Russia has lost over 900,000 soldiers since February 2022
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High salary? I thought at this point most of their fighting force is getting paid in "Not going back to that gulag for those heinous things you did to people back home."
Most of them have enlisted out of their own free will. There are plenty of prisoners as well, but – at least to my understanding – they amount less than the people who enlisted for the money. Also, many of the enlisted prisoners are in it voluntarily because of money and amnesty. And many are simply forced to sign the "voluntary" contract by torturing them until they do.
What I've been surprised with is that as long as you are alive, you almost always do receive your salary as a Russian soldier. And your relatives will indeed receive their compensation – assuming there's evidence of you dying. There almost never is, and then you're marked as AWOL, not as dead. And if you're AWOL, your family receives no compensation. Ukraine has huge refrigerated warehouses full of Russian soldiers waiting to be sent home, because when they eventually reach the Russia, that country will either go bankrupt or has to say "we changed our mind. Although you sent your son to our war for money, we're not actually going to pay", which will seriously destabilise the Russia.
This is indeed also why the Russia's economy is such a very important factor here. There's no way they'll be able to fill the required 30 000 new soldiers per month with prisoners alone. They don't have that many hundred thousands of prisoners available for that. Send too many and you will have prison revolts.
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Just like prices ending in .99, a significant amount of useful idiots are going to look at the word “lost” and assume it means killed.
What I meant is:
Propaganda is writing 0.99 with the intention of tracking people into buying. Note here to purpose of writing 99 is used.
Casualties was born from the necessity of generals to know how many troops are available. There is no psychological trick in there. Just because civilians misinterpret it does not mean there is a propagandistic goal hidden somewhere.
See the difference?
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The Russia’s goal is the end of Ukrainians as a nation. And breaking NATO’s article 5.
I don't recall this being putin goal. Nations are invisible lines on earth
Countries are invisible lines on Earth. Nations are not.
Nations are groups of people that sometimes fill some lines, often leave some parts among the lines unfilled, sometimes cross them.
And nations can exist without any lines on Earth at all. If Ukraine was to somehow get completely occupied by the Russia, Ukrainians as a nation would continue existing. Until the Russia manages to actively purge them.
The Russia's official news agency that will not publish anything that Putin disagrees with, has written the clearest explanation about the genocidal goal. The important part is that in one part it said that all nazis in Ukraine must be exterminated, and in another part it defines Ukrainian nazis as "everybody who supports the regime of Kyiv". And then there's Putin's speech on February 21st, 2022, which was supposed to take place just hours before the missiles start flying, although the attack then had to be postponed by two days. And then there are the three articles published by RIA Novosti precisely at 08:00 Moscow time on February 26th, 2022. And Putin's speech from summer 2021.
I wish I could find the version of the "What Russia should do with Ukraine" article's text that is annotated in English language. I spent some hours looking for it a few days ago, to no avail. It's somewhere out there in the Internet – I can remember having read it.
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Well, now you are oversimplifying world politics to one man's deeds. As if Nato expansionism did not play any role in the creation of this conflict. Read a little history before 2023 and you'll see acquiring Ukraine is been a race between Nato and Russia since at least 2014.
Russia had already invaded in 2014, and successfully got a puppet as president in 2010.
NATO doesn't expand by conquest, countries choose freely to join and other countries (especially hostile ones) don't get to dictate the alliances of their neighbours.
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Most of them have enlisted out of their own free will. There are plenty of prisoners as well, but – at least to my understanding – they amount less than the people who enlisted for the money. Also, many of the enlisted prisoners are in it voluntarily because of money and amnesty. And many are simply forced to sign the "voluntary" contract by torturing them until they do.
What I've been surprised with is that as long as you are alive, you almost always do receive your salary as a Russian soldier. And your relatives will indeed receive their compensation – assuming there's evidence of you dying. There almost never is, and then you're marked as AWOL, not as dead. And if you're AWOL, your family receives no compensation. Ukraine has huge refrigerated warehouses full of Russian soldiers waiting to be sent home, because when they eventually reach the Russia, that country will either go bankrupt or has to say "we changed our mind. Although you sent your son to our war for money, we're not actually going to pay", which will seriously destabilise the Russia.
This is indeed also why the Russia's economy is such a very important factor here. There's no way they'll be able to fill the required 30 000 new soldiers per month with prisoners alone. They don't have that many hundred thousands of prisoners available for that. Send too many and you will have prison revolts.
Source on the refrigerated warehouse? I'm super curious about that.
