Literally risked it all for a little nookie
Obviously never saw this:
But just to hedge on the pessimist side, some of the night video of a huge secondary explosion doesn’t seem likely, as a EW plane should not carry any munitions. It’s not a refueler either.
It’s all kind of mysterious. I saw claims of a possible second plane in the area also being hit, but not secondary explosions. It’s hard to identify a weapon with the required range. S-200? Patriot with much greater reach than what is published? Could be the Russians are telling the truth for once with the friendly fire story.
A plane that size is going to be carrying a couple hundred thousand pounds of fuel in its tanks.
zelensky puts the number of ukrainian armed forces losses at 31,000. although US estimated 70k. taking even the conservative estimate of russian losses being 350k, that’s 5x-10x. absolutely insane.
Zelensky didn’t give a number for Ukrainian wounded. I assume the 350k Russian number is for casualties, which includes both killed and wounded. At any rate, 350k Russian casualties is in line with what’s on the wikipedia page. Based on wiki numbers, it looks like the casualty ratio is something like 2-1 in favor of Ukraine.
zelensky said dead. counting wounded would be an absolute nightmare, there’s just no way accurate methodology on either side. plus there’s the game of not revealing too much.
unofficial counts of russian dead went over 500+k, but that counts wagner/et al, conscripted convicts, LDNR mobilized, and maybe even foreign mercenaries. 350k is the “more realistic” number of russian dead which can be connected to actual russian armed forces. there’s no way to account for their true number, but based on the amount of lying RF does, i think their actual losses are even more terrible, not less.
2-1 in favor of ukraine would basically be a total win for russia, which we do not see, and therefore i dismiss as the fog of war.
350k+ dead for Russia? What is that based on? That’s a huge number
Russian dead at 350k is nearly double what Ukraine claims. 500k is Mearsheimer-level accounting. Ofc it’s possible, but as far as I can tell there’s no good reason to believe third-party estimates are that far off.
Crazy to think about 5.5 million died in siege of Leningrad over about the same time.
this is from your wiki link, which Ukraine compiles from battlefield intelligence and intercepts, to account for things like ship personnel, strikes on crimea.
the numbers are often through official ukrainian news organizations. i believe they got adjusted down by 50k a couple of times. are these numbers intentionally inflated? of course that’s possible. yet, they do appear to correlate with daily reports of fighting, rather than RU MoD estimates which appear out of nowhere, and end up inflating total ukrainian forces and materiel by 3x.
If you check the citation [115] that is supposed to back up the claim that losses mean killed, it refers to an article that mentions “lost” soldiers, at least in translation. So the citation doesn’t really support losses=killed, afaict.
The next citation [116] is an interview with Chuck Pfarrer, whose expertise is, uh, at least at times, questionable.
Anyway, the wiki writer clearly thinks the 409,820 are killed+wounded. The cite [117] is the source of the 180k killed number, and has Zelensky saying this. If you believe him on the 31k Ukrainian KIA, I don’t see why you would doubt him on the 180k Russian dead.
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ukraine armed forces does not publish a total of killed, it only publishes the “losses” number currently 409k. that 180k is basically out of nowhere, it’s by piecing together zelensky’s ua killed number this week and 5-1 comment to fox news back in december, in which is not clear whether he means fighting in then current battles ratio, or total for the war, a pretty significant difference.
the citation isn’t bullshit, but it puts killed at 75,000, much lower than either us or uk intel. the team writing it is a well known mediazona investigation that publishes regular updates a few months apart, but they specifically mention that 1) they take the absolute minimum confirmed deaths and apply a very conservative statistical multiplier to it, sometimes adjusting for region, 2) they keep contract, volunteer, and mobilized soldier numbers separate as far as they can ascertain who the person was, 3) they carry no data on LDNR and foreign mercenaries, and 4) the prison data is likely very delayed and incorrect as well, eg both wagner and mod drew from prisons at different times.
I guess the references in the wiki article have been edited since you took your screenshot. The table now looks like this
Sorry for the confusion. The Zelensky info:
He also said that 180,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the war, and that along with the wounded, Russia has suffered 500,000 casualties.
Although the story says he wasn’t specific as to the time period “in the war”, this seems clear enough.
ok for the sake of this thread, i just fast forwarded through the entire interview and found the place that question was asked. zelensky did say 180k, though he also specifically says “russians”, which he usually does not use for donbass and crimea, one factor of discrepancy. and he also referenced us and uk intelligence in previous questions, so that could also explain him using that number. 500k is higher than 409k that the armed forces released earlier that day, maybe also from a different source. i didn’t read his answer as misleading, so we can just go with that.
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At this point, it’s not all that surprising that advisors from NATO countries are in Ukraine. Sholz is pissing people off for no good reason.
The Russian AF seems to be pushing their pilots’ luck and is paying a price. I think the count in this article already needs to be updated. If reports today are right, it’s now 13 planes lost since mid-Feb.
I mean I didn’t watch the whole Tucker-Putin show, but I don’t recall seeing him make these faces in Putin’s presence.
https://x.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1763238571077447808?s=20
The Russians have decided that the chance to make gains near Avdiivka is worth the risk to their planes, due to the Ukrainians having been pushed out of fortifications that have been there for 10 years. They have dramatically upped the rate of their air strikes using glide bombs which unfortunately form their pilots have to be launched from high altitude. We’ll see how that goes form them.
https://twitter.com/axios/status/1763246659545313516?t=6c4LCtv-pxoCWbRlKS6DjQ&s=19