this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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I never made the argument about gaining ground anywhere. What I said was that Russia's strategy is to grind down Ukrainian army through attrition. The game theory approach for analyzing this needs to account for the fact that Russia has a vastly larger population and massive industrial capacity that Russia inherited from USSR that the west is admitting is not able to match right now.
Also, every credible source such as BBC and Mediazona show that Russian casualties peaked before Ukrainian offensive started and have been falling since. On the other hand, Ukrainian casualties have been catastrophic even by western admissions.
Again, there is no point continuing this since clearly we aren't going to convince one another of anything. We will simply see who is right when the war ends.
I was taking about the article which seemed to be going off that.
Did you watch the vid?
Mearsheimer's article isn't talking about territory, and the article from the Spanish paper is talking about the fact that Ukrainian army is in an operational crisis right now. Did you actually read either one?
I watched part of it. Pretty much everything he says has been proven wrong since the video was made a year ago. The fact that you keep referring to the vid that made a bunch of wrong predictions is fascinating to me.
For example, Stoltenberg has publicly admitted now what the actual cause of the war was:
He also flat out lies claiming that nazis in Ukraine don't have support of political power when nazis are literally in Ukrainian government military. Top Ukrainian officials including Zaluzhny have Bandera portraits in their offices. Azov nazi battalion is officially part of the military in Ukraine. Western media can't even find soldiers to interview who aren't covered in nazi tattoos and paraphernalia. The fact that he ignores all of that shows that he is an intellectually fraudulent individual.
He predicted that Ukraine capturing Crimea was a plausible outcome. We now know that it was not.
The idea that Russia was motivated by Ukrainian resources doesn't really stand to scrutiny either. Russia has massive untapped resources in the east, and it would be far easier to develop those than to go to war with NATO.
The reasoning he gives for the first strike advantage is directly contradicted by the quote from Stolenberg above. It makes it clear that Russia was in fact concerned about NATO expansion, and decided to take preemptive action to halt it after NATO refused to agree to stop expansion.
Once you bother reading the article I linked, you'll see that the whole 3-1 attacker advantage he talks about is not applicable in practice because both sides end up going on attack and defence. And as we just saw with the Ukrainian offensive disaster, attacks for Ukraine are far more costly due to lack of artillery numbers and air power.
He frames it as a territorial conflict, which again, as Stoltenberg explains, it is not.
The whole Kiev offensive narrative has been debunked many times already. The idea that Russia was trying to take Kiev with 100k troops is nonsensical given that they dedicated 40k troops to Mariupol which is a city that's an order of magnitude smaller. What the 100k troops were actually doing was pinning Ukrainian forces around Kiev while Russia consolidated their position in the east.
He claimed that sanctions would cause problems for Russian economy. Yet, the exact opposite is the case. European economies are in a crisis while Russian economy is growing faster than anyone expected.
Pretty much every single argument he's made was shown to be false. If you're still basing your understanding of the war on a deeply flawed analysis from a year ago, I can see why you have such a skewed understanding of what's happening.
I was more talking about the manpower video since that was more applicable to the article.
The manpower situation favors Russia in every way. First of all, 80% of the casualties come from artillery fire and Russia fires around ten times more artillery than Ukraine. This means that Ukraine is taking far more casualties than Russia in this war. This is reflected in Ukraine now having expanded its conscription to older men and even women. This wouldn't be needed if Ukraine wasn't running out of manpower. On the other hand, Russia isn't doing conscription or mobilization right now, and they raised around 300k volunteers over the past year.
Russian casualties corroborated by publicly available data as of 20 October stand at 34,857. We can also see how the casualties are steadily dropping since March
On the other hand, even western media admits that Ukrainian casualties stand at over 100k now. Again, given that Russia has a much bigger population, it's pretty clear that this is a catastrophic situation for Ukraine. It's also important to keep in mind that the trained and motivated troops Ukraine loses cannot be easily replaced. You can't just throw somebody into training for a few weeks and expect them to be an effective fighting force that's going to take on a seasoned and experienced army.
made my day 🤡
"publicly" doesn´t mean reliable, especially if it comes from "official" sources on either side.
Even western media openly admits this, but you keep on coping there buddy. The only clown here is the one who thinks that a country with a population of over 140 million couldn't recruit 300k people into military service. You know the same way people in US "volunteer" into military service because they don't have any better options in life.
Certainly more reliable than some dufus on youtube pulling numbers out of his ass. Anybody who is not a certified clown understands that.
also, highly encourage you to watch this 25 min video explaining the state of things by one of the most preeminent experts on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62FCVJycwSA
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
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