He hasn’t been watching the footage of the Chinese reporter embedded with the Russian troops at Mariupol, the first thing in this video is what he calls an ambulance, an MTLB with a red cross clearly painted on it.
That was my thought as well. There is considerable wiggle room in how one might count those “wounded” in a war, so if the Russians are excluding men who got a few cuts from flying glass, then the killed / wounded ration will be a lot higher.
Yeah, I wouldn’t trust anything he says further than I could throw him; he’s made the news more for the fact that Chinese media is parroting the Putin party line, ‘special military operation’ and all. His commentary certainly isn’t reliable, but there’s a Russian vehicle with a red cross painted on it in the first seconds of the clip of him that’s been making the rounds.
On a strangely related note, it turns out that Lu Yuguang, the Chinese reporter, was injured with cuts on his hand while diving for shelter during shelling. I wonder how that would qualify as far as being wounded goes…
Powerful. And coming from someone with experience, who has seen Russian equipment first hand.
We’ve heard upthread about frostbite in Russian soldiers who have been in freezing conditions with poor protective equipment for weeks. I wonder how many of these are not yet counted in the casualty list, but will be soon when toes and feet begin to get infected. With good medical care, there will be a lot of amputations. Without good medical care there will be a lot of additional deaths from gangrene.
I wonder too, how 30 years of no iron curtain has affected the mentality of today’s Russian troops? Do they feel more willing to express their views than those who grew up in the days when the Party had political operatives in every grouping -neighbourhoods, workplaces, social groups - to report back on who was expressing contrary views. Plus, today’s soldier has not typically been heavily shielded from Western influence.
I found this to be an informative video. Lots of us have been drawing conclusions from the videos we have seen. This guy has some good points about that. He is an American tank expert who tries his best to be neutral.
For full disclosure he works for Wargaming dot net. It’s a company started in Belarus with offices in Russia and Ukraine. They have been going through an internal crisis about the war. Link to that story after the video.
I’m not sure where this figure comes from or what it purports to measure. Russia has 900,000 active duty personnel and two million reservists and I am very certain they do not have two million of those people in Ukraine.