this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Edit: apologies - this actually isn’t a very good comparison. The chart I linked is actually just deaths, not total casualties.

According to this wiki page, the MoD’s numbers would put Russia’s military casualties alone roughly on par with total military and civilian ~~casualties~~ deaths on all sides from the US War on Terror (which lasted about two decades, compared to about 20 months for this newest active phase of the Ukrainian War).

That’s… impressive. And extremely unsustainable.

(Note: not here to litigate the war on terror or whatever you want to call it. This is simply a comparison point.)

[–] Hubi@feddit.de 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's also roughly 5.5 % of the total Soviet military losses during WW2. Pretty insane to think about all these lives being wasted to steal a stretch of land.

[–] remotelove@lemmy.ca 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Russia has the man power, but their command structure and tactics suck ass. Their soldiers have little freedom to adjust when and where they attack and it shows. If Russian troops on the ground were given an objective, and not direction orders directly from generals, we might see a much worse outcome for Ukraine.

If you look at the recent videos from Avdiivka, destroyed Russian armor is piling up in the same spots. There is no adjustment and there is no learning from mistakes, just mass being thrown at a spot where their leadership wants to get political wins.

These are the same tactics from WW2 and they are resulting in the same scale of losses, comparatively. Leadership doesn't think of their soldiers as people and it's gross. If anything, this war is not just an attack on Ukraine, but it's genocide being committed on Russians by the Russian government.

[–] Land_Strider@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

I'm not intending to say any war crime, especially committed towards civilian victims, which any army at war has and will keep committing with varying scales, can be acceptable, but consider the average Russian soldier's mental health at this point in this war.

Now that the saner, civilian population who lived their lives in comparable civic environments and acted mostly accordingly are conscripted into a known meat grinder, being dogged on higher-ups every day and waiting to be thrown into the next meat grinder in a few months at maximum, how can they keep their sanity?

This is not just one man's doing, though. Such sinister governing organizations need a lot of similarly-thinking inhuman piece of shits to get together to have such influence on millions of lives and keep their heads, let alone positions of power. This includes all powers of legislation and justice departments, financial bodies, media, local instigators and more. The total number of these people would still amount to a fraction of the normally-peacefully-living population affected, but their power to manipulate the outspoken minds the latter is to big to overcome by the latter population that usually minds its own business and is naturally disorganized.

Most governments these are still run by criminal syndicates, or feudal lords that play tag-team with their seemingly-competitors, that give the population a facade of voting them in willingly. Of course except for a few select people that actually worked mostly in favour of the general population in most democracies' histories. Not even gonna talk about failed "democracies'" like Russia or Turkey.

So yeah, I agree that this war is Russian government committing genocide on Russian people. Average Ukrainian civilians or soldiers at least know that the people of the world sympathize with them when they are at risk of losing everything. Average conscripted Russian is all alone in the mud and blood. Overall a war without any silver lining for either party, wagen on undeserving people of Ukraine and waged with unwilling people of Russia.

[–] homoludens@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago

Wikipedia states 4.5 million dead as a result of the "War on Terror".