The Slavgrinder Catches Up to WW1 Levels of Stupidity and Butchery
Moscow Slavs dying in record numbers, Kiev Slavs deserting in record numbers
Russia
In July, August and September a total of 16.1 billion rubles were paid out from the Russian federal budget as a signing bonus to volunteers. (Official data.) This is 12% less than in the previous quarter. Where Q2 payouts suggest 31,000 new volunteers monthly, the Q3 data suggests 27,500.
This is merely the best-case scenario however, since on August 1 the federal signing bonus doubled from 195,000 to 400,000 rubles. Depending on how much time passes between a recruit signing up and rubles being debited from the federal budget the 16.1 billion could correspond to as few as 16,500 new recruits per month.
Until we know more I will assume 27,500, but this is now less certain than it was before.
Meanwhile, in November Poteru.net discovered 5300 death notices for Russian soldiers. 5300 in a month. Discovered death notices in a recent month correspond roughly to 60 to 65% of actual deaths. This means the 5300 obituaries conservatively correspond to a real death toll of 8000 for the month.
Roughly speaking for each 10 KIA there are 15 to 17 heavily injured who are discharged from service (calculation by Novaya Gazeta from mid-2022 from the then available payouts budget data). That means November would have seen a minimum of 12,000 discharged for a total of 20,000 irrecoverable Russian losses.
So we’re looking at an intake of 27,500, and after 20,000 in write-offs, 7500 left to grow the force.
In November Russia captured 700 km2 in Ukraine (not counting Kursk), or 23 km2 daily. This is the fastest rate of Russian advance since March 2022, but the gains relative to lives spent remain the same as the previous month: each square kilometer cost Russia 11 dead. Or put differently; each Russian soldier died for 12 soccer fields.
The intensification of the meat grinder continues. The trend visible since July of more territory trading hands each month, and more Russian soldiers perishing each month continues.
The “record-breaking” 700 km2 November gains are equal to pushing the entire 480-kilometer front in Ukraine forward by 1.5 kilometers.
On the other hand, the 20,000 permanent losses to do it mean the monthly growth of the force was whittled down to just 7,500. This is in the best-case scenario. If the intake is closer to 16,500 (rather than 27,500) then the Russian side actually slightly shrank.
The continuous ramping up of the meatgrinder sees the battlefield marginally more fluid in the here and now, but comes at the sacrifice of force expansion and having more and better options in the future. As always Moscow is fixed on the near-term.
Ukraine
From late 2023 to May 2024 Kiev was nabbing between 10,000 to 15,000 men monthly for the military. After the new mobilization laws came into effect on May 18 this surged to 35,000, but had by late October gradually come down to 21,000 monthly. (Likely it will keep slowly falling until the old 15,000.)
And what about attrition?
There are signs of a decoupling.
Data in the death notice databases — MediaZona and Poteru.net for the Russian side, UALosses and Lost Armour for the Ukrainian side — corresponds to some 70,000 Ukrainian and 80,000 Russian dead in the first two years of the war.
Data for the first half of 2024 (during which only Russia has been on the attack) is already less even. It corresponds to 4500-5000 monthly dead on the Russian side, 2500-3000 on the Ukrainian.
Then H2 2024 sees a steady rise of confirmed and implied Russian dead each month, but nothing like that can be observed in databases tracking Ukrainian death notices. The data for November and October is still too incomplete to make a judgment, but September which saw 4300 confirmed and 6300 implied for Russia only has 1600 confirmed and 2500 implied for Ukraine.
For a long time I’ve assumed this was just lag, since UALosses in particular is notoriously much slower to update than Poteru. But it has been 5 months since the Russian attrition started climbing without a sign of an uptick on the Ukrainian side. The seemingly common-sense assumption that as Russian losses steadily rose so proportionally did Ukrainian ones has become all but untenable. I’ll keep looking at the figures but 5 months in there is no data to suggest that.
What data says is that as Moscow has ramped up the monthly human sacrifice from 5000 to 8000 this has indeed resulted in a more fluid map as Trump prepares to take office, but it hasn’t even helped generate more enemy attrition. Instead it somehow took an already icky 1.8:1 casualty ratio and made it as bad as 3:1.
April was the nadir of Ukrainian shell expenditure, owing to complications with the aid bill in Congress, but this has now reached near parity. (As I warned in 2022 it would eventually come to.) Ukrainian drone manufacturing has also exploded to 1.5 million per annum which is higher than Russia’s. So the Russian advances being made now are being made against the densest barrier of shells, drones, and drone-laid mines yet.
So then is Russia in trouble? Yes, of course she is. And so is Ukraine. Where Russia’s problem is deaths, Ukraine’s problem is flight.
