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Comment by neoromantique | Hacker News Reader

Russian losses are significantly higher, from what I hear in first hand reports are 3-4x at the very conservative end.

What you are posting is not factual.

I mean, are Zelensky or Syrskyi willing to share truthful information with you in private? If so - good for you, otherwise I'm not sure what "first hand" reports you can use. I'm relying mostly on data about obituaries collected on both sides as proxy for true figures.

first hand reports from friends who are fighting the war every day. I'm sure the very lacking obituaries that Russia is actively fighting to suppress will give you a better picture.

So anecdotes from biased sources?

If you use Russian recruitment and army size numbers, you get much more realistic figures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja6-espHVSE. Russia is up to ~700k to 800k casualties Russia has lost ~3-4x more people than Ukraine so far.

I think that's probably a good estimate for the Russian side, while 200k casualties total for Ukraine is a joke. Aren't even their official figures for wounded in the 400k range?

Do invading armies suffer more casualties than defenders ?

sometimes yes, sometimes no. In both US iraq wars, the US had way fewer casualties than Iraq. Invading is harder than defending, but a country won't invade unless they think they are likely to succeed with acceptable losses.

It depends.

In this particular case Russia doesn't seem to care care about lives and uses WW1 style of waves of meat, which of course drastically increases losses

This is the most recorded war in history and I know someone(History Legends)offering a good amount if you can show him videos of these Russian meat wave attacks .

Ukraine didn't release casualty figures for a long time (though to be fair, Russia government doesn't exactly post daily casualty figures either, the Russian casualty figure is divined by infering what we can from Russian media), the Western press released a figure for the Ukrainian forces, which is probably quite low, and the figure hasn't increased in almost a year.

It's sort of like how Western press has been claiming for over a year that 20,000 people have perished in Gaza, and the figure never goes up.

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