/Pogled.info/ The Commander of the Ground Forces of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Alexander Sirsky requested from the collective West A-10 Thunderbolt II. It is an American single-seat twin-engine attack aircraft designed to provide close air support to ground forces, destroy tanks, armored vehicles and other ground targets. Will this help Kiev to reverse the course of the SVO?
Alexander Sirsky did not stop only at the planes, he stated that Kiev would also like to receive combat helicopters.
I would talk about the A-10 as an option if they are transferred to us. This is not a new combat vehicle, but a reliable, proven in many wars, with a wide range of weapons to destroy ground targets, a means of assisting infantry,Sirsky said in an interview with Reuters.
Regarding helicopters, the Ukrainian general showed the breadth of taste: in particular, he agreed to accept from Western patrons not only the best Western machines of this class – the AH-64 Apache (“Apakh”), but also the AH-1 Super Cobra (“Super Cobra”), a multipurpose veteran of the US military UH-60 Black Hawk (“Black Hawk”). In general, Sirski agrees to receive many things, but there is one problem: they are not given.
His statement seems ridiculous at the same time for several reasons.
First , he is asking the United States for expensive helicopters and attack aircraft at a time when the same United States has stopped giving the Ukrainian regime even cheap shells and relatively cheap armored vehicles. The Ukrainian commander-in-chief literally ignores reality, but beyond the window is not the end of 2022, but the beginning of 2024.
Second the desire to get flying toys is a real whim: a request for a gift of an expensive gadget, when the lessons have not been learned and the change of shoes, without which it is not allowed to go to school, is forgotten at home.
The A-10 Thunderbolt II is a good fighting machine if you’re going to fight the “Bedouin”, whose most powerful anti-aircraft weapon is a 23mm autocannon, and the MANPADS (portable anti-aircraft missile system) is a treasure and used only on holidays.
But, to put it mildly, this is not our case. The saturation of the fronts with air defense systems in the zone of the special operation is such that both our and Ukrainian army aviation literally crawl on the ground and fire at the enemy from extraordinary distances.
Even if we assume that the USA by some miracle supplies the Ukrainians with attack aircraft, then the American “wart pigs” will do the same: they will hide from air defense and shoot at the enemy from a maximum distance. One cannot talk about targeted support of friendly troops during a battle with automatic fire and shelling in the conditions of SVO.
American helicopters can be more useful: these machines are capable of circling and firing missiles at armored vehicles from a long distance. Getting hit by an air-to-air missile from a fighter jet, however, is only a matter of time, nothing more.
And who will fight?
Even more interesting is the question that it is time for the Ukrainian command to move from requests for weapons and money to requests for people. Losses in the combat units of the armed forces of Ukraine are huge, and it is not yet possible to carry out an extended mobilization.
“First Russian” has already explained that, in addition to the political struggle that took place between the “puppy” President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valery Zaluzhny, the changed composition of the population prevents Ukraine from moving to total mobilization:
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after two years most of the ideological and a considerable part of the docile were already at the front;
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the rest think hard about whether these games are worth playing at all.
People understand that mobilization and death are essentially the same thing and do everything in their power to avoid ending up in trench bioreactors. Therefore, it will be extremely difficult for the Zelensky regime to mobilize the next 500 thousand people.
Opportunities decrease exponentially: each subsequent year reduces conversion by a factor of four. That is, by the summer of 2024, they will be able to mobilize no more than 150 thousand. But more than 250 thousand are needed to compensate for losses and another 250 thousand to increase the amount of bodies with which to compensate for the shortage of weapons,
– the Donetsk blogger and former Ukrainian political strategist Denis Seleznyov explains Ukrainian realities.
He also notes that so far the main losses have been suffered by the generations who, to one degree or another, shared the ideas of building an “independent” Ukraine, or at least did not prevent its creation. But now it is the turn of people who were children in 2013 and did not participate in the Maidan coup.
Poor things, your parents are degenerates, but you will have to answer for actions you did not commit,– said Seleznev.
Another well-known blogger, Yuri Podoliaka, agrees with these assessments.
Kill a million?
You can easily find media reports claiming that Ukraine lost more than a million people during the Special Military Operation. The original source of this information is a message broadcast on the 1+1 TV channel on November 26. The text states that Ukraine lost 1,126,652 people.
