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Russia is in fact loosing more than 1000 people per day. It has for many months. https://www.newsweek.com/russia-highest-monthly-losses-ukraine-casualties-1907

Russia is in fact loosing more than 1000 people per day. It has for many months. https://www.newsweek.com/russia-highest-monthly-losses-ukraine-casualties-1907093 https://www.newsweek.com/russia-highest-monthly-losses-ukrai... They also loose equipment at a staggering rate. From the start of the invasion 2022 until end of July, they have lost more than 570 000 soldiers, 8000 tanks and 16000 artillery systems. Oh and also 38 war ships and one submarine - against a country that didn't have a navy at the start of the invasion. Drones is ammunition and is used in air, land and sea.

CapricornNoble 2y ago
[flagged]
- genman 2y ago
  How much spreading Russian talking points pays these days?
  - lawlessone 2y ago
    That's not all he's spreading.. edit: though largely it is.
  - MC995 2y ago
    Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - lawlessone 2y ago
      It's going on this website whether people would like to admit it or not.
    - genman 2y ago
      Why should I waste my valuable time to answer anything meaningful to an obvious propaganda comment? Such comments are what are degrading HN discussion.
    - sqeaky 2y ago
      Isn't the real problem astroturfing, shilling, brigading, being a government agent, and the like? The person who posted the big wall of text that seems plausible superficially said a bunch of really dumb or dishonest things. At best they're disingenuous, they're doing things like averaging advancements per day, in some places lines literally aren't moving and others people are advancing unopposed, averaging some things is fundamentally dishonest or a fundamental misunderstanding. There are other issues with their comment, but these are all the kinds of mistakes and an informed person participating in honest discourse doesn't make. People arguing in bad faith need to be called out not tolerated.
      - CapricornNoble 2y ago
        Despite saying that I'm arguing in bad faith, you actually have the only substantive response to my post. My interpretation of your comments is that either: 1. I am incorrectly interpreting the models because I am assuming aggregate/averaged rates of advance across a very large (~1000km) frontage. Or: 2. The models are incorrect if they expect rates of advance averaged across such a large front to produce reliably realistic results. The task, then, is for me to dig back through the specifics of the models (I've got Dupuy's books and a couple of publications and related DoD-internal wargaming rulesets based on Relative Combat Power Analysis) to see if they articulate the scale at which they break down. I do recall reading that QJM was used to estimate the outcome of Desert Storm and produced surprisingly accurate results for that campaign. Given that, I don't think it's unreasonable to apply the model to the current stage of the Ukrainian conflict. In particular you seem critical of the values I suggested for the "rate of advance" variable. I suspect that even if you dropped that value to 0.1km/day or even 0.....the models would still suggest a highly skewed rate of Ukrainian losses due to the lopsided-balance of fires assets in Russia's favor. The point is to get people to do the math themselves, and to get them thinking about the second and third order effects of a country with 1/3 of its attackers manpower pool losing men at a greater-than-equal rate. As an aside, it's weird to me that a few paragraphs is derided as a "Wall of Text" but I guess it is to a generation who's baseline of social media engagement is mobile phones and Twitter. I developed my habits of internet discourse on places like bbs.stardestroyer.net in the late 90s: everyone was on a desktop, and everyone was expected to write long-form explanations for their positions, preferably with references. This is how I write many of my posts on HN, twenty years later.
    - racional 2y ago
      And yet sometimes that's exactly what's happening -- and it needs to be called out. Not the "foreign agents" part; that's your insinuation of what the parent commenter said. But there's an unusual degree commonality to the talking points and flat-out factually wrong narratives that people continually post about this conflict -- such that some of them (like "Ukraine wanted to negotiate, but...") we literally hear several times a day. It doesn't matter what sources they are uncritically adopting these garbage narratives from. It's just propaganda, straight up, and quite obviously so.
  - cassepipe 2y ago
    The thing is that it's both. It does put in perspective the western narrative that's being pushed because in order to make the necessary support for Ukraine appear as a better deal that it is but also jumps to conclusion when it says Russia will win, this is delusional. The best Russia will achieve is to get Donbass and Luhansk and it's hard to see if that's worth all the lives and money wasted into this stupid war.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - fpoling 2y ago
      Russia gains more population from occupying the remaining parts of Donbas than they lost from the whole war. As for the resources they now confirmed that the world would continue to buy the oil from them for the next 10 years no matter what. That will provide them with enough profit to rebuild. So until the West starts helping Ukraine for real instead of giving barely enough for Ukraine not ti collapse, I do not see how what Russia is doing is stupid.
  - ClumsyPilot 2y ago
    They are gaining ground, that’s an indisputable fact. Current western position is that they don’t want Russia to win, but also don’t want to provide the level of support that would stop Russia - for example take 1,000 Abram’s tanks out of storage and give them to Ukraine. Obviously this is hypocrisy. We are on the road to failure, and yet here you are, accusing anyone that point out the obvious of working for the enemy. Deaf to feedback and in denial of reality. That’s how you get giant failures like Afghanistan and Vietnam.
    - speakfreely 2y ago
