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Vadym Ivchenko, Member of Committee on National Security, Defence and Intelligence of Ukrainian parliament has said, in public and over the internet, that Ukrainian armed forces have likely sustained at least half a million dead.. He is from Tymoshenko's party, with a pro-Western record.
So, at least around 2.5x more than is the Mediazona estimate of Russian casualties, and assuming identical age distributions, the per capita losses are 10x higher.
Seems like Russians are employing a simple if sound strategy to win a war of attrition as manoeuvre is sort of dead because nobody has enough counter-surveillance technology. The only remotely safe way of moving forces up to the front is sending infantrymen in small groups into prepared positions.
According to this report on Ukrainians training in Poland, nobody told NATO, at least the lower ranks, that the nature of war has changed.. Even though it's been 3 years of heavy recon drone use in Ukraine, NATO units still mostly trains and operate as if the drones weren't there, which is surprising to observe in a force that prides itself on being reliant on technology and good training.
That is ... not exactly BS, but somewhat distorted. The only reason the war in Ukraine is as it is - is because no air superiority exists on the Ukraine side. In a large scale conflict Nato vs Russia we will have orders of magnitude more jets than Ukraine has and probably enough to make sure that Russian airforce won't be able to lob KABs at their leisure, their Geran launch sites will be exposed, their fiber drones C&C will be easier to neutralize and we will be totally free to conduct as deep strikes in russia's territory as we feel is needed with whatever weapons we have in our arsenal.
So don't rush drawing a conclusions about what the nature of the war is. Ukraine has been fighting with limited resources, some of them with strings attached and Russian airforce is far cry from the USSR numbers - and russians don't seem to be able to mass produce them.
And completely automatic jets are at least some years away.
I don't know, is the NATO:Russia air advantage much bigger than the Russia:Ukraine air advantage? Being able to lob KABs is one thing, but Russia at no point dared overflying Ukraine freely, because the economics and optics of losing even one manned plane every now and then because an AD launcher was successfully hidden in a nondescript warehouse somewhere are too painful. The dynamics of a hot war with the involvement of the entirety of NATO would of course be different, but despite everything it seems implausible to me that they would look like the comfy desert turkey shoot war that NATOcore acolytes live for.
(I would also expect that the opening move after a NATO entry into the war is that at least all the NPPs in Ukraine - and quite possibly also everything in Europe east of the centerline of Germany - get blown up, since the only thing that kept them safe so far is Western sensibilities. As for what effect this would have on warfighting capabilities, I honestly can't tell - do we have contingencies to maintain our economy if there is actually no energy grid? Would the sudden need to cook on an open fire in your block's courtyard shatter Europe's heiwa-boke and result in rapid return to WWII-era buff doge form, or a quick noping out and licking of wounds?)
The critical difference is the ability to assert mutual air denial via active air defense systems.
The Russian airforce dared to overfly Ukraine for about a weak, but stopped because even the rare active-detection radar system was enough to get good aircraft shot down, while Russia lacked the sort of EW / counter-emitter capabilities to suppress those air defense systems. However, this was a mutual paradigm- Russia couldn't intrude, but Ukraine couldn't either, and both stayed behind their lines in the air-defense bubble.
The issue is that NATO has a lot better tools to conduct suppression of enemy air defense (SEAD), most notably stealth aircraft that aren't so vulnerable to that sort of 'pocked AD' strategy. You turn on that sort of active radar, you (generally) still don't detect the aircraft for a weapons lock, but those weapons it has can lock onto you. Once high-altitude air defense systems are cracked, you can 'simply' fly over the lower air defense systems, use the gravity advantage to extend the range of your strikes, and progressively widen your air operation area to progressively strike more things.
It's not as absolute or one-sided as that, and it's certainly not a turkey shoot setup. Russia has absolutely invested a lot in mitigating those sort of stealth investments. But the Soviet anti-air concept that Russia inherited was much more of a 'buy time for the ground forces to win' model, as opposed to 'we have nothing to fear.' With time, you can take care to gradually peel back a defense envelope and act within the safe margins, which is exactly what we see in the current environment with the Russian glide bombs. However, the NATO countries have much better air penetration options, and air munitions, than the Russian airforce whose design purpose was to keep the NATO aircraft delayed by days/weeks/months so the army could run over the ground defenders and then get entrenched.
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