Russia vs Ukraine critical assessment

[Typhon]

Claiming someone is supporting Putin just because they are criticizing some behavior in Ukrainian's military is absurd.  Make no mistake about it, there are some pretty evil people on both sides of that fight.  I've heard that one of Ukraine units wear uniforms adorned with Nazi symbols. 

[Zzzptm]

Ukraine units wear uniforms adorned with Nazi symbols. 

This one in particular is one the Russian propagandists hit home on. In the 2014 action, there was an Azov Battalion of ad-hoc fighters, an independent militia, that formed to repel Russians. Azov Brigade made no secret of their neo-Nazi affiliations. However, that group has dissipated and far-right groups in Ukraine won less than 2% of seats in recent elections. No active duty Ukrainian units use a Nazi symbol as part of their insignia. That several individuals put fascist symbols like the black sun on their uniforms is an individual act. Russia's use of the "Z" symbol to promote Putin's line certainly falls into place as a state-approved and state-promoted fascist symbol.

As for Dore, he's been promoting Putin since before this, so there's more than just his take on Ukraine's military to reveal him as a willing repeater of Russian propaganda. As for others that may be out there, it's pretty easy to sift out the commentators that may be calling attention to legitimate equipment shortages, the logistical issues contributing to the shortages, and the impact on performance and morale and those who bring up problems specifically to undermine faith in/ support of Ukraine. Putin doesn't have to get the world to support his views, he just has to get people to question those opposed to his views.

Russian disinformation campaigns go back to Stalin's day, with a short break between Gorbachev and Putin, when Yeltsin was leading Russia. Russia's made frequent claims about US biological warfare research and weapon use, most effectively so during the Korean War. When the USSR was trying to extend influence in Africa, it started the lie that the USA had created AIDS to depopulate Africa. Again, it didn't have to make people love Russia, just distrust Russia's enemies.

Russia also likes to use the "everyone else is doing it, so it's OK if we do it" argument. Variants of course include the arguments of "there are sinners on both sides", "nobody's perfect", "you guys did it first (or worse)". True or not, none of them provide legitimate justifications for Russian actions. We don't have an international system where every nation that wants to gets to take turns invading other nations. Bad people on both sides does not justify offensive war. Nor does it justify bombing of schools, hospitals, refugee convoys, or nuclear power facilities.

Right now, it's the Russian army that is bombing civilian targets, raping civilians, looting civilians, and killing civilians. Right now, it is the Russian army that is engaged in an offensive war completely unnecessary for its national survival. Right now, it's Putin and his circle that are engaged in war crimes. And that means, right now, the most dangerous propaganda to trick one's self into believing is Russian propaganda - they have the most at stake, so they have the biggest lies to get others to swallow. Of course, it's a little at a time, but it all adds up.

[Zzzptm]

In other news, Russia's stock exchange re-opened, but only to trade Russian government bonds.

US Army estimates of Russian war dead: 3-10,000. Ukrainian estimate: ~14,000

We do see evidences of Russians trying to conceal/minimize their number of war dead, with corpse trucks heading into Belarus and then corpse trains going from Belarus to Russia. Belarus hospitals near the border are reportedly full of Russian wounded.

Although China has protested that condemning Russia's invasion solves nothing - and has yet to issue a condemnation of the invasion - it is also not shipping military aid to Russia.

[Charger]

I'm sure lots of neo nazis and other extremist groups in Ukraine are having a field day now. Pretty much a dream come true scenario for them...getting to kill people at will without any fear of repercussions.

Same for Russian side ofcourse.

That's another horrible side of war. The truly nutty people get to fully express themselves.



As far as the death toll estimates I'd be very very weary about the Ukrainian numbers...those are inflated to the max....and ofcourse equally weary about the Russian estimates as those would be cut down to minimum.

I doubt there's any factual data about those numbers available...But I'm sure we're talking thousands on each side.

Same goes for the estimated civilian casualties...those numbers are probably pretty inflated too but that really doesn't matter as every civilian victim in a war as pointless as this is totally futile.

[Zzzptm]

Some great points, Charger.

Wars are always opportunities for individuals to settle whatever scores they imagine with murders. Family feuds, village conflicts, old grudges, ethnic friction - all of these flare up under the shadow of wars.

Death tolls - always a matter of contention. Always. If you thought counting COVID was tricky, war casualties are never better than an educated, qualified guess. Pressures from involved parties try to move the estimates up or down, depending on what suits their position. Scholars, years from now, will make or break reputations on following this or that method of calculating casualties. There will be official records of the dead, injured, and missing that are close to the truth... unless the power in charge of those records prefers the truth not be known.

