The number of soldiers sent this time was estimated by the South Korean intelligence service to be between 1000 and 3000 soldiers. It doesn’t make a dent to DPRK’s military, and it also doesn’t affect the war against humanity very much, because the Russia loses that many soldiers per day or two.

They’ve got tens and tens of this size, but not hundreds and hundreds.

One such explosion destroys typically ammunition worth a couple of weeks of use. It does hurt the Russian military quite nicely, but it’s not something that alone could end the war. It’s one of the many things that, when all done, will together win Ukraine the war.

It forces the Russia to send more meatwaves, which is a good thing: their ability to recruit soldiers has not been able to increase from the level of 25 000 to 35 000 per month, so if mire than 1000 soldiers.are removed from their army per month, their army shrinks.

People are telling you that sources that don’t have a track record of lying are typically good sources. Beyond that, you can use the FIRMS map for reviewing if an attack has really taken place. It’s a system for detecting forest fires by satellites, but it also detects any other bigger fires. You can use it for example to see where the actual front lines are because where a lot of artillery shells explode, there’s a “forest fire” on the map. It might not show everything because if there happen to be clouds overneath, the satellites will not recognise the fire. So, it might give you false negatives, but usually not false positives.

I don’t think this one was dementia. Qt least not primarily. He’s used to gaslighting in his personal life, and here he’s simply gaslighting the whole world on television. If there’s some dementia to this, then that is not to understand that you cannot gaslight a million people at once, because the point of gaslighting is to make its victim think they are going crazy and imagining things.

Though… Can it be that for the MAGA audience this gaslighting does work and they really will believe Trump has never called Zelenskyj a dictator?

The paper is a screengrab from this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ERkPYntsPLU

From a farmer who had a donkey? Those are animals that exist. I don’t really know why people have donkeys, but for a reason or another, they do. And are able to sell them.

Maybe someone has them just as a hobby, like other people have horses? Not a common thing, that’s for sure, but a phenomenon that can exist.

Also, you can see the donkey on the video, so I’d say it does exist.

According to this, the French intelligence assumes the Russian artillery shell production to be 3,7 million per year. That translates to quite precisely 10 000 shells per day. Here’s the image that shows the numbers:

There’s indeed been a campaign for destroying the Russian logistics. A lot of trucks have been targeted in the last week or so.

This looks like an exercise you’ll be doing for the rest of your life. Jump left, jump front, jump right, dive down. Until the end of your days about 25 seconds later.

But, maybe it helps the soldiers feel safe, so they are less likely to revolt before it’s too late?

Hm… A brigade consists of 3000 to 7000 soldiers. And the article says “many” have one or several amputees. That would mean something between 1 in 7000 and 5 in 3000. Yeah, that’s in the ballpark of a tenth of a percent or a hundredth of a percent. True, not terribly significant. Though, many of them are probably good trainers!

It’s a very different thing to give the amputee crutches and to give them high-quality prosthetics. The Ukrainians you refer to as “cripples” aren’t really cripples, because they can move almost normally. Also, they are used very differently: Russian troops need to advance on foot, Ukrainian troops need to arrive to a location in a vehicle and stay to defend it.

I wouldn’t say the two cases are very similar at all.

This is actually very important news that is contrary to what I have thought! The Russia mostly is not able to give prostethic legs to its wounded soldiers, Ukraine is. That changes the military loss ratios dramatically!

The ratio of total military losses between Ukraine and the Russia has been around 1:2½, while the ratio between populations is 1:3½. However, the ratio between dead is 1:4½. Anything where the ratio is smaller than the population ratio is favouring Ukraine. Now, if a sizable amount of the non-dead military losses in Ukraine are able to return to duty, then a large share of those are not military losses at all! That would mean that even in the number of military losses including the wounded Ukraine is doing better than the Russia. What share of the “irrecoverable” wounds are losses of limbs? Does anyone know?

You mean, such an army is not realistically going to come to existence? Giving visibility to the idea is a way to slowly increase the likelihood of it someday becoming reality.

This one has optical guidance, so it can work without a radar. Still, the most important AD targets are radards. The Russia has hundreds and hundreds of AD launchers, but only couple tens of radars, apparently. Destroy the radar, and the launchers’ usefulness is mostly lost. Still a nice hit. It probably had a crew that more or less knew its job and is now hopefully non-alive.

