~snip~
So we have CSIS, a US based think tank headquartered in Washington DC and sponsored in part by US government and US defense contractors, putting Russian casualties at 2:1 to Ukraine. Fine, let's pretend that it's the most objective source of information and we all believe it, how long do you think Ukraine will be able to keep that up considering Russian population being over 4:1 to Ukraine? And Ukraine already lost almost 25% of it's population according to your numbers?
And how many millions of Ukrainian refugees are in Russia? And finally, how do you feel about people in the west continuing to encourage Ukrainians to fight to the last Ukrainian, seeing the current dynamics?
Russians only trust Russian sources, right? That's why I wrote that there's no point in citing any sources (unless they're Russian). Even if we agree that the side that attacks loses a lot more soldiers than the side that defends, you will still claim that the losses on both sides are equal, but I didn't even expect otherwise.
It is completely pointless to compare the populations of Ukraine and Russia in this context, because Russians generally have to be
"motivated" to go to war, while most Ukrainians defend their country and are paid around $500 per month. Therefore, in my opinion, every Ukrainian with a rifle in his hand is worth at least 5 poorly motivated Russians who go to war because they are paid for it, and in addition they loot everything they can get their hands on.
The majority of Europeans will support Ukraine as long as necessary, in any way - because we consider Ukraine to be part of the EU (still unofficially). I survived a similar war that your Serb brothers started, they didn't give us even a 1% chance of success, but David defeated Goliath again. I think most Ukrainians live by the old saying
"better a grave than a slave".Sources are sources, you just have to know their bias and adjust for that.
Sure, we can have different opinions but the difference seems to be between 1:1 what i claim and 2:1 what you claim. Even the best case still doesn't look good for Ukraine.
Right, just like every motivated Afghani, Iraqi, Libyan, Iranian... was worth 10 US soldiers just because they were motivated to protect their land right, solid logic! There's is your opinion and then there's what's really happening in the world. It's been years since Ukrainians were volunteering for military, Ukraine long had to resort to
busification to find souls for the front lines, unsurprisingly "busified" soldiers are not very motivated and just ran away the first chance they get. Look up how much Russian soldiers get paid before talking about looting. And stop spreading fake news!
January 16, 2026 Inside Ukraine's AWOL and military desertion crisis. The spike in AWOL and desertion comes as Ukraine faces a deepening infantry shortage on the front line, allowing Russian troops to probe and advance in thinly manned sectors.March 25, 2026-As Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine enters its fifth year, manpower continues to be the most pressing issue for Kyiv.
While Russia continues to be able to recruit tens of thousands of soldiers voluntarily through lucrative sign-up bonuses, Ukraine's ongoing forced mobilization — a necessity in an existential war — has put increased pressure on state and society internally.
Falling motivation among draftees, exacerbated by shortcomings in the mobilization and training process, as well as in the units themselves, has led to surging AWOL and desertion rates over 2025, according to figures published by the Prosecutor General's Office.
In the changing environment of the drone-saturated battlefield, soldiers serving in the infantry — almost all forcefully mobilized at this stage of the war — are often forced to spend months at a time on combat positions, as rotations are made impossible both by Russian drone control logistics routes, and by the lack of infantrymen ready to replace them.
And this is from The Kyiv Independent! So adjust for their bias to you'll get the real idea of what's happening! Who could've thought that retreating for over 4 years wouldn't motivate soldiers
I don't know what's exactly written in this article because it's under paywall. But from your quote it looks that their source is unknown Brittish offiacial in Ukraine. So, I would say this is ''Trust me bro'' level of source.
It's first time when I hear such numbers. 20 millions, where are these people are gone. According to public data there is between 5 and 6 millions Ukrainian refugees in Russia and estimated 1.5 milliion in Europe. Where is rest 12-13 millions? Killed in war. Even Russian is their wildest dreamsaren't telling such numbers.
What is actual population of Ukraine. It's very difficult to tell it under war conditions. But if you exclude occupied regions, these numbers still won't go below 30 millions.
