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On losses RU vs. UKRExcerpt from Jacques Baud´s 2024 study “THE RUSSIAN ART OF WAR – HOW THE WEST LED UKRAINE TO DEFEAT”.
A book I recommend to everyone. Along his “Operation Z” and his latest “Covert Wars in Ukraine”.I will post here the entire text not just particular quotes so no-one may blame me of cherry-picking.
This is his assessment on Ukrainian losses up to publishing of the book last year.
Including the footnotes with sources in the end. For the particular footnotes see the three-digit numbers in the text.note: Baud´s method is always to rely almost exclusively on Western/Ukrainian sources. When he does use “hostile” i.e. RU sources he will try to come up with corresponding additional non-RU.
„(…)
Military LossesThe number of dead Ukrainian servicemen is unknown. Fearing—with good reason—that if Western public opinion knew the number of dead, it would oppose its governments’ support for the war, Ukraine gives no figures.
Observations on the ground and testimonies from returning Western volunteers tend to confirm that Ukrainian forces are suffering considerably higher losses than the Russians. Significantly, while our media have attempted to estimate Russian losses, they have not done so for the Ukrainians, reiterating official Ukrainian statements—no doubt too afraid of what they might discover.
The Ukrainian strategy of defending every square meter of territory to the bitter end only leads to the destruction of its own forces. This is what the French and Germans did in 1914-1918. But this time, the Russians are mobile. To use a historical comparison, we therefore have the situation of a 1914 defense and a 1940 attacker. The result—by the summer of 2022, Ukraine’s military potential had been destroyed.
The West took fright and began to supply Ukraine with arms, hoping to turn the situation around. The Russians realized that the West would not allow the Ukrainians to negotiate, and would seek to prolong the conflict until Russia was exhausted. Thus, they changed their approach—if they couldn’t stop the flow of weapons, they would have to destroy those who were using them.
A different kind of war began. The objective was still military potential, but instead of destroying the weapons, those using them were destroyed. Thus, in early June 2022, President Zelensky reported daily losses of 60 to 100 men.764 On June 9, Zelensky’s adviser Mykhailo Podoliak told the BBC that Ukrainian forces were losing 100 to 200 men a day.765 In mid-June, David Arakhamia, Zelensky’s chief negotiator and close adviser, spoke of 200 to 500 dead a day, and put total losses (dead, wounded, captured, deserters) at 1,000 men a day.766 According to Business Insider, Ukraine would then have lost the equivalent of the entire British infantry, or more than 18,000 men.767
Whether these figures are accurate is unclear. On the one hand, experts close to the intelligence services believe that these figures are far below reality. On the other hand, the Ukrainian figures are higher than the estimates given by the Russian army. Some claim that Ukrainian forces suffered 60,000 dead and 50,000 missing. By June 2022, former US general Stephen Twitty estimated Ukrainian army losses at 200,000 men.768
In September 2022, according to a Ukrainian soldier in the Washington Post, the Russians were losing one man for every five Ukrainians.769 This is exactly the opposite of what NATO told us, as we have seen.
On November 30, 2022, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, declared770 that “more than 20,000 Ukrainian civilians and over 100,000 military personnel have been killed to date.771” This immediately aroused the ire of Kiev, which demanded that this figure be withdrawn. This was done on the spot.772 But this indicates several things. Firstly, the sensitivity of the death toll for internal stability in Ukraine. Secondly, Mrs. von der Leyen certainly did not invent this figure, which is probably circulating confidentially in Western halls of power. Thirdly, given Mrs. von der Leyen’s tendency to play down Ukrainian losses, the figure of 100,000 dead is probably underestimated.
This hypothesis seems to be confirmed by Israeli Mossad estimates published at the end of January 2023 by the Turkish media Hürseda Haber,773 which mentioned 157,000 Ukrainian deaths. Unverifiable, but realistic.
