Ukrainian officials are concerned that Russian advances could gain significant momentum by the summer unless their allies can increase the supply of ammunition, according to a person familiar with their analysis.
I remember when the "counteroffensive" smacked against the Surovikin Line, and Russia MoD posted some numbers for casualties. A navalnite lib I know (from waaaay back) mocked it, smugly asserting that the ratio was greater than the one at Omdurman.
I doubt the Ukranians think the ratio is 7:1. But they've gotta convince western taxpayers it's, in Lindsey Graham's words- the "best money we've ever spent" to keep the MIC money flowing.
Not really. The relevant metric is “combat power”. If the attackers out number the defenders or if the attackers have more big guns and more ammo than the defenders then the casualty ratio can be much worse for the defenders.
Russia likely both outnumbered the Ukrainians in the sector and even the Ukrainian side described Russia as having a 5-10x artillery advantage, with Russia saying 10x.
Under those conditions the actually observed historical casualty exchange ratios in modern battles would suggest significantly worse casualties for the Ukrainians despite being the defenders. Possibly even much worse casualties with some battles from the US experience in WW2 and Korea said that with sufficient “combat power” they documented even a 5:1 advantage for the attackers.
Most battles see defenders and attackers taking roughly equal casualties in fact.
Part of the reason for this is that basically defense isn’t a static thing. Defending a place actually involves going on the attack as well. You don’t just sit there and wait for the enemy to slowly roll you up, you have to hit back to disrupt his plan. Defending in modern war actually involves a lot of attacking.
Also the attacking force has the initiative. They can choose where they want to attack, from where they want to attack, and when. The defender is forced into a more reactive role.
Given Russias large combat power advantage and given that Russia had the initiative and so was able to partially siege and take its time with the attack to maximize strategic advantage, and given in the end it became a disorganized rout, actually you’d expect Ukraines losses to be probably worse and possibly a lot worse.
No, being dug in in a battle where enemy have significant artillery advantage can cause 7 to 1 but the 7 is lost by defenders. Compare for example with US battles on the Pacific, where Japanese were heavily dug but still took many times the losses of attackers despite the attackers using infantry pretty actively and aggressively too.
Marx said eventually the contradictions of capitalism will cause it to collapse on itself. Later on in life he agreed with revolutionaries, of the Lenin ilk, that perhaps it won’t collapse on its own and direct intervention has to happen. He might have just been wrong about the timing and it might have taken an extra hundred years. We see that the liberal foreign policy has created a checkmate.
How can you claim Ukraine is this horrific tragedy when it’s significantly tamer than in Palestine where a genocide is going on and the government is telling people to relax that it’s not that bad? How can they rally the normie liberal to really care about Ukraine again without making Israel look bad? If anything the US might just throw Kyiv/Kiev under bus to save Tel-Aviv.
I think the way Marx should be understood is that there isn't a way capitalism can remain stable in the long term, contradictions will lead invariably to crises. Not that he can predict the future exactly how that unfolds. It's like looking at a house built on a cliff prone to mudslides and predicting that shit's gonna collapse eventually
It loosely reminds me of the Foundation Sci Fi series. In the novel, a Mathematician creates a new field he calls psychohistory, basically a mathematics of sociology, vaguely dialectic materialism. Using statistical laws of mass action, it can predict the future of large populations, and the first thing he sees is the inevitable collapse of empire.
These reports of losses in Ukraine, even some outlets admitting defeat, makes me wonder if this was the reason why that display in the library was set up.
Very likely, they're desperately trying to reignite support that the war enjoyed in the first few months. The problem with emotional manipulation of this sort is that most people can only stay emotionally invested in a particular topic for so long because it's exhausting. Eventually, people just grow numb and even if they still support your cause, they're no longer fervent about it. On top of that, it's becoming increasingly clear that the writing is on the wall, and people are now able to engage with the subject more rationally precisely because they're emotionally exhausted.
I honestly can’t tell if the student body is receptive to this anymore, I know I’m not. This definitely feels like a desperate attempt to keep support up but at the end of the day it doesn’t seem to be as effective anymore, at least to me. People don’t linger around the display and when Ukraine is brought up in my classes people don’t get super feral over it either, at worst they’re still annoying about it but not in the “send weapons and troops” way. I do wonder if Canada will be desperate enough to start drafting considering how leadership acts towards Zelensky and Ukraine in general, they just won’t let up.
"The losses of Russians around Avdiivka are colossal. My colleagues and I did the calculations and pulled up our archival records from the beginning of the year," said Dmitry Likhovy, Ukrainian military spokesman.
Ukrainian forces pulled out, they haven't counted bodies, this is a pretty wild number. I wonder what time frame they're using for their "calculations" and just how much of the fighting in areas around Avdiivka were being included in the numbers?
I heard quite the opposite, that at the start of the war it was 5 UKR per 1 RUS but now that ratio is more like 10:1, which would make perfect sense, considering the late-war Volksturm state of the UKR "military".