The thing is, he might have no other choice: he is a strongman, and for any strongman loosing a war would mean the end of being in power.
> Plus this is a ground war, so any nuke ruins the land they're fighting over and kills as many of their own troops (who aren't exactly equipped for basic fighting, let alone fallout)
If you know the history of the Soviet Union, you know that they don't care about the lives of their own people, at all.
How many Soviet soldiers died in WWII? About 10M.
How many Russians soldiers died in the past 7 months alone? Between 50-80K.
> Russia has enough nukes (almost 6000, and the ability to deliver them) to annihilate any other country, and put the whole planet into nuclear winter. That makes them a super power, even if they cannot win a ground war with Ukraine. For reference, India only has 160
Many analysts point out, that all the Russian nukes are from the 1960s-1980s, and given the state of all their military equipment during the invasion there is an extremely high likelihood of complete failure to deliver any threat at all.
You didn't say casualties, you said deaths, which is the number the Ukrainian government gives too.
>If there’s so few casualties of the initial invading force it makes absolutely no sense for putin to start mobilisation, which he did.
Russian army doctrine is different to US army doctrine. Russia always had a conscription heavy army and needs vastly more manpower than the US to fight a war. I imagine they were expecting the Ukrainian army to collapse like the army in Georgia did in 2008 which is why they weren't prepared for an actual fight.
This is the first real war between advanced economies since Desert Storm. It is a painful lesson that second rate powers can again standup to first rate powers on the ground since military tech now costs pennies on the million.
I _really_ hope the West is taking notes because if we're not than we're in for a surprise just as unpleasant as the one the Russians are getting.
> I find it kind of astonishing people are citing Ukrainian numbers as anything short of blatant propaganda, just like Russian ones.
US reports are worthless, because it has no soldiers on the ground.
The extremely high Russian casualty rate has been reported by multiple independent sources from inside Russia.
For instance:
> "Everyone went to the SVO," Astashov told RFE/RL, using the acronym for "special military operation," the euphemism the Kremlin has insisted on using when discussing the war in Ukraine.
> According to Astashov, the size of the brigade when it deployed was about 1,500 troops. The total number of dead, by Astashov's estimate: "At least several hundred."
Also, many huge Russian loses in Ukraine were confirmed by NATO countries with visuals:
> The British defense ministry on Friday said satellite imagery has confirmed that Ukrainian forces decimated a Russian battalion as it tried to cross a series of pontoon bridges over a river in northeast Ukraine earlier this week, a dramatic setback for Russian forces already struggling to make significant progress along the eastern front.
> Russian battalion groups generally have between 700 and 1,000 men.
Whenever somebody said that "Putin is not that crazy to do X" – he eventually did exactly that.
Hear it from the Russian soldiers themselves:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/28/world/europe/...
The thing is, he might have no other choice: he is a strongman, and for any strongman loosing a war would mean the end of being in power.
> Plus this is a ground war, so any nuke ruins the land they're fighting over and kills as many of their own troops (who aren't exactly equipped for basic fighting, let alone fallout)
If you know the history of the Soviet Union, you know that they don't care about the lives of their own people, at all.
How many Soviet soldiers died in WWII? About 10M.
How many Russians soldiers died in the past 7 months alone? Between 50-80K.
> Russia has enough nukes (almost 6000, and the ability to deliver them) to annihilate any other country, and put the whole planet into nuclear winter. That makes them a super power, even if they cannot win a ground war with Ukraine. For reference, India only has 160
Many analysts point out, that all the Russian nukes are from the 1960s-1980s, and given the state of all their military equipment during the invasion there is an extremely high likelihood of complete failure to deliver any threat at all.