Russia and Ukraine

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Russia has lost more combat troops in 32 days in Ukraine than the US has lost in 46 years of sending troops overseas to 'protect American interests'. And not just a little more - 20% more.

How is this war anything but an unmitigated disaster for Russia?

Boru

Depends on who you listen to, the people who presented, or Rebroadcasted, in-game footage from Xbox to show how one Ukrainian jet shot down several dozen Russian ones?

Russians themselves say they suffered roughly 2% casualty,   Which means they suffered much fewer casualty per square mile taken than the US did in either iraq wars.   

Keep in mind the territory they have taken and the Ukrainians have acknowledged they’ve taken is larger than all of Great Britain, as large as New Zealand, and larger than the territory the Wehrmacht took from France before the French surrender, and they did it with 1/15 the troops the Germans used to take that territory, and 1/4 the troops the Germans used to just occupy that territory. 

If we use the casualty rate on dead/wounded per 1000 troops engaged in each day of intense combat as a measure, and use historic campaigns involving sustained high intensity combat against entrenched defenders, such as the Normandy campaign as benchmark,  we might expect the Russians have suffered 2-3 times casualties then they admitted, but 1/5 the casualties Ukrainians or the west claimed the Russians suffered.

I don’t take either the Russian or Ukrainian claims as valid. The Russia-reported numbers are obviously too low, the Ukraine-reported numbers are clearly inflated. The likely number - from third party sources - of Russian combat deaths is around 10k, which is more than US combat deaths since Vietnam.

Not sure where you’re getting your geography figures. Russian forces currently occupy about 7% of Ukraine, an area vastly smaller than either the UK or NZ (for them to have taken an area ‘as large as New Zealand’, they’d have to occupy ~50% of the country).

Boru