      I've been purposely avoiding logging in to be more passive and less invested in the comment wars going on, but I just reversed my policy to congratulate you for a succinct and valuable post. The political environment is so toxic that anyone who points out any flaw or bad news regarding the NATO strategy is somehow labeled a Putin apologist. It's a horrible state of affairs. You cannot gaslight your own population into a war victory, it's doesn't work like that.
- CorrectHorseBat 2y ago
  >The Russians already did the math. They are accepting the butcher's bill because the trendline is obviously heading towards a Russian victory. If it was so simple no war would ever be fought since the losing side would just decide it's not worth the fight. It was clear Japan and Germany would lose the war the moment the USA entered, yet they fought on for four more years.
  - CapricornNoble 2y ago
    I recommend reading Wages of Destruction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction Part of the problem is incorrect assessments of the balance of power, combined with stubbornness. Both the Germans and the Japanese assessed that their martial spirit would enable them to overcome their industrially-superior adversaries. Both were wrong. Also militaries the world over have a culture of stoicism under conditions of adversity. At the tactical level it sometimes means you can turn around what appears to be an unwinnable situation. I'd have to dig to see where this has reliably worked at the strategic level. My initial thought is "it doesn't, but military officers who have spent their entire adult lives inculcated to act otherwise will never acknowledge that". Look at some of the ridiculous propaganda that was written at the start of Ukraine's 2023 summer offensive: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/09/british-made-tanks-about-to-sweep-putins-conscripts-aside/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/09/british-made-tan... There's been interviews where Ukrainian troops said "we thought the Russians would just run away after the first day of seeing our Leopards". Both sides in this conflict have underestimated each other in different ways, but industrial attritional warfare is the great equalizer: it doesn't matter what men THINK will lead to victory if enough steel is thrown in the other guy's direction to remove all subjectivity.
    - zh3 2y ago
      None the less, at the heart of the matter it comes down to economics. Russia's GDP vs the colective West's says who's going to win this one - at least, assuming it goes to the long haul and nothing changes (which of course it will, unexpectedly, at some point). Also the Ukrainians are fighting for survival from the top of the country to the bottom (motivation makes a big difference). For the other side, the view at the top is very different from the view of those going into the fight (often unwillingly) at the bottom.
- fpoling 2y ago
  The models do not account for attack drones which kills most Russian soldiers these days. They also do not account that due to observation drone presence attacking leads to greater losses.
  - CapricornNoble 2y ago
    >>The models do not account for attack drones which kills most Russian soldiers these days. If you have data that reliably attributes Russian casualties to the weapon systems causing them, I'd love to see it. I know that Twitter and Tiktok are chock full of Ukrainian "drone drop" videos but again that is part of the information operations and shouldn't be taken as an accurate reflection of the battlespace writ large. That said....if they were killing >500 Russians daily with drones, which almost all have recordable video footage, we should be seeing maybe 10x as much footage as is getting released. One work-around would be to find the most appropriate weapon system that IS in the model and see if it could cover FPV drones. I think QJM aggregates weapons systems but goes down to the squad level, so maybe it accounts for specialized infantry tasks like snipers. Insert a weapon into the model that is a "sniper" but with a 10km effective range. Then run the numbers again. That still ignores the effects of Russian EW but hey...this is an iterative process.
    - fpoling 2y ago
      There are reports that drone loss for Ukraine is like 3-5 drones per a successful attack. There are also reports that Ukraine carries like 4000 daily drone flights. It is not clear how may of those are for observations and how many are for attacks. If one assumes that there 3000 attack flights and 600 reach the target, it can easily explain 50% of Russian losses. In addition a sniper is a bad analogy. The drone warhead is at least a hand-grenade useful against hard targets. A better analogy would be a guided light artillery shell if such exists in models.
      - CapricornNoble 2y ago
        Hmmmm, I'll look for an approximation of a laser-guided 60mm mortar.
bluGill 2y ago
Those are Ukraine numbers, so there is double counting, propaganda, and other such reasons to take some salt with them. Different countries have different estimates but they publish them less often. Those numbers are the best we have, and give a similar magnitude to other estimates but they are also higher than others. Of course there are also things that nobody can see and there is reason to believe Russia is intentionally not counting some thing. On the other hand we also have reason to believe Russia is recruiting about 1000 men per day, and the number of troops they have is not increasing. So while the numbers above are suspect they cannot be too far off.
- JoachimS 2y ago
  Those are Ukraine numbers, but they are repeatedly confirmed by ISW and others. There are of course errors, uncertainties. But they seem not to be inflated. Often they instead seem to be somewhat conservative compared to other sources.
cassepipe 2y ago
1000 a week seems more in line with the numbers I have seen
- jeltz 2y ago
  If that was the case the Russian army in Ukraine would be growing quickly. We know that Russia recruits around 1000 people per day and their army stays virtually the same size. That pretty much proves that the casualties are close to 1000 per day.
  - passing_by_and 2y ago
    How do you know this?
anovikov 2y ago
My point is mainly that "drone only does something of value 1/4 of the time, rest of them are lost uselessly" isn't a bad statistic. Even if it took 10 drones to significantly wound an infantryman, or 100 to blow up a tank, that would be still a very good use of them.

