Prediction Thread: When Will Ukraine Conquer Russia

[Dauphin]

I'm surprised he didn't declare peace was achieved and that the day will forever be known as Victory Day for WW3

[BlackCat]

This is actually quite interesting

[BeBMan]

Just came across this:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yg4z6v600o

[Provost Harrison]

Just came across this:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yg4z6v600o

There are so many takes on where Russia is. They're like Schrödinger's enemy, they're on the verge of collapse and any day now...any day now...they'll collapse. But they're also on the verge of invading and overrunning Europe.

However logic tells me they aren't in a good place. Their wartime economy is overheating - there aren't enough people to do the work fuelling inflation all the while throwing young men into the meat grinder. It is not sustainable and there is a lot of opportunity cost to that "military investment". Plus it feels like they are not getting good value for money for it. And it feels like economic catastrophe is looming which makes me worry if it makes them more desperate. Desperate powers with thousands of thermonuclear weapons doesn't give me a warm, fuzzy feel. Also we have to look at history and their invasion of the Ukraine was ill conceived and poorly executed. Very poorly executed. Their plan to seize the airport and fly in soldiers to quickly force a Ukrainian surrender quickly backfired, their inbound column of equipment obliterated. And in that they lost a lot of their most vulnerable equipment and soldiers.

Also casualty estimates are crazy, the highest from the Ukraine pushing 1m Russian soldiers dead. Even if that is a massive overestimate it's not going to be a small number.

And the sad thing about this is that there is no way to stop people like this short of humiliation. It's desperately sad but I hope this is like Germany's situation at the end of WWII which results in them becoming something much better.

Sometimes it seems that some people are so entrenched in their situation that the only way they learn is via the most brutal means and a cost of untold lives.

[BeBMan]

I don't take any of the reps of casualties for being totally accurate (and the Bibs is wise enough to not claim their numbers are). I think they indicate general trends though.

And yeah, I do think that the numbers are telling what kind of an idiocy this war is (not that others are terribly great to begin with, but that's another story).

Unfortunately the Kremlin does not care, and has means to still plow on, while wasting more lives. But any Russian hopes that Ukraine is just going to break anytime soon are delusional.

[Dauphin]

Birth rates are an intriguing proxy for reproductive age men deaths.

[BlackCat]

I might have been sloppy - the two videos are quite interesting :

[BeBMan]

Just found on ISW update for May 25:

Russian Security Council Deputy Chairperson Dmitry Medvedev suggested that Russia will occupy most of Ukraine if the West continues to aid Ukraine. Medvedev called for Russian control over a buffer zone encompassing nearly all of Ukraine, (...snipsnap)

Same day, somewhat below

Russian forces would need roughly a century to seize Medvedev's proposed "buffer zone" at their current rate of advance at the cost of nearly 50 million casualties at current loss rates.
(...snipsnap)

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/ukraine-conflict-updates

(includes lengthy backgrond info I snipsnapped)

[Serb]

You Westerners are so LOL!!!

[Geronimo]

This is actually quite interesting

If Trump actually finds that reality pushes him back into real support for Ukraine it's going to be incredibly rich watching as he tries to take credit for any success Ukraine has subsequent to that given how much harm his months of only working to end US support for Ukraine have indirectly inflicted on Ukraine's success in the war.

[Geronimo]

Birth rates are an intriguing proxy for reproductive age men deaths.

really? I would think that they are mainly determined by variables that only weakly correlate with reproductive age men deaths. Things like affordable childcare and cost of living in general.

[Dauphin]

Article just today. Make of it what you will.

Dying Russia: Rosstat Stops Publishing Current Birth and Mortality Data - Pravda EN

The Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) has classified data on birth and death rates in the Russian Federation amid a record demographic decline. In the latest file for March, almost all the data has disappeared - only a table with birth and death rates for the first quarter in Russia as a whole, which was published in May, remains. It seems that we will no longer see tables by region and age.
​​

[Dauphin]

Ukraine has a similar story of much reduced birth rates.

[Dauphin]

really? I would think that they are mainly determined by variables that only weakly correlate with reproductive age men deaths. Things like affordable childcare and cost of living in general.

To clarify, I am not implying a causal relationship, only that they are connected variables. Like ice cream sales and shark attacks. They both increase in the summer.

[BeBMan]

Article just today. Make of it what you will.

Russia stopped detailing the info because there are so many new folks that they can't keep up counting.