Accounting for 65 percent to 75 percent of casualties, artillery is one of the main causes of death on the battlefield.774 The number of shells fired is therefore probably a good indicator of the ratio of losses on either side of the front line. According to Ukrainian and Western military officials, the Ukrainians are firing around 2000 to 4000 shells a day and the Russians around 40,000-50,000, a ratio that varies between 1:10 and 1:25. According to the Spanish newspaper El Pais, this ratio is 1 to 10;775 thus, we can estimate that the Ukrainians have 10 to 11 times more dead than the Russians. For February 2023, the calculation would give between 140,000 and 350,000 deaths on the Ukrainian side. Difficult to confirm, but more likely than the far-fetched figures thrown around by the media without justification.
We can see that the Russian loss figures announced by Ukraine—and therefore our media—are systematically 10-11 times higher than those observed by Mediazona. It is likely that Ukraine is artificially inflating the figures so that they are higher than its own losses. This means that, if we accept the figure of 14,000 dead announced by the site for Russia in February 2023, it is not incongruous to estimate the number of Ukrainian dead at over 150,000 men. This would confirm the figure mentioned by the Israeli Mossad at the end of January.
The fact remains that these figures are still estimates. However, despite what our media tell us (without ever proving anything), testimonies from Ukrainian soldiers seem to confirm considerably higher losses on the Ukrainian side.
In early 2023, an American ex-volunteer on the Ukrainian side told Newsweek magazine that life expectancy in Bakhmut for Ukrainians is around 4 hours.776 In March 2023, a Ukrainian military officer reported that his forces were losing 1-2 companies a day and around one battalion a week.777 In March 2023, the Washington Post quoted the testimony of a commander of the 46th Ukrainian parachute brigade in Bakhmut, who claimed that he was the only survivor of his original
unit and that it was now made up of new conscripts with no experience.778 He was dismissed three days later.779
On July 17, 2023, Roman Revedjuk, a well-known Ukrainian journalist, revealed on his Facebook account that the Ukrainian army had more than 310,000 dead.780 Difficult to verify, but this corresponds to around 11 times the total of 28,652 dead stated by Mediazona for Russia on July 28, 2023.781 The Ukrainian site Wartears.org does a similar job to Mediazona, but for Ukrainian forces, filling in the missing data with a mathematical model. By the end of September 2023, it estimated 285,000 deaths.7822/2
On losses RU vs. UKR“(…)In September 2023, The Times of London painted a tragic picture of the situation around the village of Rabotino, where losses were said to be as high as 90 percent. This is undoubtedly an exaggeration, although one of the officers interviewed admitted that he had lost 75 percent of his troops.783 It does, however, give an idea of the level of Ukrainian losses, which our media play down in order to keep Ukraine fighting.
These are just figures, of course, but a June 29 report by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology shows that 63 percent of Ukrainians know at least 3 people who have been killed in the fighting, and 78 percent know at least 7 people who have been killed or wounded.784
What is pompously referred to as “OSINT” (open source intelligence) has grown in importance with the Ukrainian conflict. But the methodology and professionalism of these amateur “analysts” very often leave much to be desired, which is why their figures should be treated with caution. Perhaps it’s because fiction has failed to surpass fact that the Oryx website will ceased operations on October 1, 2023.785
Furthermore, it should be noted that no Western organization has attempted to do the same job as the BBC and Mediazona in assessing the number of dead Ukrainians. Testimonies from Ukrainian soldiers are systematically ignored so as not to compromise the Western narrative, and military and financial support for Ukraine. This indicates that the figures given by our media are most likely underestimates, as they do everything to keep Ukrainians fighting—and keep getting killed.
