Seriously. I feel like there should be some rule that any link to a news story should be a link to a major trustworthy news organization. When I see these other domains I immediately assume fake news.
I don't get this performative helplessness people put on.
The NYT paywall doesn't function if you disable JavaScript in uBlock Origin or something similar. Tools like Archive.is have been around for years. Both of these techniques are regularly shared every time a NYT article comes up on HN or Fark.com or Reddit.
The 7k is cited as a conservative estimate, plus 14k-21k wounded. Add in some unknown counts for deserters and prisoners of war and let’s call it 30k troops lost. Astonishing.
Question for anyone who might know. When Russia says it sent in 150k troops, does that mean 150k people expecting to fight? Or are a substantial portion of them going to be non combatant support staff?
Probably somewhat more than half are for support. The support troops are also at risk, especially the ones driving trucks on the roads in the north. They are valuable (especially tanker trucks) soft targets on a very long supply line and are constrained to traveling on roads.
The Russian army is made up of Battalion Tactical Groups[1]. They have ~170 per Wikipedia, ~160 per [3]. They staged ~120 for the attack on Ukraine[2], all of which are now committed to battle (no reserves left). Per Wikipedia, a BTG is 600-800 combat troops (probably 800 when in full strength, probably closer to 700 in actual strength because 100% strength is impossible). This would imply ~80,000-90,000 combat troops.
Ukraine claims that they have rendered 31 BTGs "combat ineffective" or have been destroyed[4] - ~30% of the Russian force in Ukraine.
If I were a Russian general responsible for defending the Russian homeland, I would be sweating really hard over the BTG math... 160 - 120 = 40 BTG (actually less since several BTG are deployed to Syria, Georgia, etc.) to defend all of Russia. No wonder Xi Jinping is grinning like a shark in the pictures with Putin.
From what I understand it’s 150,000 troops which will include combat infantry and support personnel. You need a lot of support personnel to supply infantry effectively. We’re talking cooks, field hospital staff, people trained to be truck drivers, armorers, operations personnel, radio operators, you name it. It’s noteworthy that it appears (smartly) that the Ukrainians are ambushing and taking out supply convoys and units which are way less capable of fighting, but are nonetheless critical.
What I’ve seen is Russia lacking in the ability to conduct combined arms operations. Like say you want to take some piece of geography. You’d want to have close air support, artillery being directed toward enemy positions, etc. and it seems that this is just not happening.
When the United States invaded Iraq, according to Wikipedia it was with 177,000 with 45,000 from the United Kingdom [1].
And this was for a country that was all but inept against American forces, and a local population that certainly didn’t care for Saddam.
You could also probably draw up comparisons equipment-wise with the US and Russia now, except give the Iraqis missiles used in war in 2022, take away combined arms, and instead of having an at least somewhat welcoming population you have one that’s armed to the teeth and hates you and is getting fed intel on your every position.
Russia assumed they’d be able to decapitate the country before anyone knew what to do, but then that didn’t happen, and now they don’t have enough troops without conscripting Russians and sending them to Ukraine.
I don't think that they stuffed an additional 150k of support staff right next to the soldiers, so I guess they include them in the soldier count usually.
As far as I know, the distinction of who is "fighting" and who isn't, is dubious at best. Also, all the air force pilots and personnel aren't accounted for in that count because they are stationed elsewhere.
“Two American military officials said that many Russian generals are talking on unsecured phones and radios. In at least one instance, they said, the Ukrainians intercepted a general’s call, geolocated it, and attacked his location, killing him and his staff.” [1]
How can they do these careless mistakes, and at that level? Mind boggling!
Russia took out Ukraine’s cell towers, which broke their own encrypted comms. They then switched to radio but the Ukrainians started flooding the channels with music. So now they’re on unencrypted personal phones.
>> Russia took out Ukraine’s cell towers, which broke their own encrypted comms. They then switched to radio but the Ukrainians started flooding the channels with music. So now they’re on unencrypted personal phones.
> What's the best practices supposed to be for this kind of thing? Satellite phone?
The GP isn't internally consistent (how could they switch to "unencrypted personal phones" if they took out the cell towers), but my non-expert guess is the solution to their problem is probably better radios. It sounds like the Ukrainian jamming might be an amateur effort since it uses music, and I doubt a radio that uses frequency hopping would be very vulnerable to that.
I've also read reports that the Russians troops have been issued civilian radios from a Chinese manufacturer, so we can hope they were dumb enough to have their generals use similar equipment.
IIRC, I read somewhere that one of the weaknesses of the Russian BTG is that they have relied on local paramilitaries to provide security, and the commanders have to rely on cell phones to communicate with those groups.
”If the estimate of U.S. intelligence is correct, the Russian military has lost more troops in Iraq than it has lost in Afghanistan in 20 years,” the report said.”
Iraq? That’s some mighty fine proof reading.
And is this the same US intelligence that said Iraq has WMDs?
Here's the original sentence (NYT article) this was butchered from:
> The conservative side of the estimate, at more than 7,000 Russian troop deaths, is greater than the number of American troops killed over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
They managed to change which military, the current war and the comparison wars in one bad edit.
> And is this the same US intelligence that said Iraq has WMDs?
I heard an interesting explanation for that - intelligence agencies don't deal well with adversaries that lie to themselves. Allegedly they had captured communication of Saddam bragging to his inner circle that his WMDs are ready and will be used soon ... but he didn't actually have any. Oops.
Same with overestimating Russian ability to wage war - when you capture communication that says "we have 30 planes ready" it is hard to know that 10 of those are fictional and 10 are broken because people routinely lie to their bosses.
I belive the US intellegence also was correct about the WMDs but the politicians didn't like their answer and basically got them to come up with an answer they liked instead so they could go ahead with a planned invasion they'd been working on for decades.
Ironically seems like Russia might have just done the same thing.
edit this link factchecks intelligence Vs politicians:
> One problem is that few members of Congress actually read the classified 2002 NIE. Instead, they relied on the sanitized version distributed to the public, which was scrubbed of dissenting opinions. (It was later learned that the public white paper had been drafted long before the NIE had been requested by Congress, even though the white paper was publicly presented as a distillation of the NIE. So that should count as another manipulation of public opinion.)
The CIA didn't lie. And the Bush government's lie wasn't that they believed Iraq to have WMDs, the lie was in the exaggeration of their evidence.
Ironically, almost everyone in the region had WMDs, including the Isrealis. Even Saddam Hussein must have had some at some point, particularly when he used them against the Kurds. So it's not so easy and clear-cut.
> “If the estimate of U.S. intelligence is correct, the Russian military has lost more troops in Iraq than it has lost in Afghanistan in 20 years,” the report said.
"World War II losses of the Soviet Union from all related causes were about 27,000,000 both civilian and military...this includes 8,668,400 military deaths as calculated by..."
It is impossible to compare these situations. World War II was an entirely different kind of war and its horror had an even greater order of magnitude.
Hard to tell that to the people on the ground, of course.
