130
Russia ‘losing 6,000 more troops in Ukraine each month than it can recruit’
(www.theguardian.com)
“recruit”
Press gang to the front or hire out from mercenaries.
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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The Russian commitment to meatwave tactics in the face of such disastrous results against superior tech, strategy, and tactics is a sight to behold.
They’re blowing the whistles and charging into machine gun fire circa WW1.
The YouTube channel Perun has an excellent video on the actual tactics ans nature of the front lines at the moment.
The TLDR, is its part WW1 in term of it being a defence and artillery dominated battlefield, but neither side has the manpower to concentrate defenders into solid lines, so you get a large grey zone of trenches and basements with small teams infiltrating hundreds of meters beyond eachother.
Didn't Russia stop using "meatwave tactics" long time ago? Now i keep hearing that they send only few people to show that they conquer more terrain than they acually do. Which one is it? Is it the same story as russia being so weak that is about to collapse any moment, but at the same time strong enough to threaten europe? Schrödinger Russia
Both can be true in this case, they have the population to sustain it, however the economy is on borrowed time, just like any war. Ukraine is attacking the economy. So the war weariness is increasing. The population has a constant supply of new births however unless you maintain the economy it won't grow on its own, unless you capture more land or production facilities.
It's how the us effectively lost the Vietnam war, it was a political loss, the war weariness caught up on them. Yes they won ever battle, yes they still had the manufacturing output, however they had to pull out. The same thing is happening right now in the us-iran war, and probably why troops haven't engaged in a land invasion yet.
I do get what you are thinking, it sounds like fascist propaganda that the enemy is weak and strong at the same time, but I think it falls apart a bit once propaganda becomes an actual war, and economies are involved
Does this mean the war will end soon? Or is this exaggerated, like the stories we've heard every month since the start of the conflict?
Paradoxically, if Russia were running out of troops to continue the war, I would expect the war to escalate
Putin cannot allow this war to end with a defeat. He is liable to be killed once the people turn on him
To avoid that outcome, the obvious choice would be conscription when troop numbers get low. Conscription is incredibly unpopular, as we saw in 2022; therefore, Putin would need additional justification for conscription. The justification would come in the form of an additional external threat -- NATO
NATO, obviously, has no intention of attacking Russia unless attacked themselves. Putin would need to attack NATO and provoke a response
It appears the US has intelligence suggesting Putin planned to do just that, which spurred John Ratcliffe's visit to Moscow. A trip that closely mirrors then CIA director William Burns' 2021 trip to discourage Russia from invading Ukraine
Neither. 6000 is nothing in terms of Russia’s fighting age population. If it came to it, there would be ways to streamline deployment much like in endgame Germany.
The goal is to keep support in the west high with a constant "we are not winning now, but we will very soon! (if we get enough weapons from you)". Same old story.
Meanwhile in the Eaat it’s all, “We are winning, it’ll take only 3 days to win our in and out 1,647 day conflict”
North Korea has entered the chat
and sourcing it from russian aligned countries elsewhere. Indians, south america, africans. while avoiding St petersburg and moscow at all cost.