How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[JonS]

Noice

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/may/02/david-cameron-commits-3bn-a-year-in-aid-to-ukraine-for-as-long-as-necessary?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

[Aragorn2002]

On 5/2/2024 at 9:08 AM, Offshoot said:

The BBC has been involved in compiling a list of know Russian dead since Feb 2022 from social media, cemeteries, etc. - Russia's meat grinder soldiers - 50,000 confirmed dead

Disappointing if true.

[Holien]

1 hour ago, JonS said:

Noice

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/may/02/david-cameron-commits-3bn-a-year-in-aid-to-ukraine-for-as-long-as-necessary?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

This government has a track record of saying big numbers on lots of things and then not delivering.

If it happens great, but they are currently lame ducks waiting to be removed in less than a year.

However I think the new lot are likely to keep supporting Ukraine depending on the state of finances which isn't great...

Ohhh to be able to have back all the lost tax revenues from the recent massive increase of red tape between us and our closest and largest trading partners.  

[MikeyD]

We constantly hear stories of 'no body, no payment' out of Russia. Official stats of Russian loss counts would likely be grossly underrepresented, especially from those penal battalions. I don't think Russia would have staggered and fled back across to Dnieper if they had only sustained the losses presented in current estimates. 50,000 confirmed Russia dead would translate to what, a 3-to-5 exchange ratio?  

Edited May 3 by MikeyD

[Offshoot]

26 minutes ago, Aragorn2002 said:

Disappointing if true.

These are confirmed (i.e. they know the name) deaths only relying on public records. The group tracking them have estimated the actual number is around twice as much - https://www.npr.org/2024/04/18/1245495971/at-least-50-000-russian-troops-have-been-killed-in-ukraine-media-probe-finds

Quote

And obviously, from the very start we understood that that's not everyone, every Russian soldier that died, because not all are reported. Not all cemeteries could be visited by volunteers and so on. We did, together with another independent news outlet, Meduza, we came up with a methodology to estimate the overall amount based on the probate registry. And that gives a number of approximately twice more than 50,000.

 

[JonS]

53 minutes ago, Offshoot said:

The group tracking them have estimated the actual number is around twice as much

Wouldn't "twice more than" equal 150,000 total?

[Tux]

9 minutes ago, JonS said:

Wouldn't "twice more than" equal 150,000 total?

Yeah, it is ambiguously worded, isn’t it?  Unfortunately the interviewer doesn’t seem to have asked for a clarification.

[Offshoot]

1 hour ago, JonS said:

Wouldn't "twice more than" equal 150,000 total?

This would depend on whether you twice the 50,000 or twice the twice for 200,000.

Quibbling aside, I assumed the interviewee is a non-native English speaker and really meant "twice as much". If he indeed meant 150,000, "twice more than" would be a very strange construction when "three times more" or just saying the number would be simpler and more obvious.

EDIT: another article on losses by Meduza who helped develop the methodology mentioned by the "twice more than" guy - https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/02/24/at-least-75-000-dead-russian-soldiers. This covers the period up to late 2023 and they estimate 75,000 dead by that time. I think it reasonable to assume then that their estimated number is currently around 100,000.

Edited May 3 by Offshoot

[Letter from Prague]

I know we talk about drones a lot when we talk about weapons. But one thing has been bugging me.

The West has bet a lot on PGMs. Like instead of biggest booms, or using a lot of weapons, West uses small but precise weapons. But turns out those are trivial to defeat with GPS jamming and end up being rather ineffectual.

So what next? What is being done to fix it? Didn't West lose most of its combat power when most weapons are possibly useless against peer enemy who will definitely have EW?

[Carolus]

9 minutes ago, Letter from Prague said:

I know we talk about drones a lot when we talk about weapons. But one thing has been bugging me.

The West has bet a lot on PGMs. Like instead of biggest booms, or using a lot of weapons, West uses small but precise weapons. But turns out those are trivial to defeat with GPS jamming and end up being rather ineffectual.

So what next? What is being done to fix it? Didn't West lose most of its combat power when most weapons are possibly useless against peer enemy who will definitely have EW?