The new world war
Why the battle for Iran and Ukraine is coming for us all
By Will Lloyd
“You are talking about this like it’s over,” the author Oleksandr Mykhed said when we met in central Kyiv last month. In a more bookish era Mykhed would be a famous man. His The Language of War (2024) is a landmark of conflict literature, an extended scream of pain, a rare war book written from the perspective of a soldier defending their homeland from invasion. I had asked him about the future of Ukraine, Europe and the West. About peace. He hated the question. The future was no more than a “luxury”, something “impatient” Westerners imagined while Ukrainians were raped, kidnapped, bombed, burned and droned.
Mykhed, dressed head-to-toe in clerical black, was scowling over his coffee, dead tired. Everyone was dead tired in Kyiv this winter. We were a short walk from the Maidan, ground zero of the revolution, where today a section of the square pays tribute to the soldiers killed fighting the invasion. The images of the young men’s faces, the miniature Ukrainian flags, the insignia and laminated love letters – they were all covered by blue snow and hard frost, their faces hard to see, buried for a second time.
“Our Western partners are gung-ho, saying ‘woo-hoo, keep on going’,” Mykhed told me. “But we are not OK.” He likened the war to a chronic illness. This war entered your bones, like arthritis. I could hear the Ukrainians around me creaking. But that didn’t mean the war was nearly over, or that a peace deal would be struck. Arthritis isn’t fatal. The war was in the bones of this country, and in those that refused to flee, men like Mykhed. Ukraine was a militarised society, a laboratory for some of the most sophisticated weaponry in human history, funded by allies abroad; a garrison state, “a big Israel” where every activity pulled towards survival.
Mykhed wanted to know if Europeans understood this. Ukrainians would survive, he argued. They always did. But would Europeans when the war came for them? Everything we thought we knew about the world order has been violently upended. Now the war was spreading, germ-like, warping those it touched.
What had begun as a street protest against a corrupt government on the Maidan in 2013 had taken Ukraine, and eventually Europe, into a new security reality. A war waged with circuits made in China, drones designed by Iranians and mercenaries drawn from Colombia and Cameroon, North Korea and Tajikistan. The war was fought in Ukraine, but likely to be decided by drab industrial parks in Shenzhen and production lines in Massachusetts and anonymous offices in Düsseldorf.
I came to the war late, first visiting at the end of 2024, with the advent of the second Donald Trump presidency. I wrote stories about smuggling and alarming demographic decline, about volunteers who exclaimed they would fight for the next thousand years if they had to. I witnessed Europe’s early hope and energy begin to curdle and move elsewhere: to Gaza and Greenland, Venezuela and now Iran. The world was a mess, expensive munitions for advanced air defence platforms were running low and needed everywhere from Kyiv to Tel Aviv to Abu Dhabi; Ukraine was not a front-page story any more. There was no romance to be found in the front line in the east, where men hunted each other with FPV drones across ruined forests and shattered villages. The same image, the same blood, the same nation. Shrug. A terrible thing was happening somewhere far away. This war, as grotesque and strange as a Max Ernst canvas, was becoming normal even as it transformed the rest of the world in ways it barely understood.
As the fourth anniversary of the invasion approached last month, Zelensky inflated his rhetoric. He used the same formulation I had heard countless times from Ukrainians every time I visited. This was not a conflict between Ukraine and Russia any longer, if it had ever been that to begin with. These were, Zelensky told the BBC in February, the first years of the Third World War.
“People think this is the third act,” Mykhed told me as we sat in a café, in ice-bound Kyiv. “But you should think of this as the first act.”
Ukraine awakened extraordinary hopes in a generation of European leaders. As Russian rockets fell across Ukraine on 24 February 2022, signalling the start of the invasion, Volodymyr Zelensky was told by his allies in the West he had hours to escape. But Zelensky did not move, and all those predictions of collapse were swiftly, surprisingly, bloodily falsified.
Historians will recognise that as the moment when the energy appeared; everything started to move. The German chancellor struck a term on 27 February: Zeitenwende. Literally the moment when “times turn”. This shocking, euphoric energy was propelling us from one period of history into another.