CapricornNoble 2y ago

[flagged]

genman 2y ago
How much spreading Russian talking points pays these days?
- lawlessone 2y ago
  That's not all he's spreading.. edit: though largely it is.
- MC995 2y ago
  Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - lawlessone 2y ago
    It's going on this website whether people would like to admit it or not.
  - genman 2y ago
    Why should I waste my valuable time to answer anything meaningful to an obvious propaganda comment? Such comments are what are degrading HN discussion.
  - sqeaky 2y ago
    Isn't the real problem astroturfing, shilling, brigading, being a government agent, and the like? The person who posted the big wall of text that seems plausible superficially said a bunch of really dumb or dishonest things. At best they're disingenuous, they're doing things like averaging advancements per day, in some places lines literally aren't moving and others people are advancing unopposed, averaging some things is fundamentally dishonest or a fundamental misunderstanding. There are other issues with their comment, but these are all the kinds of mistakes and an informed person participating in honest discourse doesn't make. People arguing in bad faith need to be called out not tolerated.
    - CapricornNoble 2y ago
      Despite saying that I'm arguing in bad faith, you actually have the only substantive response to my post. My interpretation of your comments is that either: 1. I am incorrectly interpreting the models because I am assuming aggregate/averaged rates of advance across a very large (~1000km) frontage. Or: 2. The models are incorrect if they expect rates of advance averaged across such a large front to produce reliably realistic results. The task, then, is for me to dig back through the specifics of the models (I've got Dupuy's books and a couple of publications and related DoD-internal wargaming rulesets based on Relative Combat Power Analysis) to see if they articulate the scale at which they break down. I do recall reading that QJM was used to estimate the outcome of Desert Storm and produced surprisingly accurate results for that campaign. Given that, I don't think it's unreasonable to apply the model to the current stage of the Ukrainian conflict. In particular you seem critical of the values I suggested for the "rate of advance" variable. I suspect that even if you dropped that value to 0.1km/day or even 0.....the models would still suggest a highly skewed rate of Ukrainian losses due to the lopsided-balance of fires assets in Russia's favor. The point is to get people to do the math themselves, and to get them thinking about the second and third order effects of a country with 1/3 of its attackers manpower pool losing men at a greater-than-equal rate. As an aside, it's weird to me that a few paragraphs is derided as a "Wall of Text" but I guess it is to a generation who's baseline of social media engagement is mobile phones and Twitter. I developed my habits of internet discourse on places like bbs.stardestroyer.net in the late 90s: everyone was on a desktop, and everyone was expected to write long-form explanations for their positions, preferably with references. This is how I write many of my posts on HN, twenty years later.
  - racional 2y ago
    And yet sometimes that's exactly what's happening -- and it needs to be called out. Not the "foreign agents" part; that's your insinuation of what the parent commenter said. But there's an unusual degree commonality to the talking points and flat-out factually wrong narratives that people continually post about this conflict -- such that some of them (like "Ukraine wanted to negotiate, but...") we literally hear several times a day. It doesn't matter what sources they are uncritically adopting these garbage narratives from. It's just propaganda, straight up, and quite obviously so.
- cassepipe 2y ago
  The thing is that it's both. It does put in perspective the western narrative that's being pushed because in order to make the necessary support for Ukraine appear as a better deal that it is but also jumps to conclusion when it says Russia will win, this is delusional. The best Russia will achieve is to get Donbass and Luhansk and it's hard to see if that's worth all the lives and money wasted into this stupid war.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - fpoling 2y ago
    Russia gains more population from occupying the remaining parts of Donbas than they lost from the whole war. As for the resources they now confirmed that the world would continue to buy the oil from them for the next 10 years no matter what. That will provide them with enough profit to rebuild. So until the West starts helping Ukraine for real instead of giving barely enough for Ukraine not ti collapse, I do not see how what Russia is doing is stupid.
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago
  They are gaining ground, that’s an indisputable fact. Current western position is that they don’t want Russia to win, but also don’t want to provide the level of support that would stop Russia - for example take 1,000 Abram’s tanks out of storage and give them to Ukraine. Obviously this is hypocrisy. We are on the road to failure, and yet here you are, accusing anyone that point out the obvious of working for the enemy. Deaf to feedback and in denial of reality. That’s how you get giant failures like Afghanistan and Vietnam.
