dimitrig said:
movielover said:
Puppet Scott Ritter estimated kill rates from a podcast today:
- 30 Russias KIA per day / ('200 a week')
- 100 American KIA in Vietnam / a day
- 1,000 Ukrainians KIA / a day
Do you really believe 1000 Ukrainians are being killed every day but only 30 Russians?
Is that soldiers or just old women and children?
The kill ratio has been heavily lopsided, that much is certain, though it's hard to ascertain with precision how lopsided it has been, it's anywhere between 5 to 1 to 8 to 1 overall.
This being said, the current situation in Bakhmut has been one where complete noobs conscripts have been taken from the streets of Kharkov, Odessa, Dnipro etc and sent to the "meat grinder" to plug gaps, by the thousands, going against hardened, well-organized Wagner squads, with no air support, artillery support, not even mortars, just light weapons they barely know how to use. This is where we have kill ratios well above 10 to 1.
In cases where Wagner is going against more hardened troops in Bakhmut like the 94th and special forces, like the battle for the metalworks industrial zone in the north of the city, the loss ratio still favors Russia, as they have far greater artillery and air support resources, because the Ukrainians are heavily constrained in their supply lines to that front, and they start with far smaller resources (down to only 300 artillery pieces for the whole front, with something like 10 shells/day available per canon). But that ratio is somewhere around 5 to 1 in favor of the Russians, vs up to 30 to 1 against the untrained, panicky "bunnies", poor souls that are being sacrificed by the tens of thousands in the last few months.
I would refer you to the recent WaPo article, which is a rare candid account of what is really going on in a sea of MSM propaganda:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/03/13/ukraine-casualties-pessimism-ammunition-shortage/"On the front lines, however, the mood is dark.
Kupol, who consented to having his photograph taken and said he understood he could face personal blowback for giving a frank assessment,
described going to battle with newly drafted soldiers who had never thrown a grenade, who readily abandoned their positions under fire and who lacked confidence in handling firearms.
His unit withdrew from Soledar in eastern Ukraine in the winter after being surrounded by Russian forces who later captured the city. Kupol recalled how hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers in units fighting alongside his battalion simply abandoned their positions, even as fighters for Russia's Wagner mercenary group pressed ahead.
After a year of war, Kupol, a lieutenant colonel, said his battalion is unrecognizable. Of about 500 soldiers, roughly 100 were killed in action and another 400 wounded, leading to complete turnover. Kupol said he was the sole military professional in the battalion, and he described
the struggle of leading a unit composed entirely of inexperienced troops."I get 100 new soldiers," Kupol said. "They don't give me any time to prepare them. They say, 'Take them into the battle.' They just drop everything and run. That's it. Do you understand why?
Because the soldier doesn't shoot. I ask him why, and he says, 'I'm afraid of the sound of the shot.' And for some reason, he has never thrown a grenade."
So yes, I do believe that the kill ratio in a fight between Wagner squads and Ukrainian conscripts who are literally afraid of the sound of their AKs is going to be somewhere around 30 to 1.
This also really shows how cruel and pointless this war is, it is a wholesale massacre of a generation (or two) of Ukrainian men being forcibly sent to their deaths by the tens of thousands.
There is no military solution for Ukraine, this is something I have been repeating for a year, and now this reality is only starting to emerge through the wartime propaganda.
