• MoreAmphibians [none/use name]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    We have no real idea, but we can make some educated guesses

    We know for a fact that Ukraine is taking heavy casualties, they've had a bunch of waves of mobilizations while Russia has had one wave that just called up reservists. This is despite Russia being outnumbered at the beginning of the invasion. Ukraine has been constantly begging western countries for weapons but the West has been trickling in stuff so Ukraine often has to go without.

    Artillery is what kills the most people in modern war. Russia is seems to be outshooting Ukraine 5:1 in general. Russia also has overall air superiority, althrough Ukraine's Soviet AA is keeping them from running roughshod. Russia is using it's advanced helicopters to great effect on the defense though. Russia also seems to have advantages in both quantity and overall quality of armor and armored vehicles. Ukraine has an absolute hodge-podge of vehicles which are very difficult to keep maintained and running, much less repaired. Russia has better drone recon and normal recon but Ukraine is being fed strategic info straight from US satellites and Polish AWACS so who knows who has the advantage there.

    I think 10:1 is reasonable for Ukraine's current offensive. Ukraine is attacking heavily fortified Russian positions using green troops and still has all the same disadvantages it's had for the rest of the war. The NATO training that was provided to those brigades was absolutely awful and led to them driving face-first into minefields like they're Germans in the battle of Kursk. The troops training abroad couldn't get any real combat experience or even advice from veteran Ukrainian troops. The most successful UKR units (like the 128th) are those that aren't using the NATO doctrines and have gone back to normal Ukrainian tactics of heavily relying on forests and urban areas to avoid drone recon and artillery fire.

    I can't emphasize enough how much NATO training fucked over the troops that were trained in it. They're still trying NATO-style assaults but they've gotten slightly smarter about it. Russia's defenses weren't a secret, they were visible from space. NATO knew what sort of equipment Ukraine had because NATO provided it. NATO knew that Ukraine didn't have the artillery or engineering equipment to punch through a minefield like that.

    Russia has been heavily fortifying their positions for six months. They have 5 lines of defense in some areas. Ukraine's weeks of assaults haven't even reached the first line of defense, they've been stuck in back-and-forth fighting on the screening line. Ukraine has been advancing slowly and I think they will actually reach the first line of defense and finally see the dragon's teeth.

    I don't think Ukraine is knocked out and I think Ukraine still has a goodly portion of NATO armored vehicles left. They'll likely be used in either one giant push in the counteroffensive or possibly used more defensively.

    Here's a recent war map.

    https://twitter.com/War_Mapper/status/1672242762983301123

    Another thing for doing your own research. Russia often doesn't include Wagner or Donbas republics losses in their official counts. I'm not sure if how they count Kadyrov's guys. Russia should be integrating all forces under it's Ministry of Defence soon(tm) though. I think that's a large part of what the recent excitement was about. Also remember the difference between fatalities (killed) and casualties (killed or injured).