  - speakfreely 2y ago
    I've been purposely avoiding logging in to be more passive and less invested in the comment wars going on, but I just reversed my policy to congratulate you for a succinct and valuable post. The political environment is so toxic that anyone who points out any flaw or bad news regarding the NATO strategy is somehow labeled a Putin apologist. It's a horrible state of affairs. You cannot gaslight your own population into a war victory, it's doesn't work like that.
CorrectHorseBat 2y ago
>The Russians already did the math. They are accepting the butcher's bill because the trendline is obviously heading towards a Russian victory. If it was so simple no war would ever be fought since the losing side would just decide it's not worth the fight. It was clear Japan and Germany would lose the war the moment the USA entered, yet they fought on for four more years.
- CapricornNoble 2y ago
  I recommend reading Wages of Destruction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction Part of the problem is incorrect assessments of the balance of power, combined with stubbornness. Both the Germans and the Japanese assessed that their martial spirit would enable them to overcome their industrially-superior adversaries. Both were wrong. Also militaries the world over have a culture of stoicism under conditions of adversity. At the tactical level it sometimes means you can turn around what appears to be an unwinnable situation. I'd have to dig to see where this has reliably worked at the strategic level. My initial thought is "it doesn't, but military officers who have spent their entire adult lives inculcated to act otherwise will never acknowledge that". Look at some of the ridiculous propaganda that was written at the start of Ukraine's 2023 summer offensive: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/09/british-made-tanks-about-to-sweep-putins-conscripts-aside/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/09/british-made-tan... There's been interviews where Ukrainian troops said "we thought the Russians would just run away after the first day of seeing our Leopards". Both sides in this conflict have underestimated each other in different ways, but industrial attritional warfare is the great equalizer: it doesn't matter what men THINK will lead to victory if enough steel is thrown in the other guy's direction to remove all subjectivity.
  - zh3 2y ago
    None the less, at the heart of the matter it comes down to economics. Russia's GDP vs the colective West's says who's going to win this one - at least, assuming it goes to the long haul and nothing changes (which of course it will, unexpectedly, at some point). Also the Ukrainians are fighting for survival from the top of the country to the bottom (motivation makes a big difference). For the other side, the view at the top is very different from the view of those going into the fight (often unwillingly) at the bottom.
fpoling 2y ago
The models do not account for attack drones which kills most Russian soldiers these days. They also do not account that due to observation drone presence attacking leads to greater losses.
- CapricornNoble 2y ago
  >>The models do not account for attack drones which kills most Russian soldiers these days. If you have data that reliably attributes Russian casualties to the weapon systems causing them, I'd love to see it. I know that Twitter and Tiktok are chock full of Ukrainian "drone drop" videos but again that is part of the information operations and shouldn't be taken as an accurate reflection of the battlespace writ large. That said....if they were killing >500 Russians daily with drones, which almost all have recordable video footage, we should be seeing maybe 10x as much footage as is getting released. One work-around would be to find the most appropriate weapon system that IS in the model and see if it could cover FPV drones. I think QJM aggregates weapons systems but goes down to the squad level, so maybe it accounts for specialized infantry tasks like snipers. Insert a weapon into the model that is a "sniper" but with a 10km effective range. Then run the numbers again. That still ignores the effects of Russian EW but hey...this is an iterative process.
  - fpoling 2y ago
    There are reports that drone loss for Ukraine is like 3-5 drones per a successful attack. There are also reports that Ukraine carries like 4000 daily drone flights. It is not clear how may of those are for observations and how many are for attacks. If one assumes that there 3000 attack flights and 600 reach the target, it can easily explain 50% of Russian losses. In addition a sniper is a bad analogy. The drone warhead is at least a hand-grenade useful against hard targets. A better analogy would be a guided light artillery shell if such exists in models.
    - CapricornNoble 2y ago
      Hmmmm, I'll look for an approximation of a laser-guided 60mm mortar.

