this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
106 points (93.4% liked)
Memes
4026 readers
70 users here now
Good memes, bad memes, unite towards a united front.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
That one took a few months to do a 180, CNN is publishing contradictory shit concurrently. It's a choose your own adventure style news reporting.
It’s a choose your own adventure style news reporting.
N I C E
I'm stealing that.
Shit, I thought they were just over a year apart not two days apart lol. Mayhem.
This isn't contradictory reporting though (in this case). Both statements could easily be true.
The conflict has been mostly immobile trench warfare for the last year, and casualties have been resultantly high across the board. Both countries have gone through multiple rounds of conscription.
Wagner alone self reported 60,000 combined deaths and casualties, and they're a small fraction of the total fighting, though probably the worst hit.
Ukraine's not any better off though, and Russia has a far greater capacity to replace their dead, so even with those numbers, Russia is probably eventually going to win.
It's a war of attrition where most casualties come from artillery and Russia enjoys a massive artillery advantage. The only western source that provides any methodology puts overall Russian casualties at 39k. If Russia actually lost 87% of troops than the army would be collapsing now the way Ukrainian army is. You can't just replace your trained and experienced troops with untrained people and continue to have an effective fighting force.
The only western source that provides any methodology puts overall Russian casualties at 39k.
I remember Ukraine propagandists on reddit putting Russian casualties in the 100ks, dont remember the exact number they gave but i think it was ~300k and I am fairly certain it was above 100k at least.
I've seen 100-300k thrown around a lot. I think 300k got more popular recently, presumably the number will keep getting inflated as things keep getting worse. The narrative is going to be sure Russia is now taking territory and it's not a stalemate, but they're taking massive casualties so it's money well spent.
All that said, around 120k wounded is a plausible number if we go with the standard 3:1 ratio of wounded vs dead. It's hard to know how many end up seriously wounded where they're not rotated back in though. Given that Ukraine is suffering higher casualties due to their artillery disadvantage though, this gives us a hint at just how catastrophic things must be for their army at this point. Ukraine had a lower population to start with, and a lot of people fled early on. So, if Ukraine lost a significant portion of the initial army, they don't really have the people to replace that effectively. And we're starting to see western media slowly admitting this problem. I saw one article where Ukrainians were quoted saying that even if they got more weapons, they wouldn't have the troops to use them at this point.
Our standard for confirmed deaths is stringent—it requires an official publication or social media post from a relative with corresponding details, accompanying photos or dates of burials from local messaging groups, or photos from cemeteries.
Your link does not estimate overall casualties, only deaths that can be expressly confirmed through Russian social media. It provides a good minimum, but it's important to consider that a large number of those conscripted are from extremely rural communities and remote ethnic minorities within Russia who do not have access to social media, and so wouldn't be represented in those statistics at all.
Your same source mentions that their investigations suggested 47000-50000 deaths as of May 2023, and a great deal of the more intense fighting has happened since then.
Assuming Russia has a better death-to-casualty ratio than the average WWII army thanks to modern medicine, we're looking and anywhere from 1:6 to 1:10, which would put casualties as of May at 300,000-500,000.
If Russia actually lost 87% of troops than the army would be collapsing now the way Ukrainian army is. You can't just replace your trained and experienced troops with untrained people and continue to have an effective fighting force.
Every Russian adult male has served in the armed forces as part of the compulsory year of national service, so their conscription pool can be assumed to have some experience already, and seeing a near total replacement of fighting men about two years into the conflict is consistent with historical armies in trench warfare. Britain and France in 1916 had exhausted essentially all of their pre-war trained soldiers by 20 months into the war and were relying on conscripts.
load more comments
(1 replies)
The headlines you posted only become contradictory when you have a 1-bit resolution for analyzing statements.
Extremely low resolution views of the world produce apparent contradictions in things that don’t contradict one another.
They always contradict.
Europe's foundations are trembling
good
Europeans should never have felt safe on top of this rickety fucking world system
I love this guy, you just know his favourite food is probably a cheese sandwich or something and he thinks pepper is too spicy.
I do believe Ukraine was made to accept the fact of defeat almost straight away. I don't expect Hannan to comprehend that.
it's so funny how many examples of these dueling headlines there are lol. it's like a new meme format
Well polarising peiple is a good way to get attention and interaction
The enemy is both strong and weak
Like a river
At this point, you could give Ukraine more money than ever existed and they would still claim defeat is imminent for Ukraine unless a few more Trillions are given for aid
Exactly, it's lack of weapons, ammunition, and manpower that's the real problem. That's the material reality of the war, and there's no way for the west to print their way out of it.
With billions of dollars, you can buy lots of weapons, ammunition, and manpower.
The issue is that dollars do not make weapons via alchemy, Europe spent shittons of money on of artillery shells to Ukraine, just to raise the price of existing shells without making any more new ones.
The raised price of new shells is already causing new ones to be made. It is now a more profitable endeavor.
Look at this free market bullshit. 
You think supply responding to price is bullshit?
