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The original NYT, JapanTimes and Greyzone reporting show the Ukrainian casualty figure as 70k and the Russian as 17k. I’m more tempted to believe this happened and then the West retconned the numbers, as opposed to Russia frantically and successfully retconning the numbers and tricking the original journalists.
The version you are thinking of is a rather obvious photoshop of the original.
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That would make prolonged fighting for control of an elevator shaft next to a bombed out train station that much more embarrassing for Russia.
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It'd be pretty shocking for Russia to have a 4:1 casualty ratio in their favor and for the war to be going this poorly for them.
The Ukrainians have been drafting very intensively: the Economist points out a case in which they tried to draft a man who'd lost both hands until a social media storm forced them to stop. Draft officials have been snooping all over the place, including military funerals. This would suggest that manpower is being expended rapidly.
https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/02/26/ukraine-finds-stepping-up-mobilisation-is-not-so-easy
The Russians have a major advantage in firepower, they've been firing at least 4x more shells than Ukraine and they're still on their first wave of mobilization. It's unclear (at least to me) how many waves of mobilization Ukraine is on, they're on at least their 5th.
This later part isn't quite correct, as the the Russians are still doing their normal conscription cycles, as well as attempting what some have called 'stealth mobilization' efforts. The conscription cycle is more relevant to your point, since the war started at the first normal conscription levels, and the 'first wave' was more about replacing losses than actually expanding the force... which makes it more or less equivalent to the normal conscription waves once you implement stop-loss measures like the Russians have.
Russia is currently entering it's normal spring conscription cycle, which is yet another mobilization wave in practice, and will likely consider the need for another out-of-cycle mobilization based on the Ukrainian spring offensive (if there is one).
It's possible that the Russians don't implement a 'mobilization wave', but stick to their lower-level efforts, not out of a manpower concern, but mutual munition shortfalls. While Russia has been firing more shells than Ukraine, both have reportedly been extremely constrained, and Russia's scope for offensive capacity via artillery lessened with the generally failed offensive of he last two months.
Munition shortfalls is one of the reasons why stormtrooper detachments have been reintroduced, and stormtrooper tactics require a constant influx of mobilized troops to replenish the losses.
The new electronic mobilization law is a way to avoid attention-drawing mobilization waves. With a push of a button, you can summon as many men to the draft stations as you need, and if they don't present themselves, they get slapped with a whole roster of restrictions: their driving license is suspended, they can't buy a train or plane ticket, their business license is suspended etc.
I don't disagree (with you).
I'd disagree that these are actually stormtrooper tactics, though this could be the pedantic in me.
WW1 stormtroopers depended on heavy artillery support to suppress enemy forces so that the stormtrooper detachments could approach, fix, bypass, and then clear the enveloped positions, and it was extremely high attrition on higher-quality troops even when 'successful.' The Russian adoption seems to invert this- it's being done because of a shortage of the pre-requisite (suppressive fire munitions), and it's being done with inferior rather than higher quality forces (ie. those least able to carry the momentum). If you take away what made stormtroopers effective, you get less storm and more Somme.
Rather than a countermeasure for artillery shrotages, my read is that this is the Russian army trying to adopt what seemed to work from the Wagner approach with prisoners as part of pushing out Wagner in the ongoing turf battle, but what Wagner did wasn't stormtrooper strategy as much as turn-based strategy micromanagement. Hyper-focused individual infiltration and attack plans against specific battle position attacks would be planned, surveilled, suppressed, attacked, and re-suppressed at a squad level. This did indeed get results over time... but these results were the Wagner casualty ratios that the Russians dismissed because, well, prisoners.
My feeling is that there's a bit of a political disconnect between the Russian army, the Wagner 'stormtroopers', and Putin. Wagner got 'results' because it was willing to spend huge numbers of casualties doing so. Putin was willing to accept the prisoner casualty rates because it was politically low cost due to being 'Wagner' and 'prisoners,' not 'conscripts' or 'good Russians.' The Russian army won't get equivalent results without equivalent casualties, but they can't endure equivalent casualties with equivalent political cost.
I'm not saying Putin sincerely cares about the casualties, but he does care about the political costs of various mobilization actions, hence the various efforts to skirt around mobilization the first place, and transitioning the entire Russian Army to Wagner tactics is neither going to produce great victories or keep the political costs below the level of increased mobilization.
This I fully agree with, and I think it's going to serve as a case study of what digitized governance can do to try and coerce people into supporting the state... and the limits thereof.
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The Wehrmacht in 1943-44 was putting up impressive casualty ratios all the way back to the Vistula.
Sure, but Russia is fighting a country with a fifth of its population and Germany was fighting several countries with I think a much larger combined population.
Russia is fighting a country with a third of its population.
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What I've heard was that it was pro-russian posters online that edited the document, presumably to own their online pro-ukrainian opponents, not the actual Russian government.
I'd say that's entirely believable.
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