Russo-Ukrainian War Thread - Page 632

On November 27 2023 00:54 Manit0u wrote:


Do you think Russia would intentionally downplay their numbers to feign weakness? IMO if they were falsifying the numbers they'd probably want to prop them up to have the narrative of laughing at sanctions and farting in the general direction of EU and NATO. If the released numbers are propped up and it still looks bad for them then the actual situation is even worse.

So, any potential falsification would have to be downplaying the numbers but then again Russia would seem weak and it would be harder to project strength and resort to the standard bullying.

Obviously we won't know the truth until later but for now it doesn't look that great for Russian economy either way.

- non oil & gas revenue up over 50% from pre-invasion (showing that Russia managed to pivot some of its economy)
- total revenue in 2023 is actually higher than in 2022 (but still about 25% lower than in 2021)
- total expenditure is 25% higher than in 2021
- overall, unlike in previous 2 years where for the most part of the year Russia was showing actual net profit in 2023 every month has been a pretty big deficit

On November 27 2023 01:04 Simberto wrote:


Yes, it is reasonable to view the Russian numbers as an upper bound, but it very hard to estimate how far below them reality actually lies, which makes it hard to actually use them in any useful fashion.

Especially all the positive conclusions you pulled from those numbers, like for example



are highly questionable. None of that needs to be true in any way. Basically, the way you describe the video describing the numbers (i didn't look at any of them) sounds something like "middling, but far better than expected, with good trends for the future". And i simply wouldn't believe any Russian numbers enough to take any such conclusions.

On November 27 2023 00:26 2Pacalypse- wrote:
Perun made a new video in which he spends 20 minutes highlighting the compared losses of Ukraine and Russia in Zaporizhia and Avdiivka. He spends almost 5 minutes painstakingly describing the difficulties in assessing losses and making sure it's correctly attributed. And then with all of the filters applied he shows the numbers which seem, to me, as correct as one can expect it to be.

I wonder if @zeo would find this analysis critical enough and do these numbers seem reasonable enough from the Russian perspective?

Here's the video with the timestamp starting at the assessing losses section:

In audio intercepts from the front lines in Ukraine, Russian soldiers speak in shorthand of 200s to mean dead, 300s to mean wounded. The urge to flee has become common enough that they also talk of 500s — people who refuse to fight.

As the war grinds into its second winter, a growing number of Russian soldiers want out, as suggested in secret recordings obtained by The Associated Press of Russian soldiers calling home from the battlefields of the Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk regions in Ukraine.

The calls offer a rare glimpse of the war as it looked through Russian eyes — a point of view that seldom makes its way into Western media, largely because Russia has made it a crime to speak honestly about the conflict in Ukraine. They also show clearly how the war has progressed, from the professional soldiers who initially powered Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion to men from all walks of life compelled to serve in grueling conditions.

“There’s no f------ ‘dying the death of the brave’ here,” one soldier told his brother from the front in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region. “You just die like a f------ earthworm.”

The prospect of another wave of mobilization lingers, even as Moscow has been trying to lure people into signing contracts with the military. Russia’s annual autumn conscription draft kicked off in October, pulling in some 130,000 fresh young men. Though Moscow says conscripts won’t be sent to Ukraine, after a year of service they automatically become reservists — prime candidates for mobilization.

The AP verified the identities of people in the calls by speaking with relatives and soldiers — some of whom are still at war in Ukraine — and researching open-source material linked to the phone numbers used by the soldiers.

The conversations, picked up in January 2023 — some from near the longest and deadliest fight in Bakhmut — have been edited for length and clarity. Names have been omitted to protect the soldiers and their relatives.

The voices in these calls are of men who didn’t or couldn’t flee mobilization. Some had no money, no education and no options. Others believed in patriotic duty. One worked in a meat processing plant, cutting bone. Another worked at a law firm. A third, who worked as a roofer and later at a supermarket company, had a string of debts and had defaulted on his utilities payments, records show.

It is hard to say how representative these calls are of sentiment in Russia’s armed forces, but their desperation is matched by a spike in legal cases against soldiers in Russia who refuse to fight.

