Ukrainian War Developments

Overbom said:

Whatever the West can use, Russia will use 10 times more if it is threatened. And if the West gets the courage to enter a nuclear exchange war with Russia then Putin will happily oblige it.

After all, who has the most to lose from a nuclear exchange? The combined almost $40 trillion Western economies or the $1.5 trillion Russian economy?

Similarly, who will lose the most, the West's 800 million population or Russia's 150 million people?

In both cases, the biggest loser is the West not Russia. As such, we can conclude that from power dynamics, Russia's nuclear threat is much more of a deterrence against the West than the other way around

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sinophilia said:

As you can see, nuclear war is one area the US can't win. US population density is also vastly higher, land area in overall size is much more limited, and urbanization is higher as well. A nuclear war with Russia would end for all time the US, but would not end Russia despite crippling it for many decades (assuming climate catastrophe from a nuclear winter is overhyped, which it certainly is).

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InfamousMeow said:

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I don't know if anyone has posted this yet, I only have time to skim through this thread and I haven't seen anyone post this.

This is, allegedly, a former PLA commander's assessment of Russian military's performance in Ukraine. The summary of military aspects is as follows:

(1) Ukrainian military with similiar equipment level and three times the manpower advantage hasn't even tried encirclement once. This shows its true combat will and ability (lack of).

(2) Russian military is really bold/brave/audacious, especially the taking of Kiev airport and northern armor units' breakthrough in Chernobol. Russian military's use of deep battle strategy was of no other alternatives, especially when they cannot undiscriminately bomb, cue Murica here.

(3) This war kind-of serves as a practice rounds for further improvement of BTG. Real Russian BTGs are strong and have great firepower, but (previous) wargames never had such deep of a penetration. Another problem is there are a lot of fake BTGs. Real BTGs were first assembled and thrown into Syrian battleground. All rest of the BTGs are emulators. Have to recognize that for such a deep penetration, the penetration has been on point, which then exposes that BTGs run too far and logistics cannot keep up.

(4) The problem with Russia is its lack of money. The problem with Ukraine is the military is trash (kind of).

There are way more in the original post than what I translate here. The whole article is here and there so it's hard to get the gist of it. Please google translate if you find it interesting.

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Bill Blazo said:

I think it's important to have some broader perspective about the losses on both sides, especially since it's such an active topic of conversation here. If you include equipment held in reserve, then Russia has roughly 60,000 ground vehicles (let that number sink in for a moment). They’ve lost about 1,400 ground vehicles so far in the war, or 2.3% of their total. That's bad, no doubt, but it's not catastrophic to the overall Russian military. Based on my comments before about the vast undersampling of Ukrainian losses, I estimate that Ukraine has lost roughly 700 ground vehicles. Ukraine has a total of roughly 12,000 vehicles, so it has lost about 5.8% of its total inventory. As a percentage of what they have in total, the Ukrainians have lost more than the Russians. This remains true even if you go with more conservative numbers from Oryx and other public sources. And if this war drags on for a long time, it's this statistic that will matter far more than total absolute losses.

That's one thing. The other thing to keep in mind are factors like quality and utility; not all losses are equally significant. About one-third of all Russian losses are trucks and jeeps, which can be easily replaced in a heartbeat from both military and civilian sources (and the Russians already have). By contrast, Ukraine has pretty much lost its navy in this war. The scuttled flagship alone weighed 3,500 tons, equivalent to about 60 Russian tanks. Losing a navy is far more devastating than losing a few jeeps. And then there's critical energy and industrial infrastructure, like factories and warehouses. The Ukrainians have lost virtually all of that, so they're now almost exclusively reliant on Western aid to keep the war going. By contrast, Russia will continue to pump out equipment and replace losses for as long as it needs, simply because it can. Not a single Russian factory has been hit in this war. If the conflict continues for a few more months, Russia's industrial advantage will start to matter more and more, just because they'll be able to replace heavy equipment losses (like tanks) while the Ukrainians cannot.

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