Here’s former Lieutenant General Mark Hertling on Anderson Cooper 360 from a couple of days ago.
He says that the ratio of wounded to dead may be lower than one would normally expect because the Russians are unable to get their wounded to field hospitals in time to keep them from dying.
Thanks for the actual quote. I recall he also had something negative to say about Italian men as well. I think the point is, when you’re fighting a group of people you come to hate them. And not in an abstract way like hating their leader or certain party members. Putin isn’t the one in Ukraine lobbing artillery at their cities, sending Ukrainian civilians to Russia, or shooting at them. The Russian people are the ones with the boots on the ground carrying out Putin’s orders.
I wonder if that’s true in this case. My impression was that the Ukrainians were focusing on cutting off the supply lines for the front-line units. So the percentage might be skewed more than normal towards those people being killed and injured.
If this figure is accurate, this would mean that in less than a month of fighting, Russia has lost as many soldiers as it did in the 1979-89 Afghanistan war in the first SIX YEARS of the conflict.
At this rate, Russia will lose as many soldiers as it did in Afghanistan (15,000 in 10 years) in a week’s time, about 5 weeks after they began to invade Ukraine.
That would be a first! In the rear with the gear is supposed to be the “safer” assignment. I bet the cooks and bottle washers are just all put out.
Using the USA as a counter-example, I recall reading somewhere that the U.S. is the best army in the world when it comes to preventing wounded soldiers from dying. The treatment wounded get is gold standard. So this ended up resulting in an unusually high ratio of wounded to killed, because the military was so good at staving off death.
9,861 Russian soldiers died in Ukraine and 16,153 were injured
So the Russians are saying 26,000 casualties in total. And we can add to that a couple of thousand taken prisoner.
Ukraine is saying about 15,000 casualties, but they wouldn’t have much information about those injured.
~10,000 in 25 days. That’s more like 400/day.
Still pretty bad. A draft isn’t necessary because Russia has a huge reservist reservoir that are liable for service. But they’re mostly conscripts that did their 1 year of service, with only a handful getting refresher training. Anybody more than a few years out are going to be a real problem getting up to speed. And even the recent reservists are mostly going to suck, because most basic conscripts suck with only a year of training. It’s one of the Achilles’ heel (and there are several) of the current Russian military system. Even old-fashioned Soviet conscripts struggled in Afghanistan and those guys had two year terms - instead the Soviets leaned hard on the Airborne infantry and Spetsnaz, but there only so many of those to go around.
The US says it’s currently 1,000 a day, but it’s probably increased a lot lately.
I think you’re making a distinction here that isn’t warranted. “Conscripts” are usually considered to be “draftees”. And even if we could find a technical difference between the two, for societal purposes, I think the effects here would be the same: A whole lot of Russian men who didn’t expect to be going to war are going to be sent into the quagmire of Ukraine. I suspect few of them would appreciate any difference between being a conscript and being a draftee.
This is a HORRENDOUS casualty rate. If true it’ll render the Russian army incapable of operations long before Ukraine is beaten.
There are many reports that the Russians are digging in to their present positions, a logical move if you are taking too many casualties on the offensive to sustain. Bombardment of Kyiv and murder of its citizens is the next move.
I was replying to this:
i.e. no institution of a draft is needed, because one functionally already exists.
At the end, it says 17,000.
If that’s an actual Russian number - which it seems to be - and we assume that it’s at least a few days or of date with the real situation on the front then we’re looking at about 20,000 deaths. ~800 per day.
Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda posted a story yesterday stating that 9861 Russian troops have been killed and 16153 injured. They subsequently deleted the paragraph.
The Internet Archive remembers:
Translated section is as follows:
The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation refutes the information of the Ukrainian General Staff about the alleged large-scale losses of the RF Armed Forces in Ukraine. According to the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, during the special operation in Ukraine, the Russian Armed Forces lost 9861 people killed, 16153 people were injured.
Posted about 20 posts back, but thanks for the Internet Archive link to the source.
Gotcha, will tone down future snarky comments.
One of the problems with the draft here, before it ended in the early '60s, was that the period of service (two years, latterly reduced to eighteen months) was so short that the services weren’t getting good value for money out of them, especially people with trade training, before they were due for discharge. In some cases they were due for discharge even before their trade training had ended , and none of them were interested in staying in the service.
Drumming up conscripts, IMHO, is not a good idea.
Just IMHO again, but people in the US probably have more knowledge and skills with a rifle than most Russians. Not saying that’s great, but probably true.
I’ve target shot since I was 9 yo. My Wife, that had never touched a rifle before wanted to learn to shoot. We did a day of it. Ummmm. If you did not grow up around firearms, I takes quite a bit of training and things drilled into your head before you can be safe. Let alone a good shot.
I’ll never forget when showing her the very basics of an open iron sight on a .22 single shot rifle and how to line things up so you might get close. And she asked, “What site do I use? The front one or the rear one”
My Wife is very intelligent and a great chess player. But it NEVER occurred to me that someone may not understand the very, very basics of trying to line up open iron sights.
That’s my fault.
We both decided, that unless she had quite a bit more time understanding shooting a weapon, it might not be such a great idea (she didn’t like it anyway).
So circling around.
If Russia rounds up 10,000 men that have never shot before in their life (and are probably already pissed off about this clusterfuck), and are given 2 days of training on an AK variant and are sent off to fight people they don’t want to fight. People that are defending their lives. That won’t end well for them.
they can be Ukrainian bombs. And it works just fine when it’s in the context of self defense.
Yes, a lot of ground leaders get accidentally shot by poorly trained troops.