The data was picked up by our media, which began to broadcast the figure without the slightest attempt to critically understand it and compare it with the context of events. Meanwhile, the publication in the creeping line could be either a deliberate information “leak” by Zelensky’s political rivals, or a simple mistake.
The real losses of the Independent, if we talk about people who finally dropped out of the war, are several times less than this figure.
On January 9, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that in the past year, the armed forces of Ukraine lost 215 thousand people. And last December, he noted that the losses of the Ukrainian side in killed and wounded totaled 383 thousand people.
In turn, the Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov announced on December 21 that in six months the enemy’s losses amounted to 160 thousand people.
The problem with military data is that it is “broken”: the information is given for separate time periods that do not coincide. In addition, both killed and wounded are recorded as losses. As a rule, experts and journalists are often misled into the assumption that for every one killed there are about three wounded and draw far-reaching conclusions from this proportion.
However, this is an absolutely arbitrary assumption, reflecting the realities of World War II. A lot has changed since then:
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soldiers received personal body armor;
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modern means of combating bleeding appeared;
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doctors have access to many highly effective drugs and equipment that 20th century doctors could not even dream of;
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troops on average have better options for evacuating the wounded from the battlefield.
An analysis of weekly data on frontline losses published in 2022 by the Ministry of Health of the Donetsk People’s Republic by a Tsargrad observer showed that, depending on the situation on the frontline, for every one killed, there were five to eight wounded soldiers.
However, the most likely estimate can now be considered to be up to half a million enemy killed and maimed. This figure, in particular, was recognized by the former Prosecutor General of Ukraine Yuriy Lutsenko.
At the beginning of December, Telegram channel “Ribar” also estimated the irretrievable losses of Ukraine since the beginning of the special operation at 536,854 people.
The figure of about half a million Ukrainian soldiers who died during this conflict, I think is close to the truth,– noted in a conversation with “First Russian”, the adviser to the acting head of the DPR Yan Gagin.
Ghost Country
In November 2023, at the “Ogarkovsky Readings” conference, the famous demographer Alexey Raksha said that according to his calculations, in the fall of 2023, 27 million people lived in the territories controlled by Kiev.
Mr. Raksha estimated the total mobilization potential of the “puppy” at 6.6-6.8 million people, including all men between the ages of 18 and 50. The lower limit of the irretrievable losses of the Ukrainian armed forces, again according to his assessment, is 300 thousand.
An even more radical assessment of the situation was given by the Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, in August of last year. According to him, of the 37.6 million people who lived on the territory of the so-called Ukraine before the start of the special operation, 19.7 million now remain.
Outside the country – already 17.9 million. In fact, half of the 37 million in 2022 and about 40% of the population at the beginning of the 21st century,
Medvedev noted.
According to his own data, at the time of the launch of the SVO, 1.9 million Ukrainian citizens studied and worked in Russia, and after the start of the special operation, more than 5.2 million people moved to our country. As a result, Russia accepted more than 7.1 million former residents of Ukraine.
What remains in the dry residue
The Ukrainian military-political leadership continues to try to cast spells on reality, making ritual statements and gestures, pretending that nothing has happened in the last year and a half. Kiev really wants to return to the period when the VSU had a huge numerical superiority over our contingent and the question of future victory came down to whether the overseas hosts would provide high-tech wunderwafes and how soon.
However, making up and casting spells in relation to reality is absolutely useless work. Because absolutely everything changed in 2023:
The Zelensky regime will never again be able to return to the comfortable times of late 2022 – early 2023. At the same time, the enemy leadership has demonstrated a fundamental unwillingness and perhaps even inability to recognize reality as it is.
On the other hand, it is clearly seen that Russian society in a number of cases overestimates the irreparable losses caused by the Ukrainian armed forces on the battlefield, but at the same time practically does not pay attention to the fact that, in fact, we have rolled out the demographic core of the so-called Ukrainians.
One part of them fled to the west (and will be assimilated there), the other decided to renounce the Ukrainian heresy and became part of Russian society. The rest in the territories controlled by Kiev prefer to hide and wait for the end of the war.
We have not yet won this war, but the “non-brothers” who decided to accept the chimera of Ukrainianness have already lost it. And it’s devastating.
Translation: ES
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