kraze

Not KIA, casualties. When Ukraine reports casualties it literally says casualties. Right now those are close to 10k and most are calculated based on stuff destroyed. E.g. 100 tanks destroyed = 300 casualties. 4x VDV il-76 shot down before they could paradrop = around 800 casualties. And so on. It's obviously impossible to determine exactly how many of those are dead or are they just wounded (in case of VDV planes though you can say those are most definitely all dead because high altitude plane crash/fireball). But press translates casualties as KIA for some reason.

So this is how russian armored vehicles look after sanctions

B..but they weren't empty on paper!

Apparently russians completely left Enerhodar (after robbing what they could) and ZNPP, which is now confirmed, to continue their advance either on Mariupol or Zaporizhya... ...which means they have no troops to occupy a 50k pop town.

It's worth noting that Zhytomyr and Bila Tserkva aren't anywhere close to the ground battles - so russians fully expected people to try and live a somewhat normal life, incl. perhaps taking kids to school. There's just no excuse, no "american drone operator" - it's another straight warcrime in a long streak of warcrimes that will keep on going with the West showing fear every step of the way - at least give us those planes.

Collateral damage and purposeful leveling of cities are two different things. A drone operator making a mistake or a "mistake" - and a whole russian airforce bombing appartment blocks can't be compared. Saying that US killed some civilians somewhere via a drone strike on a military target is the same as sending a whole squadron targeting civilian hospitals is ridiculous Also because that drone operator will most likely face a tribunal and russian pilots will just get medals.

It's like that for russians today. No other country acts like that in a modern war. Nobody else levels cities anymore, murdering civilians on purpose, it's all about precise strikes on the military objects.

About the "green corridor" in Mariupol: sigh.

If they take Mariupol they have that "bridge" on paper. It's not like that very moment Ukraine is going to call them and be like "Congratulations! you have a road connecting Russia and Crimea! Please don't turn off your console while reality is being saved" and let them keep it. What I'm saying is that the south is notoriously hard to defend when you have an empty steppe with no forest areas in the north and a sea in the south. As for Kyiv - massive nope at this point unless something changes. Human waves at Hostomel are also mind boggling.

They certainly don't have enough to level the whole country. But enough to make more and more people hate them. They also refuse to let civilians leave, because in their doctrine they need someone to terrorize to lower the will to resist. Can't terrorize a guy with a gun. Granted at this moment russians agreed to give "green corridor" to evacuate civilians from Mariupol starting in 10 minutes and I would be surprised (actually want to be) if it doesn't end up in a tragedy as usual.

Last big major war with that kind of involvement that russian army took part in was WW2. Even during WW2 much of Soviet victory was dependent in half on non-stop human waves and in half on American support. And they also had Ukrainians and Belarusians fighting for them (which actually suffered the most casualties). They can do neither today - also because unlike WW2 there's no legit casus belli apart from "you go die in a foreign country so we can restore USSR" and that's weak sauce when you aren't winning easily. Can they enforce total mobilization to just throw bodies at us? Sure they can. Thing is the war isn't fought by the numbers for a long long time and throwing scared, broken human waves at ever angrier defenders may as well cause massive unrest back home.

WW2 had no precision munitions and no "hearts and minds"-like doctrines. Pilots during WW2 didn't have much say in where their dumb and completely non-aerodynamic bomb will go. It was pray and spray. Now a pilot has to target a civilian building on purpose to hit it. Even with junky soviet munitions his plane shows him where that bomb will go on his HUD. So comparing WW2 to modern war is wrong.

He is censoring the media because in his nest of vultures he's afraid of looking weak. And if people see that their dictator is weak - some opportunists may get an idea. African tribal warlord system being an extreme example of this but it's easier to demonstrate. Warlords aren't getting dethroned because people suddenly realize what they are and say "no" to violence - warlords are getting dethroned by a more ruthless, opportunist runner up that just wants his place. Russia is, of course, a lot more "civilized" compared but you get my point. The moment Stalin showed weakness - he was immediately poisoned, his buddies killed and everybody found themselves on a brink of an all out nuclear war for the next 40 years because Khrushchev took the throne from him.

Another Su-25 pilot was taken alive today. But no upcoming teary-eyed statement of his on camera will make me ever understand how, knowing that those targets are just civilian buildings with absolutely defenseless people, often hospitals, one can pull a trigger and feel OK about the multiple murders and shrapnel traumas/decapitations that follow. I just don't get it. One has to be absolutely devoid of humanity.

