Redbrickbear said:
whiterock said:
Redbrickbear said:
whiterock said:
Sam Lowry said:
MOSCOW, October 30. /TASS/. The number of cases of desertion and unauthorized abandonment of the unit in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine surpasses 100,000, Verkhovna Rada deputy Anna Skorokhod admitted.
"Unauthorized abandonment of the unit, desertion - I will not name the number, but I would say - more than 100,000," she said in an interview with YouTube channel Novosti Live.
Earlier, military lawyer from the Center for Support of Veterans and Their Families Roman Likhachev said that more than 100,000 servicemen of the Ukrainian Armed Forces had voluntarily left their units.
On Tuesday, president of Ukraine's Supreme Court Stanislav Kravchenko announced a significant increase in desertion cases in the ranks of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, calling the situation threatening. According to Ukrainian media estimates, the total number of deserters in Ukraine has already reached 170,000.
Imagine how bad it must be for Russia, too.....
What side do you think can afford more desertions from its forced conscript army?
Demographics are not terribly relevant in the outcome of this particular war. Each side has ample manpower available for service. The difficulty is in organizing all that manpower into an army that can be sustained over time. The primary disparity in this war is that Russia has more finite resources to do that than Nato. As long as Nato continues to supply Ukraine, Ukraine can (and likely will) outlast Russia.
I have a hard time believing that.
In almost every war you can think of demographics have mattered a lot.
not as much as your arguments presume
Iran would have lost their war with Iraq but they had millions of young men to throw into the fight to save their Islamic revolution. And had Iraq had the population of Iran they would have taken Tehran.
(The population of Iraq in 1980 was 13.65 million. While Iran had a population of 39.5 million)
Those numbers are roughly proportional to the disparity in Ukraine/Russia population, correct?
The Iran/Iraq War lasted EIGHT YEARS and the two sides settled basically to a draw.
If we apply the demography is destiny premise which undergirds your analysis, Iran should have been the victor. So why did that not happen? (because Iran did not have the money to exploit its manpower advantage).
Heck I bet Germany would have won World War I if they had double the population in 1914
losing armies usually run out of bullets before they run out of men.
The Russia/Ukraine War could last for at least as long as the Iran/Iraq War....two nations exhausting themselves in increasingly desultory combat over very small pieces of ground. That's where the Ukr/Russia war already is. Ukraine will lose the war when it runs out of bullets. Your argument implicitly cedes that fact - that if Nato cuts off funding, the war will end. But. If we keep sending ammo to Ukraine, Russia is likely to collapse before Ukraine (because Nato GDP dwarfs Russia GDP).
GDP matters more than demographics because it is GDP that makes uniforms and rifles and ammunition and arty tubes and tanks and boots and laces and mess kits and.......... All of those things and more matter too. An army cannot fight barefooted in a Ukrainian winter. So the number of troops in the field is not a function of demographics; it is literally a function of stockpiles of boots & socks. (remember what the Russian winter did to the victorious French army that occupied Moscow?) I mean, sure, a soldier can wrap his foot in rags and survive, but he cannot fight effectively that way for long.
It's not that demographics don't matter. It's that they are not the sole determining factor that your analysis consistently insists. With substantial outside aid, demographics become a minor detail in the very long term....decades down the road. BOTH Russia and Ukraine have more manpower than they can afford to recruit, train, arm, and deploy......hundreds of thousands of fresh bodies rising to military age each year. From a strictly manpower standpoint, the war can go on for at least as long as the Iran/Iraq War......as long as Nato keeps supplying Ukraine.