bluGill 2y ago

Those are Ukraine numbers, so there is double counting, propaganda, and other such reasons to take some salt with them. Different countries have different estimates but they publish them less often. Those numbers are the best we have, and give a similar magnitude to other estimates but they are also higher than others. Of course there are also things that nobody can see and there is reason to believe Russia is intentionally not counting some thing. On the other hand we also have reason to believe Russia is recruiting about 1000 men per day, and the number of troops they have is not increasing. So while the numbers above are suspect they cannot be too far off.

JoachimS 2y ago
Those are Ukraine numbers, but they are repeatedly confirmed by ISW and others. There are of course errors, uncertainties. But they seem not to be inflated. Often they instead seem to be somewhat conservative compared to other sources.

cassepipe 2y ago

1000 a week seems more in line with the numbers I have seen

jeltz 2y ago
If that was the case the Russian army in Ukraine would be growing quickly. We know that Russia recruits around 1000 people per day and their army stays virtually the same size. That pretty much proves that the casualties are close to 1000 per day.
- passing_by_and 2y ago
  How do you know this?

anovikov 2y ago

My point is mainly that "drone only does something of value 1/4 of the time, rest of them are lost uselessly" isn't a bad statistic. Even if it took 10 drones to significantly wound an infantryman, or 100 to blow up a tank, that would be still a very good use of them.