I think the Western response is to fire an anti-rad or anti-EW missile salvo with its infinite airforce that homes in on whatever is making the most EM noise after being launched in the general direction of the enemy.

Some people might say "but what about long-range AD" at which point we look at the comparatively unimportant Iraq war with over 1000 airplanes in the initial attack waves. 

Edited May 3 by Carolus

[The_Capt]

9 hours ago, dan/california said:

We were all drunk in 1991, both literally and figuratively, we placed this HUGE bet at the blackjack table that if we helped China sort outs its economy and join the "rules based order" on generous terms, that its politics would naturally evolve in a more benign direction. We lost, rather badly, and the price is going to be another ~century of great power competition. Actually that is the best case scenario.

 

Now let’s not suddenly forget the real reason why China has risen to power…western greed.  We exported manufacturing and every other hard/increasingly expensive job to China because they would do it for a fraction of what western workers were demanding nor was governed by pesky workplace safety regulations.  We wanted cheap everything from Tshirts to running shoes to cellphones.  We did not admit China into the WTO until 2001 and by then we were over-invested in China for our lifestyles that no one could slow that train down:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_and_the_World_Trade_Organization#:~:text=China became a member of,changes to the Chinese economy.

We had started this trend back in the 80s.  There was nothing altruistic or generous about any of this, it really was simply an extension of western benign (and sometimes not) imperial doctrine.  The Western Rules Based order was really designed to keep the West on top. China figured this out and used that system to rise to power.  They did it using Western money, not charitable intent.  China conducted a series of pretty radical economic reforms and the outsourced the industry we downloaded on them to places like Bangladesh and Vietnam.  They then reinvested in their own high tech and bolstered it with an historic industrial espionage campaign.

None of this was “western misguided liberalism gone wrong” it was straight up pursuit of profit and reinforcing our own consumer based economies.  By the time we realized the problem in the mid ‘00 it was too late.  No politician, even Trump, could simply “drop China”.  Since then we have seen attempts at a gradual uncoupling but we are still too dependent on Asian manufacturing and industry, the pandemic showed this in spades.  And now we are stuck.  We either keep funding Chinese rise to power or try and roll the clock back to 1960, which we can’t do with current standards of living and economic realities.

None of this was generous or high minded.  Anymore than British rule of India was.  It was a 20th century version of economic colonization, which like a lot of colonization came back around to bite.

Edited May 3 by The_Capt

[The_MonkeyKing]

 

Well well, that line took a long time to cross 

[Carolus]

16 minutes ago, The_MonkeyKing said:

 

Well well, that line took a long time to cross 

The article was edited to remove that quotation. 

I hope it's true and this was simply done to create plausible deniability for the UK government. But it could also just be a hasty comment by Cameron or an overly eager journalist who misheard.

[The_Capt]

8 hours ago, Vanir Ausf B said:

I was frankly stunned by the graph I saw passed around yesterday.

 

Am I reading this right?  This graph says under 300k per month from China and 450k globally.  

[Battlefront.com]

4 hours ago, Offshoot said:

This would depend on whether you twice the 50,000 or twice the twice for 200,000.

Quibbling aside, I assumed the interviewee is a non-native English speaker and really meant "twice as much". If he indeed meant 150,000, "twice more than" would be a very strange construction when "three times more" or just saying the number would be simpler and more obvious.

EDIT: another article on losses by Meduza who helped develop the methodology mentioned by the "twice more than" guy - https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/02/24/at-least-75-000-dead-russian-soldiers. This covers the period up to late 2023 and they estimate 75,000 dead by that time. I think it reasonable to assume then that their estimated number is currently around 100,000.

The important point is that they have confirmed 50,000, not that there is 50,000 total.  Just like vehicle counts, you can only visually verify something if it is spotted and noted.  Russia is a vast country with many nooks and crannies to check into.  Even if 100% of the deaths were reported in an obvious way, many would be missed.  I'm sure that sort of clarity doesn't exist.

First, you'll have some people who died and for whatever reason their death isn't clearly associated with being in Ukraine.  Kinda like in the US we have a huge percentage of our obituaries that report "died unexpectedly" instead of "blew his brains out".

