Arnon Grunberg

Action

Toll

On deaths – NYT (Catie Edmondson and Eduardo Medina):

‘The Biden administration is quietly circulating an estimate of Russian casualties in Ukraine that far exceeds earlier U.S. estimates, telling lawmakers that more than 75,000 members of Russia’s forces had been killed or injured.
A legislator who recently visited Ukraine confirmed on Wednesday that the estimate had emerged in a briefing from the State Department, Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Earlier in the day, a reporter for CNN tweeted the estimate and said it had been shared in a classified House briefing.
Casualty estimates for militaries on both sides are highly speculative, U.S. officials have said. They often give ranges rather than specific numbers, though just last week, the C.I.A. director estimated that 60,000 Russian soldiers had been killed or injured. And some estimates have gone as high as 80,000 casualties.
If the Biden administration’s current estimate is accurate, it represents a staggering toll. Estimates of the number of Russian forces in Ukraine ranged as high as 150,000 in the spring, meaning that roughly half could be out of action.’

(…)

‘Throughout the war, Ukraine and Russia have shielded their casualty numbers, keeping one another, and the rest of the world, guessing about the depth of their losses. Both sides have an interest in underreporting battlefield losses: Russia to preserve its domestic narrative of success, and Ukraine to maintain morale. Troop deaths and injuries have been mounting, given that fierce fighting has endured for months, but the Biden administration’s estimate suggests just how high casualties may have gone on Russia’s side.
More recently, a senior adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that Ukrainian military casualties were now 100 to 200 per day.
Just weeks into the war, American officials offered what they said was a conservative estimate of more than 7,000 Russian war deaths so far — more than the number of American troops killed over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Russia followed with a far smaller count, saying on March 25 that 1,351 of its troops had been killed. And Mr. Zelensky said that month that an estimated 1,300 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed.
In May, Ukraine claimed that 30,000 Russian soldiers had been killed since the invasion began in February, a number impossible to independently verify. In April, a British intelligence assessment put the estimated Russian losses at half that number.’

Read the article here.

For a long time, no numbers on casualties have been published, 75,000 death Russian soldiers is extremely high.

Once again, in the ten years that the Soviet-Union was in Afghanistan about 15,000 Russian solders were killed, and that war was unsustainable. Obviously, Russia is willing to shed its own blood, part of a long tradition.
But I can imagine that at a certain point the mothers are not willing to sacrifice their sons anymore for an endeavor that even quite a few Russians don’t see as a war of necessity.
In a dictatorship discontent is hard to measure, even harder to express. But the casualties on both sides deserver more attention. If for no other reason than because shedding your own blood becomes unsustainable at a certain point.
Especially nowadays, where sacrificing young men is less noble than it once was.

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