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The richest people don't care about the war, if groceries go up 25% that barely makes a dent. You won't see the people who are actually suffering from this being tourists.
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Classism is present in Russia too.
I watched a couple of YouTube videos from a normal guy who lives in Russia talking about what it was actually like to live in Russia around the time that Tucker Carlson did that weird state visit and he peeled back a layer of intentional propaganda that the American journalist was spreading - that Russians are living in some kind of luxury paradise. Sure, everything costs less over there, but people are also paid a lot less too. If you're working class, it's hard to afford enough food to put on the table sometimes. The rich, however, are not hurting for anything and a lot of big brand labels that said they would exit Russia just rebranded themselves or quietly re-entered the market after all the commotion about the war died down.
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But they keep taking land, don't they?
So far all the land they gained was in that territory that they were destabilizing since 2014. They spend thousands of people and all the money to level small towns to the ground, after which Ukranian forces fall back from the rubble, and Russians technically take it. Sometimes they do that several times, because holding a bunch of smoldering derbies is actually hard.
On paper you can call it taking the land. -
Source on the refrigerated warehouse? I'm super curious about that.
Hm, cannot find that article anywhere. I found two articles that talk about refrigerated trains bringing bodies there, but they don't tell about the actual morgue at all. They are here:
https://www.bbc.com/ukrainian/features-61567949
All articles I can find about the larger warehouse near Kyiv are from 2022. There are articles telling about swaps of Russian soldiers who have had influential relatives. In 2022 there has been a swap of 50 such soldiers – and the same amount of Ukrainians in the other direction.
Starting from summer 2024, there are suddenly several articles telling about swaps of hundreds of bodies at once, so at that point something has changed. Of course, with the Russia losing 1300 soldiers per day, and therefore about 400 of their soldiers dying per day, swaps of 200 to 600 dead bodies a few times per month are not that very many, really. Even if most of the Russian soldiers die in areas unreachable by Ukrainians, that still seems like a very low number. There is some amount of pressure inside the Russia for getting some of the bodies away from Ukraine, but none of the halfways recent articles tell anything about how many Russian bodies are currently in storage somewhere, waiting for repatriation to the Russia. Based on the amounts of a few hundred at a time, I'd say there must be many that the Russia does not accept. But no information on where in Ukraine they are physically located at the moment. Kind of understandable, because the Russian military could bomb the morgue to get rid of evidence, if they found out where it is.
It is weird that apparently no articles have been written on this subject in the last two years or so!
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There has been no indication that any new NK soldiers have arrived after the initial 12000. That's ten day's worth losses or one month worth Russian army size decrease if you take the Russia's recruitment capacity into account.
When did the NK soldiers come? Four months ago? If so, they have recruited 100 000 to 140 000 Russian soldiers during that time, and the 13 000 NK soldiers are about 10 % atop that number. As they are muchore skilled than Russian soldiers, you'd assume their number is less than the slightly under 10 % you'd otherwise assume.
So, let's guess about 5 % of the current number are NK losses. Possibly less.
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"as a black man" vibes
A residential house in my home town was hit with a rocket today. 88 injured, of them 14 children - a school was nearby. How's your vibing mate?
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Geez man, that really sucks. I'm sorry that's happening to you and your people.
Thank you. News are bad today
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A residential house in my home town was hit with a rocket today. 88 injured, of them 14 children - a school was nearby. How's your vibing mate?
Then you woke up
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Russia had already invaded in 2014, and successfully got a puppet as president in 2010.
NATO doesn't expand by conquest, countries choose freely to join and other countries (especially hostile ones) don't get to dictate the alliances of their neighbours.
Yeah, Nato is such a saint entity who 'freely' bombs Yugoslavia and Libya.
Nato's whole purpose is to deter Russia and will not stop until whole east Europe is pointing missiles at it. Do you believe that's a 'random freely admittance' policy?
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Yeah, Nato is such a saint entity who 'freely' bombs Yugoslavia and Libya.
Nato's whole purpose is to deter Russia and will not stop until whole east Europe is pointing missiles at it. Do you believe that's a 'random freely admittance' policy?
Yes the whole point of a DEFENSIVE alliance is to defend against a known aggressor, thank you for clarifying
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Yes the whole point of a DEFENSIVE alliance is to defend against a known aggressor, thank you for clarifying
So you bought the russian bad, american good story? So naive. Look how that ends for Ukraine now.
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does ukraine actually have resources? russia is gigantic what could they possibly need so badly
