You have more in common with those soldiers than you do with the warpigs pulling the strings that led them to their deaths.
I’m pretty sure everybody on these websites knows they’re more similar to enlisted soldiers than to Vladimir Putin.
Not everybody, according to some of the comments in this very post.
So… You have a lot of common with people who are ready to go kill in exchange for money?
Oh wowzies.
Also what a damn bad dichotomy: either side with killers for money or those who pay them to kill.
For once, a normal human being will not side with either of.
edit: oh keep them downvotes coming, keep yourself counting all y’all who think killing for money is ok ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
You mean the 18-30 y/o men who are conscripted into compulsory military service for a year? Kinda sounds like a lot of them might not have much choice, barring gulag or suicide, in the matter.
tbf, most Russian conscripts are not involved in the war - men sign theoretically voluntary contracts in exchange for extra pay or reduced service time to be deployed outside of Russia.
That being said, there’s a great deal of coercion that’s involved, so while you can resist pressure to sign a contract, it’s not unreasonable to think that a significant minority felt they really didn’t have a choice.
Ah welcome to your private fantasy land. Enjoy it.
I just believe the righteous antipathy is better leveled at the Russian government, specifically Putin, than the anonymous cannon fodder.
I prefer to hate everyone willing to kill me, my friends, my family, take over my country equally. Especially so, if they do it for money, for ten years.
Hard to grasp such a complex concept, I understand.
I can understand why you feel the way you do and cannot dispute it is a hatred you’ve earned.
Just like I wouldn’t be able to blame any Canadian for hating every US soldier if the US were to invade Canada.
I personally feel bad for every person involved in something as horrible as fighting in a war. I wish their hearts, brains, and energies could instead be employed in something peaceful, helpful, and beneficial for the future.
I agree with both of you.
I live in Finland, where about five percent of the people are Russian-speakers. Half from the Russia, the other half from Baltics.
My image of them has changed dramatically since 2022. I’ve had a job where I encounter a lot of different low-educated workers, and that has a included several tens of Russian-speakers. There has been precisely one among them that has not been repeating Putin’s talking points.
Nowadays I try to steer clear of everyone with a Russian name because I don’t want to ruin my workday. When they hear that I’ve lived some time in Ukraine, the war easily comes up. And then does the propaganda.
Having this experience has been something I really wouldn’t have wanted to have. I have indeed met Russians who are decent people. But, all of them have received other citizenships already years ago, because if you don’t believe the Russian propaganda, you see what a horrible country it is, and want nothing to do with it.
If someone has not left the Russia by 2025, they have a reason for that. They stand for Putin’s fascism.
Thank you for sharing your personal observations and experiences. They sound even more insufferable and dangerous than MAGAsites in the US.
I thought this meme was dead. I miss meme center.
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The war is about 20 km away from my home town. I took part in two revolutions in order to prevent my home from becoming a totalitarian shithole.
You are wrong in almost every point.
But please, don’t let me stop you from living in your little Narnia, you stupid potato.
“as a black man” vibes
Vibe away
A residential house in my home town was hit with a rocket today. 88 injured, of them 14 children - a school was nearby. How’s your vibing mate?
Then you woke up
Geez man, that really sucks. I’m sorry that’s happening to you and your people.
Thank you. News are bad today 😞
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For a lot of people, yeah actually. It’s all relative to each country’s general economy and propaganda, but there are a lot of people around the world either already in the military willing to die or kill for their country because of patriotism or feeling like there’s no other career paths for them, or that would take up the call if conscripted by their country.
Then think about how hitmen, assassins, sicarios and those type of criminals are usually from poverty or lower class and just regular people that descended into a life of crime and kill for money. Yeah, I think it’s actually quite common for regular folk to be killing others for money unfortunately.
PSA: Losses include dead AND wounded.
If wounded means combat ineffective, I’ll take what I can get.
Anyone know the number of Americans killed in Vietnam without looking it up?
Tap for spoiler
~58,000
Plus about 300k “casualties”, which is more apples to apples with the 900k Russians.
Only about 150k Americans seriously wounded in Vietnam.
I would imagine Agent Orange and severe PTSD-induced homelessness or suicide should also contribute to that number.
They don’t count as military losses. This isn’t a statistic about Russian suffering. This a statistic about how many soldiers the Russian military has lost from its ranks. PTSD doesn’t remove a soldier from the ranks.
