I don't disagree with you that cats kill lots of animals but a million over its lifetime is way too high. If you assume a 20 year lifespan, that's 50k/yr or a bit under 140 per day, every single day. The wikipedia article cites one study that claims ~90 animals killed per year, which seems much more reasonable.
- former cat parent and future indoor only cat owner
“WE CAN’T DRAW big conclusions yet,” said the senior Ukrainian military officer. Although Ukrainian forces had broken through heavily defended Russian lines on July 26th in the southern Zaporizhia sector (see map) and had since made modest advances in two areas, he said, it was too early to claim more than modest success. “It can’t change the big picture for the moment,” he added.
His caution looks justified. The idea that at the first breach the Russian lines would crumble, setting off a wholesale retreat of the kind that happened last September when Ukrainian forces stormed through the Kharkiv region, was never realistic. “It is fifty-fifty,” the officer said. “Sometimes we have successes and sometimes we have had to take our units back.” Having had six or seven months to prepare their lines for the Ukrainian counter-offensive, the Russians have constructed formidable barriers.
Mick Ryan, a retired Australian army general, describes the Russian obstacle design as being “much more complex, and deadly, than anything experienced by any military in nearly 80 years”. Tens of kilometres deep, it is intended to break up or slow down even the most competent combined-arms teams and separate them from their logistical support. What the Ukrainians are trying to do on the southern front—to drive south to the occupied city of Melitopol and the port of Berdiansk, aiming to cut the Russian occupation forces in two and sever Russia’s land bridge with Crimea—is incredibly hard.
Ukrainian forces are facing a lethal combination: millions of mines, FPV drones that transmit live pictures back to their operators, Lancet loitering munitions, the jamming and disabling of Ukrainian drones, long-range rockets and attack helicopters, all knit together by a dense network of sensors and data links. Even when mines are cleared, aircraft or artillery quickly re-seed the fields with scatterable munitions.
Breaking through such well-prepared defences, says Mr Ryan, requires combined-arms operational skills of the highest order. That is something the Ukrainians have not yet demonstrated at scale, says Michael Kofman, a military analyst who visited the front line earlier in July. Moreover, the techniques and the technology for breaching defences have barely evolved in 30 years. Even the best-trained NATO armies enjoying air superiority might struggle to overcome such obstacles. “We need to break this combination,” says the Ukrainian military source.
On the other hand, the Russian manpower behind these lines has clearly been severely stretched by Ukraine’s strategy of attrition. Russian units, says the source, are “becoming smaller…companies that used to be 150 men are now only 20-30 and battalions of 500-600 are now 200 or 250.” If the breaches in the line that the Ukrainians have achieved can be carried farther, the Russians may have difficulty finding reinforcements.
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