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At the same time, the assumption is that there will be no backlash inside the country if 'infinite' amount of soldiers die ?
I've got a high quality 486 processor here but it still gets slaughtered by a cheap, ropey CPU I bought last year. A high-quality Soviet tank is a high-quality outdated tank that's very vulnerable to modern weaponry.
T-72s and such are also kept updated with modern gizmos like reactive defense, etc.
I'm curious why they have chosen not to deploy them, then.
Corruption and mixed priorities meant that most of the storage depots didn't see regular maintenance done, so vehicles that should have been "mostly workable" were basically rust-buckets. However estimates put the stockpiles at like 8000 T-72s, 10000 BMPs, etc., and even if only 1/3 of them are viable that still represents thousands of vehicles.
Logistics are another problem though. Even if only 1/3 are viable you have to ship repairs, replacement parts, and the entire vehicle across huge distances and that takes a lot of time. If there is a T-55 in a depo that's closer and it doesn't need parts -- great, get that to the front now; it'll do rear-line duty or something.
"High Quality" is also relative -- virtually all of NATO's, and Russia's, tanks are upgraded late-Cold-War models, but there is a non-trivial difference in the late-Soviet vs. post-Soviet era developments. Getting an old T-72 working might be easy enough, but getting that upgraded to the T-72B3M edition is a different story.
Have you seen that smoking aircraft carrier? Russian military equipment is often in a terrible state.
Of course they also have this brand new super tank, the T-14 Armata. No idea why they're not fielding that one, but I suspect it doesn't work.
How exactly is the massive deployment of mobile artillery supposed to result in less deaths?
In any case, the end of the war would obviously not be the end of the world. Isn't the whole point of the aid for Ukraine that it is supposed to contain Russia and deplete its military and economic capabilities?
So yeah, my point to parent asking why Russia might not be throwing everything at once.
In most cases they're there to get shot at enough while drones watch and tag enemy positions for artillery strikes.
In peer- or near-peer conflicts arty accounts for a high, often monumentally high, number of casualties -- easily 75% or more. The prisoners aren't expected to win, that would require lots of training, trust, gear, and planning; they're expected to draw fire, and the VDV or main-line regulars will clean up the rest.
The highest quality soviet tank is a rust bucket compared to even low end western tanks from 25 years ago.
Ukraine is smaller than Russia, but by no means a small country. Ukraine has 40 million people and is far more motivated to fight than Russia is. Russians really have nothing to win here; it's just about Putin's pride. Meanwhile Ukrainians are fighting for their lives, their country, and the future of their children. These are powerful motivators, and go a long way towards explaining Ukraine's unwavering morale in the face of overwhelming odds.
Ukraine also fights much smarter. Russia uses very primitive tactics: use massive artillery to flatten entire cities, move infantry in, and if they get killed, flatten the place with artillery again. And then they ran low on artillery ammunition, not to mention that many of their barrels have been so overused they can't shoot straight anymore, so now they've resorted to human wave attacks. Ukrainian defenders of Bakhmut have described wave after wave of Russian attackers crawling over the dead bodies of their dead comrades only to get gunned down too. There's no sophistication at all, and coordination is often poor.
Meanwhile Ukraine with its more limited resources executes very smart attacks. Most of the time they target Russian supply lines to make it harder for Russia to fight. But sometimes they've undermined Russian positions so much that they can suddenly grab an enormous swath of territory, like they did east of Kharkiv and west of Kherson.
I frankly don't see how Ukraine can lose this. In some ways they have already won. Although of course it really depends on how you define victory and loss here; both sides have lost a lot, and any end result where Putin is in a position where he can try again later, means that the war for Ukraine is not really over.
What exactly is that assertion even based on?
People talk like it is some kind of a definite fact, but there is no reference to any particular source or a universal explanation of how this was deduced.
well for starters the fact that there is no record of him saying that
Just before the war, he said he was not going to invade. Then he did it anyway. His words are meaningless. His actions are what counts. And he obviously did try to take Kyiv. There were paradrops intended to take Kyiv in hours, even. There was a push by more forces to take Kyiv in days. It all failed because they encountered far more serious resistance than they expected, and it turned out they lacked the supplies for a longer operation, and couldn't get those supplies organised in the face Ukrainian defense specifically targeting Russian supply lines. Eventually they couldn't make any progress and withdrew. Though not before murdering lots of civilians in Boucha.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/02/ukraine-dead-o...
that started after both sides hurled molotov cocktails at each other?
The world is complicated, yes, but your comment reducing this to "one side burned the other side alive" is disingenuous at best.
Nonetheless, Russia is definitely not winning after 1 year.
Maybe Russia will end up controlling the majority of the land. Just rubbles and ashes.
This is not winning IMHO.
I believe this is wrong. Russia doesn't have 10 times more soldiers now, and regular army isn't deployed in Ukraine; only volunteers (including prisoners), mobilized soldiers and contract army is.
May you elaborate on what your understanding of "regular army" is?
Army of conscripts is around 1-1.5 million soldiers; professional army was about 300 000 soldiers before invasion. It was not enough to win so there was a mobilization of about 400 000 (official numbers) and recruiting volunteers from prisoners.
Not true. They are still flying.
Soviet tanks also have reactive armour. You can easily see those boxes on a photo of a tank. Or did you mean some other kind of armour?
I don’t think anyone’s particularly hopeful about any breakthrough from either side, and the Russians do not seem to be the comically inept force they’re sometimes portrayed as. But it’s no secret that they’re poorly resourced and were ill-prepared for the conflict.
Congratulations now you've traded a soldier with better reflexes than most professional baseball players for a $500 drone.
You men the ones that go extra-boom whenever something hits them?
(just to be clear I mean having the auto-loader under the turret make things extra-spicy when hit even by a grenade or something)
The T-72's jack-in-the-box design flaw is being productively exploited on the battlefield. That's not a "can explode" problem.
Looking at current ratio of Russian and Ukrainian losses, having three times the soldiers is not going to be enough.
Still a lot, esp. you consider the primary draftable age groups (e.g. 18-30), and that not all males in that group would be military worthy, i.e. medical or mental disabilities, etc.
Also a big deal if you consider that most of them are the wealthier, smarter, more mobile parts of the population, which will exacerbate the brain-drain and impact the economy. A lot of those guys aren't gonna go back anytime soon, or at all.
This a post-Covid era. Everything that is "smart and mobile" is also remote. Which means that physical relocation doesn't exactly imply brain drain, especially given that wealthier destinations such as the US or some parts of Europe are harder to reach then ever.
What precipitates from these issues isn't always clear at the outset.
Which is, go figure, why Poland, the Baltics, the Czechs, etc. are so eager to support Ukraine...
https://apnews.com/article/czech-ukraine-russia-government-p...
And Putin wants all of that back.
> western europe managed fine then
But eastern Europe didn't manage fine, and they're the ones now pushing western Europe into putting more effort into stopping Putin.
Western Europe mostly just wants to trade with Putin. This is most visible in Germany of course (technically central Europe, but the old east-west divide is suddenly relevant again), but also France. They've been slow to accept that Putin is not really a trade partner but an aggressor. They ignored it when Putin destroyed Chechnya. They ignored it when he took chunks out of Georgie. They ignored it when Putin took Crimea. Only when he tried to take Donbass did they finally start to see there might be a problem. Meanwhile Poland and the Baltics have been pointing out that Putin is a threat for two decades now. They were undeniably right to join NATO.