In this case, Russia is infamous for historically fudging its numbers. Their official death toll of The Great Patriotic War is considered too low. It's a massive number, for sure, but it's the lowest Stalin could go without straining credibility with a devastated people. But even today, the government wants to present a number that shows a high price paid in the sacrifice and not the even higher price paid for incompetence and miscalculations at the highest level. China follows a similar method in counting its casualties - pretty much a number that looks right to go with a story that they fought a hard fight, but the leaders didn't make mistakes that cost even more lives. (And yes, this also extends to how China counts COVID, which is why their numbers are pretty much good only for measuring their leadership's confidence in how they're handling the situation.)

Civilian costs are even harder to figure. War can increase the impact of natural risks like disease, accidents, and malnutrition. Most calculations have to fall back on "excess death" figures, and those miss out on non-lethal impacts like injury, property loss, and rape.

I'd consider US Army estimates to be reliable for historical estimation purposes. The range of 4-10,000 dead for a force estimated to be around 200,000 involved in the invasion translates to 2-5% of the estimated total. If that's true, and the casualties are predominantly among first-echelon troops that are engaged in the closest combat with Ukrainian forces, then one would expect a stalled offensive with the elite forces blunted like that... which is what we do see, so I can accept that range as likely close to the actual number.

[Typhon]

Right now, . . . Right now, . . .  Right now, . . .

Sure everyone wants to talk about what's happening now, who's dying now, who's the aggressor now.  But for the last 5 plus years that Ukraine has been fighting and bombing its Donbas area, nobody was talking about the number of people who were killed or who the aggressor was.  Government and media let us know strictly what they want us to know so it suits their needs.

[Vyn]

Sure everyone wants to talk about what's happening now, who's dying now, who's the aggressor now.  But for the last 5 plus years that Ukraine has been fighting and bombing its Donbas area, nobody was talking about the number of people who were killed or who the aggressor was.  Government and media let us know strictly what they want us to know so it suits their needs.

The aggressor was a pro-Russia group in Ukraine backed with arms and intelligence by Russia who seized Ukrainian government offices and thereby kicked things off.

[Zzzptm]

Right now, . . . Right now, . . .  Right now, . . .

Sure everyone wants to talk about what's happening now, who's dying now, who's the aggressor now.  But for the last 5 plus years that Ukraine has been fighting and bombing its Donbas area, nobody was talking about the number of people who were killed or who the aggressor was.  Government and media let us know strictly what they want us to know so it suits their needs.

You mean the area that Russia invaded and occupied in 2014? The Donbas is not a breakaway ethnic region. The Russians living there were a pretext for Putin's invasion, there wasn't a widespread separatist movement. In 1991, 83.9% of voters in Donetsk Oblast and 83.6% in Luhansk Oblast supported independence from the Soviet Union. Turnout was 76.7% in Donetsk Oblast and 80.7% in Luhansk Oblast. Since Putin took office, Russia has been working the "oppressed Russians" angle to its advantage. True, in 2010, the region had strong support for the pro-Russian president Yanukovych, but politically the region pressed for federalization of the Ukrainian unitary state, not secession and certainly not being joined to the Moscow regime. Their biggest beef with the unitary state was that authority had been shifted from Moscow to Kiev, not that they were inside a largely Ukrainian-speaking nation.

When the Donetsk and Luhansk pro-Russian groups took power in 2014, 72% of the people in the regions disapproved and only 12% wanted union with Russia; 38% wanted federalization with Ukraine and 41% wanted a unitary state with Ukraine with decentralized power, and the remainder were in favor of being independent of both Russia and Ukraine.

Russia did a full-on invasion in 2014 when it looked like Ukraine was close to attaining a military solution to the rump states created by Russian separatists with large degrees of Russian aid. A 2019 survey returned results that 71% of the population in the Donbas opposed the Russian occupation, with only 9% accepting it.

There was talk about the aggressor in Donbas: Russia. Russia is responsible for that conflict, for stoking the unrest that formed a cover for their intervention, and the woes that resulted.

