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Notes -
Western claims that Russians are losing way more people than Ukrainians. Can you point to something contradictory?
The Russians have a lot more heavy weapons. If they expend more munitions, they should be inflicting more damage. Most casualties in conventional war come from artillery and the Russians have a lot more guns and shells than Ukraine. They also have more drones.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/04/23/ukraine-war-artillery-shortage-production-military-aid-bill/
Consider the state of long range bombing - Ukraine has damaged some Russian oil refineries and occasionally damages some buildings in Moscow. Russia routinely fires massive volleys of missiles at Ukrainian power generation, causing rolling blackouts and large-scale destruction of grid infrastructure. There are no such blackouts in Russia.
Ukraine has been drafting intensively, there are many, many videos of Ukrainian men being dragged struggling into vans for the front. One man, Ruslan Kubay, was drafted despite having no hands, which was subsequently reversed. People are drowning as they try to flee the country. People have been fleeing Russia too but not to such a great extent, more for business reasons and (legitimate) fear of conscription. However, Russia has mostly been filling its front line by promising generous bonus, they have not been forcibly conscripting. A much larger proportion of the country has fled Ukraine than Russia, I suspect that they have made a logical decision.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/29/i-am-not-made-for-war-the-men-fleeing-ukraine-to-evade-conscription
I was probably wrong to say that there were more prisoners held by Russia, I can't find any independent proof of that. Nevertheless, the Russians have demonstrated more capacity to inflict damage than Ukraine has, while Ukraine seems much more desperate than Russia. Furthermore, I think it's unwise to trust Western military estimates or any military estimates for that matter - they lied all the way through Afghanistan and Iraq.
While I do agree that Western estimates aren't to be trusted, Russia hasn't given us any casualty numbers to compare (other than a claim of 5,000 or so made fairly early on in the war). In war, truth is the first casualty, and we aren't going to get any reliable numbers until after the war is over. Or maybe never, given the wildly varying estimates you can still see for many historical conflicts.
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