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The shock within the EU and NATO and especially in the UK is the result of the fact that we've all been living in the midst of the most intensive information war the world has ever seen.
You have people who think, who thought that it was a good idea, this is the Biden Administration, not to discuss anything with the adversary on the battlefield. How that was supposed to accomplish anything is unclear but there was no diplomacy at all, there was only fighting.
The fighting steadily escalated amidst claims that Ukraine was winning which was palpably false, amid claims that the Russian casualties vastly outnumbered those of Ukraine which is also false and amid repeated claims that the introduction of some new weapon would cure everything on the battlefield in favour of Ukraine.
None of those things were true and so people who believe those things, which is the majority in both Europe and America but not the majority in the rest of the world where there was great scepticism, now confront reality. The reality is completely at odds with what they've been told for the last three years so naturally this is a shock.
He blames blames Boris Johnson for persuading Mr Zelensky to stop negotiations that were about to bring to peace.
Our good friend Boris Johnson then suddenly flew to Kev and apparently delivered a message to the Ukrainians that you may be ready for peace but we're not which illustrates that the purpose of the war to the extent it had any purpose was not to do anything for Ukraine, which has suffered terribly in this in this war, but, in the words of Lloyd Austin the then Secretary of Defense, to weaken and isolate Russia.So it was a strategic move and we were prepared to fight to the last Ukrainian to to achieve it and we are now down to pretty close to the last Ukrainian which is why wonderful weapons of some major new kind are not going to produce a setback to the Russians.The problem Ukraine has is it's lost too many men and women to carry on an offensive.
The conversation is here.
Political scientist Ivan Katchanovski in August:
ReplyDelete"Russian hackers" claims of 1,7 million Ukrainian troops killed or missing during three & half years of the Russia-Ukraine war are fake & physically impossible. My estimate of the total Ukrainian forces casualties is around 160,000-200,000 killed based on nearly 150,000 killed & missing identified by name by the Ualosses site and excluding nearly 5,000 POWs. The number of wounded is about 640,000-800,000 based on 4 to 1 wounded to killed ratio.
These numbers include casualties in all branches of the Ukrainian military, the police, border guards, the National Guard, Security Service of Ukraine, foreign volunteers. However, the identification by name significantly undercounted the casualties because it was based only on obituaries and other public data available online and limited data from many cities and regions of Ukraine and did not include data from cemeteries, in contrast to the identification of Russian casualties by BBC Russian and Mediazona.
The Russian forces casualties during three and half years of the war are estimated to be at least 125,000 killed and 500,000 wounded based on the ratio of about 4 wounded for 1 killed. The estimate is based on identification by name by BBC Russian and Mediazona of over 120,000 killed Russian military, National Guard, FSB, police, border guard members, and Wagner mercenaries during three years and five months of the war. The number is adjusted by a rough estimate of missing in action who were killed and prorated for another month. The identified casualties include about 18,000 recruited Russian prisoners who were killed during the war in Ukraine.
The casualties of Donbas separatist formations, which were since the Russian annexation formally incorporated into the Russian forces, are estimated at about 25,000 killed and 100,000 wounded. The casualties are derived from the BBC Russian estimate based on obituaries and messages about search for missing, of 21,000-23,500 killed members of Donbas separatist forces and the 4 to 1 wounded to killed ratio.