You also made a mention of Ukrainian soldiers with neo-Nazi symbols but neglected to cite the ties of the leaders of the Donetsk and Luhansk breakaway regions to far-right fascist and neo-Nazi ideology. The leaders have close ties with the Russian Nationalist Uniont (RNU), a Russian neo-Nazi group that was founded in 1990. The RNU is itself tied with the Russian Orthodox Army, a religious ultranationalist group. In the Donetsk army, there are three battalions that incorporate neo-Nazi symbols into their official insignia. While the Ukrainians sport the symbols unofficially, their opponents use them officially. While I'm worried about unofficial use of neo-Nazi symbols, I'm dead-set against any outfit that makes official common cause with such elements.

The neo-Nazism in the Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine has led to a general exodus of Jews, Romani, and LGBT persons.

Again, the line that Ukraine is somehow the aggressor and oppressor in Eastern Ukraine is pure Russian propaganda, used to justify their invasion of the region. Pointing at a few far-right persons on the defenders' side is done to divert attention from the neo-Nazis that have flocked to the banners of the aggressors. Trying to use a historical "they did it too!" argument is to distract from the massive scale of the atrocities being committed by the Russian army and to suggest that there is some kind of reciprocity in play. There's nothing that happened in the past that even begins to compare to what is happening right now in terms of scope and scale.

[Zzzptm]

Latest news regarding Russian and Ukrainian claims of casualties:

According to pro-Kremlin news outlet Komsomolskaya Pravda, 9,861 Russian soldiers were killed and an additional 16,153 were wounded in Ukraine. Shortly after the publication of the article, the contents were changed to edit out the numbers. The Russian Ministry of Defense last reported the death toll at 498 on March 2, 2022. The number has not been updated since. According to Ukrainian Armed Forces, more than 14,000 Russian soldiers have died since the beginning of the war. The latest US assessments estimate the number to be between 3,000 and 10,000.

Russia reportedly continues to forcibly evacuate Ukrainians to Russia. On March 21, 2022, the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that Russian forces forcibly deported 2,389 children from Donetsk and Luhansk regions to Russia. The Russian Ministry of Defense reported on March 20, 2022, that 16,434 Ukrainians, including 2,389 children, were evacuated to Russia. Reports from the last couple of days claimed that Russia is forcibly evacuating people from Mariupol into Russia. The Russian government evacuates Ukrainians to Russia in an effort to create an illusion of humanitarian aid.

The KP numbers prior to the wipe dovetail with the high end of the US range, so I'll go with 10K based on that. While both Russia and Ukraine agree on the 2389 children number, the verb differs: evacuated vs forcibly deported. Given Russia's human rights record - mostly abusive - I'll go with "forcibly deported" here.

[Charger]

I think the proper term would probably be forcibly removed or evacuated...can't really be deported as they were taken TO Russia not kicked FROM Russia.

I seriously doubt almost 10000 Russians could have possibly died...it just doesn't seem right. I'm assuming the estimate might come from destroyed tanks and vehicles but the truth is the Russian soldiers have been abandoning a lot of gear and the Ukrainians have been destroying empty vehicles too. So the errors accumulate rather fast if they're counting full personel on each destroyed vehicle vs abandoned vehicles.

The fighting morale is reported to be very low in the Russian forces which has led to abandoned positions and vehicles...and the last thing Russia would ever want to admit is that their forces aren't willing to fight for their supreme leader.

It might be in the thousands but can't possibly be in the 10000 range.

Eventhough it is ofcourse always bit easier to defend than it is to attack that would still mean atleast double that for the Ukraine side based on the balance of power and the bombardments done by the Russians and I do not see such numbers anywhere.

So I'm willing to believe somewhere between 2000-5000 losses on both sides at the moment.

[Zzzptm]

Reports of Russians heading to the rear with frostbite - total deaths could be worked higher due to non-combat factors.

[Charger]

Yes it is a possibility but I find that hard to believe in this day and age as well...frost bites yes but dying from them...that happened back in the 1st and 2nd WW but nowadays....Possible I suppose but highly unlikely with modern medicine and modern transportation.

[Zzzptm]

Yes it is a possibility but I find that hard to believe in this day and age as well...frost bites yes but dying from them...that happened back in the 1st and 2nd WW but nowadays....Possible I suppose but highly unlikely with modern medicine and modern transportation.

Russian medicine and transport at the front is a big question mark right now. If the traffic jams aren't cleared, exposure can be a real issue.

[Typhon]

It is practically impossible to confirm what each side claims in this entire conflict.  It's tough enough to figure out what is true or false in my own country, let alone from half way around the world. 

[Zzzptm]

While the exact truth will escape any analyst or historian, there are a number of ways to arrive at decent estimates and approximations. It's possible to gather evidence and extrapolate from it.