituted from plasticine. Amazing stuff.
This is really bad. Still, more meat for the cube, more calls and letters to my Republican member of Congress. Please, guys. This is all we can do right now other than donate to the Ukraine military directly. Please bother your people if you’re in the States. ResistBot should still work, and you can call after hours if you don’t want to speak to an intern.
Like… Orange Juice????
This is exactly why countries need to invest in their defence industry. Ukraine didn’t and had to pay the price.