They should leave Ukraine then.
Speed running demographic collapse. Things weren’t good before this, and they’ll be a ton worse now.
In a desperate bid to replenish its manpower, Moscow is sending injured (Sometimes amputated) soldiers back into battle.
Ouch. Everyone but Putin felt that one.
The latest figures posted by the Ministry of Defence do not include the Wagner Group nor their prisoner battalions that fought in Bakhmut.
Hundreds of thousands of mercenaries and prisoners died in that meat grind. If they did include them, they’d have to put the casualty number much higher.
Oh, and they are now kidnapping civilian immigrant workers, in an effort to bolster their numbers. They will not count either.
That’s some Warhammer 40k stuff right there.
In future Russia, there is only war. Under the watchful eye of the carion emperor Putin.
https://twitter.com/defencehq/status/1715968466501472576?s=61&t=mrc6rlMU5ame1QTCGpMbCg
Article cites UK Ministry of Defence wrong, it’s actually total of 240,000 to 290,000 killed + permamently or temporarily wounded. Still staggering figures, though.
They’ve lost over twice their original standing army.
If the average Russian knew what was going on they would rip Putin from his mansion.
I don’t know how they could not notice that their men aren’t coming back, or are coming back in boxes when they do. These loss numbers can’t be swept under a rug, they’ll be felt for generations and we’ll see smaller generations every few cycles in Russia that can be directly pointed at this war similar to how there are small population numbers every few generations in Europe overall due to the world wars
I remember thinking one benefit of the pandemic would be to show conservatives the truth vs what their propaganda says.
Unlike all the other garbage policies they push that take decades before consequences are noticeable, not wearing a mask and not getting vaccinated provided a quick shot of reality as they watched loved ones lose their lives to the disease.
So many more conservatives died because they did not take it seriously. Yet still nobody seemed to learn from it. Propaganda is powerful.
Persuasive arguments against your point of view often entrench beliefs that were not examined critically in the first place.
If your beliefs are structured around oppositional, contrarian reactionary thinking to protect some aspect of your ego you are not considering other ideas that don’t reinforce you.
There’s a difference between noticing it and being angry and actually being able to functionally do anything about it, which is the real challenge. I’m sure there are a non-trivial amount of people extremely angry about this whole disaster, but actually organizing and trying to create some change would be extremely dangerous. I’m honestly not sure where a path forward comes from until Putin eventually dies.
Yeah there absolutely plenty of Russians who never wanted this war, and some of those Russians died on the front line fighting a war they didn’t agree with. Unfortunately when Putin’s mafia is murdering foreign journalists and carefully controlling the messaging the rest of the world sees, it’s hard to see just how many of them there are. It’s the byproduct of a fascist dictator state pretending to be a democracy, something that some people from my nation (the United States) are all too happy to try and get into power
