Kraft

I am curious about the tally. Lets see, Avdiivka was the most one sided battle in terms of vehicle losses.

224 tanks, more than twice the total Ukrainian losses. Best Case scenario, a 10-1 ratio.
Using the Swedish FOI as a source, russia builds/refurbishes ~44 tanks/m. So they are short about a month, or gained 2 months if all the abandoned vehicles can be recovered.

With a production rate of close to 0.
And foreign aid (pledged or delivered) as of my knowledge: 0.
Loss of 21, that will likely not be replaced within.. half a year, full year? Unknown.
You can draw it parallel for IFVs and the rest, although I think those are more likely to be replenished by the West albeit in insufficient numbers.

Yeah, we shall see.
 

A bit TOO MUCH theater for even a charade of a commitment to the oath they took to serve. Consider that just about half of the country voted for the Party in charge now - by a *5*seat majority out of *435* seats. And, half the country voted for the other Party. But the Speaker insists as per the (made up)  “Hastert Rule”, that only bills that will pass with *only* Republican votes will be brought to the Floor for a vote. Although both parties in the House indulge in this defiance of the full nation’s voters, only this Party enshrines the practice as a Rule. 
All students of the USA political system must remember this: No legislation is enacted without passing both the Senate and the House. So these 5 seats, out of the entire 435, control the entire federal legislative functioning of the United States of America. 5 individuals, no matter how wacko they maybe. And they are. That is, unless the Speaker acts as Speaker of the entire House, which formally he is. And his Party can boot him out if he does, like they did to his predecessor. Takes some guts to do the right thing…

I would argue it is more a result of the overly cautious escalation management, which threw a pebble while russia was going all in and showed little to no signs of serious backing off.
 
 

Reportedly another field road was cut in the north. Corridor now has ca. 1,5 kms, part of which is contested. On better side, there are some news that Ukrainian artillery started to work more heavily and some reinforcements may counterattack in the north (among others, some subunits of 1st Armoured Brigade are supposedly in vicinity).

What a squealing little worm.
I know LotR is more popular here (for good reasons) but he reminds me of that rat of Ronald Weasely who turned out to be a cowardly traitor

Completely not true.  Just a few GOPers could simply vote to pass the aid.  Last I checked 6 out of ~218 GOPers is all it takes.  Might make folks feel better to blame it on the crazies, but then why don't the allegedly sane major of GOPers simply vote to do the right thing?   The reality is that they vote as a block and simply refuse to do the right thing.

I would argue it is more a result of the overly cautious escalation management, which threw a pebble while russia was going all in and showed little to no signs of serious backing off.
 
 

That is not a security guarantee agreement though. It is about supply of arms, various ways of political cooperation etc. But security guarantee is a type of military alliance which nobody will sign with Ukraine now, obviously.

I understand that but that is not the point.  The point is that in this case democracy has generated a situation where the executive branch of the governement is blocked from realising its preferred policy and in that sense, seems weak.
I am not offering any value judgements on the US constitutional system of checks and balances because I do not have enough knowledge of it. I also have not seen any evidence for longing for a Russian-type governement on this thread.
I am already regretting making that post. 

Please remind me when did the Republicans took the house. If I’m not mistaken, Biden’s admin had almost a year where they could have done almost anything they wanted in terms of aid… but they didn’t.
The slow-rolling of useful equipment, and refusal to give aid in quantity (cluster shells that we aren’t using, old ATACMS, all of the old Bradleys, F16s with volunteer pilots, a cruise missile for every missile that caused a civilian death etc.)… that’s entirely on the executive branch. We’ve all been complaining about this since the beginning of this war.

What a squealing little worm.
I know LotR is more popular here (for good reasons) but he reminds me of that rat of Ronald Weasely who turned out to be a cowardly traitor

I have no right to vote in the US election and try to stay out of very heated discussions on the subject for my own safety's sake - so this is just a brief clarification comment on the general logic of the argument. Here it goes:
Is it not the whole point of Biden administration looking weak and bad that it can be blocked by a group of opposition House members (or, as some say, even one individual, the House speaker)? I mean, an administration which openly states its aims and then cannot carry them through looks weak precisely because of that.