What’s happening in Ukraine is “simply genocide,” the soldier in Kharkiv told his brother. “If this s--- doesn’t stop, then soon we’ll be leading the Ukrainians to the Kremlin ourselves,” he said.

“This is just a huge testing ground, where the whole world is testing their weapons, f--- it, and sizing up their d----,” he went on. “That’s all.”

But there are other voices, too, of men who remain committed to the fight.

“As long as we are needed here, we will carry out our task,” a soldier named Artyom told AP from eastern Ukraine at the end of May, where he’d been stationed for eight months without break. “Just stop asking me these stupid questions.”

The Kremlin and Russian Ministry of Defense did not respond to requests for comment.

SOLDIER: ‘BONES, TEARS — ALL THE SAME, THEY ARE THE SAME AS WE ARE’

When he finally got to go home, it came at a terrible price: his brother’s life.

Nicknamed “Crazy Professor” because of his disheveled hair, he was swept up in the first days of Russia’s September 2022 draft. The soldier said he was assured that he wouldn’t see combat and would get to go home every six months.

Neither turned out to be true.

After a few weeks of training, the Professor was sent to the front line near Bakhmut as a mortarman. He wanted out almost immediately. He was ill-equipped, at least compared to the well-camouflaged Wagner soldiers wandering around.

“They have night vision and automatic rifles with cool silencers. I have an automatic rifle from 1986 or hell knows what year,” he told his brother in a January phone call.

It was his job to aim, but the Russian army’s coordinates were so sloppy that soldiers ended up killing each other.

The Professor said his commander instructed them not to kill civilians, but who was a civilian and who was a combatant? Even a kid could carry a grenade, he told his brother. Where did the mortars he fired land? Had he killed children?

The worst was when he was out with young guys in his unit. There was just a strip of woods between them and the Ukrainians.

“I imagined that there, on the other side, there could be young people just like us. And they have their whole lives ahead of them,” he told AP in June. “Bones, tears — all the same, they are the same as we are.”

The Professor told himself he didn’t really have a choice: Either fire the mortar or face criminal charges and end up in a pit or a prison.

“If you don’t like something, if you refuse to do something, you’re considered a refusenik,” he told AP. “That is, you’re a ‘500’ right away. … So we had to follow orders. Whether we wanted to or not.”

The Professor never thought he’d be a refusenik one day too.

The Professor: The worst thing is that there might even be children there, you know.

Brother: And what can you do. … You have your orders. … It seems to me that if it had been voluntary, you wouldn’t have gone.

The Professor: You know, I’m glad about that. Plus, we did such a good job that they gave us a car. The downside is, you know, how many lives were ruined for the sake of a car?

Brother: Not of your own free will.

The Professor: I’m already so tired.

Brother: I believe it. Time to come home. I wish you could come home. Not so that you could home but so that all of this could be over already.

In the spring, as the Professor’s brothers drove down a road outside their hometown in Russia, a car made a U-turn into the side of their vehicle, sending it spinning as a semi bore down on them.

One brother was killed. Another survived but now cannot walk, family members told AP.

Desperate to go home to bury his brother, the Professor said he got approval from his commander for a 10-day leave. Military police in Russian-controlled territory in Luhansk let him through, he said, and he paid for his own taxi ride home. Once he got back to Russia, however, he was told he didn’t have the right paperwork.

Not long after the funeral, the Professor got a message from his commanding officer: “What is happening there? Are you going to come back or stay there?”

“I’ll collect the documents, and then we’ll decide everything,” he wrote back.

Two hours later, around midnight, his commander responded: “I’m reporting you as AWOL, unauthorized abandonment of the unit. It was nice fighting together.”

Now he faces up to 10 years in prison.

He hired a lawyer. Months into a 10-day leave, he can’t even apply for an extension to legalize his stay and help his family because he doesn’t have the right documents. He said his brother can move around on his arms and mostly get into his wheelchair by himself, but can’t function independently.

People from the military came to his home, he said. Terrified they’d arrest him if he went outside, he passed documents attesting to the dire state of his family’s health to them through the window.

His lawyer told him to look on the bright side. “You are the only, well, how do I put this … at least, you’re the only healthy person here.”

