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Nobody seems to talk about the RU-UA war here anymore. I guess it's because we're saturated with it everywhere else.
Yet given that Ukraine has launched what is unquestionably the largest offensive since the Kharkov surge in late September when it took back wide swathes of territory, I believe a status update is warranted.
First, it is immediately clear that the Russians are much more prepared this time. The area that Ukraine took back in autumn was barely defended by a rag-tag group of volunteer militias. That was a big lapse by the Russian general command, which also led to the big mobilisation drive. This time is different.
Even pro-UA accounts like Julian Röpcke are conceding that Ukraine is losing lots of armored vehicles with very marginal gains. Western officials like the CIA chief or the US foreign secretary have all pointed out that the aftermath of the offensive will shape upcoming negotiations. Given that Ukraine has little to show for their offensive thus far, this inevitably casts a dark shadow on any prospects for large territorial compromises. Why would the Russians give the Ukrainians something at the negotiating table which they cannot gain on the battlefield?
To my mind, the best that Ukraine can hope for now is a stalemate. This war has shown that in the era of ubiquitous ISR capabilities, trying to surprise your enemy is much harder if he's on his toes (which the Russians weren't in the autumn, but they are now). Consequently, offensives are simply far costlier and harder. The Russians had the same problems, which is why capturing Bakhmut took such an absurdly long time.
For those of us who would want to see a negotiated settlement, the reality is that neither side is running out of money or arms. Russia is spending a moderate amount of money and the West can keep supplying Ukraine enough to keep going for years if the decision is made that defensive action is the way to go. The only way this war ends is if the West tells Ukraine to give in and accept large territorial losses in return for a settlement and possibly security guarantees. Such an outcome would be nearly impossible to sell to Ukraine's domestic public and would almost certainly end the career of whoever was leading the country, including Zelensky. Whatever comes out of this war, I'm not optimistic about Ukraine's long-term prospects.
I agree with many of the sentiments expressed below. It's not an issue of saturation, but rather that the Ukrainian war has dropped off the radar for most people, and it's been a grinding stalemate for over half a year now. There was the initial flurry of people taking their positions at the start of the war, and they're very unlikely to change given that they're based on unfalsifiable high-level generators of disagreement.. It was fun debating the takes like "Do Europeans have any agency?" and "Why
diespend some money forDanzigDonetsk?", but it got old after a while. It didn't help that one of the most eloquent pro-Russian pundits, Mearsheimer, completely lost his marbles. It's hard to claim he isn't just swallowing Russian propaganda wholesale when he asserts Ukraine's army is taking 2x-4x more casualties than Russia's army, which is just wildly out-of-band with any credible analysis.The Ukrainian army tried to conscript a man with no hands - they are clearly hurting for manpower. Ukrainian casualties are a state secret so we can only judge via indirect signals of desperation. Meanwhile, Russia is still on its first wave of mobilization, plus prisoners.
https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/02/26/ukraine-finds-stepping-up-mobilisation-is-not-so-easy
2x-4x casualties is reasonable since the Russians have superiority in artillery and airpower. They've been firing considerably more shells than Ukraine has. Why would Russia be taking more casualties than Ukraine?
There are ways of estimating casualties including visually confirmed losses, obituaries, social media, espionage, etc. These will give estimates with significant error bars of course, but most credible estimates put UAF casualties below those of Russia's. In the Discord leaks the pro-RU side had to photoshop the CIA's casualty estimates since it was embarrassing.
Ukraine has a growingly serious ban on publishing any video/photo evidence of war stuff. There used to be multiple phone videos of almost any fighting that occurred near Ukrainian civilian centers and nowadays Russia's 50 cruise missile salvos into Kiev will have perhaps one video showing a distant explosion and almost everything is blurred. They got good at finding anyone sharing such videos and punishment is severe.
On the front, Ukrainian military is enthusiastic about making slick edits of any Russian death and publishing to often tasteless music. It makes sense since they are toast without their foreign patrons and they need to show some results. Russians don't have such constraints and rarely put out anything official other than suicide drone hits on expensive military hardware.
There was a lot of hype around open source intelligence at the beginning of the war when everyone was uploading everything to snapchat. But it is no longer to an accurate way to keep track of the action. There has since been a lot of Western media effort to inspect Russian information which can be a proxy for casualties and make calculations (new graveyard space, small town recruits returning with less men than they left with etc) but nothing for the Ukrainian side. So it is quite pointless to try to keep any ratio. We simply don't know.
If the leaks have shown anything actually important, it was that the Americans don't have a good insight of the workings of the Ukrainian military, and in some case maybe know more about the Russian side. So this should be taken with a large grain of salt as well.
Everything will be an estimations until after the war. The radical skeptic's take is to just throw a big question mark on everything, and in some ways that'd be more epistemically hygienic. In that case, you should still see the confident claims of 2-4x Ukrainian casualties as improbable. I'm personally still in favor of trusting Western (especially US) intelligence since it's been pretty accurate in this conflict.
I am basically ignoring any casualty figures for the reasons I have detailed. I wouldn’t be surprised if Russians truly have significantly fewer casualties since they have a superiority on hardware and munitions and they have been very risk averse in some situations that can lead to mass casualties, preferring to just withdraw. But I wouldn’t be surprised by the opposite either.
I am sure US intelligence has a good picture of the conflict and they sometimes put it out for mass consumption when it’s useful. But I don’t think the numbers at the discord leaks was such an occasion. They were simply taking Ukrainian mod at their word for their own casualties and repeating OSINT numbers for Russian side. My expectation is that there was an intelligence sharing mess up deliberately or not deliberately.
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