Part of russian modus operandi is to lie (remember those teary-eyed POWs that said "we thought we came to do a training exercise" and then docs were found where everybody consented to take part in an aggressive war abroad?) - another thing to remember is that only a minute before he was taken POW - he was still coming to kill us and had no reservations about it. Can I say that he feels sorry only because he got caught? For comparison - Belarus hasn't sent in the troops yet (not in any major way at least) because troops there are rioting and a few military trains got derailed by some "caring citizens" - delaying that attack, hopefully indefinitely. But this guy, having a choice, signed an agreement to come and kill us. He had a choice, they all do. And, once again, I'm all for showing a good treatment of POWs, because hearts and minds stuff does work to some degree. Excluding artillery guys and CAS pilots naturally. Those are bound to suffer critical ammo cookoffs and repeated blunt traumas from trees they eject into respectively. I hope you understand why.

Russians aren't interested in ceasefire. This war is ideological to them. A some kind of a retarded jihad. They are hell-bent on destroying Ukraine and doing ethnic cleansing of Ukrainians and won't agree on anything less. Any ceasefire will be temporary and russians will just do murder or deportation on territories they occupy (see Crimea and Donbass, except this time it will be much worse due to these territories resisting). That would be letting our people die there for nothing, unprotected.

I have doubts that putin will risk open confrontation with the West even now, especially now that the world has seen how much of russian might is really just on paper. He didn't do it with Stingers, NLAWs and Javelins, which already caused a very huge loss for his army - why would he do it with Patriots? Especially in such scenario that worked well for US during cold war. However if the West keeps letting him do what he does for some more time - he may really go off the rails but it may be too late for all of us. His army shelled a nuclear power plant of all things and EU is trying to pretend like it wasn't a big deal. "Hey it didn't explode so everything is fine". That's literally enabling putin right there.

So why not play by the same rules and send a patriot crew as official and legal volunteers of International Legion - can even ask a few veteran ex-members of the US air defenses if they are willing to go of their own desire and if yes - then just let them. And you get perfectly deniable thing going: Providing Patriots as is (in quantities equaling willing crew members to man them) and also crew members not being actually sent there by US - which would be legit. After all this isn't about just two armies clashing, it's about russians doing major war crimes avoiding punishment

Yes, but also no. Today two Su-25 were shot down doing just that - bombing civilian buildings. One was hit and downed with Igla of all things

When talking about proper AAA only something like Patriots will help. US / UK were sending us Stingers because they legit thought the war will quickly turn into a very long and bloody war of insurgency, slowly bleeding Russia - but with current events it appears that much suffering can be prevented if russians will stop having an advantage in the air, not to mention most likely shorten the war considerably without it ever going too far. TL;DR: a few "gifted" Patriot systems manned by the International Legion "volunteers" will make all the difference in the world while formally keeping NATO out of it.

Last 8 years have seen no tries to dislodge anything because those years were spent preparing for the current events, both militarily and diplomatically. Nothing has changed inside russian army, which is still stuck with the doctrine from the 80s, while our army used maximum US and UK instructor help to upgrade our doctrine to the modern way of fighting. Unfortunately most of our technology is still outdated but see what difference modernization of tactics makes. Now if only we had a modern anti-air defense there would be a lot lot less civilian casualties. I mean NATO is quite pussy when it comes to russian bluff and that's why russians grew so mad and out of control to a point of starting this war due to no punishment - but could've at least tried to help us solve the AAA problem which would make things infinitely less complicated.

Simple answer: there are a lot of them. Slightly less simple: they fanatically worship and follow their "great leader" until they get hit by the javelin in the face. Then it's turn of a next fanatic cannon fodder group. One soldier had words written on his armor that quoted putin "you are all going to die and we will go to heaven". Hostomel, a prime example, is like this giant scrap heap at this point, spetsnaz, VDV, kadyrovites got wiped there multiple times at this point and yet they keep coming as if expecting a different result each time.

https://russianfield.com/netvoine (in russian) According to sociology - 58.8% russians currently support the war outright. More than enough to bring another "putin" into power if this one goes but nothing changes globally in there.

They shouldn't worry. We wouldn't be keeping it, just give it away to the US.