That’s a fact. Though it’s hard to know what kind of statistic we’re seeing in Russia’s numbers here, by comparison
This is in no way true is it? Holy shit
Did you miss the article where local officials were giving out meat grinders to the parents of the KIA?
It’s . . . not . . . I don’t . . i mean. Yeah. Putin’s an absolute monster.
If you looked at the news article, the spokesman for the Kremlin mentioned that it was what the parents had “wanted and requested” which makes it look more like the parents taking a subtle jab at the leadership because they then had to publically hand them out.
I’ll be honest: I know next to nothing about the Vietnam War, living in Germany. We just read Slaughterhouse 5 in our English class and that’s it. Given its omnipresence in culture in general, I never would have thought that so “few” people died. Don’t get me wrong - it’s still a lot of people. But compared to the 900000 it’s just a drop in the bucket.
Fuck Putin and what he’s doing to my fellow countrymen/women/people
Most of those killed in Vietnam were Vietnamese civilians
Interesting comparison. People cheering on those Russian deaths should also be cheering on those American deaths
From an odd point of view, I think it’s been good that world war 2 happened, so that we lost our grip on a lot of countries. Such as Vietnam.
Can’t really say that out loud tho aha
Also I wouldn’t exist without world war 2.
If I didn’t have sex with my wife on that specific night then my specific sperm cell wouldn’t have gone into her specific egg cell.
Existential crisis intensifies
I don’t think your existence depended on your having sex with your wife…
You might be right… unless… time travel 🤨
Yes, yes I do.
have they looked under the couch?
There’s only a JD Vance there.
Are they stupid? Just find them!
They throw their young generations into the meat grinder just to control resources. Putin couldn’t find a way to pivot to new domestic products so now people get to die.
Fight war, not wars.
does ukraine actually have resources? russia is gigantic what could they possibly need so badly
Ukraine has lots of valuable natural resources, but Russia has much more of everything. The biggest reason for the invasion is most likely that Putin could not let a “brother nation” prosper and drift towards Europe and being a functioning democracy.
Russia’s population might get wild ideas if they saw that their Ukrainian cousins’ standard of living starts to rise rapidly while they have to endure living under a fascist dictator. And substandard and underdeveloped infrastructure, due to the rampant corruption and a government who doesn’t give a shit about the areas outside the larger cities.
It’s that but (playing devil’s advocate for a second) Russia “traditionally” had a huge buffer between Moscow and the evil west. If Ukraine goes European and -worse- NATO, then that evil west with their evil ideas like freedom and democracy is suddenly quite close to Moscow’s doorstep.
They have some rare earth minearals and a lot of farmland.
anything fancy that russia doesn’t have ?
Not particularly, the problem is that Russia is stupid and would rather try to annex Ukraine rather than invest time and resources into the development of Siberia. Also they don’t want to actually improve things just make them worse.
That’s kind of what happens when your government and economy functions off of corruption.
Well its either that or collapse, problem with Russia though is that the various ethnic and political groups that could’ve collapsed it easily were more or less wiped out during the holodomor. Specifically the ones in Siberia and the far east.
What happened in Siberia and the far east? Which groups were killed?
I thought it was about access to that gasline without Ukraine intervention, but then they blew it up or something, soooo…nothing? Baby boy Putin has been anti-Ukraine for a decade at least. Seems to be about being anti-NATO and for “political power”, but I doubt Putin will gain any if they end up winning against Ukraine.
It is.
It’s about oil and natural gas, everything else is spin and propaganda.
Russia is losing… Badly
Their only hope is for Ukraine to just give up
This is trumps job now
good news for ukraine, trump is on russias side.
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Including wounded is the official definition of lost, always been. No need to call propaganda, it simply how is defined.
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Lost means “not able to fight”. If they lose a leg, they might be alive, but not very useful in the battlefield. Therefore the soldier, not the human, is lost.
Most of it it’s because in military setting, those two are equivalent, sine the only thing they care is about how many abled bodies they have available for the meat grinder.
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What I meant is:
Propaganda is writing 0.99 with the intention of tricking people into buying. Note here to purpose of writing 99 is used.
