Biff Bashed

Just like Biff, Putin never saw it coming.

10K dead, 15K wounded, 5K POW/defected, as the Ukrainian Debacle enters Week Five.

Quite the box score for four weeks of blundering in the mud.

Putin's invasion forces have literally been decimated there. They've lost something close to 10% of the armored might of Russia in less than a month, and now they're getting pushed off of ground that had previously been secured by them.

For the attention-challenged, about six weeks before this Ukrainian disasterpiece, Putin had to send 250K troops to Kazakhstan to put down violent riots and open revolt there. They can't leave now without risking a two-front war.

All tolled, Putin's missing 35-55% of his entire armed forces, either destroyed or tied up, and taking troops from elsewhere risks similar risings in Georgia, Chechnya, and elsewhere, not to mention Russian borders at risk with opportunistic neighbors, including China, and staving off a coup in Moscow itself.

On paper, Russia's Biff Tannen army outnumbered Ukraine's George McFly forces 5 to 1 in combat power at the outset of this invasion. But Putin could only spare an attack force barely sufficient for a 2:1 advantage, when normal combat calculus is that an attacker needs 3:1, 5:1, or more in order to prevail. And so they haven't. And then we found out how untrained, unprepared, unprofessional, incompetent, and simply outright awful the Russian Army is at combat in 2022. How the mighty have fallen. And in their thousands.

UPDATE: Russia brags about shiny new ship unloading fresh war material at a Black Sea port. So Ukraine promptly blows it the hell up.

All the Russians have actually accomplished is to threaten to move Putin up to the medal-round in killing civilians, nearing parity with Castro, and then moving up on 4th-place Pol Pot. Whether he gets to bronze depends on whether or not he skips straight to the WMD phase once his demoralized and dreadful conventional forces are completely exhausted.

The only question remaining is whether Ukraine will continue to be resupplied with Javelins, Stingers, etc., sufficient to maintain this level of combat performance until Russia finally throws in the towel.

If they do, Russia stalls, and falters.

If they cannot do so, Russia eventually prevails by sheer weight.

For about 5 seconds. And then has to conduct an endless occupation against 100 times more fighters than the mujahideen ever mustered against the Russians in Afghanistan, but this time, against a near-peer adversary with a permanently seething hatred of all things Russian.

And every minute this continues, Russia appears militarily weaker by the minute to every other country on the planet, and their 12th place Brazil-sized economy shrinks by half, to one closer to 22nd place Taiwan's.

Unrest grows as well in the Russian military, which has lost more generals in the last 4 weeks than the US Army has lost in total since 1965. (The biiger problem is not the generals Ukraine has whacked; it's that they've identified the ones who most resemble Larry, Curly, and Moe, and have left them completely unharmed and unmolested, and free to carry out their cunning plans to the limit of their abilities. The Moscow citizenry is none too pleased either. Demonstrations recur, and someone today dropped off a gift of gasoline at Putin's Kremlin residence, in the handy 750-ml flaming wine bottle party package.

This does not bespeak a Russian victory parade any time soon, and the only group destined to suffer higher casualties than Russian troops attacking Kiev are likely to be Putin's food tasters.