His mother is at the end of her endurance.

“I write everywhere, I call everywhere, too. Because he was told that he has to return to his unit,” his mother told AP. “But how can he leave his brother? I have no one.”

Now, the Professor has visions of dead people. They stare back at him. He can almost hear them walking nearby. Sometimes he bolts awake at night, sweating, or dives under the covers at the sound of a whistle.

He wants his old life back, that sweet time he had with his wife and baby. He has picked up some roofing work at construction sites, and his neighbor proposed a new side job: digging graves.

ARTYOM: ‘EVERYBODY’S F------ MAD, F------ GLOOMY AS HELL’

Artyom left behind a string of debts in Russia. Things got even worse in Ukraine, where it was so cold he couldn’t wash his underwear and his lighter kept freezing.

“It’s not like I’m having any f------ fun here, day in day out. It’s been f------ four months already,” he told his wife in January. “Everybody’s f------ mad, f------ gloomy as hell.”

It was New Year’s Day, and the Russians were getting bombarded by Ukrainians and not even firing back, he said.

“Yesterday we were f------ bombarded, for f---’s sake, we didn’t even get a single shell out, not a single f------ shell,” he told his wife.

The war seemed senseless to him. Why wasn’t Putin satisfied with Crimea? What business did they have trying to take Kharkiv and Kyiv? Why was everyone lying about how great things were at the front?

No one was saying the one thing he wanted to hear: that he could go home.

Artyom: Yesterday we were listening to the radio and someone f------ said, “the situation with mobilized soldiers is f------ wonderful.” I don’t know who the f------ idiot is who said that. “Only five thousand people died.”

Wife: Mhm. Of course.

Artyom: F------ s---heads. I think half of them are probably gone at this point.

Wife: Right.

Artyom: Five thousand people my ass.

Artyom doesn’t have much sympathy for draft dodgers and deserters, though he can see the wisdom in making a run for it.

“That’s what you have to do, given the chance,” he told his wife. “This is not the best f------ place to be … But then they’re gonna say you’re a f------ freak who ran away. I don’t f------ need that.”

He told her he’ll stay put and follow orders. “If God wills it so that you’re gonna f------ die, you’re gonna f------ die, can’t do much about it.”

The AP reached Artyom by phone at the end of May. He was still in eastern Ukraine, where he’d been serving for eight months without break.

Artyom said he’d been “a little worn out mentally” when he was speaking with his wife. He said he loved his family before the war and loved them even more now. He regrets he didn’t spend more time with them.

“I have to save the guys who are with me in the trenches — and myself,” he said. “That’s what I want to do. And to put down the Ukrainians faster and go home.”

On November 28 2023 09:12 Falling wrote:
I guess a follow up question or two would be
1) Do you apply the same standard to your own sources?
For instance, at this point you are engaging in speculation rather than analysis: "My theory is that he came across the spreadsheet, knew a lot of his audience would only accept that version of events and then tried to come up with scenarios" Are you equally negative on your own sources to the point of speculating on their thought process as part of your evaluation as to the quality of the source?

2) Is there any outside analysis that you have seen (besides your own) that rises above "better than some of the horse shit posted here" as that seems your final evaluation of Perun. (I mean outside of this thread: professional analysts, retired generals, etc. I'm not asking for an evaluation of TL posters.)

On November 28 2023 05:34 zeo wrote:

Ok, so this is an interesting video and right off the bat I’d like to say that long-form researched and scripted videos with editing for graphics (visual explanation) are much much more valuable as a resource to understand any subject than any off the cuff hot takes twice a day. That said, full disclosure, I haven’t had time to watch the entire video. I watched the part you recommended to me regarding assessing losses which is I think around 20min long give or take a minute or two.

At the beginning Perun goes into an explanation of the data points he is using, he claims his statistics come from satellite imagery and there are a few glaring problems with his logic. First he says that the fact that the lines have been relatively static and that its easy to discern which equipment belongs to who. What he doesn’t take into account is that both sides have been raiding into each others territory over the last two years and both sides have had equipment losses in enemy territory. The line at Krasnokorovka has been there since mid 2022 which means that for a year and a half there have been on and off tank battles on that exact patch of land that Russia is now attempting to advance out of.

