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I mean weapons do not fire themselves. You can arm Ukraine all you want — they are still toast more or less. And Ukraine is rapidly running out of people. If you’re resorting to abducting senior citizens off the street to fuel your army, you are in no position to defend much. And this is the calculation that NATO missed — Ukraine didn’t have the population to sustain this effort, and so any weapons given were useless because eventually you’d have no one left capable of firing them.
Ukraine lost about a half million in casualties in three years of combat, in a country with a population of about 38 million. In World War I, Germany lost about 6.3 million out of 65 million total before calling it quits, and even then it was controversial. At a consistent rate of attrition, it would take Ukraine another 20 years to hit those kind of numbers. While you can argue about the population pyramid being more favorable to Germany, this is balanced by the fact that the relatively slow rate of attrition gives Ukraine a much bigger pool to draw from, including people not yet born. After all, Germany started another war 20 years after than one ended and managed to double their casualty numbers. Those of us who have never lived through a serious war don't understand how huge casualty numbers can get before they become unsustainable.
It’s not just the men literally killed, it’s also people fleeing the country. And a lot of people have fled already.
True, but most of the Ukrainian refugees left at the beginning of the war. It's not like war casualties where there's a continual drip drip for years. In 2023 and 2024, Ukraine had one of the highest rates of in-migration of any country, almost all of whom were returning refugees.
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