In the early weeks of the war, so many British citizens drove vans full of aid to the Polish border that Ben Wallace, then the defence secretary, had to ask with some tact that people send money instead. A few hundred miles away, near the village of Liubymivka, in the Kherson Oblast – this is a story Ukrainians still laugh about today – local Gypsies purloined an abandoned Russian tank, one of many left rotting around Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s hapless armies. The Gypsies have stolen a tank: the phrase became the punchline of patriotic memes, a tagline for cash-in retail goods. Clips of born-in-the-USSR Russian incompetence electrified social networks. This was warfare as knockabout viral entertainment: ubiquitous images of death, spun for a laugh and viewed from a safe distance. No war ever seemed to cost so little.
As the spring of 2022 saw the Russian blitzkrieg falter, this utterly harmonious communal energy spread across the West. One voice spoke from podiums in the White House and Berlaymont and No 10 Downing Street. The voice said that we would not allow the encroachment of the Russian world beyond its borders.
The crusading energy generated a new, brief faith in ourselves, even in Boris Johnson. Our capabilities, our diplomacy, our technology, our sanctions packages, our intelligence services, our rules-based liberal order. You were either with us inside the Swift international payments system or with them inside the Russkiy Mir. “A battle between democracy and autocracy,” said the then US president, an ailing but seemingly decent man. A wall of money, military hardware and intelligence support moved towards eastern Europe.
We didn’t even have to fight. The Ukrainians would do that for us. Ukrainians funded by Western treasure and armed with Western technology. “We Ukrainians have ended up in a time and place where the planet’s future literally depends on us,” wrote the author-turned-soldier Artem Chapeye in early 2022. “We’re the guardians of the fucking galaxy.” Has a heavier burden been placed on a people in our lifetimes?
On 29 March 2022 the Kremlin announced that Russian troops were “repositioning” from the north of Ukraine to Donbas. As they withdrew from Kyiv, Cherniv, Kharkiv and Sumy atrocities were uncovered. Hundreds of dead civilians shot by Russian troops in the Kyiv commuter town of Bucha, with many showing signs of torture and rape. Other once-anonymous towns soon became similarly infamous: Bakhmut, Sievierodonetsk, Maryinka, Rubizhne, Volnovakha, Lyman, Izyum. Ukraine, unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, Syria and Libya, was a good war, a morally clean war, giving a precious gift to Europe’s leaders they could not get from governing their own countries: meaning, valour, solemnity, glory.
Yet that was not how it looked in Kyiv this winter, where the congealed violence of four years of war had transformed the country into something many in Europe no longer want to think about: a war of extermination fought between two militarised societies barely two days’ drive from Dover.
“You begin to perceive war more professionally, as a type of activity,” Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi told the flagship ICTV news show Facts on 6 February as I watched from my room in Kharkiv. Biletskyi is the commander of the 40,000-strong 3rd Separate Assault Brigade, a powerful volunteer formation that he claims has the lowest number of soldiers going absent without official leave in Ukraine. “At first war is a challenge, it’s a battle, it’s an emotion… but people can’t burn all the time, endlessly.”
The energy was gone in the West, but it had left Ukraine transformed. The national flag was, wherever I went, joined by the red-and-black flag of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Ukraine was a society that experienced a revolution and then rapidly militarised itself, closer to France in the 1790s or the USSR in the 1930s than anything in Western Europe. (Crucially though, Ukraine remained a democracy.) The most radical Ukrainians were always the happiest Ukrainians. Nataliya Zubar is a nationalist I met in Kharkiv, an organiser and an activist whose grandfather secretly spoke Ukrainian to her in the dark winters of the USSR, telling her this war would come one day. Now, it was everything to her, wish-fulfilment on a barely believable scale. To see Ukrainians, armed, dangerous, radicalised – truly, this was her dream come true. “We are building the Ukrainian nation,” she said. The power in the café we were sitting in came and went. “When this war is over Putin will have some place as a hero, as someone who united this nation. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has told you that.”
Volodymyr Matsokin wakes up every morning at 5.30am. The deputy mayor of Izyum helps his wife turn on the heating in their home, then begins his daily rounds. He’s responsible for healthcare in the city. Check the hospitals, check the pregnant women, check the elderly, the sick, the parents with suffering children. The heating went down across the town yesterday. There is a kind of tiredness you see in Ukrainians like Matsokin, a special kind of tiredness that makes people turn grey. “The day never ends,” he said in his office, a spartan room decorated with a single portrait of the writer Taras Shevchenko in a brick municipal building flecked with shell damage, on 3 February. He likens himself to a “firefighter”. Matsokin said his town was “invincible”. But the fires around Izyum never go out.
