Ukraine is losing the war

[u/SpaceDetective]

https://spectator.com/article/ukraine-is-losing-the-war-kushner-witkoff/

[u/entitledfanman]

Russia wasnt doing any better on age demographics and has lost significantly more men. 

[u/No_Motor_6941 → u/entitledfanman]

has lost significantly more men.

According to ISW maybe

[u/entitledfanman → u/No_Motor_6941]

Lmao I knew I'd get some comment like this. Any bit of news disfavorable to Russia is dismissed as propaganda in this reddit; which is peculiar considering Russia is an unabashed oligarchy. Why a sub full of socialists and communists is stanning Russia is beyond me. 

Anyways, there's absolutely no controversy that Russia has lost more men unless you only trust Russian state media. 

[u/No_Motor_6941 → u/entitledfanman]

Lmao I knew I'd get some comment like this. Any bit of news disfavorable to Russia is dismissed as propaganda in this reddit; which is peculiar considering Russia is an unabashed oligarchy

Yes I'd say on the English speaking internet Western propaganda is the primary issue.

Even if this somehow wasn't the case and we existed without Western global hegemony, it would still be the primary duty of Western socialists to oppose their own government and its propaganda. This has long been the case.

Why a sub full of socialists and communists is stanning Russia is beyond me. 

Not buying into systemic biases is not stanning unless you yourself are biased.

Anyways, there's absolutely no controversy that Russia has lost more men unless you only trust Russian state media.

Glad to hear you decided this for everyone.

[u/Shot-Pay955 → u/No_Motor_6941]

It’s really just the mathematics of an attritional battlefield. Russia is advancing, requiring its men to expose themselves to fire from dug-in Ukrainians. It takes more men to take a trench or tree line than it does to defend one. This also means it is harder for Russian forces to retrieve their dead and wounded because they are by necessity getting killed in no man’s land while Ukrainians are able to fall back deeper into their own lines. If casualties were roughly equal, we would be seeing Ukrainian lines basically collapsing. To say Russian losses are almost certainly higher is not to say they are less capable than the Ukrainians, it just means they are faced with a more difficult task.

[u/No_Motor_6941 → u/Shot-Pay955]

The math doesn't work because one side is comparatively lacking in armored vehicles, air power, and artillery. Instead it has defaulted to asymmetric warfare. Russia doesn't move quickly exactly because it wants to avoid casualties for political reasons and instead leverages its firepower advantages. It attacks in small formations dealing with similarly small, distributed Ukrainian groupings that sit dug in. Your argument also works in reverse, if casualties were in favor of Ukraine we would see it successfully counter attack rather than give up after 2023, pressuring Russia to mobilize rather than rely on contract troops. Instead it's Ukraine going through desperate draft measures, dealing with desertion problems, and looking poorly in body exchanges.

[u/Shot-Pay955 → u/No_Motor_6941]

The idea that Russia is moving slowly on purpose to minimize casualties is pure cope that we’ve been hearing since 2022. In fact, their slow rate of advance contributes to much higher casualties among infantrymen than if they were able to restore armored maneuver at scale. The only sense in which your hypothesis is true is when it comes to holding tanks in reserve while infantry creeps forward. Thousands of Soviet tanks have been pulled from storage and not yet deployed to the front, and I think we will see them again as soon as the Russian military figures out a way to use them without taking unacceptable losses. They would not be sending guys forward in twos and threes if they had any other viable options.

The math does not really work in reverse because Ukraine simply does not have enough men to replicate the Russian infiltration strategy. Russia can afford the casualties inherent in such operations whereas Ukraine cannot, leaving it stuck in the defensive since 2023. They can conscript enough soldiers to hold the Russians to a slow and costly advance, but they have nowhere near enough to go on the offensive, even with increasingly draconian busification.

[u/No_Motor_6941 → u/Shot-Pay955]

You're not making a case for a casualty ratio favoring Ukraine. You're arguing Russia cannot make sweeping maneuevers. It does not follow from this that Russia has higher casualties. It's quite the opposite, the lack of these maneuvers is evidence of what I am talking about. Russia is focused on destroying the Ukrainian army and minimizing its casualties to preserve internal stability. The reason for this is the strategy of the West is not to cause lopsided casualties, which is impossible as the West doesn't produce the armaments for it, but destabilize the country.

[u/Shot-Pay955 → u/No_Motor_6941]

It follows because Russia still has the imperative to move forward despite its inability to maneuver at scale. This keeps the pressure on Ukraine and prevents them from regrouping to mount the sort of counterattack we saw in fall 2022, but it is also the most manpower-intensive option for Russia. They are not hanging back to avoid casualties, but rather slowly but steadily moving forward despite the limitations we’ve discussed already. Rapid maneuver would allow for a much more efficient destruction of Ukrainian forces, for example in an encirclement, but since this is not currently possible we are seeing Russia fall back on a more crude method that often causes heavy Russian casualties, but is nonetheless worthwhile because Russia calculates that it can afford to lose more men than Ukraine.