There is a lot of old losses from both sides littering the field and with a lot of these quasi-annalists they count old, rusted and blackened equipment along with the actual resent losses. And they are easy to blend in together while using satellite imagery, Perun cited Frontintelligance Insight and going into their substack were they posted their findings... Yeah, its bad. By all means go into it yourself and have a look, its incredibly blurry and unfocused imagery that might or might not be there of what looks like rusted out hulls that could belong to either side by their claimed positions.

He then goes off the edge completely with the next part. While talking about ‘information’ and ‘data coming to us’ he goes into talking about the ratio of losses between the two sides, and although he doesn’t mention where the data is coming from its probably from the same bonkers spreadsheet posted here a few days ago. I listened carefully for any source of anything and as far as I know he didn’t say where the data points came from. Its so jarring and completely off the wall, what was the point of the previous talk of methodology when your data could have come from a 16 year old girls dream diary and been more accurate.

My theory is that he came across the spreadsheet, knew a lot of his audience would only accept that version of events and then tried to come up with scenarios and explanations from how those numbers could make sense in a way where people who are not complete idiots would not feel like idiots for believing them. I don’t think there is any malice here, its just a guy trying to make money. His closing argument is ‘well at least the numbers are half as crazy as the numbers coming out of the Ukrainian MoD’ like thats proof of anything, they could be lying for 10x the amount so you are only lying for 5x. True, accurate analysis takes more than just being able to do a halfassed search for quick, cherry-picked ‘dunk’ material that bolsters your point. This analysis is just telling your audience what it wants to hear (in this case cope) so you can keep living off of them.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve watched this youtuber before and he is miles better than some of the horse shit posted here but anything to do with Ukraine is clearly biased and gone into with a conclusion that needs an explanation.
Not talking about Russian or Ukrainian perspectives, all you need to do is to be able to apply the minimum amount of common sense to this kind of propaganda and it falls apart. i.e. always ask where the data is coming from and who is doing the counting / coping.

Maybe the rest of the video isn't this bad i don't know. At least he's not citing 'British Intelligence'

As snow fell silently in a secret location in eastern Ukraine, the Russian infantrymen huddled on a garage floor, their hands dirty and their faces exhausted.

The men had been captured by Ukrainian troops during intense fighting for the city of Avdiivka. Now they waited to be sent to prisoner-of-war facilities, far from the front line.

Moscow’s fall offensive in Ukraine, of which Avdiivka is the primary target, is resulting in a steady flow of Russian POWs. Often, the captured men say they got lost and ended up among Ukrainians by mistake. Voluntary surrender is a crime in Russia.

Many of their comrades were less fortunate. Fields and factory districts around Avdiivka are littered with dead Russian infantry, sent to attack Ukrainian positions in costly frontal assaults.

Russia is accepting high casualties as the price of advancing. Its troops are pushing gradually into Avdiivka’s outskirts, while also trying to encircle it by taking the surrounding countryside.

The Ukrainians call the Russian assaults “meat waves.” The defenders inflict casualties with artillery, drones, mines and tanks, but they are struggling to cope with the Russians’ sheer numbers. Kyiv estimates that Russia currently has over 400,000 troops in Ukraine. Moscow has never disclosed its troop numbers.

If Russia takes Avdiivka, it could open up further local advances in the eastern Donetsk region. It would also be a propaganda win for President Vladimir Putin, allowing him to claim that momentum is back with Moscow after Ukraine’s counteroffensive this summer couldn’t achieve a breakthrough.

The POWs in the makeshift holding facility, mostly in their 30s and 40s, face an indeterminate confinement. Prisoner exchanges between Russia and Ukraine have stalled in recent months.

Yet some of the Russians sitting in the garage also expressed relief. The carnage of Avdiivka was over for them.

Several soldiers volunteered to talk to The Wall Street Journal. They described their motivations for joining the Russian army fighting in Ukraine, their brief training and their units’ low morale after being ordered to conduct costly assaults. The Journal verified their identities and has withheld their surnames.

