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Notes -
Ukraine.
By now, wise people, people who avoid reading the newspapers (newspaper generally lie) have noticed that the news out of Ukraine is bad. After years of relentless and very stupid propaganda, even 'The Sun' ran an article which was basically fine. Torygraph ditto. A bit of lying around the end, some lies by omission but generally thoughtful and not grossly incorrect.
That's means something. Not at all clear what. Obsessive observers of the war believe Ukraine is likely to hold out until end of '26, early '27. However:
1- There's a financing issue, sure - Americans, unwilling since Trump inauguration to keep paying for what they started now only want to deliver weapons if Europeans, who were against it initially, pay for them.
Europe, as everyone knows, is mostly broke, with the exception of Germany, which isn't only because it typically doesn't shower money around. Paying through the nose for overpriced weaponry like e.g. Patriot or Aster 30 missiles ($ 2mil per unit) which then are going to be fired, best case, at cruise missiles of equal worth doesn't seem like a winning strategy, especially with the Geran spam being able to destroy anything that doesn't have a rare cannon SPAA sitting on top of it. If there's 50 of them in Ukraine, that's probably too much.
There was a plan of 'magicking' up money by making a loan to buy more weapons, covered by the frozen Russian assets, thus 'risk-free' because 'Russia is going to release those assets as war reparations'. Belgium, which would have ended up having jurisdiction over it refused to go along..
2- Materially, it's bad. We know the gist of the situation: Ukraine has too few men -line infantry is at 20-30% staffing , is outmatched in drones, artillery and air attacks. Russia, being larger, is able to mobilize troops and sustain operations. There is shortage of everything on the Ukrainian side. Civilian cars, drones, men. -save perhaps small-calibre ammunition which is barely used in this war. (allegedly <5% of wounds are from gunshot). Why there is a shortage of cars seems.. mysterious. Germany surely should be able to keep Ukrainians knee deep in cheap trucks. E.g. Dacia Duster cost €20k and there's 100k made per year. A mere 2 billion € a year could give Ukraine 1 4x4 car for every 5 servicemen. What gives?
Ukraine drops some bombs using their few planes, possibly even daily , but Russians sometimes delivers up to 300 a day, although the mean is 160 in 2025. Any bunker, HQ, supply dump close behind the front can be hit. That's pretty modest- just 40 sorties in an Su-34. Ukraine doesn't have what to use - France supplied 800 glide bombs... for the whole of 2024. Promised 1200 for 2025. 4 a day. If Americans have given more, we'd have heard about it. If GDP so high, why so few bombs? Where's the American UMPK? Does US have no huge pile of old bombs you can stick sheet metal & gps modules to? Are cheap, effective, good enough weapons only something despotic alcoholic nations can make ?
The true rate of attrition is unknown. Ukraine armed forces, internally seem to believe it's 8 Ukrainians for 10 Russians or something along those lines, if we go by the testimony of this International Legion guy who deserted earlier this year after being allocated to an especially dire 1st rifleman battalion with 50% odds of surviving one rotation. (or so he says). In any case, as Europeans and Americans have shown themselves unwilling to go and risk death, the required rate needed to have been something like 2:10 just to break even, demographics wise.
3- the front. right now, a some amount of troops is encircled at Pokrovsk. Supposedly very few (AMK_mapping, an autist who follows the war hourly says Ukrainians mostly withdrew), but then, it's unclear how dire the situation is, however GUR fed their spec-ops team to the front near Pokrovsk, in an effort to make evacuation easier, to probably little avail (there is an FPV montage of these guys getting blown up already). They operate 3 Blackhawk helos, one of them was apparently downed.
Overall, as you probably know, the situation on the front is bad. Ukraine cannot hold territory, cannot counterattack effectively. Previously, Russia was only being able to push one place at a time, now it's multiples. If you want an overview, here's an interview of AMK_Mapping, a rare pro Ukrainian OSINT account respected by people on both sides. Honestly he seems autistic. The 'mapping' means he's one of the people keeping track of the war online by obsessively reading Telegram channels, geolocating etc. The interviewer is pro-Russian, somewhat overly optimistic I think.
Going by the aphorism 'If you're reading this, it's for you', it looks like the American press is preparing the public for a closing act of the majestic capeshit arc that started with the Maidan massacre. Ukrainians are generally eager to negotiate, nobody believes in winning anymore, though the demands Russia has are not viewed as acceptable. I wonder what the frontline troops and officers would say in private.
Jesus Christ what a horrifying implication. I mean, being wounded by a a bullet is surely bad enough. But at least you can generally shoot back at the guy trying to kill you with a gun.
I'd guess, then, the bulk of wounds are from drones, bombs/artillery, maybe landmines, and armored vehicles? Or maybe wounds sustained when your armored vehicle gets blasted?
And this leads me to wonder about that phenomenon we saw way towards the beginning of the war: Western Volunteers who joined up for a chance to fight fascism. Ukraine created a foreign legion for those guys.
