Asia Times, 12/22/23
Recent articles in several leading US newspapers followed a statement from National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson saying that Russia had suffered “staggeringly high losses” in the Ukraine war.
The casualties are a vital part of understanding the war not only because the subject speaks to the future of Ukraine and Russia, but it also, if the losses are as severe as some insist, speaks to the issue of just how long the war can continue.
Every number cited below is from the Internet. There is no controlled, classified or proprietary data. The US National Security Council may know things that we don’t know, but this wouldn’t be the first time in history that casualty reports were inflated up the chain of command.
What we do know is that casualty ratios are fairly consistent across a large number of wars, and this helps us use public source data effectively. We have very little hard data. But what data we do have suggests that Ukraine’s casualties are higher than Russia’s.
The little hard data we have on Russia comes mainly from one source, an anti-Putin group who have people in Russia who have, since the beginning of the war, continually searched local newspapers as well as thousands of websites all over Russia looking for obituaries or blogger “memorials” to family members or friends.
They have been able to find about 36,000 documented deaths. They estimate that they are missing nearly 50% and currently place their “guesstimate” of total Russian deaths at “47,000 – 70,000.” What does this imply for total casualties, that is, killed/wounded/missing/prisoner?
Prisoner numbers are low. The best published data suggest that there are currently fewer than 5,000 Russians held by Ukraine and fewer than 12,000 Ukrainians held by Russia.
For purposes of calculation, we designated all Russian deaths as “Killed In Action” (KIA). This is, of course, not (and never is) technically correct.
In Vietnam, the US had 58,000 killed (58,220). In fact, only 47,434 were combat deaths; the others were from a host of other causes. Anecdotal reports suggest that a significant percentage of Russian deaths are not, in fact, combat-related.
The number of missing is also a mystery. There must be some, but those numbers are unknown. We do know that there is a very large number of people, virtually all young men, who have fled the two countries. This number is (another guesstimate) roughly 350,000-400,000 Russians and over 650,000 Ukrainians.
Wounded in Action (WIA) figures have, again based on spotty reporting, averaged between 3 and 4 times the KIA numbers. 3.5 is a good rough estimate for both sides.
wudnt trust Adrienne Watson with a bus timetable
By modern American Standards it’s true the Russians have suffered much more than the American Military could possibly bear and stay intact. (The American new solution is to start recruiting illegal immigrants, which after a foreign war or two will happily machinegun American plebs on order. See Senator Dick Durban’s new bill)
Even the Vietnam numbers don’t tell an accurate tale. On Vietnam War, many of those numbers for the first 8 years were blacks, poor whites – particularly Southern Whites, and Project 100,000(also known as McNamara’s Morons). The blacks early on were in particular a there as eugenics program to trim down the number of long serving blacks with military expertise that might be a problem if they were state side and aligned with civil rights movements that promote confrontation. It’s when black men and poor whites began to frag their officers so that white middle class men had to be drafted into the front lines that the war really lost popularity. Hence even by Vietnam the Americans were unwilling to see losses.