Izyum, a city on the Siverskyi Donets River in Kharkiv Oblast, used to be home to 45,000 people. It’s close to Donbas to the east. Further north is Kharkiv, further south the strategically vital fortress towns of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, much desired by the Kremlin. Izyum, Matsokin said, has lost about half its population since 2022. The city was occupied by the Russians between April and September that year, after they had destroyed an estimated 80 per cent of its buildings during bitter fighting at the start of the war. After the invaders were forced out that autumn a mass grave was discovered on the forested outskirts of the city.
“There are not enough fingers on my hands to count the number of people who were tortured or killed”, Matsokin, a bald, squat, spectacled man in his fifties, said flatly. Ukrainian investigators eventually uncovered 447 bodies.
Since 2022 the city’s population has stabilised at around 27,000, including 2,000 children. A lot of life, particularly schooling and healthcare, goes on underground, as it does elsewhere in eastern and southern Ukraine. New apartment blocks are being constructed, slowly. The streets in Izyum are webbed with anti-drone shields made from donated European fisherman’s plastic nets. These were being stretched out and strung around tall metal poles all over Kharkiv Oblast in February. I never knew whether these made much of a difference with drones, but they did catch birds, crows usually, which froze and hung like dead flies above the roads.
In 2022 Izyum had fallen to the Russians. Some in the city, assuming the conquest was permanent, switched their allegiances. Halyna Ivanova, the director of the local history museum, has been collecting evidence of the occupation since 2022. She could “forgive but not forget” what happened in those months. Occupation bent people you thought you understood into new shapes. “My best friend wouldn’t share half a loaf of bread with me,” Ivanova sighed. “Whereas one of my neighbours, an alcoholic who I didn’t know very well, used to give me food.”
A short, phlegmatic woman with a black bowl cut, Ivanova was particularly proud of one room. Her “museum of occupation” collected everything the Russians left behind. There, hanging from the ceiling, was half a Shahed-136 wing, from the same simple Iranian-made drone currently throwing the global economy into disarray and menacing the British in Cyprus. Below the drone were remains of cluster munitions, military uniforms and helmets, ration packs and brands of cigarettes that Ivanova, in her sixties, hadn’t seen since the fall of the USSR. She pointed to a box of ammunition with labels written in Mandarin.
Ivanova passed me a wooden crutch the invaders had left behind. It looked like it was made around the same time Tolstoy was reporting on the Crimean War. The Russians had invaded carrying antiques and maps of eastern Ukraine from the 1980s. Their rations were minimal, their uniforms were cheap, and the soldiers in them were rustics from Dagestan, Buryatia, Volgograd and Bashkortostan. Poor men out for a pay cheque and violent sprees. Ivanova showed me a crudely fashioned wooden medal – a joke? – awarded, according to its Cyrillic inscription, “for all this shit”.
In that exhibit, in the stories of occupation Ivanova relayed to me over many hours by the tiny heater in her office, you could feel that Russia’s war was a despairing howl against decline driven by the logic of rape and plunder.
Soon spring thaws would turn the ice around Izyum to mud. The Russians call the mud rasputitsa; it would help them, just as the winter helped them. It was Mykhed who pointed this out to me, the pagan belief the Russians had in snow and frost and mud to save their misfiring armies. In a few weeks’ time the ice would melt, the rains would start and the dust and the mud would coat the remains of women and men and the wreckage of the drones and missiles that killed them in Kharkiv Oblast. A thousand miles south, meanwhile, the drones would begin to land in the Gulf; an Arab spring offering diplomatic opportunities – and dangers – for Zelensky’s war-ravaged Ukraine of a kind not yet perceivable.
