Eaton Rapids Joe took a look at Russian casualties in Ukraine.
It's a good idea, and a welcome break from too much all-heat and no-light screaming from the shallow end of the IQ pool.
His conclusion: compared to WWII casualties, they're not doing too bad in Ukraine.
Let's take a closer look. All work will be shown.
First, let's set some guidelines.
In WWII, the Soviet Army had about 11.5M men.
Their war lasted 1470 days, from the German invasion on 22 June 1941 to VE day when Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945. (The 15 seconds to take their half of Poland, and the week or two between them finally declaring war on Japan, and Japan surrendering, entailed no serious military engagements.)
In that time, they suffered 6.3M KIAs and Died Of Wounds casualties. I'm not looking at other casualty numbers, because KIA/DoW is all we're looking at for Ukraine.
That puts all Russian military losses in WWII at an average of about 4,285/day, 24/7/365.
(Joe comes up with a higher number, but it isn't going to matter much in the grand scheme, as we'll show presently.)
First of all, consider a wee historical tidbit: the Soviet Army suffered those losses fighting 150 divisions of the Wermacht, including 15 armored divisions. (For comparison, right now, the entire US land forces, Army and Marines combined total, is 13 active divisions total (10+3), and 9 reserve divisions (8+1), including a total of one armored division.)
Secondly, the Russian Army now is only about 500K men, and the size of the force that invaded Ukraine is generally acknowledged to be about half that size, i.e. 250K troops, all in.
The Soviet Army of WWII was therefore 46 times bigger than the Russian invasion force (well, until they started making contact with Ukrainian forces) that entered Ukraine.
So for a comparison that's apples to apples, instead of apples to pineapples, that 4285/day casualty rate, divided by a force 1/46th the size, drops to 93/day, for any 250K troops.
But of the 250K troops who invaded, the casualty number after 14 days of conflict is 6000 men.
As Joe correctly noted, barely a bad day for WWII. For that matter, barely a bad afternoon at Antietam or Gettysburg in the US Civil War, and hardly more than one stupid attack across No Man's Land any day at Ypres in WWI. But this wasn't our Civil War, or WWI, or WWII.
And the Army in question isn't the behemoth juggernaut 46 times bigger than the present one, nor engaged in combat with the most ferocious army in world history through 1942.
It's a campaign with literally half the current Russian Army, and experiencing a casualty rate not the 93/day (per 250K troops) from WWII, but rather a death rate of 428/day, which is only 4.6 times worse than Russia experienced at the height of WWII, against most of the German Army.
Inflicted on them by a ragamuffin militia that wouldn't even qualify for the U.S. Notional Guard, except they have Javelin anti-tank missiles, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, and the usual Russian hand-me-down small arms.
And they're fighting the "mighty" Russian Army clown posse to a standstill.
By any objective standard, the Russians have been getting the ever-loving shit kicked out of them, six times a week and twice on Sundays.
This is why the Russians are now attacking passively, by holding up short, and shelling cities full of civilians from 15 miles outside of town: because when they go toe to toe with the Ukrainian ragamuffins, they get their asses handed to them, shit their pants, and retreat.
At the height of the Vietnam War, we had about 500K troops in-country.
On the absolute worst day of the Vietnam War, the day after the 1968 Tet offensive, when battles broke out in 100 cities and hamlets nationwide, what happened?
If every day in Vietnam had been that bad, the entire war would have lasted just 8 months, to get to the number of deaths (over 58,000) it took 10 solid years to accomplish.
The Russian forces in Ukraine - half the size of the US Army in Vietnam - are dying at nearly twice that number, every single day for two solid weeks. They'll have suffered a Vietnam in just 4 months, at the current rate.
If any American commander since 1960 had suffered 10% KIA and 25% casualties and equipment losses for anything short of nuclear warfare, they'd have been relieved and court-martialed.
The Russians are and have been suffering Kasserine Pass levels of ass-whupping, every week they keep this up. And every day, they get weaker, while the Ukrainian forces get stronger.
If you can't conceive what a dick-punching is being delivered on Putin's invaders, you simply can't count. It's worse that WWII, and it's worse than Vietnam on its worst day. TheRussians are not getting better at it over time, and they're burning up war stocks of material and ammunition of which they only have a finite supply.
[BTW: Russian doctrine when they're getting rolled, since the 1950s, stipulates that Plan B is to drop chemical or tactical nuclear weapons, to rock the enemy and gain offensive momentum. How curious that they just magically "discovered" 'bio-warfare labs' in Ukraine, just as their invasion fleet runs aground on the rocks of Reality, and just after they shipped in a good supply of chemical warfare suits for their troops in Ukraine. Just a serendipitous coincidence, I'm sure.]
Putin has pulled his own pants down, and the Ukrainians are smacking his sky-clad cheeks with a board. Every other nation that doesn't like Russia can see that, and that only destabilizes the entire world, and makes future pushback against Russia not just likely, but inevitable.
You got Bunker?