Casualties was born from the necessity of generals to know how many troops are available. There is no psychological trick in there. Just because civilians misinterpret it does not mean there is a propagandistic goal hidden somewhere.
See the difference?
A bit over one third of these losses are deaths.
Typically in wars it’s about one sixth, and that is also approximately Ukraine’s ratio as well. For the Russia the number is very different because they don’t care for their wounded – many of the wounded are converted to dead through inexistence of medical care.
So, 900 000 Russian losses equals a bit over 300 000 dead orcs/roaches/whateveryoucallthem.
The thing is, for the war it doesn’t really have much meaning whether the loss is through death or a serious wound. It’s one soldier less all the same.
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I largely agree with you on that.
But, that depends on who is using the numbers. For immediate military use it is not important what happens after the war. For the general who is planning a war strategy, what matters is how much the army is losing manpower. For the society it does matter whether the lost manpower is dead or just missing one arm, but for the war strategy it doesn’t.
Albeit, I do somewhat disagree with this myself. I keep arguing that although the total military losses of Ukraine are close to those of the Russia, it makes a huge difference that the number of dead soldiers is smaller even in proportion to Ukraine’s population than the number of dead Russian soldiers is in proportion to the Russia’s population. It also seems that Ukraine’s recruitment capacity (in absolute numbers) is at least on par with that of the Russia and it’s unclear if its maximum capacity has even been reached.
Ukrainian soldiers seem to always receive decent prosthetics that enable them to remain in working life and be with their families. In that case it is not a huge loss for the society that a soldier has got seriously wounded. If the risk of death was as high as that of Russians’, there would be (even) less motivation to enlist.
But, be it like this or that, the reality is that the common practice in wars is to assume it makes no difference whether the lost soldier is dead or crippled, and because of that, they typically count military losses, not military deaths. Regardless of how retarded that is.
The world allowing the few to massacre the many for their personal gain has to be what we reject in the 21st century. We need to start arresting and trying every war monger for the murders they are.
Russian has been losing and the economy is collapsing since 2018 according to these news. Every other week I see something like this. Yet we dont see them retreating.
900k is more than 50% of there forces according to wikipedia that list 1.5 millions.
I highly doubt the accuracy of these news reports.
It is collapsing. Some people have interpreted the news as the economy being at the brink of an immediate collapse, but articles I have read have talked consistently of end of 2025/early 2026.
The difference is, in 2022 and 2023 it was assumed that once it becomes clear that the Russia’s economy collapsing will be inevitable unless they immediately end the war, they would indeed end it. Now it’s clear that they will indeed go to the very end, allowing their economy to collapse and then the war ending as a consequence of that.
So, yes, it was predicted that the economy will collapse by 2026, and the war would end in 2022 or 2023 to avoid that. But, the timetable of the actual collapse has not changed. Or, at least not the timetables I’ve been seeing.
Their losses are clearly significant enough to bring a foreign army (North Koreans) to replenish their forces. Maybe not 50% but I don’t think it’s that far off.
I have not heard of another batch of NK soldiers after the initial 12000. There are talks about them possibly sending another 12000.
With the Russia losing 1300 soldiers per day as dead and wounded, the NK troops cover 10(+ maybe another 10?) days worth soldiers.
The Russian army is shrinking by about 15 000 soldiers per month. That was canceled out by NK troops for one month once, and possibly another one soon.
I travel a lot, both for work and leisure, and wherever there’s no travel restrictions for Russians, like Thailand, UAE, or Egypt, it’s simply overrun with Russian tourists. And they’re rich, too, with the latest iPhones, Apple Watches and all the other fashion brands.
As much as I’d like to see l say that Russia is feeling the impact of this war, empirically, I can’t say that it seems that way.
The richest people don’t care about the war, if groceries go up 25% that barely makes a dent. You won’t see the people who are actually suffering from this being tourists.
Yes, of course, and I agree; I was only remarking that there’s a demographic that doesn’t appear to be affected by this at all.
Classism is present in Russia too.
I watched a couple of YouTube videos from a normal guy who lives in Russia talking about what it was actually like to live in Russia around the time that Tucker Carlson did that weird state visit and he peeled back a layer of intentional propaganda that the American journalist was spreading - that Russians are living in some kind of luxury paradise. Sure, everything costs less over there, but people are also paid a lot less too. If you’re working class, it’s hard to afford enough food to put on the table sometimes. The rich, however, are not hurting for anything and a lot of big brand labels that said they would exit Russia just rebranded themselves or quietly re-entered the market after all the commotion about the war died down.
