Despite the decades that the world spent believing the Hollywood lie about Russia’s military formidability, it only took about two weeks of attempting to invade Ukraine for the Kremlin to come out looking like a horse’s rear end.
Vladimir Putin, once-feared as a military strategist, has been transformed into a sickly putz on the world’s stage. His troops, demoralized, hungry, and literally trying to fake marriages to get out of the war, are being stymied almost every step of the way. And, in the places where they’ve had success, they’ve had to commit warcrimes in order to gain that ground.
Now, as new figures come rolling in, some military experts are warning that Russia may simply run out of soldiers.
Casualties among Russian and pro-Russian forces are mounting at an unsustainable rate in Ukraine, British intelligence reports, raising more questions about the extent to which Moscow can maintain its current pace of operations amid limited progress on the battlefield.
The sheer numbers of soldiers lost must be infuriating for the Kremlin.
Figures published last week by the Donetsk People’s Republic, part of the self-declared pro-Putin autonomous region in eastern Ukraine known as the Donbas, claimed that more than 2,100 of its forces had died since operations began and nearly 9,000 had been wounded.
The casualty rate equals roughly 55% of its total force, according to the U.K. Ministry of Defense, “which highlights the extraordinary attrition rate Russian and pro-Russian forces are suffering in the Donbas.”
While the possibility of Russia admitting defeat is not all that likely, we can only wonder what lengths Vladimir Putin will go to in order to save face at the end of all of this.