There is no supply. If there's not enough capacity to produce the thing - the money's going to end up in those fat MIC pockets. End of story
Yes
Mmm yes, especially the manpower. How are you going to buy all that if there's no industrial output to physically create them and the stocks have run dry? By telegraphing fucking aliens across the galaxy?
Fucking libs... Ugh
The idea that libs have believed that Ukraine has been winning this whole time is still really strange to me
A lot of it is just good old chauvinism. They believe Russia to be an inferior culture, and therefore it's unimaginable to them that Russians could have a better functioning economic model and a better military. Russia was supposed to lose because it's backwards and decrepit, all they had to do was blow hard enough and it would fall apart.
A someone who was radicalized during the SMO in Ukraine and used to be on the other side, this is more or less that.
I remember r/Ukraine and other related subreddits treated the conflict like a show.
They focused on every failure of the Russian army (or rather rumors of failure, which they accepted as having happened without any evidences) and ignored all their successes, insisted that they were pathetic and corrupt and that their equipment was falling appart and were just soviet era stockpile, that they got tanks stollen by unarmed farmers (it became quite a meme in pro-Ukraine subs), and generally worked to make the Russian military look like a joke.
I remember in the beginning of the smo they were talking a lot about a Russian column heading for Kiev until one day they suddenly completely stopped talking about it and everyone interpreted the silence as the column having been destroyed or having run out of fuel on it's way or run out of food and water and having been abandoned, it was never clear what they thought happened to that column but everyone were persuaded that SOMETHING happened to it.
There were also these daily charts that supposedly indicated Russian losses, of course, the numbers were never backed by anything, and nothing about Ukrainian losses obviously. They also made a lot of noise when a Russian flagship got blown up and pretended it was a turning point of the conflict. They also kept saying that the Russians thought they would win if 3 days and that they would surely attack a NATO country next, some said the Baltic states, some said Moldova, this too was never really clear.
On the other hand they had a cult like faith in an incoming Ukrainian victory.
They swallowed the "ghost of Kiev" propaganda whole. They were quasi-worshiping the Javelin rocket launchers supplied to the Ukrainian army. There were also talks about a "Neptune" Ukrainian made anti-ship missile coming soon that we never saw. They couldn't go one day without quoting Zelensky, especially the "I need weapons, not a ride" one.
Every day the victory was "happening any time now" yet no proof of material progress were ever shown. Even the maps of the frontlines THEY posted could at most be interpreted as a stalemate if you are generous and ignore every relevant information about both armies. A lot even thought that Ukraine would retake Crimea somehow.
Everyone was completely gaslit and believed that any suspicion of neo-nazi activities in the government or miliary was just Russian propaganda. "there is just SOME neo-nazis and they are only in the AZOV battalion, and it's not like Ukraine has a choice, they need them" and "Russia too has neo-nazis" is how they would justify it when pressed.
To them it was a show, Ukraine was the benevolent hero protecting Europe and Russian was the pathetic evil mastermind trying to take over the world.
Don't forget all the stuff surrounding Chechnya. Claims that the Chechens were poor conscripts who were more likely to defect, or that story about the Chechen general whose plane was destroyed. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians were posting Islamophobic stuff like how they were greasing bullets in lard, and libs in those forums told them they shouldn't post about it because it was bad for optics.
They can propagandize all they want and scratch their heads at why reality never lines up with what they're taught. The contradictions will eventually break the West, one way or another.
My favorite part was them making fun of Russian tanks because the turret flew away when it blew up... like it already blew up my dude does it make any difference if it flies up or disappears?
That's a really good summary, and really shows the power of the media in shaping the narrative.
Most of Russian war industry is half-decayed remnants of Soviet industry, but it is still more efficient than Western MIC. It's impressive.
Turns out the Soviets knew what they were doing. Why could've guessed.
Remember when they believed that Russia attacked Nordstream? I got called a Russian bot for stating the obvious: why would Putin blow up his own source of income?
the first article title is self explanatory, according to us intelligence, or even better the lack of it
from what I read they just take what Ukraine tells them at face value
i think it is backwards, they tell ukraine was is supposed to he happening and they take it
my bad, the comment was supposed to be a pun on the low level education of us and etc...
Well you see they started with the human wave attacks, but by the time 87% percent of their troops were dead the rest had leveled up enough to take on the rest of Ukraine by themselves
"Who must go?"
The Russian ghost battalion still kicking ass i see
Schrödingers Russia, inside a box, if let uncovered, Russia is an evil Superpower which will destroy the west and simultaneously a weak backwards slum fueled by corruption
Western imperialists know that a dedicated weak backwards slum fuelled by corruption could bring down their house of cards version of a weak backwards slum fuelled by corruption.
The 87% is based on the number of troops prior to the war, you know before recruiting policies for the war were issued lol. Its just a stupid stat, i wonder why they dont bring up Ukraines numbers, i bet theyre > 100%.
Even if we take figures prior to the war, this doesn't really add up. BBC and Mediazona were able to cough up only 39k losses, and they're the only ones with any sort of a methodology https://en.zona.media/article/2022/05/20/casualties_eng
you may be right, still i was pointing out that it is a misleading statistic even if it were true.
view more: next ›