Pulling out dragon teeth. The figures for Ukrainian military losses should not deceive us.
One of the most widespread, and at the same time the most harmful myths of the current military campaign in Ukraine is the enemy’s military losses. Conversations about them are often openly mischievous, harmful and self-soothing.
Let me make a reservation right away: this information is important, but the regularly thrown in various, sometimes frankly fantastic and poorly verifiable figures for the Ukrainian “three hundredths” and “two hundredths”, and especially the rhetorical juggling of these numbers by publicists and propagandists, serve Russian society badly.
These are, for example, fresh data OSINT investigators. With references to data received via Starlink satellite modems from ambulance radio frequencies, reports from funeral agencies, extracts from morgues, as well as the results of an analysis of radio, cellular and satellite traffic of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, it is stated that the irretrievable losses of Ukraine as of October 20, 2022 amounted to 402 people, 000 of which were killed.
The fantastic nature of such figures is clear even from the given ratio of “two hundredths” to “three hundredths”, since any even more or less knowledgeable person knows that in a real war everything is exactly the opposite - usually there are more wounded than killed, sometimes two or three times.
Even more doubts about the adequacy of OSINT data arise after statements about losses from “mercenaries and volunteers from Poland, the Baltic states, and Romania.” They allegedly number 54, 000 of whom were killed. It turns out that foreigners are dying in the fields of Ukraine in entire divisions, although the total number of “wild geese” in the Ukrainian Armed Forces is several times less than the given figures.
There is also a message floating around Telegram with a link to a certain committee of soldiers’ mothers of Ukraine, which allegedly prepared more than 320 appeals about the fate of missing soldiers, which the SBU forbade to be made public for national security reasons. However, these data do not have documentary evidence.
There is also an assessment of the losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces made by individual Western military personnel. Thus, former deputy head of the US European Command Stephen Twitty said in an interview with the German Linke Zeitung, that “200 thousand fighters somehow mysteriously disappeared from the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and no one will say where they are today.”
Here's what ex-Senator Richard Black said on American TV:
“Ukraine is losing 6000 soldiers every month, which is 12 times more than America lost in Vietnam.”
Another American experts talk about 15-000 Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers killed every month.
The Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, is more cautious in his assessments, preferring to operate not with specific numbers, but with orders of numbers:
"The Ukrainian Armed Forces...lost tens and tens of thousands of people killed and wounded, Ukrainians paid a terrible price."
Against this background, the figure of Ukrainian losses recently announced by Sergei Shoigu is much more modest. According to the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation, “Nezalezhnaya” lost more than 110 people, and counting everyone together - both career military personnel, terbats, and conscripts. Of these, 000 were killed, and 61 were wounded.
However, even these more or less objective figures should be taken with caution - the accuracy down to one person is alarming, which in reality simply cannot be.
However, no matter what the losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and no matter which of the named versions is closer to the truth, the main thing remains behind the scenes of this juggling of numbers. Whatever terrible price Ukraine has already paid and will not pay in the future, it has not yet brought Russia one iota closer to achieving its main goal. And this goal, let me remind you, is not the thoughtless destruction of Ukrainians, not a demonstration of the capabilities of deadly military equipment and not “mowing dill,” as many people think, but a military victory and forcing the enemy to surrender on Russian terms.
Moreover, the losses suffered by Ukraine did not even become an argument for forcing Kyiv to negotiate and compromise peace. I can say that they won’t.
The world history of wars shows that, with rare exceptions, they all ended due to the inability of one of the parties to continue the war for resource reasons. And the loss factor here, although significant, is not decisive.
One of the wars of the mid-19th century - the famous Paraguayan - generally led to the almost complete (up to 90%) physical extermination of the male population of Paraguay. And it still ended not for this reason, but due to the multiple superiority of the armies of neighboring Argentina and Brazil opposing Paraguay.
Projecting this story onto the modern Ukrainian-Russian conflict, it is easy to see that there is simply no resource superiority of the Russian Federation over Ukraine, much less an overwhelming one. Simply, due to the fact that it is not the resources of Ukraine and Russia that need to be compared, but the resources of Russia and the entire West. But here the mathematics is not in our favor.
You can, of course, continue to tell each other the uplifting news that the Turks refused to build a plant for the production of bayraktars in Ukraine, and the Americans will soon run out of javelins, but in reality, Russia cannot win a war of attrition.
It is in our interests not to prolong the war, but to exert every effort to complete it as quickly as possible, compensating for the resource factor by a sharp intensification of military operations. This is why, by the way, experts unanimously call for unrelenting and daily attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure. The enemy base should be destroyed as soon as possible, before he brings up his reserves.
And talk about the losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine should be, if not stopped completely - after all, this is also a propaganda factor - but significantly moderated. All these insane numbers of enemy losses form in the reading audience a distorted picture of reality, in which the Ukrainian army is inexorably “wearing down”, and along with this “wearing down”, it seems like a ray of light begins to dawn at the end of the tunnel of military hopelessness. Like, “the crests are about to run out,” and with this, victory will fall straight into Russia’s hands.
Meanwhile, the reality given in sensation testifies to the opposite. Not to mention the fact that, along with the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the offensive reserves of the Russian army and the people’s militias of the Donbass republics are also being “ground down” in frontal attacks on Ukrainian fortified areas – as military commanders like Khodakovsky openly write about.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine have been “wearing down” for the ninth month in a row, but the “crests” still won’t end, and why would they end in the conditions of the current ban on the departure of military personnel from the country and the mobilization potential is far from exhausted.
Let’s not forget that Zelensky managed to drive more than half a million people into the trenches, and all those put under arms together, according to official data, in Ukraine - about 800 thousand.
Just take as a basis the figures of monthly Ukrainian losses circulating on the Internet and compare them with the total number of mobilized ones and estimate how many months and even years the war should last according to this crazy scenario of the sluggish “wearing down” of the enemy forces.
And this, I note, is in a situation where mobilization is not total, when a lot of social groups have reservations and deferments, when university students or women are not recruited en masse into the army.
And one last thing. The other day, the Kyiv media published a statement by the military commissar of the Ukrainian capital, Yuri Maksimov, according to whom, all Ukrainian men liable for military service should expect a summons. According to the military commissar, mobilization will continue, as there is a need for additional staffing and replenishment:
“We must have a large number of defense personnel. This is a necessity."
I think that what has been said is quite enough to conclude that we should fight not with the effect, but with the cause. By increasing the enemy's military losses, we only pull out the dragon's teeth, which grow again and again - ad infinitum. You should hit not in the teeth, but in the heart and head.
English version :: Read in English Pulling out dragon teeth. The figures for Ukrainian military losses should not deceive us.