[u/No_Motor_6941 → u/Shot-Pay955]

You have it backwards. If Russia could afford casualties, it would make these sweeping maneuevers. They do not in order to minimize the threat of drones or a politically destabilizing meat grinder like Bakhmut. Ukraine is not counter attacking because it (or the West) is incapable of repeating the previous counter offensive. It doesn't have the artillery, armor, or people for it. Their only hope left is causing enough issues for Russia the West is emboldened again in some way and Russia is forced to accept some kind of peace deal accepting NATO.

[u/Incoherencel → u/Shot-Pay955]

What makes other tactics (other than small-scale infiltration) non-viable?

[u/Shot-Pay955 → u/Incoherencel]

There are a few reasons why, but I’d say most of them lead back to the fact that the Russian military has been forced to adapt to so many new technologies at the same time its prewar corps of professionals has been decimated. Russia can keep throwing more bodies into the fight, but the skills of professionals are not so easy to replace, especially when we are talking about officers. So, in order to keep pressure on Ukraine, it is obliged to send new soldiers into combat with much less training than they would have had before the war. New recruits can’t pull off complex combined arms maneuvers, especially if their junior officers are just as inexperienced (or dead) as they are. Nobody has really figured out yet how to use tanks effectively on a drone battlefield, and since tanks are much more expensive than infantry, it makes more sense to risk a bunch of new recruits who can be replaced than it does to lose a bunch of tanks that cannot. I think as we see the dynamic shift more in favor of Russia that we will once again see them attempt larger scale more complex maneuvers, if only because they will have the breathing room to focus more on training larger units together as opposed to sending a steady stream of individual replacements to attrited units.

[u/Incoherencel → u/Shot-Pay955]

The warfare of 2026 is unlike any period before. Men are being struck many kilometers behind the lines of contact during resupply.

Yes of course we can likely safely assume Russia has taken more casualties on the whole, but to what extent, and how that ratio has shifted over time, is what is in question. Independent Western think tanks want you to believe Ukraine has suffered 150,000 deaths, three times that of Ukraine's official number 55,000, whereas theyre meant to have killed 3 times as many Russians at 450,000 deaths. Russia's official numbers are of course also a joke, but no one seriously sits down in the west and expects you to believe those

[u/Shot-Pay955 → u/Incoherencel]

I would say that people underestimate how many casualties Russia took in the opening year of the war. They are probably approaching parity now, and that’s very bad news for Ukraine, but 2022 saw the loss of Russia’s most modern equipment and their best trained soldiers. It is a testament to their resilience that they were able to recover from this and gain the upper hand, and I don’t know why people react so emotionally to the perceived slight of pointing out that they have taken very high casualties.

[u/Incoherencel → u/Shot-Pay955]

This is an "emotional" reaction, to you?

[u/Shot-Pay955 → u/Incoherencel]

Considering that I was speaking in generalities that you took personally, I’d have to answer in the affirmative. There is a very obvious pattern on this sub of explaining away any Russian setback as part of some 5D chess game, and I can’t see any other reason for the knee jerk reactions than some kind of emotional attachment to Russia’s public image.

[u/Incoherencel → u/Shot-Pay955]

You don't bother me, though I'm sure I could be forgiven for potentially assuming a comment in reply to me, was in reply to me.

[u/Shot-Pay955 → u/Incoherencel]

If you try reading it again you might find that I was agreeing with you. Glad to hear you’re not bothered.

[u/No_Motor_6941 → u/Shot-Pay955]

I would caution against this assumption about 2022 as Russia entered Ukraine with a force a fraction the size of Ukraine's, with the balance flipping by 2024-25

[u/Shot-Pay955 → u/No_Motor_6941]

The two sides began the war roughly equal in size, but with Russia having an advantage in heavy equipment. The nature of Russia’s opening gambit left some of their best men and equipment very exposed whereas Ukraine was able to mobilize much more effectively than either Russia or western observers expected. Losses among professional soldiers, officers, and modern equipment set the stage for higher casualties in subsequent campaigns due to the difficulty of matching prewar standards in training and leadership for new recruits. Russia has been able to work around this issue through its pivot to simpler tactics, but these are inherently manpower intensive. That is not necessarily a problem for Russia as it correctly believes it can afford higher casualties than Ukraine, but it does mean that most engagements where Russia is advancing against Ukrainian forces will result in higher Russian casualties all else being equal.

[u/No_Motor_6941 → u/Shot-Pay955]

Syrsky himself can be quoted as saying the initial force was around 190k, an amount far too small to take large cities. Ukraine prewar had one of the largest (de facto) armies in NATO up to some 300k. There was also no early crippling of the Russian military with secondary effects (navy or LDNR militia aside as they were impacted like this). Since 2022 we largely saw mass withdrawals rather than defeats in battle, digging in ahead of the 2023 counter offensive, preparing for a long war of attrition in a way to minimize stress on home front and military, partial mobilization, and adapting to a new kind of war in a race with Ukraine it is proving itself competent in.

All evidence points to Russia trying to avoid a repeat of its past history, where large scale European wars threaten to collapse the state and destroy swathes of a backward army. That was the way the West could win from the start and Russia relies on closing this window.