I didn’t mean to suggest that it isn’t affecting the ordinary, working class Russian. My observation is that there don’t appear to be any less affluent Russian tourists.
I’m going against the grain here, but I just think this is really sad. A lot of these people will have been decent people, loved by decent people and some have been brainwashed. It’s a horrible, terrible human cost cos of a dictator
Seeing as they are still on their murderous war of conquest, obviously not enough yet.
The total number is not what you should be looking at. The interesting thing is the number of losses in proportion to the Russian recruitment capacity. They have recruitment infrastructure that enables them to recruit a maximum of 35 000 (or, according to some sources, just 25 000) soldiers per month. They are not able to restructure their recruitment procedures in wartime, as that would first decrease the recruitment capacity for a few years.
The Russia must get their losses under that number, because as long as they don’t, they won’t be able to train their soldiers – they are needed too acutely at the front for that. If they can train their soldiers, their daily losses will decrease a lot.
Neither side is going to run out of population to send to the front in the next 50 years. But they can lose them faster than they are able to recruit new ones.
I find this difficult to believe. Edit: Wikipedia has a total (both sides) death toll of 160k-290k.
Casualties != Death
As always that this topic gets discussed: dead and wounded
Title says “lost”. I took that to mean killed.
Many do. But, in military purposes, it is not really relevant whether your army loses a soldier through death or through a severe permanent wound. He is still a soldier that you cannot use at the front.
It’s a standard practice to count the dead and permanently wounded in the same number, because that’s what is militarily relevant.
See first comment, 900K include wounded too.
Seriously wounded.
There are also slight wounds, which number at around 10 000 per day on average (according to a Russian source that I read two-three days ago). Remember that this number includes everything, including getting a paper cut in your finger, so the same person can end up in that number several times per month.
The number of Russian military losses consists of wounded by a bit under ⅔ of the number. The wound gets included in the number only if its severe enough to permanently remove you from the front.
This difficulty to believe it’s actually quite fundamental to what’s happening.
If you like, I invite you to imagine what would be the explanation if these numbers were true. (Even adjusted for being dead and wounded)
regardless of the total number there are combat footage videos of entire platoons getting obliterated
IDK but seems probable if anybody on earth can take large amount of casualties, might be the Russians
Yup. They do have that feature.
As do Ukrainians. Which causes it to be a detrimental feature for both sides. If only one side had that, then it would be of advantage.
Let them keep dying, it’s pretty obvious Russias weak if it wasn’t for the Nukes the rest of Europe would just pull an Iraq on them. I feel Russias real threat is probably China though they have a lot of land and it’s ripe for the taking.
This is the reality of war. Millions of people die fighting over invisible lines on the map
This isn’t a war of lines on the map, really. The Russia’s goal is the end of Ukrainians as a nation. And breaking NATO’s article 5.
The Russia’s goal is the end of Ukrainians as a nation. And breaking NATO’s article 5.
I don’t recall this being putin goal. Nations are invisible lines on earth
Countries are invisible lines on Earth. Nations are not.
Nations are groups of people that sometimes fill some lines, often leave some parts among the lines unfilled, sometimes cross them.
And nations can exist without any lines on Earth at all. If Ukraine was to somehow get completely occupied by the Russia, Ukrainians as a nation would continue existing. Until the Russia manages to actively purge them.
The Russia’s official news agency that will not publish anything that Putin disagrees with, has written the clearest explanation about the genocidal goal. The important part is that in one part it said that all nazis in Ukraine must be exterminated, and in another part it defines Ukrainian nazis as “everybody who supports the regime of Kyiv”. And then there’s Putin’s speech on February 21st, 2022, which was supposed to take place just hours before the missiles start flying, although the attack then had to be postponed by two days. And then there are the three articles published by RIA Novosti precisely at 08:00 Moscow time on February 26th, 2022. And Putin’s speech from summer 2021.
I wish I could find the version of the “What Russia should do with Ukraine” article’s text that is annotated in English language. I spent some hours looking for it a few days ago, to no avail. It’s somewhere out there in the Internet – I can remember having read it.
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