• Collatz_problem [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    Ukraine has around 800k troops overall, if you count Army, National Guard and various other units. 400k isn’t enough to break a stalemate even despite Russian artillery superiority. Ukraine also tries to train its recruits, even if the allocated time for it is steadily shrinking. Don’t forget that at its core the Ukrainian Army is still a mass mobilization army like the Red Army. The system for conscripting and training people is still there even if it was significantly distorted by NATO-sponsored reforms, and it is working pretty well.

    Volunteers are enough to replace losses and slowly grow the army, but they are not enough to amass a sufficient attack force for significant offensives, so Russia has to resort to limited attacks.

    If the Western support dries out, Ukraine will collapse regardless of what its leadership is doing now, everyone understands it, so they are running the war on the assumption that Ukraine would keep getting at least enough to support its current army. And I don’t think Ukrainian leadership are thinking about what happens next, they are now focusing on not-collapsing as long as possible, and that is why Paraguay scenario is becoming increasingly likely.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOP
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      11 months ago

      800k is not all combat personnel. General estimates of actual soldiers tend to be around 100-150k. And 400k number is for actual combat troops in Russia. Again, it can’t be a stalemate when Russia has artillery superiority, because Ukraine is losing more troops than Russia is on daily basis. The estimates for the losses are around ten to one in favor of Russia as this article from Mearsheimer explains. This is simply not a sustainable situation for Ukraine. The core of Ukrainian army is nothing like the Red army. Conscripts literally have weeks of training before being thrown into combat. There are plenty of western publications admitting this now.

      You can read these three recent articles to see how well NATO-sponsored reforms are actually working

      And the only western source that has any methodology tracking Russian casualties puts them at around 38k now. The volunteer recruits are very much growing the army as opposed to replacing losses. https://en.zona.media/article/2022/05/20/casualties_eng

      I agree that Ukrainian regime doesn’t really have any plan for what to do when western support runs out though. I think most likely scenario is that Russia will take significant territory in the east and create a land bridge to Transnistria. Western Ukraine will end up being a dysfunctional rump state that the west will either have to keep pouring money into or risk a refugee crisis from.

      • Collatz_problem [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        11 months ago

        400k is all of the Russian troops in Ukraine, as far as I know. Granted, there are also troops in Russia along the border, but I don’t think there are that many. Given recent enlargement plan of Russian Armed Forces to 2.2 million people with 1.3 million military personnel out of them, I think it is a reasonable estimate.

        10 to 1 losses are probably overblown, even with disastrous losses during Ukrainian offensive.

        It is a stalemate from tactical and operational point of view. Neither side currently can achieve decisive breakthrough, although attrition warfare is more advantageous for Russia.

        • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOP
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          11 months ago

          Total size of Russian military currently is around 1.9 million, which is the number that should be compared to the 800 thousand figure for Ukraine. A lot of the military is logistics support for the active troops, intelligence, and so on. They don’t need to be located on the ground in Ukraine.

          10 to 1 losses are probably overblown, even with disastrous losses during Ukrainian offensive.

          I don’t see why you’d say that given that Russia fires around 10x more artillery and most losses come from artillery fire.

          Again, the notion that this is a stalemate is simply not supported by the evidence. Even Stoltenberg is now saying that NATO should be prepared for bad news, which is as close to an admission as we’re going to get that Ukrainian army is collapsing.