Combat at Avdiivka was “an animal nightmare,” said Sergei, a former factory worker from Perm near the Ural Mountains who signed up in October for money. His old job paid 30,000 rubles a month, he said, or about $340. The army offered him 100,000.

Training consisted mostly of menial chores such as picking up branches, he said. Combat preparation consisted of firing two magazines’ worth of ammunition from an assault rifle, he said, and mostly theoretical first-aid lessons.

He didn’t expect to be at the front line. He thought he would only be driving trucks in the rear, he said.

Sent straight to Avdiivka, his unit was ordered to attack Ukrainian-held tree lines on the city’s northern flank. But the assault was driven back by Ukrainian armored vehicles. The unit retreated to its starting position, leaving dead men strewn across the muddy fields.

Sergei was wounded but was soon sent back to the front line. In late November, he was captured while disoriented, he said. “I felt relieved. I don’t want to see this nightmare anymore.” His family hasn’t seen any of his promised pay yet, he said. The Ukrainians let him and other POWs phone home.

Pavel was drafted in late 2022, during Putin’s first big wave of conscription to bolster Russian forces in Ukraine, which were on the retreat at the time. “My choice was either to come here or face a fine or prison,” said the former machine-tool operator from Siberia.

Tactical training consisted of charging across a field, in the style of Soviet-era World War II movies in which troops shout “for Stalin!,” said Pavel.

He spent many months in the rear in northeastern Ukraine. He saw little action but came to fear large Ukrainian drones that buzz unseen in the night, which Russians have dubbed “Baba Yaga”—an evil witch in Eastern European folk tales.

This fall, Pavel’s unit was sent to Avdiivka and told they were now assault troops.

His company was ordered to cross the fiercely contested train tracks north of the city and take some trenches, he said. Many of their vehicles were knocked out by artillery well before they reached the Ukrainian position. Russian infantry fell dead and wounded in the mud. The unit took and held the trenches, taking more casualties, before being relieved.

“The captain said we fulfilled our goal. But how can you say that if only 35 out of 100 men came back?” said Pavel. “And that was just on one day.” He blamed the losses on commanders’ blunt tactic of frontal assaults and on the men’s lack of training. “To become real assault troops takes work and a lot of time,” he said.

Russian authorities have disclosed very little information about the heavy casualties in the war, noted Pavel. “Now I saw them with my own eyes.”

One night his depleted company was sent back to the contested area near the train tracks to stabilize the Russian position. He was ordered to help collect some wounded men. He said he and another man lost their way and ended up at a Ukrainian-held tree line.

“I thought this is the end. We went to ground and shouted ‘don’t shoot!’” he said. The Ukrainian soldiers told them they were very lucky men: They had just wandered through a minefield.

Russian commanders’ insistence on sending wounded men back to the front is another reason for low morale, said Andrei, who was also taken prisoner north of Avdiivka.

Russian soldiers are dying because they are ordered to attack positions where they have no protection from Ukrainian fire even if they succeed, he said. But commanders are under orders from higher up, he said.

“If you don’t follow an order, you will face either a long time in prison or you’ll be shot,” he said.

Andrei, a former bank worker, said he volunteered for the army because many of his relatives had served. He thought he would be in a reserve unit because he has a heart condition but instead was sent to the front line.

Soon he found himself at Avdiivka, advancing in an armored vehicle with 11 other men when it hit a mine. Half of the men were killed. He was badly concussed. He lay there all night until he found the energy to stagger back to base, he said. After three weeks’ rest, he was back in a trench, where men around him were being killed by shelling. They withdrew.

“I got lost,” he said. “I saw two soldiers and asked for water. They were Ukrainian.”

The losses on both sides are “unjustified,” Andrei said, calling it a war between brothers. It is a description that Ukrainians, after years of Russian efforts to control, invade and subjugate them, decidedly reject.

On December 01 2023 20:30 ZeroByte13 wrote:
There's still a lot of Dota 2 teams that have both Ukrainians and Russians, this didn't change.
Including current (and 2x) TI champion, they have 3 Russians and 2 Ukrainians.
The organization / team itself is based in Serbia now.

I'd guess the same is true for other e-sports too.