13,000 russian casualties just since october?! Holy shit
What usually happens to these bodies? I would assume a lot of them just rot somewhere. It seems insane to me that you find decomposed bodies and guns and shit in the forrest somewhere in 10 years.
Some are lost, buried under collapsed trenches/bunkers or sink into bogs/marshes. The rest, if Ukraine controls the area loads them up into train cars to ship back to russia for identification and burial though russia isn’t accepting them last I heard, would look bad for them. Russia controlled areas they leave them on the ground to rot or pile up the corpses and burn them making later identification next to impossible.
Massive is right. And Russia has still never recovered the population losses from WWI (at least 1.7 million), WWII (27,000,000), Stalin’s purges, believed to be 20-30,000,000) the living exodus from Soviet break up, or the 4,585,000 covid deaths, and now has less than half this place’s population, which limits is status as any kind of global power.
Russia ought to be begging for emigration, right now. But, they are a peria.
And it’s not only the population, but its GDP is tiny. Back when Russia first invaded Ukraine, I wondered how big Russia would be if it were a US state. I compared the GDP per Capita of all US states to Russia’s.
Mississippi’s GDP per Capita was almost 4 times larger than Russia’s. Mississippi! I finally went into the US territories to find one that Russia could top (American Samoa).
And, in case you’re thinking “well, that’s GDP per Capita, they’d dwarf all US states in GDP,” they’d be the third largest state behind California and Texas and just ahead of New York. The US as a whole has a GDP over 10 times larger than Russia.
If I trade you a car for your truck, congratulations, we’ve just raised the GDP. Kind of a shit metric just sayin.
Another article has an estimate of 315,000 Russia casualties since the beginning of the war.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/12/us/politics/russia-intelligence-assessment.html
The Russian/Afghanistan war estimates (1979-1989) are: 15,000 Soviet soldiers killed, and about 53,000 wounded source
Oh my god, they were there 10 years? Jesus Christ , and under 100k casualties too. Wow.Tripled that in two years.