What a squealing little worm.
I know LotR is more popular here (for good reasons) but he reminds me of that rat of Ronald Weasely who turned out to be a cowardly traitor

What a squealing little worm.
I know LotR is more popular here (for good reasons) but he reminds me of that rat of Ronald Weasely who turned out to be a cowardly traitor

On the topic of rotation and casulties, situation in Zenit and Avdiivka overall. 

On the topic of rotation and casulties, situation in Zenit and Avdiivka overall. 

On the topic of rotation and casulties, situation in Zenit and Avdiivka overall. 

On the topic of rotation and casulties, situation in Zenit and Avdiivka overall. 

On the topic of rotation and casulties, situation in Zenit and Avdiivka overall. 

I'd like to a bunch of back-of-the-envelope calculations and present them here for "public scrutiny". Lately I have been fascinated by this data set on confirmed RU KIA. Sadly, I can't embed the individual interactive plots, so I'll just use a screenshot or two, but I'd encourage everyone to take a look for themselves. Especially the breakdowns by branch of service and by time are really interesting.
So these people have been collectively gathering data on at least 43,460 killed RU soldiers from all branches (including PMCs and convicts), sampling from a variety of sources, ranging from social-media obituaries to on-site graveyard visits. I am not sure, if this data set includes L/DNR KIA figures or not, but it seems likely to me, since I found a couple of individual records of KIA high ranking officers that fought in (former) L/DNR formations. Now the total figure is obviously too low and one must also keep in mind that the degree of inaccuracy in the weekly KIA figures may also vary, but I think it is not totally unreasonable to assume a factor of roughly 7.2 for total casualties, overall (x3 for WIA/MIA, x2.4 for unreported losses). Note, the site makes a convincing argument, putting the probable WIA:KIA ratio in a range between 1.4:1 and 4:1. Using a 3:1 ratio would put the total figure at around 315,000, which matches with the CIA estimated as stated on this site (I didn't double check this figure or how recent it is). The UKR MOD currently claims just short of 400k for total personnel losses, btw.
Below the figure I am referencing here it says that only for 34,388 out of the total of 43,460 KIA (~79%) the exact date of death is known. I take that to mean the remainder is not included in this figure and, assuming an even distribution of these cases, will include a factor of ~1.26 in all subsequent calculations, i.e., x3.033 for probable KIA and x9.099 for probable total casualties, based on the number of (date) confirmed KIA.

 
If we now look, for example, at the weekly breakdown of all recorded KIA for the duration of the summer/fall 2023 offensive (roughly 01/06 through 4/10, or 18 weeks) we come up with a total of 5,591 confirmed KIA, with the intensity of the fighting seemingly steadily declining after June. So a probable total KIA count for this timeframe would be around 17,000 and 50,900 probable total casualties. On average and per week, this is 310 confirmed KIA, 940 probable KIA and 2,820 probable total casualties. These weekly averages are much lower, by a factor of ~2, than those during the two bloodiest months of the war (01/23 and 02/23) and lower by a factor of ~1.2 than weekly RU losses in 10/23 (right after cessation of the offensive, when the assault on Avdiivka began). Between 29/12/22 and 01/03/23 (9 weeks), which is somewhat arbitrary but roughly coincides with the deadliest fighting for Bakhmut and Vuhledar, the Russians suffered a total of 5,878 KIA, 17,800 probable KIA and 53,500 probable total casualties. On average and per week, this amounts to 653 confirmed KIA, 2000 probable KIA and 5,900 probable total casualties.
I am not totally sure what to make of these figures, maybe others can gather meaningful insight from them, though. I really hope I didn't miscalculate anything. If I did, please correct me. To me, they seem to underline that, considering a RU replacement rate of about 20k per month or 5,000 per week (although we don't know since when and for how long this rate has held or will hold), a strategy focused on personnel attrition is probably not a viable option. Not that anyone would have made that claim. Even in their worst time, this replacement rate would have been almost sufficient to absorb their casualties (at 5,900 weekly casualties only 84.5% over a period of 9 weeks). There are some further caveats to that, I think: Before the fall 2022 mobilization and through early 2023, the RU replacement rate seems to have been much more inadequate before they managed to reach the current high levels, that allow them to absorb even absurdly high casualty rates. So there would have been a serious backlog of unreplaced losses, that would only slowly have been filled by that time. This might serve to explain the RU unwilligness to demobilize (or even just rotate) the fall 2022 mobiks and to just keep them for the duration. These figures also seem to indicate that the 2023 summer/fall offensive was probably never adequate at inflicting debilitating losses to the Russians, at least from a global perspective. How serious these losses affected RU troops locally can not really be concluded from this, although my gut feeling tells me that it probably never got all that serious for them, given that they managed to absorb roughly the same number of casualties in half the time during the winter (while on the offensive).

