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I don't listen to RWA. I just pay attention to the relevant ratios, who's consistently shown to be full of it, and what get leaked or admitted.
none of even the serious pro-Ukraine people expect them to win the fight. Peter Zeihan is a full on neo-con and he keeps talking about pushing Kherson and cutting off the water and Electricity supply to Crimea, that that'd be a bargaining chip, or taking out the bridge at the Kerch strait and cutting off rail supply... but neither of those seem to be materializing, and it seems more likely Russia would just retaliate against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. And aside from that, he's just "Ya Ukraine is outperforming... really showing bravery, too bad the default is they'll probably lose"
And every neo-con or belicose commentator is like this once you ignore the high energy announcements and get into their analysis and predictions its "Ya no its exciting they could pull off this crazy dramatic campaign we've never seen signs of them doing and it would change everything ever... but odds are they won't and they'll get ground down and lose everything slowly and painfully... but hey we still bleed Russia and stop the Germans from pivoting to them, so a US geostrategic victory"
Every time, as soon as you dig into one of these more serious commentators that stake their influence on major us intellectuals taking them seriously, they'll spend ten minutes hedging, praising the UKrainians bravery, lay out some absurd tele-lazer snipe Zelensky could do if he levels up his mech to 5 stars... and then they say "But they need something like that, because as is they're going be ground down militarily and economically until they collapse"
Zelensky admitted 200-500 deaths a day, that's probably 1000-1500 total casualties once you include wounded. That's not sustainable. Their squads that go around black bagging people for the front are going to become predictable and conscripts will dry up. Especially in a corrupt country where gdp is 3k per person, everything runs on bribery, and perhaps even a majority of America's 100 billion went to just paying people off.
We should not expect the Ukrainian commanders to be much different than the Afghan allies the US was funding and training for 20 years... Right now they're getting those black bagged conscripts to the front, because the money hasn't dried up yet... after a winter of economic decline and the US has gotten distracted by an election cycle, another current thing, and congress and the senate are gridlocked across multiple parties, and no one can pass a Ukraine funding bill without someone attaching funding for abortion for illegal immigrant's ar-15s...
US clients have never not been like this. Vietnam collapsed the second US funding and backing started to wane, ditto Iraq, ditto Afghanistan... Hell the US almost lost Berlin to the soviets.
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US backed regional wars are a very specific genre just like slasher movies or romantic comedies There is a formula, a very simple formula.
The enemy is always on the run... except none of the "Dangerous" regions ever seem to become safe regions, and there are a shocking number of offensives that get uncomfortable. The allies are always great brave men fighting for their homeland and the best anywhere in the world... but their budgets are never trackable and they seem to be oddly overlapped with organized crime... hey is that oppium? Hey are those neo-nazi tattoos? America's allies are always winning and training and get really professional and buttoned up...yet they never seem to stop being dependent on attached mercenaries and special force... and seem to always have bad luck maintaining any initiative,
and finally The enemy is always laughably incompetent, loses every battle, and can't do even basic stuff the US expects of its worse units...and yet somehow they win the war.
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The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results... well the US kinda learned... they aren't sending their own conscripts to this Vietnam... just blowing incredible amounts propping up an ARVN force they know isn't sustainable... so instead of years and administrations before the whole thing fails, Ukraine has months and a midterm.
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America wins every invasion, and cia coup... for the same reason it loses every complex local enabled patronage war... the US in constitutionally incapable of addapting its meta tactics. Its winning formula are winning and they work, and they don't get changed... and the second a US invasion gets repelled it might literally be the end of the world, but until the end of the world every US invasion will be a cakewalk. And likewise every US backed local military force, militia and insurgency they arm and train are going to be primarily interested in scamming the American tax payer, because hell that's what the American contractors are there to do and the US isn't going to adapt tactics even if you're caught scamming them.
That people can still fall for this Afghan National Army bull... I swear some of the articles about female fighters were just search and replace and they forgot to take out the sentence about face coverings.
Its a formula. Its a very simple formula.
So many words, and so little truth and substance. Everything verifiable in your post about the war is a lie, and others are just inane ramblings.