One freezing morning in early February, as the air around the city briefly rang with the sorties of war planes, we took a trip to a wooded training ground near the front line. The man escorting us there was a communications officer in the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade, call sign “Disney”. He wasn’t a natural soldier. As we drove deeper into the forest, Disney occasionally broke up his long, chatty answers on the role of the United States in this conflict and the demanding technical knowledge now required of his colleagues in an age of rampant drone warfare to admit, quite simply, that he missed driving his car around Kyiv at night, drinking coffee and chatting up girls.
It was -21C when we left the vehicle in a clearing surrounded by pine trees. A couple of pick-up trucks were already parked nearby. Eight soldiers of the 3rd’s Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) Company were there, preparing to test their new kit. Icicles hung off their facial hair. One of the men, irritated, scratched at his eye: the lids had been frosted shut.
The 3rd wanted to show us their latest toy: a remote-controlled box the size of a large fridge, a vehicle they used for evacuating casualties, for delivering pizza to the men bored in their foxholes and for gunning down Russians with 12.7mm machine guns. What the 3rd are doing with the UGVs was groundbreaking, Disney claimed. There was no rulebook, no real record of using these machines in combat, no accepted tactical doctrine for their deployment. Their caterpillar tracks crunched in the distance. “We are making history here,” Disney chuckled, shifting his weight from foot to foot, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, half-soldier, half-salesman.
This cost-effective capacity to build, operate and kill with drones has become a hallmark of the Ukrainian resistance since 2022. Small teams of engineers working at speed have changed the face of warfare. Ukrainians had worked out how to fight a larger enemy with less manpower in appalling demographic circumstances while millions fled the country. Drones were the weapons for a century in which fewer and fewer countries had a fertility rate above replacement level.
Such advanced drone warfare is seen as Ukraine’s gift to the West. “For us, this is like oil,” Zelensky told reporters on 15 March. “The production of modern drones and Ukraine’s relevant expertise is today’s Ukrainian oil.” That was the offer Zelensky made to the Gulf as the Iran war began last month. You only had to talk to the soldiers in the 3rd about their experiences training with Nato armies – the Nato guys had no idea what they were doing any more – to realise how far four years of conflict had pushed the Ukrainians in fighting terms. They were in 1918; the rest of us were in 1913.
The machines were less interesting than the men who made them function. While the average age of a Ukrainian soldier is reportedly 43, the volunteers in the 3rd skewed much younger, usually around the twenties. They were vividly unlike their grandfathers, farmers who grumblingly acquiesced to the Soviet imperium, more familiar with tractor engines than automatic rifles and FPV drones. In the space of a single generation the Ukrainian male had transformed. He no longer resembled a peasant farmer but a cossack.
The men in the 3rd styled themselves as such: long, whiskery moustaches and closely shaven heads save for the long locks of black hair left to dangle at the back. They were ultra-nationalists too, a fact testified by the Scandinavian runes they tattooed around their arms and up their necks. Russian propaganda calls these men Nazis. They do, of course, dispute that. They – these warriors, engineers, mechanics, software developers, drone operators – are easily among the most admired men in Ukraine, educated and transformed by revolution and war. What was the future balance of power like in a continent where 40,000 men like this existed, trained and armed to kill with advanced weaponry? What happened if their hopes were disappointed after the war?
The 3rd has its roots in the Azov Battalion, a volunteer unit of radical ultra-nationalists formed by Biletskyi and others when the war in the east with Russian-backed separatists began in 2014. Biletskyi, who has been a politician before, likely has a political future ahead of him should the war ever finish. The 3rd’s distinctive orange-and-black marketing is a feature of every city and town in Ukraine I have reported from in the last three years. In Izyum this took the form of banners that starkly called for “REVENGE”. Often, the fiery posters and banners featured Biletskyi, whose ferociously blank expression now loomed over buildings across the country.
Combining logistics, technology, public relations, and ideological partisanship, the 3rd can look to an outsider less like a formation in a national armed unit than a paramilitary force. When I interviewed Biletskyi’s men, they spoke of him using his full name and title whatever the context of the conversation. Our Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi says. Our Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi taught us. Our Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi is a student of history. I thought little of this before a Ukrainian friend mentioned how unsettled it made them feel. It was strange to use the full name, they said, as if they were back at a political meeting in the days of the USSR.