By May 2024 Ukraine had opened 55,000 registered cases against soldiers for desertion or going AWOL, but the nationalist journalist Volodymyr Boiko who serves in the military estimated the number of soldiers who exempted themselves from service was actually over 130,000, because in most cases the authorities do not wish to escalate by opening a formal case, or advertise the scale of the problem by registering it.
By September the number of registered cases had grown to 80,000 (including 45,000 in 2024) and Boiko estimated the number of absentees was approaching 200,000. At this time it was reported two-thirds of the cases were article 408 or going AWOL, and a third were article 407 or desertion.
By now the number of registered cases has grown to 100,000, including 60,000 opened in the first ten months of 2024. (Meaning September-October saw 15,000.)
7,500 new cases a month, which if Boiko is right equals 18,000 new absentees monthly. Question is, how many of these are irrecoverable? As opposed to a soldier going AWOL but returning after a couple of months of unauthorized vacation?
Is the number of registered cases (7,500 monthly) a good proxy for how many the military has given up on, and aren’t coming back? Or is it the registered deserter cases (2,500 monthly) the better proxy for irrecoverable flight? Or perhaps permanent flight is close to 18,000? We have more information, but little certainty.
What we do know is that flight is taking a big chunk out of the ability to regenerate the force. If 21,000 are mobilized and 2,500 are lost as dead, 3800 as discharged, and another 7,500 as deserters then the net gain is just 7200. And the monthly mobilized figure is likely to continue a slow descent to the 10,000-15,000 range before the new law, so at that point you’re looking at a monthly deficit and the deployed force shrinking each month.
Indeed a Ukrainian MP told the Associated Press that Ukraine already recorded a deficit of 4,000 troops in September. If that is the case then either the battlefield losses or flight are way higher than the numbers I mention here. (Or perhaps the MP is also subtracting the lightly wounded who will return to duty, which I do not.)
State of the Meat Grinder
The SMO is in many aspects a phony war, but that doesn’t mean there is anything low-intensity about it for the two forces actually deployed to it. The 350,000 Ukrainians and the 580,000 Russians.
To the contrary, both are under absolutely immense strain. With only slight exaggeration we can now speak of the Ukrainian force as one stripped of infantry. While even in the drone and artillery arms you will find many 2-year veterans in the infantry they do not exist. Virtually everyone from the 2022 days has been killed, crippled, or got themselves transferred. You can think of the Ukrainian force as one that has already lost all of its infantry one time over, and has never fully rebuilt it. (By mid-2024 Ukraine had sustained 88,000 dead for a total of 220,000 irrecoverable losses, mainly infantry.)
No wonder that desertion is highest among the newly mobilized. It is not just that these are people pressed into service, but that they’re being bused directly into the infantry where without a prospect of demobilization the odds of getting out alive and with limbs intact are dim. They are well aware that they are being plucked for the select corps of chumps commanded to bear a war burden far in excess of anyone else in the society, including most of the rest of the servicemen.
In September Ukraine boasted that it received 6500 volunteers in a month. The catch is that Kiev incentivizes volunteering by giving them leeway on what role they serve in so volunteers mostly can’t be sent to the infantry. As renewed mobilization has increased the likelihood of receiving a summons, preemptively volunteering to steer clear of the infantry death sentence has become more attractive. This also means that if Ukraine is achieving a monthly intake of 21,000 but 6,000 are volunteers, then only 15,000 of that is useful for reconstituting the missing infantry.
The same infantry-vs-support caste system exists on the Russian side but there it is formalized. The 28,000 who sign up for the hefty bonuses monthly? What do you think they are signing up for? That’s right, they’re all headed to the infantry. Specifically the “reconnaissance-assault” battalions. You signed the paper, you took the bonus. Now you’re ours to do as we please.
The pre-war enlisted men serve in the old combined arms formations, the volunteers serve in new infantry-heavy “assault” units built along the lines Wagner pioneered with convicts at Bakhmut. An “assault” unit provides the men for the attack, a unit of regulars provides the men to support them. The volunteers perform the same role for the military the convicts did for Wagner — expendable infantry that can be spent leading the relentless mini-attacks, most of which fail, without losing the experience of the veterans thinned out by 2022.
Which of the two systems is more horrific? You decide, but between its larger population and financial lure for provincials from places stagnant since Soviet times, Russia is better able to replenish its infantry.
And it’s not as if Russia has an abundance of infantry. But unlike Ukraine it has some, and it isn’t shy about expending it. 11 for a square kilometer at the current exchange rate. A couple hundred for a village, or a “key” treeline.