Second, the huge number of prisoners will have a disproportionate % of non-reporting because nobody cares enough to acknowledge their death.

Third, Russia was documented to have been picking up vagrants off of the street and sticking them into uniform at the very early stages of the war.  Who knows how many, but whatever that number is it's not likely to be reported.

Fourth, estimating dead Donbas Ukrainians has got to be beyond difficult to do, yet we know very large numbers have been killed.  With such a very large pool of dead, the number missed could be quite large.

Fifth, we also know that Russia has "recruited" migrant workers and the poor from other countries in very large numbers.  These were fed into the z-storm units that suffered massive casualties, which means the dead in this group is disproportionately higher than other groups.  The researchers are not combing every local paper in a few dozen non-Russian countries, so these would likely be totally missed.  And even if they were looking for them, they were disproportionately poor and less likely to have easily found and detailed death notices.

In aggregate, the number that they missed could easily be 2-3 times what they have confirmed.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

Am I reading this right?  This graph says under 300k per month from China and 450k globally.  

That's what the chart says.  Another reason to take charts like these with a pinch of salt.

Steve

[photon]

22 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

That's what the chart says.  Another reason to take charts like these with a pinch of salt.

Steve

Ok - I think I found the source of the chart: 

It looks like those numbers are not dollar values, but "transaction records" whatever that means.

[The_Capt]

4 minutes ago, photon said:

Ok - I think I found the source of the chart: 

It looks like those numbers are not dollar values, but "transaction records" whatever that means.

Ok, well really hard to tell what that really means.  Could be military socks for all we know - and don't turn a nose up at that one, good socks are a lifesaver in this business.

Regardless, we know Russia has started pulling and China has jumped in to an extent.  What we are not seeing are high end Chinese military platforms or systems on the battlefield.  I encourage anyone interested to take a look at what China is really producing - https://odin.tradoc.army.mil/WEG/List/ORIGIN_china--people-s-republic-of-d6ee02

If the high end stuff was getting shipped we would be seeing Chinese HIMARs show up in force: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHL-03  That plugged into Chinese ISR support could make this war so much worse - the other side of the proxy escalation ladder.

[photon]

6 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Ok, well really hard to tell what that really means.  Could be military socks for all we know - and don't turn a nose up at that one, good socks are a lifesaver in this business.

The whole report is an interesting read. Much of it will be familiar to the audience here. It seems like most of what they're tracking is not what I'd call military procurement, but really defense industrial base procurement. So CNC machines and the like.

The enormous jump in imports of basically everything in Feb '23 suggests that Russia was still hoping to win a fast war until then (?), or that it's DIB took a whole year to recover from the panic about the failed initial invasion.

[The_Capt]

2 minutes ago, photon said:

The whole report is an interesting read. Much of it will be familiar to the audience here. It seems like most of what they're tracking is not what I'd call military procurement, but really defense industrial base procurement. So CNC machines and the like.

The enormous jump in imports of basically everything in Feb '23 suggests that Russia was still hoping to win a fast war until then (?), or that it's DIB took a whole year to recover from the panic about the failed initial invasion.

It hits a bothersome issue that has been nagging in my mind for at least a year now.  Russia is buying and making fishing rods - even if they are crappy ones; while we keep pushing Ukraine fish. There was talk of a Ukrainian MIC/base building effort but it appears to have died while we all clamor to try and get the basics into the game.

I think the longer term strategy has to be to offset capacity issues by creating a military industrial base for Ukraine itself.  For things like ammunition this should be a no brainer.  Given some arm twisting and pressure you could site the things right on the Polish border.  Ukraine has already done this with FPVs, they should be able to do it with artillery shells.

[dan/california]

3 hours ago, The_Capt said:

Now let’s not suddenly forget the real reason why China has risen to power…western greed.  We exported manufacturing and every other hard/increasingly expensive job to China because they would do it for a fraction of what western workers were demanding nor was governed by pesky workplace safety regulations.  We wanted cheap everything from Tshirts to running shoes to cellphones.  We did not admit China into the WTO until 2001 and by then we were over-invested in China for our lifestyles that no one could slow that train down:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_and_the_World_Trade_Organization#:~:text=China became a member of,changes to the Chinese economy.

