Back in July I wrote a thread analyzing Ukrainian personnel losses in the context of German casualties in WWII, in which I determined that due to extreme casualties they could not sustain the war effort much past Spring 2024.
Today their new mobilization law came out and it's insane. Here's some highlights. People are now fully eligible for service in the Armed Forces of Ukraine are in "Disability Group III," comprising people who:
1. Are missing or blind in one eye 2. Are partially deaf 3. Have a tracheotomy 4. Have jaw defects that prevent normal chewing 5. Suffer from dwarfism (<130cm for men) 6. Have a missing or nonfunctional arm 7. Have an amputated leg up to the thigh 8. Are missing fingers 9. Are missing both feet 10. Have a pacemaker implanted 11. Have only one working kidney 12. Have only one working lung 13. Have suffered from "traumatic castration" 14. Have a brain abscess (!) 15. Have a substantial skull defect 16. Have Parkinson's (!) 17. Have extreme scoliosis 18. Have severe chest deformities 19. Have "severe adrenal insufficiency" (it's a war eh?) 20. Have no bladder.
It also apparently drops the official conscription age from 27 to 25, but I doubt that's been taken adhered to at any point in the war and particularly not in the last year.
These are not the measures of a healthy society fighting a low-casualty war. This is Armageddon.
The closest historical analogy to the Ukrainian War I can think of is the American Civil War - ironically a conflict that Europeans have always shied away from carefully studying.
A thread.⬇️
The underlying causes of the American Civil War festered for decades, finally erupting into open conflict after a series of political calculations and miscalculations brought down a national compromise that increasingly resembled a house of cards.
Ditto Ukraine. I've said elsewhere the number of political offramps available to Western leaders to avoid this war were so numerous that the fact war broke out can only be explained as the result of anti-Russian policy - clearly miscalculated policy given the results thus far.
Top 10 pro-Ukrainian talking points - and why they're nonsense.⬇️
10. Ukraine is a democracy!
False. The last free and fair election in Ukraine - not held under an ultranationalist jackboot after the 2014 coup - was in 2010.
All elections in Ukraine have been suspended since 2022, and Zelensky's five-year term from 2019 expired months ago.
9. Russia is an autocracy!
False. Vladimir Putin and United Russia enjoy approval ratings among the Russian public that are extremely high, even in polling conducted by Western-backed, anti-Putin organizations.
Putin is popular enough to win any election held in Russia handily.
How many plans has NATO gone through to try to beat Russia in Ukraine?
Let's count 'em!
Plan A: The FGM-148 Javelin
It seems absurd now, but in late 2021 NATO's leadership thought Javelin was a tank-deleting magic wand that would deter Putin from challenging Zelensky's scheme to conquer the LDPR.
Javelin failed in service and is a rare sight on the battlefield.
Plan B: The Kazakh Gambit
The West quite obviously fomented an uprising in Kazakhstan in January 2022 in hopes of distracting Russia from the then-boiling Ukrainian crisis.
Didn't work. CSTO troops arrived and helped the Kazakh government crush the would-be color revolution.
Late last week the Ukrainian command, seeing their offensive in Sudzha-Koronevo bog down, tried to expand the flanks of their salient into Russian territory in Kursk. Part of this was an attack on the Glushkovo district to the west.
The Glushkovo District is somewhat isolated from the Russian interior by the Seim River.
Having learned the wrong lessons from their 2022 counteroffensive in Kherson, the AFU command decided to try to induce a wholesale Russian withdrawal by attacking the bridges over the Seim.
The large road bridge at Glushkovo, the district center, would be their first target. As in Kherson two years ago, HIMARS fired on the bridge with GMLRS. As in Kherson two years ago, it was ineffective.
Unlike in Kherson two years ago, the Russians killed the HIMARS launcher.
Today was probably the worst day for the Armed Forces of Ukraine since February 2022.
Let's walk through it.
The Russians started the day off by destroying two HIMARS launchers at their hide site in Sumy. This has likely ended GMLRS support for the Kursk operation temporarily.
Next to emerge was a video of a MiG-29* struck at an airfield near Dnipropetrovsk, just as it was being armed and the pilot had climbed in for preflight.
Once again the Russians coldly waited to cause maximum casualties among key AFU personnel.
* initially reported as an Su-24
13 Ukrainian soldiers were caught on camera surrendering in Kursk, and today was the first day I didn't even hear substantive rumors of new AFU advances in the area. Instead they seem to have lost considerable ground.
Top 10 Failed Wonderweapons of the Ukrainian War⬇️
My criteria are simple - these are weapons (defined loosely) that were heavily hyped by Western pundits that actually failed in service.
So, for example, the Leopard 2 isn't on here because it's actually a perfectly functional tank that has performed in line with other tanks.
10. The Ukrainian Foreign Legion
After the war kicked off, Western outlets began encouraging adventurous foreigners to travel to Ukraine to fight. These new recruits were housed in barracks at the Yavorov Training Ground.
One Russian missile strike largely ended the project.