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I'd be willing to bet that a lot of those "regular soldiers" were POG/REMF types looking to get their glory on who were then disappointed to find out that they were going to be spending most of their time digging foxholes and standing post rather doing action movie shit. Meanwhile the dudes with actual frontline experience seem to have had more realistic expectations and their attitudes reflected that.

What are they thinking, digging foxholes and standing post massively beats firefights.

Getting into firefights with an army notorious for the quantity of its artillery fire (apparently in summer they were firing US yearly 6" shell production in two-three days) and general callousness seems like .. one of the worse ideas out there, unless one has a death wish or very strong feelings about Ukrainian independence.

And the unconfirmed but probably real casualty figures of 100k+ Ukrainian dead suggest it's a very lethal environment in Ukraine.

Him saying that out his three buddies, one is died also suggests the 300 dead Americans (Russian MOD) figure might be accurate. If there had been 1.2k volunteers at that one base so early, there's probably in total something like 8-9k by now.

It's really surprising that so far I've seen zero sob stories about grieving mothers or spouses from the "international community" whose relation stopped a bullet or shell fragment in Ukraine.

EDIT: went to check, but wiki is .. abysmal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Legion_of_Territorial_Defence_of_Ukraine#Casualties

Says 20k volunteers fighting, with only like 80 casualties so far. That seems absolutely implausible, given how bad people say it is, and the 100k+ Ukrainian dead figure that occassionally gets admitted by various non-Russian officials.

Seems perfectly reasonable but why didn't those "regular soldiers" show up from other countries(as much) or did they just have different expectations for some reason (even if that includes less morally upstanding stuff like looting)? Or maybe he just didn't meet them as much for some reason, leading to a skewed impression?

If it's the first thing my assumption would be that either America has to scrape the barrel more than other countries due to higher recruiting requirements (thus ending up with more REMF) or perhaps American (army?)culture encourages glory seeking more.

Or its just statistical noise.