We had started this trend back in the 80s.  There was nothing altruistic or generous about any of this, it really was simply an extension of western benign (and sometimes not) imperial doctrine.  The Western Rules Based order was really designed to keep the West on top. China figured this out and used that system to rise to power.  They did it using Western money, not charitable intent.  China conducted a series of pretty radical economic reforms and the outsourced the industry we downloaded on them to places like Bangladesh and Vietnam.  They then reinvested in their own high tech and bolstered it with an historic industrial espionage campaign.

None of this was “western misguided liberalism gone wrong” it was straight up pursuit of profit and reinforcing our own consumer based economies.  By the time we realized the problem in the mid ‘00 it was too late.  No politician, even Trump, could simply “drop China”.  Since then we have seen attempts at a gradual uncoupling but we are still too dependent on Asian manufacturing and industry, the pandemic showed this in spades.  And now we are stuck.  We either keep funding Chinese rise to power or try and roll the clock back to 1960, which we can’t do with current standards of living and economic realities.

None of this was generous or high minded.  Anymore than British rule of India was.  It was a 20th century version of economic colonization, which like a lot of colonization came back around to bite.

I don't disagree with any of this, but it still amounts to doing something stupid and hoping it wouldn't end badly.

Edit: And my bit was certainly how it was sold, even though the money guys were actually driving the bus.

Edited May 3 by dan/california

[Battlefront.com]

3 hours ago, The_MonkeyKing said:

 

Well well, that line took a long time to cross 

I doubt the UK just came up with this on its own.  My bet is that Ukraine asked the UK to allow them the use of Storm Shadow for something quite specific (even if they didn't tell the UK what it is).  So what might it be?

There's plenty of aviation targets within range, so there's that.  However, it is possible (though quite risky) for Ukraine to get within range of Russia's northern Black Sea coastline.  That puts a lot of BSF infrastructure at risk.  Infrastructure that Russia is now mostly relying upon after Crimea became unsafe.  Going after the ships or docks loading Kaliber cruise missiles could be on Ukraine's short list of targets.

Steve

[Letter from Prague]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

It hits a bothersome issue that has been nagging in my mind for at least a year now.  Russia is buying and making fishing rods - even if they are crappy ones; while we keep pushing Ukraine fish. There was talk of a Ukrainian MIC/base building effort but it appears to have died while we all clamor to try and get the basics into the game.

I think the longer term strategy has to be to offset capacity issues by creating a military industrial base for Ukraine itself.  For things like ammunition this should be a no brainer.  Given some arm twisting and pressure you could site the things right on the Polish border.  Ukraine has already done this with FPVs, they should be able to do it with artillery shells.

That has it's pros and cons. For a while, everyone was saying "Ukraine has huge benefit in that Ukraine can hit Russian MIC but Russia can't hit 'Ukrainian MIC' because it is in Europe and US". But that of course is benefit as long as the MIC delivers.

[The_Capt]

11 minutes ago, Letter from Prague said:

That has it's pros and cons. For a while, everyone was saying "Ukraine has huge benefit in that Ukraine can hit Russian MIC but Russia can't hit 'Ukrainian MIC' because it is in Europe and US". But that of course is benefit as long as the MIC delivers.

And there is nothing saying we could not set up Ukrainian industries outside Ukraine...happens all the time in other sectors (e.g. Canadian Auto sector).  The bottom line is that a more secure Ukrainian owned supply chain for some critical items is a better longer term strategy than what we are seeing now.  This is war-by-pan-handling at the moment.  So long as passers by keep tossing in nickels it will work out...but people are getting stingy with the nickels.

[The_Capt]

2 hours ago, photon said:

Ok - I think I found the source of the chart: 

It looks like those numbers are not dollar values, but "transaction records" whatever that means.

Link: https://www.csis.org/analysis/back-stock-state-russias-defense-industry-after-two-years-war