Zelensky said that? You got a source for it? The max I remember was 50-100 a day during the most intense fighting when Ukraine was pursuing a ridiculous no-step-back strategy in Sievierodonesk. Considerable casualties for sure but 4 times less than your lies. That difficult period lasted about a month.
You got a source for the black bagging squads? If this is common occurrence responsible for any appreciable amount of conscripts then we'd have hundreds of telegram videos as proof.
Yeah? Who are those credible commentators you are referring to? Michael Kofman? Dara Massicot? It's easy to make up shit when it's unspecific.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61742736
This Zelensky Aide puts it at 200 dead and 500 more injured.
RT cites one of Zelenksy's main negotiators as putting it at the 200-500 mark:
https://www.rt.com/news/557262-ukraine-daily-military-casualties/
And here's the Axios story if you don't trust RT citations:
https://www.axios.com/2022/06/15/ukraine-1000-casualties-day-donbas-arakhamia
And here's the video of Ukrainian forces conscripting people off the streets at gunpoint:
https://twitter.com/ivan_8848/status/1556566862846169088?s=20&t=6Cp7CVwajUHcXaPalKx9zA
"RT"
Are you serious?
Lavrov in March was claiming that Russia has not attacked Ukraine.
Even official count of shot down aircraft provided by Ukrainian propaganda is more credible.
Reading comprehension is important.
I provided two sources with the exact same data
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So, not Zelensky, and not 200-500 deaths with 1000-1500 total casualties? Your sources support none of your initial claims, but you still post them as if they do. How would you feel if I claimed Putin verified 20k dead Russian soldiers but had to walkback to Shoigu saying 6k dead Russian soldiers? Would you think I was being intellectually honest? The same applies here.
On the topic of forceful conscription, it's just a single video of soldiers bullying civilians without context. Your initial claim is that an appreciable amount of the 700k mobilized forces were pressganged off the streets, so the evidentiary standard needs to be higher.
Did you even read the axios piece? https://www.axios.com/2022/06/15/ukraine-1000-casualties-day-donbas-arakhamia
200-500 dead per day and 1000 tatal casualties per day in the donbass alone. Per the ukrainian negotiator working directly for Zelensky.
Sorry I don't know the Ukrainian term for their whitehouse so used Zelensky to stand in for the Office and Senior leadership. A normal linguistic convention for world leaders if you ever attributed anything to Biden or trump that came from Jen Psaki or Sean Spicer.
Sorry i was trying to let you save face by giving you multiple sources the most face saving of which dips down in the direction of your estimate... but lets be real Ukrainain officials have been lying about every operational detail then openly admitting they were lying at every point in this war... so I'm going to take the higher number that even they admitted.
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You say "none of even the serious pro-Ukraine people expect them to win the fight." and I ask define "win". The Fins "lost" the winter war by all official accounts, but that's not how history remembers it.
You talk about "high energy announcements" I ask who, when, where? Because the way I remember it is guy's like you Shakesneer, Cimafra, AlphanumericSprawl Et Al predicting Kiev's collapse and Moscow's inevitable victory "any day now" for 7 months now while at the same time I was getting derided for suggesting that any Russian incursion into western Ukraine would likely end in a bloodbath. You might disagree but I'm feeling pretty validated in my priors, where as yours appear to have been thoroughly falsified.
Ditto so called the claims of so-called "intellectuals"
Continuing, 200 - 500 deaths out of 1.5 million or so aint nothing, but it aint exactly something either. Yet somehow Zelensky admitting after the fact that that the ISW's initial estimates of Ukrainain casualties in the first few weeks of the war (despite those estimates being substantially higher than the official tally) were largely accurate is somehow supposed to to prove the Russia partisan's claims that that the ISW is hopelessly biased in favor of Ukraine. I don't see it.
You say
and I reply that the first statement is a patent falsehood, I get that as a Canadian and as a pot-smoker you have difficulty with long term memory so I will remind you that back in March the city limits of both Kiev and Kharkiv were under immediate threat not so much any more. as for the latter statement it is trivially true because all offensives get uncomfortable.
Hey, leave us pot smokers out of it.
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You really should, Ukrainians are not like Afghanis, or if they are, they're closer to the Taliban.
Oh well.
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