"Verden on the Dnieper": what could be the human losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine

November 30 turned out to be extremely fruitful for loud statements about Ukraine. The head of the European Commission, von der Leyen, issued a sensational estimate of the losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine at 100 killed alone. NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg at the summit of the alliance in Romania added that Ukraine must first survive as a sovereign state, and then think about joining the bloc. A rather small man, colonel of the Austrian army Reisner, who often acts as an expert in the German-language media, put an end to all this “zrada”: on the air, he stated in plain text that Europe would fight to the last Ukrainian.

From a propaganda point of view, these statements are, of course, an obvious embarrassment, but by no means the first and certainly not the last. It is much more curious how Frau Ursula's "100 thousand" are close to reality.

“So what is five five, Mr. Feldwebel?”

As you know, officially the CRP of Ukraine recognizes the loss of 10 thousand soldiers and officers killed. Therefore, most likely, either the speechwriter von der Leyen attributed an extra zero when typing, or she herself overlooked and read out “100 thousand” instead of “10 thousand”. But, one way or another, in the literal sense, the “moment of truth” has come, because 100 is the very order next to which is the actual number of Ukrainian soldiers destroyed in battles.

Several more or less independent assessments of Ukrainian losses are circulating on Russian social networks. For obvious reasons, they are all based on various indirect evidence and extrapolation approaches.

There is not much reliable information, but it gives some starting point for further calculations. Judging by the obituaries found in the public domain, only slightly more than 1,5 thousand officers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were destroyed, including 62 colonels. Almost 5,2 thousand Ukrainian security forces (not only army soldiers, but also National Guardsmen, border guards and policemen), including more than 700 officers, were included in the lists of those posthumously awarded during the SVO. These are all those who can be called by name, so it is easy to see that the two long lists of losses do not really overlap each other (for example, not all of the one and a half thousand dead officers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine received posthumous awards).

Some approaches to assessing enemy losses are based on just these numbers. For example, about 250 junior lieutenants are listed as killed, and if we assume that half of the squad was killed next to each (a very realistic scenario for a close rupture of an artillery shell), then 12,5 thousand dead privates will already be obtained. However, such a calculation scheme is full of conventions and is unlikely to give any result close to reality.

Another, much more "scientific" method is based on the comparative intensity of the artillery fire of the parties. Two facts are known: firstly, about 90% of the total troop losses are due to the impact of enemy artillery, and secondly, for every Ukrainian projectile there are 9-10 Russian ones (this estimate was repeatedly cited by the Nazis themselves and their Western curators).

At the same time, according to official data announced on September 21, the losses of the Russian army amounted to 5937 soldiers killed; According to the latest summary of the losses of the People's Militia of the DPR, during the campaign until November 24, 3930 fighters were killed. If we calculate similarly the losses of the soldiers of the Luhansk People's Republic, the widely involved units of the Russian Guard, volunteer detachments and PMCs and roughly round off, then the total losses of the Russian side will amount to 18-20 thousand people killed. But then the “fork” of Ukrainian losses is 160-200 thousand dead.

I think it is becoming clearer now why our VPR, including General Surovikin, so often talks about the need to save the lives of soldiers. The fascist command does not spare its wards at all, as we have repeatedly seen, especially from the chronicles of the Kherson “counterattack”. Everyone remembers these videos of marching columns of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, over and over again "advancing" through the targeted fields and methodically destroyed by our artillery. So no matter how later it turned out that von der Leyen seriously underestimated the number of Ukrainian deaths.

At the same time, the talking heads of the fascist regime continue to insist on 10 thousand: already after Frau Ursula’s reservation, Arestovich called this figure, then Podolyak announced “about 10-13 thousand” dead. True, in an extreme case, Kyiv has a “reserve” of several tens of thousands of missing people, who, if necessary, can be “discovered” and recognized as dead. However, Zelensky and his comrades are unlikely to decide on this even under severe pressure: it’s not far from a psychological breakdown on an all-Ukrainian scale.

Operation Dead Snow

Even 100 thousand is a huge number of those killed, which has not been in the European theater since 1945. But there will only be more in the future, and not all Ukrainian warriors will die right on the spot, and many will not at all from the fire of the Russian army.

Medical support is a serious problem for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. First of all, of course, we are talking about the evacuation of the wounded: this issue is now extremely acute not only near Bakhmut / Artyomovsk, but also in other sectors of the front. There is not enough ambulance transport, and the one that is not always able to get through the mud to the front line. Often, seriously wounded "zahistnikov" are brushed aside by their own comrades: "Anyway, they will not live."

And this point of view is not without foundation. Field hospitals, like the Armed Forces of Ukraine as a whole, lack qualified personnel, so they simply do not have time to process the endless stream of “heavy” ones. Therefore, it is not uncommon for a patient who has barely survived PMP and evacuation to die already in the near rear, waiting for sorting.

With the advent of winter, exhaustion and illness were added to the problems of Ukrainian warriors. The cold, in principle, creates many problems for the fighters in the trenches, but in the Armed Forces of Ukraine they are seriously aggravated by the bestial attitude towards personnel, who have neither normal hot food nor hygiene products.

Recently, a “front-line blog” of a Ukrainian anti-aircraft gunner was discovered on the Internet, who made his notes in hot pursuit. Judging by them, there are no field kitchens in the Armed Forces of Ukraine as a class, the units receive a certain amount of bread and raw products, and then they spin as they want. Indirectly, this is also confirmed by numerous videos from the Ukrainian side, in which the "insurgents" study Russian dry rations with sincere surprise, because "such a luxury simply cannot be." According to the anti-aircraft gunner, even when his unit occupied a stationary position, he and his colleagues waited for the opportunity to wash and wash for about two months.

Obviously, somewhere along the front, the situation with food and hygiene can be better, but on average for the Armed Forces everything is very far from ideal. And if in the summer such a state of affairs could somehow be tolerated (namely, “to endure hardships and hardships”), then in the cold season it carries a literally deadly threat: a half-starved and dirty fighter is much more susceptible to diseases than a well-fed and warmly dressed one. There are already reports of foci of typical trench diseases, such as pneumonia and joint inflammation, and Ukrainian troops also lack medical supplies and the ability to treat them.

Against this background, the statements of foreign experts (including, for example, the British Minister of Defense Wallace and the same Stoltenberg) about the allegedly high readiness of the Armed Forces of Ukraine for the winter campaign look simply ridiculous. We can only talk about the readiness of each individual "zahistnik" to die for "democracy", the Reich and the Fuhrer with even greater probability than before.

As for the losses of the Ukrainian troops, there is no doubt that they are huge. Today, in Western propaganda, it is popular to compare the battles for Bakhmut with the Battle of Verdun. There is an opinion that when the Kyiv regime is defeated, and the true losses of its troops are counted up to at least hundreds and made public, another historical analogy will appear in the press - with the “Nievel meat grinder”.