Russia appears to have launched a “renewed offensive” against Ukrainian troops in the eastern part of the country as the war inches closer to entering its second winter, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said on Friday.
But Russian troops haven’t made much progress, Kirby said, adding that the new attacks are “not a surprise.”
“The Russian military appears to be using human wave tactics where they throw masses of poorly trained soldiers right into the battlefield without proper equipment, and apparently without proper training and preparation,” he said.
Both MoD and AFU numbers are so deep in the realm of misinformation they might as well be pulled out of a hat… I guess at least the MoD gives details for their fantasy numbers so they’re slightly harder to distort? Not by much though lol
Studies on WW2 have also shown how hard it is to compare numbers in general because of widely varying definitions of a “kill” both in the air and on the ground. If you want to go down a rabbit hole, I’d recommend reading into German, Soviet, and Western ways of recording tank “kills” and aircraft “kills” (this is even outside of the rampant overclaiming of kills and underclaiming of losses: look at the definition itself). I’d opt for contemporary sources that haven’t been as distorted by the passage of time.
I’m not trying to imply that the Ukrainian ministry of defence numbers are totally accurate and I actually said the opposite of that in my comment. I’m just responding to your accusation of me spreading disinformation by pointing out that I was getting my information from the best available source as imperfect as that may be. I don’t consider this to be spreading disinformation, I guess we could argue semantics there but that would be more about the accuracy of the source.
Except it’s spreading numbers that are known to be wrong?
It would be equivalent to spreading MoD numbers.
I don’t know what to tell you, mate. These are the numbers from the people that were there doing the blowing up. If you have a better source I’d be genuinely interested to look at it.
This is a shit argument and you know it. It’s a shit argument for the same reason that spreading MoD numbers claiming that the RAF are there doing the blowing up is a shit argument. Even in a vacuum with perfect reporting to the AFU/MoD, those numbers would end up being inflated for morale reasons.
In fact, the RAF has also been remarkably silent in terms of SIGINT leakage, so even “verified sources” are becoming heavily distorted: looking at Oryx would have you believe that almost half of Ukrainian tank casualties in June 2023 were Leopard 2s, for example… And definitely not because posting destroyed Leopard 2s looks really good for Russia.
Don’t spread shoddy numbers, whether from Ukraine or Russia. It’s not helping anyone.