The BBC reports a Ukrainian military officer as saying that the “Marines” newly arrived to reinforce their bridgehead at Krinky, on the Dnieper, could not even swim.786
Ultimately, Ukraine is in a situation where the mobilization of new fighters risks affecting the country’s economic life. In other words, Zelensky’s decision in March 2022 to abandon his own proposal for resolving the conflict now comes up against the physical limits of his population, which Western material aid cannot compensate for. With his decision, Zelensky has made Putin the master of the clocks.787
(…)“footnotes 1/3
On losses RU vs. UKR764. Mazurenko Alona, “Подоляк: Щодня гине 100-200 українських захисників,” Ukrainska Pravda, June 9, 2022 (https://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2022/06/9/7351600/)
765. “У війні гине 100—200 українських військових щодня—Офіс президента”, BBC News, June 9, 2022 (https://www.bbc.com/ukrainian/news-61752749)
766. Dave Lawler, “Ukraine suffering up to 1,000 casualties per day in Donbas, official says”, Axios, June 15, 2022 (https://www.axios.com/2022/06/15/ukraine-1000-casualties-day-donbas-arakhamia)
767. Katie Anthony, “Ukraine has lost more troops during the Russian invasion than there are infantry in the British army, defense expert says,” Business Insider, June 28, 2022 (https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-has-lost-more-troops-than-there-are-in-the-british-army-expert-2022-6)
768. “US-General verwundert: “200.000 ukrainische Soldaten verschwunden””, Exxpress.at, June 8, 2022 (https://exxpress.at/us-general-verwundert-200-000-ukrainische-soldaten-verschwunden/)
769. John Hudson, “Wounded Ukrainian soldiers reveal steep toll of Kherson offensive,” The Washington Post, September 7, 2022 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/07/ukraine-kherson-offensive-casualties-ammunition/)
770. https://t.me/wartearsorg/79footnotes 2/3
On losses RU vs. UKR771. https://twitter.com/AZgeopolitics/status/1597913370023579648
772. “Von der Leyen statement about death of 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers cut from speech”, The New Voice of Ukraine, November 30, 2022 (https://english.nv.ua/nation/von-der-leyen-statement-about-death-of-100-000-ukrainian-soldiers-cut-from-speech-50287771.html)
773. “ddia: MOSSAD’a göre Ukrayna ve Rusya kayıpları”, Hürseda Haber, January 25, 2023 (https://perma.cc/FD7T-LQU8)
774. https://matthew.krupczak.org/2021/04/10/medical-department-u-s-army-wound-ballistics-causative-agents-of-battle-casualties-in-wwii/
775. https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-03-01/ukraine-outgunned-10-to-1-in-massive-artillery-battle-with-russia.html
776. Anna Skinner, “Bakhmut Life Expectancy Near Four Hours on Frontlines, Fighter Warns,” Newsweek, February 20, 2023 (https://www.newsweek.com/bakhmut-life-expectancy-near-four-hours-frontlines-ukraine-russia-1782496)
777. https://www.bitchute.com/video/WFZMB0E15Yl7/
778. Isabelle Khurshudyan, Paul Sonne & Karen DeYoung, “Ukraine short of skilled troops and ammunition as losses, pessimism grow,” The Washington Post, March 13, 2023 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/03/13/ukraine-casualties-pessimism-ammunition-shortage/)
779. Olga Kyrylenko & Olena Roshchina, “Battalion commander of 46th Brigade demoted after Washington Post interview and resigns”, Ukrainska Pravda, March 26, 2023 (https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/03/16/7393733/)footnotes 3/3
On losses RU vs. UKR780. https://youtu.be/0uAh19aQF58
781. https://web.archive.org/web/20230801021222/https://en.zona.media/article/2022/05/20/casualties_eng
782. https://wartears.org/posts/math-model/
783. Anthony Loyd, “Ukraine counteroffensive: ‘I’m ready to die… 90% of the guys here will die too’”, The Times, September 5, 2023 (https://archive.ph/IGjVe#selection-851.0-915.25)
784. https://www.kiis.com.ua/?lang=eng&cat=reports&id=1254&page=1&y=2023&m=6
785. https://twitter.com/oryxspioenkop/status/1670723829713215489
786. James Waterhouse, “Ukraine war: Soldier tells BBC of front-line ‘hell’”, BBC News, December 4, 2023 (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67565508)
787. Robert Clark, “Ukraine’s army is running out of men to recruit, and time to win,” The Telegraph, August 22, 2023 (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/22/ukraines-army-is-running-out-of-men-to-recruit/)
