XPost: alt.current-events.russia, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, talk.politics.guns XPost: talk.politics.misc, alt.military
There seems to be a recurring point made in the current discussion around
the Russo-Ukrainian War. Ukraine will always struggle with manpower as a smaller, democratic country. And Russia will always thrive in the manpower fight because it is larger and run by an autocrat.
So Ukraine and Russia are two battling animals, and Russia can bleed for
longer than Ukraine can fight.
But...what? Did we all forget that Russia announced a conscription of
300,000 last year and saw hundreds of thousands of Russians flee the
country? Indeed, over 1 million Russians entered Georgia in the nine
months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So, let's interrogate the
idea that Russia has an endless pool of manpower.
But first, we should acknowledge that Ukraine also faces real manpower shortages.
Ukraine's manpower struggles
We should get this out of the way because, while the author unabashedly supports Ukraine, it would be quite dishonest to discuss Russia's manpower
woes without admitting that Ukraine faces a lot of the same problems.
Ukraine has the much smaller population of the two countries. Ukraine has
just shy of 14 million men aged 15-64 years. Russia has over 45 million. Ukraine's pool is literally less than a third of the size.
And Ukraine has faced problems with draft dodging. An estimated 20,000 fighting-age men fled by November of 2023. That's five brigades worth, an entire division, if Ukraine was into divisions.
Meanwhile, it has already lost an estimated 200,000 casualties among its
troops and over 26,000 civilian casualties.
Ukraine, in theory, has millions more men that it can press into service.
But in practical terms, its military has tripled in size since February
2022 but probably couldn't double again without major strain.
Russia's manpower struggles
So, yes, Russia's population is nearly triple the size of Ukraine's. And
it's taking losses at just 1.5 times the rate of Ukraine (an estimated
300,000 Russian casualties to 200,000 Ukrainian ones). If Russia and
Ukraine both poured their men's blood into a pit at the current rates,
Ukraine would run out long before Russia.
But Russia is fighting a war of choice and aggression very poorly. And its
poor and disenfranchised masses understand that they're being used as
fodder for Putin's vanity war. Russia's population is surprisingly
diverse, with five minorities representing over 1 percent each of the population, and over 23 percent of Russians not claiming Russian
ethnicity.
But Russia is disproportionately calling up its ethnic minorities, and
they've noticed. And, believe it or not, oppressed minorities would
typically rather not die subjecting other ethnicities to oppression.
Remember, when Russia called up 300,000 men for military service and an estimated more than 200,000 fled the country in a week?
And AP just released phone calls of Russian soldiers who want to flee
their units.
Russia can barely keep up the bonuses needed to keep drawing volunteers
into the military, and that's without paying many of the death bonuses. Because, yes, Russian families are supposed to get death gratuities, but
Russia is reportedly hiding many deaths to prevent paying out.
Meanwhile, the Russian economy continues to flash warning signs, the
economy that's needed to provide those bonuses. As well as pay for the
massive amounts of destroyed war material.
A conscription further damages the economy, requires more money for
training, money for enforcement, and then more money for death bonuses and funerals. Indeed, Putin is reportedly afraid to call another mass
mobilization precisely because of the damage to the economy and popular sentiment.
The Russian economy is in the toilet
Most media credulously prints whatever economic numbers that Russia
claims. But more skeptical economists have double-checked Russia's claims. First, the bulk of Russia's income, as always, comes from the sale of
Urals Crude. But Urals Crude is trading at less than $62 a barrel as of
the time of writing. And that's despite massive OPEC production cuts and
Russia restricting exports. So Russia is collecting little per barrel
while also selling fewer barrels.
The exact numbers are hidden since so much Russian oil is smuggled on a
"dark" tanker fleet, that Russia had to buy, but oil revenues are
definitely down.
Meanwhile, Russia claims that its economy has grown while admitting that
large portions of it now exclusively produce war goods instead of consumer goods. But even those numbers are suspect, since researchers at the
European Central Bank found that Russia claimed its factories were humming
at full-strength even as air quality data and energy consumption showed
quite clearly that Russian factories must have either gone entirely solar
or else were sitting dormant.
Economist Dr. Joeri Schasfoort held a YouTube live with one of the
European Central Bank researchers on his channel Money & Macro. He said academics largely trusted Russia's numbers before the war, but its data
since sanctions started are entirely suspect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZMi9QZqy6M
So, yes, Russia is the larger country with the larger population. But with
its economy already strained, its men already fleeing conscription at
nearly the pace that men are accepting it, and it taking heavier losses
than Ukraine, it's not actually clear that it has some endless pool of soldiers.
Instead, we should see Russia as an already wounded animal. We may not
know how much blood it has left. But we also know it will pass out or die before it hits zero. Imagining that Russia can bleed forever is a weird,
dark fantasy.
https://news.yahoo.com/where-russias-next-wave-men-193803935.html
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