The Dead Russian Fallacy: This Week in Ukraine
The Dead Russian Fallacy: This Week in Ukraine
Killing Russians as an ineffective theory of victory, Blinken wakes up, book burning, and, of course, the video of the week.
1. The Dead Russian Fallacy
This week, we reached a milestone in the war. The “official” number (used by Ukrainian press) of dead or injured Russians crossed the 500,000 mark. On average, the Russians have been suffering 1,000 losses per day, and last week, the Russians lost the highest number of casualties (1,740) since the start of the war. This week Volodymyr Zelensky told reporters that the recent Russian Kharkiv offensive produced military casualties of 1 to 8 (one Ukrainian to eight Russians). Good news for Ukraine. We must be reaching a tipping point for Russia, right?
I call this the Dead Russian Fallacy. If Ukraine kills enough Russians, then the whole system will collapse. When we see videos of groups of Russians walking into the fray absent armored vehicles to protect them, we ask, how can this hold? When we see a video of hundreds of Russians killed by a single Ukraine ATACMS strike, we think this is crazy. Putin has no clothes, he doesn’t know what’s actually going on. Nor do the siloviki (the security apparatus elite). Nor the oligarchs. Nor the Russian people. Once they realize how bad it is, they will press for peace. Yet, this isn’t the case, and it perplexes many analysts and experts. How can Russia continue to throw men into the meat grinder?
The first mistake is believing all modern societies are sensitive to casualty numbers. Perhaps Russia is not a modern society in this regard. If that is true, then there are plenty of historical precedents for Russia supporting the liquidation of its population during wartime. The Russians lost around 3.3 million people killed (military and civilians) in WWI. The Soviet Union’s losses in WWII were as high as 27 million killed, with an estimated 70 million casualties. In the mid-1930s, Stalin purged almost 750,000. Human loss is in the Russian DNA. It is almost a source of national pride. Russian commanders now encourage their soldiers to commit honorable suicide instead of returning to Russia injured by Ukrainian drones.
But what about the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan in the 1980s? The Russians lost 15,000 dead, 50,000 wounded. Internal protests against dead Russians helped force Mikhail Gorbachev to leave Afghanistan and may have contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union. Clearly, this shows modern Russian aversion to war casualties. Yet, in the late 1980s, Gorbachev was politically more vulnerable than the autocratic Putin is today. Modern Russia does not allow public displays of dissent.
Putin has also been effective in hiding casualty rates. Early on, the Russians employed mobile crematoriums to destroy bodies near the front. Also, the Kremlin has been effective in recruiting from poor rural areas, not Putin’s political center of gravity of Moscow or St. Petersburg. And, in the final analysis, Russians might not care about dead Russians. The Kremlin says it will pay the families of deceased service members 5 million rubles (a lot of money in Russia), although it has developed techniques to obscure battlefield deaths and renege on payments.
In April, General Christopher G. Cavoli, the Commander of the US European Command, testified to the US Congress that, "Russia has been working extremely hard on reconstituting its forces, and they're being quite successful," He paints a picture of a resilient Russia with a robust military industry. And here lies the painful dichotomy. Either Russia is this growing, powerful threat to Europe, and they will crush Ukraine and move on to Poland or Lithuania, or, the Russian Army is incompetent, endlessly throwing thousands of troops into the meat grinder. Both can be true at once.
We need to let go of the Dead Russian Fallacy. It is driving an unrealistic expectation in the West and the Ukrainian armed forces. Ukraine has used it as a basis for its operational planning. For example, they held out in Bakhmut in 2023, probably longer than they should have because they were killing so many Russians. How could they not? But Russia has 144 million people, and Putin is determined to fight till the last. We need to let go of the fallacy that there is a magic number of dead Russians that will end the war. The West and Ukraine need to develop a better strategy, or Ukraine will lose this war.
2. Now, Do I Have Your Attention?
This might be the week we all look back on the war in Ukraine and say, yep, this is when everyone realized the wheels had already fallen off. Consequently, this might be the week in history when countries decided to try and take their gloves off. This week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken returned from his rock concert tour in Kyiv to advocate to the Biden administration that we should allow Ukraine to use US weapons to strike targets within Russia. All threats of escalation aside, operationally, this move makes sense. Attacking the orcs inside Russia will negate their sanctuary and complicate their ability to conduct offensive maneuvers.
As if to provide a yin to the West’s yang, it appears China is, or will soon be, supplying lethal military equipment to Russia. No way! This week, the British Defense Secretary, Grant Chaps, revealed his belief that the Chinese are going to provide weapons to Russia. Chaps did not provide any evidence, and the US National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, said that to date, he had not seen anything to support Chaps’ claim. Actual facts aside, the perception of Chinese military assistance to Russia is sufficient to rile the feathers of any hawks in the West.
Also this week, NATO is considering training Ukrainian military personnel inside Ukraine versus outside countries like Germany or Poland. The Lithuanian foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, echoed these sentiments this week, remarking that his country is ready to send trainers into Ukraine as part of a France-led excursion. Again, all threats of escalation aside, operationally, this move also makes sense. Western trainers being inside Ukraine would help alleviate the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ terrible personnel problem. The West wants to send trainers (aka “advisors”) into Ukraine. What could possibly go wrong?
It’s not hard to see where this is going. Ukraine wants to use Western missiles to attack targets inside Russia. China wants to send weapons to Russia. France and Lithuania (and others) want to send advisors into Ukraine. Oh, and F-16 are on their way! It’s like a slow train wreck. But this is what the West signed up for. We have no clear objectives nor a plan to achieve those objectives. So, we let War Jesus take the wheel, and she is driving us straight over the cliff. That being said, the West should not allow countries like Lithuania, or even Ukraine, to set the terms or the pace of this war.
3. Ruskis Don’t Surf (or Read)
As if we have to be reminded of how utterly disgusting the Russians are, they continued their assault on the Ukrainian book industry this week. The orcs killed seven workers and ruskinized 50,000 books this week using a modified S-300 air defense missile system to attack a book factory in Kharkiv. The Factor-Druk factory was one of Europe’s largest publishing facilities, with the capacity to produce 50 million hardcover and paperback books per year, as well as hundreds of millions of magazines and newspaper copies.
Destroying books is a classic method to erase culture. The Nazis famously burned Jewish books in the 1930s, and now the Russians are doing it from long distance. The Factor-Druk isn’t the only book facility burned. The orcs have destroyed hundreds of public libraries and schools in Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion. While Putin attempts to systematically eliminate Ukrainian culture, he forgets one thing—the pen is mightier than the missile.
4. [Video] They’ve Done it Again! Now, What Exactly Have They Done?
For innovation's sake, it looks as if the Ukrainians have innovated again. This week’s video shows an SBU Sea Baby maritime drone (or Unmanned Surface Vessel) equipped with a multiple launch rocket system (MLRS). I’m not sure what the possible concept of the operation could be here—MLRS is basically the rocket equivalent of blind carpet bombing. The creation of this drone sounds more like a PR stunt. It reminds me of October, 2023, when the Ukrainian SSO (special forces) attacked Crimea on jet skis. But putting a bunch of rockets on a drone is still pretty cool, in a “here, hold my pyvo” sort of way.