As of a year and a half ago it apparently wasn't going well. I daresay the early /r/volunteersForUkraine days where they hyped each other up to grab a rifle and go may have gotten numerous people killed for no major benefit.
Some deeper questions there. Is there any possible rational benefit for a Non-Ukrainian to join up in an actual combat role? If not... what's the remaining rational benefit of Non-Ukrainians continuing to fund the war effort?
I'm sure there's an object-level argument for it, still, but it probably relies on a black-swan type event that utterly breaks Russia's resolve all in one go, similar to that aborted Prigozhin coup.
This has essentially been the case since WW1, and only getting worse since. In WW2 something like 70% of all casualties were from artillery, not small arms fire. This is for conventional war, I'm sure insurgencies have much different ratios.
Right, the two world wars basically squeezed all the remaining romanticism out of warfighting. Vietnam crapped on whatever was left. There hasn't been a single piece of media anywhere that I'm aware of that made the fighting in Vietnam look 'honorable' or 'cool.' (note, I ascribe at least part of that to Western Cultural institutions moving left, but even nonfiction accounts make it sound horrible).
Even the video games about the Vietnam war don't try to romanticize it. WWII games do put some emphasis on heroics but don't undercut how horrible e.g. Storming the Beach at Normandy was.
A tiny bit got injected back in with the GWOT and rise of modern special forces doing surgical strikes with high-tech equipment against relatively inferior opponents. The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Franchise is still a best-seller, at least.
But the Ukraine conflict is NOT THAT. Fair to say that the thought of this precise kind of warfare: long battle lines, grinding attrition to occasionally advance a few hundred yards at a time, and almost all the actual fighting done via 'indirect' means, you'll rarely see the thing that kills you coming... it makes me sick. Inflicting this on your fellow human is probably, dare I say, irredeemable.
Now, I don't think medieval warfare was 'better'. Dying of sepsis or bleeding out face-down in a muddy field after you got gut-stuck with a polearm is not any more appealing. But at least many conflicts of that era got settled with a basic handful of battles and the occasional siege.
Industrialization of the affair just means its an unceasing nightmare.
The horror of medieval sieges is not to be underestimated. Plenty of death to be had there as well, between starvation, disease, rudimentary artillery, disease, undermining attempts, starvation, wall-defenses (pouring boiling oil down on attackers, etc.), disease, and, of course, night-time sallies/raids.
Also, look up the word "chevauchee" sometime if you want to have your stomach turned.
Yep.
All the worse because it inflicts pain on civilian population.
That said, it would also depend on the nature of the attacker, and whether you could expect decent treatment upon surrender.
The factor that really weighs against joining Medieval armies is the tortures one could end up in if captured by the other side. Although there's certainly evidence that we as humans haven't improved much in that regard.
I just watched a video on Vlad the Impaler and I can say that his existence ALONE is enough for me to not want to enlist to fight on EITHER side of the war with the Ottoman Turks in the mid to late 1400's.
I would not be particularly worried about torture as a medieval soldier (nobles, of course, would get three squares and a cot while they waited to be ransomed) - in times of war it was a rare occurrence limited to some instances of intimidation, like difficult sieges, a few religious conflicts, and, of course, rebels or traitors. You would be much more likely to get a quick death than tortured, but at the luckiest you'd be stripped and let go or, for professionals, offered a place in the other duke's army. Somewhere in the middle would be impressment for war labour or, if the captors weren't Christian, relocation or lifetime slavery. At worst, worse than almost any transient torture, you could be impressed as a galley slave. Harsh or torturous punishments such as blinding were considered shocking enough to Western medieval chroniclers to be specifically noted when they occurred (e.g. Henry I blinding a man who sang insulting songs about him). I'm not saying there was anything pleasant at all about being taken prisoner in the Middle Ages, just that to my knowledge torture is relatively rare in the sources compared to ransom/execution/release/enslavement, all of which are easier and generally more beneficial to the captors. The exceptions, outside of a minority of inter-faith wars, would be rebellions - unfortunately, you probably don't get much of a choice as to whether your war is considered a legitimate conflict or a rebellion...
I think in my book, a 1% chance of being tortured using the most advanced methods a postclassical civilization can devise is intolerably high.
And there are a lot of slave or indentured servant jobs that were also pretty tortuous if only because they were indefinite in length. I wouldn't necessarily be unhappy with being forced to compete in Gladiatorial games, though.
To say nothing of being a Castrato or Eunuch. Not torture per se, but... ugh.
Although another 'fun' debate is how medieval torture compares to stuff the Drug Cartels do in modern day.
Anyway, I just want to stay far away from any battlefield where inflicting excess suffering on enemies is not tabooed harshly.
Castration was done to prepubescent boys(that is, not soldiers).
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Very understandable position! I would say even 1% is a significant overstatement of how likely a captured medieval footsoldier was to be tortured, but we'll never know for sure, and captivity would have been unpleasant enough to count as "cruel or unusual" today, besides a nontrivial chance of losing your head and a far higher chance of dying of disease.
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