More Mobilization: Ukraine Scraping the Barrel, Squeezing Blood From Stones, Rummaging for Quarters in the Divan!

Squeezing hot sauce stains out of khakis.

Everyone assumes that Ukraine is on its 17th wave of mobilization because they lost the 16 previous waves. This does not appear to be true. Yes, there are videos now of men being forcibly kidnapped to fight in the army.

LogKa @LogKa11

Kiev regime rounding up men to be forcibly conscripted to the frontlines. No state would do this unless they have a severe manpower shortage

But, actually, they were doing the same thing back in the summer. Remember when they’d go to the beaches and nab people there? Does this mean that literally everyone who came before them is dead? Well, no. That doesn’t follow logically.

And if the Ukrainian army has been eliminated, why then does the Russian army continue to struggle to make gains?

Let’s use our brains here, folks.

We don’t know the kill counts on either side. But we can observe that the frontline is still a stalemate, can’t we? So, if one side has lost 600k troops over the last year, why is it that their opponents can’t seem to make any significant gains then?

Think. Just try thinking for once! Saker recently announced that he is packing it up, so you’ll have to rely on your own brain going forward!

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One thing that I won’t deny is that the casualty count has almost certainly dramatically increased since last we spoke.

Olodymr Elenskyy 🥸 @DrvnkUncleZ

today Wagner sent the fourth convoy of trucks with the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers who fought in the Soledar battle the truck is driven by a captured Ukrainian soldier

There have been some costly battles that have taken their toll on both sides. This is literally the worst possible strategy that I was hoping against hope that Russia would avoid; fighting a slow urban and trench war of attrition, that is.

And does anybody seriously believe that Wagner took Soledar without paying a price for it? And there are dozens more Soledars i.e., dilapidated post-Soviet rust-towns to take in the Donbass alone.

How does this lead to a good outcome going forward? Even if you’re killing 10 Ukrainians for every 1 Russian, then to kill 1 million Ukrainian men would cost 100k Russian lives. Ukraine can mobilize another million on top of that if pressed to do so, by the way. So, 2 million dead for 200k of your own?

What would be left of Ukraine to inherit at that point?

And then there are the apologists who say that there is simply no other way to wage war. They count on our ignorance because this is simply not true. People who say nonsense like that don’t understand the concept of maneuver warfare, of encirclements or of localized force superiority - or at least they pretend not to.

In short, the Russian plan ought to be to use overwhelming numbers to gain an advantage and defeat Ukraine’s army that way. Numerical superiority allows one to pin, encircle, overwhelm, breakthrough, outpace, and follow-through against an enemy. Instead, Russia has forgone the use of such advantages to fight the enemy head-on, and on their terms. This is comparable to having a sword at one’s hip, but choosing to throw it away for a fisticuffs slugfest against one’s opponent.

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Again, Ukraine was defending fortified positions. This along gave them enough of a fighting chance against even Wagner despite the fact that they were outmatched by the more professional force. The other side, which claims that Wagner won through use of human wave tactics, is also deluded.

Lord Bebo @MyLordBebo

Australian mercenary: “Wagner is near peer.” -> He describes the overmatch in combat capability between Wagner and Ukrainian forces around Bakhmut.

Also, here are some alternative reasons for why Ukraine might be mobilizing more men right now:

• More men = more success on the battlefield

• Ukraine has never stopped mobilizing actually

• It simply took time to process, train and arm new recruits

• Ukraine has been given more weapons and money to continue mobilizing

• They are seeking to reestablish a numerical advantage over Russia that they have enjoyed for most of this war

The funny thing is that everyone that I know from Kiev or Lvov has managed to avoid mobilization. Literally every young man or middle-aged man that I or my family knows is not on the front. We’re not oligarchs mind you, and neither are they. I’d characterize them as being middle-class. And because they all have some money, they just pay their way out of the service. To be fair, an older man volunteered to go to the front, but he was going through a divorce and probably wanted to commit suicide by Russia. He’s fine, thanks for asking.

These videos of people getting recruited to be used as cannon fodder against the Russians seem to disproportionately be from poorer villages and towns in places that I’ve never even heard of or places that haven’t been recruited from before as heavily. Like Odessa.

FiatLux 🏳️ 🌎 @LuminariumLux

Service aged man around 🇺🇦 are being kidnapped and forcefully sent to the front lines. Ukraine is 'winning' #Bakhmut

The bribe rates at the beginning of the war were rather reasonable. I have no idea what the cost is now. I assume that it’s more, sure. But once you’ve been struck off the list, you stay off the list for a while. Otherwise, why bother paying the bribe in the first place? You have to be quite poor indeed to be unable to bribe your way out of service. And even if you get shanghai’d to the local recruitment office, they have to check your name from a list. So, if you’ve done your due diligence, you ought to be allowed to go even if it gets to that point. Better to not let it get to that point though.

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Point being, this war is far from over. Ukraine on its last legs? Please.

Ukraine hasn’t run out of men and won’t do so any time soon. The war won’t end because the military police likes to kidnap people and press them into service. And if you want the war to end, you have to assume that Kiev and the West will keep fighting, so, the question becomes, what can Russia do to end the war?

One possibility: surrender and hand over Putin, let the country be dismembered and occupied.

The other possibility: win the war conclusively already.

But the larger problem is that Russia has no strategic plan and the disjointed military command is just scrambling to look busy and on top of things at this point.

If you disagree with my assessment, then explain their strategy to me like I’m slow. What is your win scenario for Russia?

How many more Ukrainian soldiers have to be killed?

If you believe that the government in Kiev is callous enough to send literally everyone to their deaths, then the answer is, in fact, “everyone”. And yet, no war in history has ever been fought like this before. Literally no military has based its strategy on eliminating the entire male population of their enemies. Their brotherly fellow Slavs, mind you.

How retarded do you have to be to think that this is either a) a good strategy b) the actual planned strategy of Russia c) likely to succeed?

At what point are you just the mirror image of the delusional people that you oppose?

Look: Russia wanted Ukraine relatively intact. They wanted to give NATO a slap across the face as well so that they’d back down. It was all meant to be over quickly.

None of this happened.

And now, the literal nightmare scenario is unfolding every single day that this war is not concluded effectively. Russia is killing off a few mercenaries from the West, true, but they are mostly just killing dirt-poor Ukrainian conscripts. And they are losing their own conscripts in the process.

People are now talking about how top Ukrainian officials are sounding the alarm about a renewed Russian offensive. Yeah, there’s reason to believe that such a thing is indeed in the works. But Ukrainian officials have been spreading doom and alarmism since the war started to get more weapons and support from the West. All while also being triumphalist at home. What the Ukrainians export for foreign consumption and what they tell their own people is different. At home, they’re talking about taking back Crimea by the summer. But you hear their distressed pleas for help and aid and assume that they’re about to throw in the towel.

Unless something changes dramatically going forward, this war will just be more of the same.

I’d love to be proven wrong though.