Well, we don't really know whether they needed to be rotated only at the time that they were. My hunch is, they were kept on the line well beyond the point of diminishing returns (of continued deployment), basically until the point of virtual destruction, which has all kinds of negative implications for later reconstituting that unit. Loss rates may be highly in favour of UKR, but from the way they seem to be deploying and relocating their brigades (and particularly, which brigades) I think we can gather that UKR seems to be unable to adequately replace these losses, regardless of how high they are.
At this point, maybe even the Russians are not betting on an operational level breakthrough, anymore. I think they likely have settled for a slow grind through Donbas on a 2-4 year time schedule while grinding their social underclass into red paste (a win-win from their view, I bet) sort of deal. At least currently, it looks to me like this might work out for them, especially if UKR can't keep up with replacing their own losses. Whether this gains them anything of value in the long run is a different question, entirely, of course. And yes, obviously, we also don't know for how long RU can keep this level of recruitment going.
This is most likely true, unfortunately. Which makes me scratch my head even harder that people keep arguing that keeping grinding forward all summer and fall was a good idea. It seems like this Summer offensive only brought the worst of all possible outcomes for UKR: Squandered reserves, stockpiles and winding down Western support. At the least they could be sitting on a comfy stockpile of DPICM, GMLRS and so forth and two corps (probably more like divisions) worth of somewhat uncommited troops to fight for whichever fortified Donbas town RU decides to bash agains next.
I guess the only upside is that UKR is at least not totally screwed as long as China keeps up its military assistence in the form of selling them cheap plastic RC toy helicopters.

Gah, imagine being Taiwan or South Korea or Japan or Vietnam and watching this absolute ****show. Or Europe. How the hell can any state that relies on American military deterrent be pleased that the Arsenal of Democracy is apparently slumbering?
Shameful. We have thousands of Bradleys piled in storage and we have sent according to wiki, about 200? It was acceptable to say at the beginning, "Ukraine needs to get the logistical pipeline set up" before shipping more, what the hell is the excuse now? This is bull****, expecting Ukraine to conduct offensives with what is virtually hand me downs and a sprinkling of equipment. (Sure, sure artillery shells)(humbug)
How is Taiwan supposed to be feeling good about facing the world's manufacturing giant and then comparing to this? This was supposed to be America's time to shine, to illustrate that time is indeed on our side, instead Xi and Putin are gambling time is on their side and our inability is costing the lives of Ukrainians.

As far as Russian force generation, I heard they probably had a bit over 600 thousand troops in Ukraine as of December 2023.
That comes initially from a statement from Putin asserting they had 617 thousand troops in Ukraine, which is not a reliable source. But it was apparently backed up by a Ukrainian intelligence estimate that there were around 600 thousand Russian troops in Ukraine. Based on ISW reporting it sounds like the main Russian recruitment strategy is to offer large financial incentives, which are very appealing to the poorer sectors of Russian society. That means when the Russians start running low on money they'll need to find a new recruitment strategy. They certainly will not be able to leverage their larger population, which people seem to be inexplicably making a big deal about.
So their recruitment efforts over the course of 2023 seem to have been just about enough to replace losses, plus a bit to slowly increase the overall force size (I think they had something like 500k at the beginning of 2023?).
Ukraine apparently had around a million troops in uniform at the beginning of 2023, and apparently similarly mostly just replaced losses throughout 2023 with current numbers apparently being around 1.1 million.
As far as casualties, I'm not sure if I can trust the absolute numbers provided by third party estimates. But whenever third parties use the same methodology to estimate both Ukrainian and Russian casualties the Russian casualties usually seem to be between 1.5 and 2.2 times higher than Ukrainian casualties. From what I'm hearing the actual fighting on the ground is pretty even, and the likely higher Russian casualties is probably a reflection of the fact that they have generally been on the offensive, and they have generally been more willing to continue pressing costly offensives.