re: Latest Updates: Russia-Ukraine Conflict

With Prigozhin's defeatist message above, I now personally believe that the Ukrainian command has been vindicated in its defense of Bakhmut. I was concerned about its plan for a long time, but it worked.

Ukraine has ended up defeating every strategic objective of Russia's "big offensive." Do y'all remember a few months ago, when people were speculating that Russia could make a big drive in from Belarus and make another attempt to seize Kyiv? Russia ended up capturing a few small towns, and some farms and woods -- the biggest town captured was Soledar, which had a pre-war population of some 10k people.

And yesterday was one of the worst days for Russian equipment in a long time. The 21 tanks destroyed obviously includes the 10 that we already saw in the video from the drone unit, but even besides that, Russia continues to lose large numbers of equipment that it cannot replace.





Of course, that's Ukraine's list, and we can't verify its accuracy.

But if you look at visually confirmed destruction from Oryx's list, it's lately been much the same story.

Here's an interesting visualization from a few days ago. If you look only at the heavy equipment (I think this guy's chart from Oryx's list excludes drones and trucks), you can see that the ratio of Russian losses to Ukrainian losses has been above 3:1 for the last 45 days or so. That's a much higher ratio that we've seen since November.




So, the final outcome of Russia's big offensive simply means Russia destroying much of its armor and heavy equipment. It's been a fantastic event for Ukraine.

If you're wondering what this ratio has looked like in the past, it was very high in the first weeks of the invasion, when Russia lost lots of equipment. Then, when Russia used a rain of artillery to take Severodonetsk and more of the Donbas last summer, the ratio dropped to almost 1:1. It then jumped to over 5:1 in September and October, as the Kharkiv offensive meant that Ukraine captured a lot of equipment and Russia's Kherson retreat showed a lot of damaged equipment left behind.