this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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This is the third day in a row with insane losses for Russia, today it passes 1000 personnel!
I'm guessing it's still the Russian attempt at a push on the eastern front. Except this is even worse for the Russians, than when Wagner pushed against Bakhmut.
Gotta get that bonus at 5000 tanks!
It's insane.
It may be only 3 days away, it's insane they even had that many to lose, and then still can keep going?
But I guess there's a reason they've been so busy digging trenches.
The Soviet Union gave Russia a huge one-time military inheritance. Russia is quickly burning through it and doesn't have the industrial capacity to replace these levels of losses unless they build up for a few decades.
True, but those tanks still cost money to maintain, and many of those tanks were from the 70's and 80's. So I guess the majority are about 40 years old!
It's sad that Russia is wasting ressources like this, when they had the option to increase their wealth many times integrating with the west.
Now we will be enemies for decades, and Russia will remain economically handicapped and way poorer than they could have been for many decades.
The question is, how many thousand of men have they allocated.
Russia mobilized around 300,000 soldiers last year, I suppose drafting is added to that.
It's estimated they have 1,150,000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Armed_Forces
It's absolutely enormous, but fortunately Ukraine doesn't have to deal with all of them, as some are in other regions protecting Russian borders, and there are also forces in Moscow.
But even with that many active in the military, losses of this magnitude are not sustainable. And Russia has already burned through most of their elite forces.
AFAIK it's usually only half in active service that are actually soldiers, the other half serve as support, for instance logistics medics and engineers.
Are there counts of wounded? There has to be tens of thousands that weren't outright killed but will not be able to return to the front.
Casualty means wounded, it's a bit mixed some say the number from Ukraine is dead others that it is wounded, I think it's supposed to be dead, and if that's the case then there should be 3-5 times as many wounded.
There's no way that the number represents Russian dead. Firstly, there would be no way for Ukraine to verify that. If they drop a cluster bomb on 30 guys, they're going to report 30 casualties, regardless of whether those soldiers are wounded, killed, or can return to action at some point in the future. They don't have someone walking through the field after every firefight tallying up the dead.
Secondly, if you figure 3 wounded for every 1 killed (and use the Ukrainian figure for casualties), that would put Ukraine's estimates at about 1.2 million Russian soldiers wounded or killed. There's no way that's right.
I always interpreted these casualties as wounded included and estimate a large part of those have been recirculated into combat after becoming fit again. That also means that some are counted at least twice. If this really were accurate kill numbers, Russia would've dropped out of the war already. 200k body bags is unsustainable, even for Russia.
@Pringles @elbucho there are no body bags of eliminated russians. There is an overwhelming stink over the combat zones. Of rotting russian corpses.
Oh for sure. But there are a lot fewer than 300k corpses. I'm guessing it's sub 100k. Which is still an enormous clusterfuck of epic proportions, mind. As a reminder, the US had ~58,000 dead over the course of the entire war in Vietnam (~10 years total for active operations). Russia has had probably around twice that number killed in less than 2 years in Ukraine.
The standard rule of thumb that has been used in all casualty estimations is three wounded (taken out of combat), captured, or missing for every dead.
Keep in mind that there's a so-called tooth to trail ratio. Typically you'd have (much) less than 30% of military personnel that's actually meant to engage in combat.
So out of that 1.1M, there's going to be less than 400k people directly in combat situations. The rest is logistics. And 30% is a very large portion that would likely have less effective combat force. (Perhaps in line with what can be seen of russian army in Ukraine)