Recently, the United States finally approved nearly $61 billion in aid to Ukraine, although a large part of the oil and water will flow back into the pockets of the US military-industrial complex as usual, but Ukraine can still receive a considerable amount of actual aid; in addition, in addition to the United States, other Western countries are also continuing to aid Ukraine, at least in the next one or two years of basic funds and armament needs, it should be said that there is not much problem.
But now even the Western media is difficult to boost the "confidence in victory" of the war in Ukraine, after all, more than a year ago, it was also a "strategic counteroffensive" based on vigorous aid to Ukraine, but it failed solidly, and the Ukrainian army failed to capture even any Russian-controlled town with the significance of a hub in the theater.
After the failure of the counteroffensive, the Russian offensive has achieved remarkable results, which makes Western observers question the effectiveness of aid to Ukraine.
Of course, it is unrealistic to expect them to think from the bottom of their hearts that Western aid is ineffective, but they raise a very real question: if Western military aid can be guaranteed, how can the problem of Ukraine's military depletion be solved?
At present, the population of the Ukrainian-controlled areas is less than 30 million people, and after more than two years of brutal war, it is now visibly difficult for the Ukrainian army to replenish its strength.
A large number of arrest videos, as well as the repeated recruitment scandals of Ukrainian officials, coupled with the great demand for soldiers in the frontline troops, are all things on the surface.
Even now among the 880,000 "army" of the Ukrainian army on the surface, how many troops there are is a confused account.
The trigger for the resignation of Zaluzhny, the former commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, was to declare that Ukraine needs to mobilize another 500,000 troops to maintain the current war.
However, in the context of the depletion of Ukraine's military resources, the mobilization of another 500,000 people is a rather sensitive topic, coupled with a series of contradictions between Zaluzhny and Zelensky, which eventually led to the change of the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, with Syrsky as the new commander.
Syrsky is a traditional Soviet-style soldier whose credo is absolute obedience to orders, and the mobilization measure after taking office as commander-in-chief is - to cut from within the Ukrainian army.
Because there are a large number of auxiliary support units in the Ukrainian army structure, it is possible to draw some troops to support the front line, and in the central and western parts of Ukraine, there are still some units that have been formed but have not participated in the war for a long time can also be used.
On the premise of "excavating" the internal potential of the Ukrainian army, Ukraine obviously does not need to mobilize another 500,000 people.
There is no need to mobilize 500,000 people, it may need to mobilize 400,000 people, at least the mobilization and conscription within Ukraine that we are seeing now has not weakened, and Kyiv has even set its sights abroad, trying to catch the fugitive Ukrainian Ding Zhuang.
The Ukrainian army is so embarrassed in terms of troop demand, then everyone can't help but ask - how many people did the Ukrainian army lose on the battlefield?
Regarding this data, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky publicly stated on the second anniversary of the start of the war between Russia and Ukraine that the number of Ukrainian soldiers killed was 31,000.
If the 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers are estimated to have been killed, then the usual loss of its irreversible attrition is only 60,000 or 70,000, and even if it is larger, it is estimated that it will not exceed 100,000;
If this is the premise, we can conclude that the Ukrainian army has a big advantage in the ratio of battle losses.
And we know that the number of mobilized troops of the Ukrainian army is much greater than that of the Russian army, so in the context of the Ukrainian army's strength and battle loss ratio are superior to the Russian army, why is the Russian army constantly advancing, the Ukrainian army is constantly defeated, and even the Ukrainian army is even more short of soldiers?
Since it can now be determined that the number of mobilized troops of the Ukrainian army is much higher than that of the Russian army, the problem can only be the number of battle losses of the Ukrainian army.
Therefore, for the data of 31,000 people, even Western countries and even the Ukrainians themselves, feel that it is unreliable.
But is this data purely made up?
- Not necessarily.
Because in the category of losses of the army, there is also a missing item.
The so-called disappearance can be a desertion, or it can be a failure to collect the body after being killed and not knowing that he died, or it may be that he was captured and not confirmed.
And in the current Ukrainian army, the amount of people who have failed to collect the bodies after the dead, and even said that the amount of deliberately not collecting the corpses and deliberately reporting the missing should be quite large.
In a series of videos of the Russian army's advance that we have seen recently, we can find a considerable number of corpses of Ukrainian soldiers killed in the newly occupied positions.
Some of these corpses are highly decomposed, even ossified, indicating that the time of their death is not recent, and before the recent past, these positions were still in the hands of the Ukrainian army itself, but the Ukrainian army apparently did not recover the bodies of their fallen comrades, but let them turn into black mud.
Could it be that the Ukrainian army does not talk about comrade-in-arms like this?
- This is not so absolute, the key is that the comradeship is also to divide people.
In particular, the Ukrainian army has now formed a set of ways to deal with front-line battles and preserve strength: its officer corps and veteran backbone are a collective, forming the skeleton of the entire combat team, and the flesh that fills the skeleton is a steady stream of new mobilizers.
The current Ukrainian army only defends, not attacks, and its defense areas include both urban strongholds and field positions, and infantry will be scattered at almost every point.
The basic habit of the Ukrainian combat brigade is to throw the newly mobilized soldiers in the most dangerous and least difficult positions to retreat, while their own backbone troops are deployed in relatively well-established fortress areas and areas that are convenient for evacuation.
In this way, the mobilized recruits of the Ukrainian army will often withstand the fiercest attacks of the Russian army and are the most prone to damage, and the backbone of the Ukrainian army does not care after these people are killed, because they are not regarded as "their own people", but only fill in the "pixels" of the front line, and only if they survive again and again, they can be included in the "own people".
And the shortage of personnel is reported to the superiors, and then the conscription unit continues to arrest and replenish it, and these "pixel" corpses obviously will not risk recovering - only if their own people are killed, they will try to take the corpses away, but this is only "as much as possible"; if the conditions do not allow it, then their own people must also be thrown down.
In this case, a large number of Ukrainian soldiers who have died have not even been recovered from their bodies, so how can they be "identified" as dead? Not to mention that under the use of aerial bombs by the Russian army, a considerable number of Ukrainian troops will be bombed to the ground, and these troops will naturally be "missing."
Therefore, if the headquarters of the Ukrainian army uses the standard of "dead to see corpses" to identify the dead, the number will naturally be greatly reduced; and considering the effect of suppressing the Russian side in the propaganda war, on the basis of recovering the corpses and confirming the dead, another knife will be made, and the number of killed will be 31,000.
However, after all, war is material, people cannot be resurrected after death, and when the amount of "missing" is unacceptably large, it will naturally detonate the problem of the soldiers of the Ukrainian army. The reason why the war can last is that it cannot only rely on weapons and ammunition, but also on the presence of soldiers to fill it.
We can say with certainty that there will be more intensive conscription in Ukraine in the future, and there will be more and more tactical failures on the front line due to the inability of new and old soldiers to twist the rope. This is not something that can be solved by shouting a few slogans on the Internet, and even the meat speakers themselves are not willing to fill in the line, can this still be "won"?