“There is a dark side to war, and anyone who says otherwise is lying,” Biletskyi declared in 2018, speaking at the launch of a Ukrainian translation of a work by the German conservative writer and war veteran Ernst Jünger. “Why was Jünger read with enthusiasm? Because there is another truth of war; when from nothing complete powerlessness, chaos, new truths, new forms, new orders are born.”
There were new forms all around us in the forest. Cossacks who had stepped out of the pages of a Ukrainian fairy tale were tinkering with advanced robots belonging to steampunk fantasies. As these hardened ultra-nationalists shared cigarettes with each other, I was struck by the irony that they were not just defending their homes but all of liberal Europe. And, perhaps, soon, much of the rest of the Allied-American world.
When the war began in February 2022, I started to note down the ways British officials described it in private. Back then the war in Ukraine was what it remains: a war for independence; a liberation struggle; an anti-colonial defence of freedom and nation. But such struggles, waged in defence of a homeland, transform the homeland in the process.
Before I returned in February a British official told me that Ukraine’s population, which had been estimated at just over 40 million in 2014, had shrunk to something like 20 million by 2025, significantly less than most estimates in the public domain. What would be left after this war, if it ever ended?
Not everything made exact sense in Ukraine this winter. One afternoon my friend took me to the outskirts of Kharkiv: I had to meet a guy there. He was in his sixties and he lived alone in a 16-storey Soviet apartment block. The top of the building had been chewed up by a Russian missile in 2022. Snow filled the empty floors. The building smelled of rotten concrete. The man’s only company was a dog outside chained to a crate and the circling crows in the grey sky.
This man, the Robinson Crusoe of the block, had no electricity and no heating. He cooked with a camp stove, collected food from a local charity and smelled unwashed, sour. I felt very sorry for him. He was trying to exist. What else could he do? He took me to a window, with panoramic views of the edge of the city, out into the flat, frozen white countryside. His bottom lip trembled while he spoke. He was tense, on the edge of something bad, trying not to cry.
Over the edge of the horizon was the front line. The teams of men coldly eyeing their live feeds in bunkers, busily assassinating each other with drones, then posting the results online. The netting hung with dead birds all along the roads. The schools where children learned underground, as if they were surviving a nuclear winter. The old men and women who froze in their apartments and had to be cut out from them once their neighbours realised what had happened. The war had pulled the US and Europe apart, invented a whole new machinery of death, underlined our dependence on brutal petro-states, flooded this corner of eastern Europe with several generations’ worth of weapons. It had killed and radicalised and burned and exposed whatever it touched. It was hard to express any of this in words. I stared out of the window with the old, broken man, watching the snow fall.
Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu launched their war on Iran a few days after I returned from Kyiv. Turkey, the keystone that sits directly between Ukraine and Iran, may yet be pulled into it. The vengeful Iranian Shaheds, so familiar to Ukrainians after four years of nightly terror, now rained down all over the Gulf. There were rumours that they were being mass-produced in China. Taken aback by the violent efficiency of the Iranian counterattack, Trump was demanding a Western armada enter the Gulf. War was spreading. Act I.
The damage to energy storage, terminals, refineries and pipelines around the region threatened to plunge the world into another recession, toppling governments, immiserating millions. They would learn what it felt like to be Ukrainian. They may come to understand that the Ukrainian experience is the key to global security now. The world would transform again, and not necessarily to our advantage in sleepy, barely defended Britain. I began to fear that we would not understand the new reality until it was crashing down towards us from a hostile sky.
Slowly, I came to believe in what Mykhed had told me in Kyiv. “People think this is the third act,” he’d said. Whatever this war was – a war for independence, a proxy war fought between empires, a third world war – it was nowhere near over. It was spreading uncontrollably, violently, like a germ. I think about Mykhed’s words all the time now. “Are you ready to be in the first act?” That is now the question for Europe and its fearful, cocooned leaders looking out of their windows as the street lamps begin to flicker across the continent.
Additional reporting by Viktoria Sybir and Viacheslav Ratynskyi
There are many more Ukrainians in EU than 1,5mil! Check your sources! Account for population on the territories now under Russia's control! And don't forget about low fertility rates during the war and excess deaths, substance abuses, suicides etc etc etc...