My understanding is that the casualty numbers only include severe casualties - that they are mostly unhealable. Also, hasn’t there already been more severely injured Russian soldiers than there are currently Russian soldiers serving on the front? If a significant share of the crippled really were sent back into action, we would see a LOT of them. The ones on crutches seem to be something of a rare case, based on how they are being talked about by the Ukrainian soldiers.

But yeah, it’s annoying that the “Russian losses” data is so ambiguously defined. I wish there was something of an official list visible for what injury gets you in that statistic and what doesn’t. Still: The earlier rate of roughly 1000 to 1300 per day was enough to make proper training impossible. We know that the Russia had to send everyone more or less immediately to the front. And that the size of Russian forces on the front apparently has not significantly grown. So, the recruitment capacity is such that it can roughly keep balance at a loss rate of 1000 to 1300 ambiguously defined casualties per day. And now the number was about 40-50 % over that for several months.

I’ve been pondering this number and have come to the conclusion that the official Ukrainian statistic most likely tells the number of unrecoverable losses of the Russian armed forces. But, this is just a somewhat-educated guess, based on an understanding that the 1000 to 1300 per day were enough to keep the Russian army from developing a reserve.

What a crazy situation we are in! It looks like we’ll get out of this reasonably fine, but there is still a risk that Ukraine will be pressured by the west into a peace deal where they don’t get Crimea back. (Donetsk and Luhansk… I don’t think they care much for those) If Ukraine doesn’t get Crimea back, I don’t understand why the Russia would not attack Ukraine again in a couple of years.

Trudeau probably won’t affect Trump directly, but knowing about his call affects other western leaders. And the US populace as well.

Well, anything can be done. If all NATO member countries want to let Ukraine in, they can do so.

But of course, Hungary is a NATO country. So, no way really.

Such messages are typically read by aides in the first place. The president might also read them, but the aides figure out what context is relevant and how the message should be interpreted.

Putin’s information bubble is a very interesting phenomenon. He never uses Internet. For anything. Ever. So, all OSINT goes completely missing on him.

His aides probably do print blog texts off the Internet for him to read in paper format, but of course those can be hand-picked and even altered to suit the aide’s needs. Atop that, Putin puts a high emphasis on trustworthiness when choosing aides. Skill is much less important than loyalty. And it looks very much like the definition of trustworthiness is that the aide’s reports show roughly the same data as other aides’ reports. The current aides give him strongly falsified reports and anyone writing something contradictory gets sacked.

This means, Putin’s understanding of many situations is extremely skewed, because he only receives information through his aides and his country’s official news. It is likely that he is being told highly inflated numbers for Ukrainian losses. Or, I’d be very surprised if the numbers weren’t inflated at all, and the only question is to what extent they are exaggerated.

If his understanding of the relative losses is strongly skewed, the strategy you’re guessing makes sense.

Let’s hope so. The Russia has a recruitment capacity of 25 000 to 35 000 roaches per month. That makes roughly 1000 per day. That’s the amount that keeps the Russia from being able to train any new soldiers. (if the losses are smaller than the recruitment capacity, a reserve can eventually be built and trained. If they are bigger, all recruits go almost immediately to front without useful training)

Everything going above that number means the Russian army decreasing in size. The 1800 per day meant that the size of their military was decreasing by 800 roaches per day. I’d like to see it return to those numbers.

But also, Putin had high hopes regarding Trump. Now it looks like those hopes have been possibly in vain, because it looks plausible that Europe will remain supporting Ukraine even if USA was to completely stop all support. As long as the political situation looked promising for the Russia’s ambitions, it made sense throwing much more soldiers to the meat grinder than can be replaced: if the war was to end very soon, the losses would not pose any danger fire the Russia, but every km² they have occupied by that point is a km² of the Russia.

Now that it looks like the war will definitely continue for several months still, Putin cannot afford to let his army diminish in size. What’s interesting is that everything over 35 000 per month (or even over just 25 000?) has been permanent losses from the Russian military capacity. That’s been a huge change in the last couple of months!