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Thank you. I appreciate not being assigned a position I've never taken.
My position for some time (years) has been neither side is running out of manpower in an absolute sense. The somewhat less than 2-to-1 in favor of Ukraine is reasonable-ish, with emphasis on swings on which part of the front when. When Ukraine does localized counter-attacks over time, such as trying to delay the fall of defense line that has gotten supply-interdicted by fires (drone or artillery), it's worse. When Ukraine is doing 'generic' line defense, it's higher. Per-capital casualty rates of national populations aren't really relevant, since neither side is being limited by the size of the population per see, but rather political considerations for accessing significant parts of it.
In Ukraine, this limitation the political willingness to draft the younger age cohort to fill the infantry with more fit bodies. This is bad, and people can feel free to add more emphasis if they like, but it's not the 'there is nothing left' metaphor either. Every year of the war, an entirely new year of potential conscripts leaves the protected age bracket, and when you compare that number to casualties per year, the number of potential 'new' conscripts far outnumbers the casualties by a large degree in absolute terms. The issues are separate about opportunity costs and so on, so the decision on what to prioritize is a political / policy decision, not a physical limit. Bad politics or policy can and do lead to bad results. But this is also not as bad in the same way / to the degree most people might conceptualize, because the Ukraine War- and particularly the drone dynamic- has changed what sort of 'fit body versus support force' ratio actually is, in ways that military science, let alone social understanding, haven't caught up with. A few years ago, a 'healthy' infantry-drone balance might have a drone user per platoon, with X platoons for Y amount of territory. Now we are looking at multiple drone operators per squad, with Z squads per Y' territory. Whatever the ratio 'should' be, the amount of infantry 'needed' for a certain level of frontage is changing. Ukraine can simultaneously not have enough, and people have outdated / over-inflated assumptions of what 'should' be.
In Russia, the limitation is the economic willingness off older age cohorts to take volunteer enlistment bonuses. Russia tried to leverage its population via a conscription model in the first year of the war, and it went so badly that somewhere between half a million to a million Russians left the country in the first year, and Putin preferred to pay significant other material and other costs to avoid a reoccurance. This works as long as the Russian volunteer base is willing to take the offered salaries, but the issue with market-rate enlistment bonuses are you actually have to pay them, and any model that relies on pre-saved money to fund deficit spending to avoid other issues will, eventually, run out of pre-saved money. Market-rate military expenses are fickle as well as fiscal, and are prone to spiking when shortages occur, such as if fewer people want to volunteer because parts of the contract bonuses (such as regional government bonuses) are cut for fiscal constraints. Difficulty does not mean absence, and Russia has already gone through various long-term costs to provide the short-term funds to meet needs, but shell-games come with tradeoffs and the functional recruitable base is not a simple total-population-size ratio between Russia and Ukraine.
This all matters because much of the discussion about casualty ratios is applied to total population sizes (Russia is X times bigger, so Ukraine needs an Y kill ratio to compensate). This misses the manpower limitation on both sides, and that casualty ratios matter more as a factor of the relative recruitable bases, which are far less clear / even less consensus.
This is approaching my position, but with a whole lot of context / framing that would take a rather long post in and of itself.
In so much that I present a definition of 'victory' for Ukraine, my inclination has generally leaned towards 'terms that are sufficient to allow Ukraine to deter yet another continuation war by Russia.' As a result, my general stance since the first two years of the war have been that victory in the war is more about the final terms than the terrain.
(The 2022 invasion is arguably the 3rd continuation war since the 2014 Crimea incursion, which was followed by the Nova Russia campaign and then the direct intervention when that failed.)
By this standard, the 'peace terms' offered by Russia in the first month of the war would have been a loss as they were basically disarmament demands that would have reduced the Ukrainian army to fewer tanks than the Ukrainian army lost in the next year or so of actually fighting the war. The Ukrainians would have 'won' more land in the short term, but at an extremely high risk of Russia just reorganzing and launching another mechanized invasion that Ukraine would likely have been able to resist without a reoccurance of the 2022 fuckups, which would have led to the strategic defeat. By contrast, while Ukraine has taken [insert McBigNumber] casualties in the three years of war since the invasion, in the process it has largely depleted the Soviet strategic stockpiles of tanks / ammo / etc. that were what allowed Russia to replenish mechanized formations. Now those reserves are largely gone, and so even if Ukraine loses all of the Donbas and the fortress belt fighting rather than merely turning over uncontested, it's still a 'better' [victory] than if Russia still had the perceived mechanized invasion capacity it had a few years ago.
Similar points exist in other aspects of deterrence credibility. If the war had not continued, the limits of the Russian ammunition stockpiles (since supplemented by purchased North Korean munitions) would not have been so clear to all, and thus strengthened the Russian negotiating leverage were Russia still at 10-to-1 artillery advantage as opposed the more contemporary 3-to-1 estimates. If the war had not continued past the first month, Russia might still have had a unilateral advantage in terms of its long-range strike capability of operational stockpiles of cruise missiles, and Ukraine would not have gradually increasing its own long-range strike campaign credibility to the point where it now routinely hits highly-visible, and budget-significant, Russian infrastructure. Had the war ended sooner, when Russia was still aggressively using Soviet AA missiles against everything it could, the deterrence narrative might have been stuck on the question of 'has Ukraine / the West run out of air defenses,' rather than flip that to 'if Russia struggles against these drones, how safe is it against NATO airpower?'
None of this is to say that Russia hasn't advanced its own capabilities in various areas over the war. Drone warfare is absolutely a thing. But deterrence isn't about 'can the attacker win,' but rather 'can the defender make it not worth the cost.' And in that sense, and for that purpose, increasing Russian costs now, in the present, shapes Russian future cost calculus later, when Russia (particularly Putin) might try again.
This is an attritional struggle, but it's not an attritional struggle to 'win' this war in terms of 'Russian military collapses and Ukraine regains territory.' While I'm sure the Ukrainian public would love it if some sort of Russian balance of payments default led to the Russian army leaving the field or mutinying in mass and marching on Moscow, that's neither likely or necessary. Rather, the war is an attritional struggle that seeks to add enough military and economic and political-will costs such that even Putin will think about starting another invasion, and go 'I'd rather not.'
And in that context, the attritional goal for Russian infantry and such isn't 'there are literally not enough men to fight,' but rather 'future!Putin does not want to pay the costs he'd have to to get enough men to fight.'
That could the direct economic costs to the Russian state budget and fiscal planning if he has to pay market costs. That could be the political costs if Putin in this war has to supplement the volunteers with conscripts. That could be the material costs, if Russia feels it needs to replace the stuff it already lost in this war before it tries again. That could be reconstitution costs, if the survivors of this war decide they'd rather not join the next war because they got their signing bonus and intend to live with it. It could be any or all of these, so long as the sum-total is enough that Putin, when he's out of sunk-cost-fallacy mode, would rather not try.
But all of this framework derives from a theory of victory that doesn't really define victory in this war in terms of territory lost or gained, or even Ukrainian casualties.
They tried drafting everyone btw 25-60 or so.
They won't get much from 18-25. Smaller cohorts too, lower birthrates.
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