To be fair, neither side has been reluctant to plow its infantry into the ground. Zelensky forbade retreat from Bakhmut long after its envelopment had made it an attritional sinkhole. He presided over the absurd nine-month Battle of Krinky. And he had the army batter itself against Russian fortifications in the 2023 counter-offensive for months after any hope of operational success had already been lost.
But 2024 has seen evolution. An early change in MO could be observed in February in the grand battle of Avdiivka, where after it was enveloped the Ukrainians promptly pulled out, rather than accept unfavorable geometry and unfavorable losses. Then in July they finally abandoned even the small-scale but nonsensical Krinky battle. Since then — except in Kursk, where they grabbed 1000 km2 in a surprise attack and on the cheap — they’ve been on the defensive the whole time, and for 5 months now have pulled back from more ground each next month.
I don’t think this reflects a change in culture. I think it is something that has been forced on them involuntarily. In the past, they may have kept reinforcing a losing position. But now, bereft of reserves that simply is no longer an option. This forces them to be more elastic on defense and to concede this or that village or treeline earlier than they would have before. But this coincidentally happens to be the much more optimal way to fight an attritional contest.
It is a static, siege-like battlefield in which the attacking Russians first take disproportionate losses to try to change the battlefield geometry, eg by carving out small local salients. Where successful the attritional calculation then flips to the disadvantage of the Ukrainians subjected to fires from three sides.
Ukraine is still often too slow to evacuate such disadvantaged positions (and good commanders still find themselves relieved for pushing for it), but they are no longer getting reinforced (because there is nothing to reinforce them with), and this has reduced the attritional payoff from such actions for the Russians, albeit the cost in blood to set them up has remained the same.
In other words, the sheer absence of a resource with which to commit mistakes is to some extent saving the Ukrainian command from its own stubbornness and shortsighted neglect of force-preservation.
On the other hand, greater manpower availability for the Russian side (courtesy of 345,000 volunteers in 2023 and 252,000 by October 1 in 2024) has allowed its leadership the luxury to act in a more wasteful and stupid manner which it has immediately taken to. True, the enemy has been pushed from a record 700 square kilometers in a month, but the 8000 dead are also a record. And in a situation where 8000 soldiers die for 700 km2 the manpower attrition part of that is clearly far more important than how many bombed-out villages switched hands. And yet there is no evidence that Ukrainian attrition has risen in lockstep with Russia's. To the contrary, the evidence we have suggests that the 1.8:1 loss ratio from the first half of 2024 had by September turned into a 2.6:1 ratio with 6500 Russian and 2500 Ukrainian dead.
This is not just wasteful and criminal, it is embarrassing.
It turns out the pace of advance rising to the astonishing speed of 0.12% of Ukraine in a month conceals a culling of Russian provincials and the dumbest and worst period for Russia’s manhood since the cynical butchery at Bakhmut. An actually good period for Russia would be mid-2023 when it actually lost a tiny bit of territory to Ukrainian offensive but enjoyed a positive losses ratio for the last time.
That’s not to say that Russia is on a track to lose. It probably isn’t. But if it “wins” it will be because it is taking in more men and absolutely nothing to do with how these men are then cashed in, which has been dumb, callous and inefficient — never more so than in the last five months.
Slaughter’s Scale
How to wrap one’s mind around the figure of Russia’s 8,000 military deaths in a month? That is more than the US sustained in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
It is equal to the number of Soviet dead from the Russian SFSR in a decade of Afghanistan.
Here is another way. In 1917 and 1918 the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front counted 1.8 million men and sustained an average of 19,500 dead monthly in that period. The Russian SMO group of forces counts 580,000 men and just sustained at least 8,000 dead for the month. In a phony SMO war, the deployed Russian force recently sustained a greater loss rate than the average for the BEF in the Great War. Wrap your mind around that. The absolute number of dead is lower and drawn from a larger population, but from the point of view of the 580,000 fighting it for the Russian side, this war is now as lethal as the slaughter of the Western Front.
8,000 Russians thrown away for 270 square miles of depopulated moonscape and the deaths of 3,000 other Slavs. NATO and Atlanticists do not have to wish for anything more for Christmas than just the repeat of more of the same.
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Your article made me feel sick to my stomach. All those mothers with lost sons and wives with no one anymore. This is pure devil's work. I can't see it as anything more than Santanic and blood sacrifice. This is not incompetence, this is not how you fight a war. This is how you corral a slaughter. May God help us and I'm not even religious or one of those Christian nuts but seeing evil like this makes me think there must be good somewhere. Thank you for your work.
The best thing both Ukrainian & Russian soldiers can do is to turn their guns on their own officers and mutiny to stop this senseless slaughter.