This is an analytical difficulty that US/NATO voices fear to parse. The key variable here is the longstanding incapacity of Ukraine to extract its wounded from the forward edge of the battle area [FEBA] in time to save their lives. Thus, there is for Ukraine, an unacknowledged descent into ancient casualty results. Whereas in Modernity, the KIA-to-WIA ratio might be 4:1 — or in the 'golden hour' dispensation of Americans in Iraq, 16:1 — for Ukrainian troopers their prospects, frankly, are worse than those of World War I, or even the American Civil War. Hence, I would expect, when it all comes out, that there are something like a million Ukrainian wounded. Many crippled, many amputees. Ukrainian amputees are already greater in number than what the German Empire suffered in World War I!
Dr. Vlahos is absolutely correct about the urgent need for a permanent peace agreement; a ceasefire will not be sufficient. Russia has alway made clear what are its security objectives (no NATO membership for Ukraine and a pan-European security agreement). However, the US War Party has always hidden its prime objective to weaken Russia with moral rhetoric designed to manipulate and control American public opinion. The question is how do we break free of the assumptions and beliefs imposed by such elites which have resulted in so much death and destruction?
Dear Luca, I was being deliberately conservative. Personally I feel that your higher total, tragically, is probably closer to the true number. I have 'irrecoverable' casualties at ~1.2 million, you have it a couple hundred thousand higher. Our 'invalid' wounded figures are the same: 420k. However, you put KIA considerably higher, and ~1 million. This is very distressing, and almost certainly true.
This is an analytical difficulty that US/NATO voices fear to parse. The key variable here is the longstanding incapacity of Ukraine to extract its wounded from the forward edge of the battle area [FEBA] in time to save their lives. Thus, there is for Ukraine, an unacknowledged descent into ancient casualty results. Whereas in Modernity, the KIA-to-WIA ratio might be 4:1 — or in the 'golden hour' dispensation of Americans in Iraq, 16:1 — for Ukrainian troopers their prospects, frankly, are worse than those of World War I, or even the American Civil War. Hence, I would expect, when it all comes out, that there are something like a million Ukrainian wounded. Many crippled, many amputees. Ukrainian amputees are already greater in number than what the German Empire suffered in World War I!
Acoording to NYT article of August 18th, 2023 the most optimistic ratio was 1,71 (120k wounded and 70k dead). A very close ratio was given by Ukrainian Telegram channel Resident on November 5th, 2024 where, commenting the Kursk incursion, they wrote about 30k casualties and they specified that 11k were the dead and 19k wounded. In this case the ratio was about 1,73.
The association of American military surgeons wrote an article about the misuse of tourniquets in Ukraine that were justified only in 25% of the cases.
If we consider the last 8 exchanges of corpses, the Ukrainians received 3547 bodies against 380 Russian ones.
At the beginning of December 2024, again Ukrainian Telegram channel Resident claimed about 420k war invalids.
A couple of humanitarian organizations (including houp) confirmed such numbers.
In July 2023 Hanna Malyar wrote that 18% of the wounded became invalids. That percentage of invalids grew to 30% in September 2024 according to Anatoliy Kazmirchuk, Commander of the Medical Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, due to the use of more powerful bombs by the Russian aviation like the FAB-1500 and FAB-3000.
A roughly average gives the % of invalids at 25.
420k invalids equals to about 1,68 millions of total wounded.
1,68 millions of total wounded divided by a ratio of about 1,72 wounded to killed brings the number of Ukrainians dead soldiers at around a million.
A count of obituaries (like Mediazona does for the other side) kept by Slavyangrad stands at 559k Ukrainians dead soldiers. WarTears, an Ukrainian site and Telegram Channel, places it’s latest estimate at 663k Ukrainians dead soldiers.
If, like Mediazona does, we consider the numbers found as lower than the real numbers, we easily reach the million mark explained above.
By collecting in the last 3 years the equivalent of 4 or 5 pages of A4 of OSINT “evidence” from Ukrainian and Western sources, I was able to gather what I wrote here.
The war against Russia is historic by Europe going back over 700 yrs .
Russians have always defeated those ideas and wars .
Getting to present war which could have been avoided 2 yrs back which Zelenskyy was going to sign peace treaty with Russia in Istanbul.
Boris the nato puppet and promised money + weapons and got Zelenskyy to fight nato proxy war.
Though no fan of Putin , o agree with him as to how NATO has broken Minsk agreement made after breakup of ussr . And Ukraine was red line which Putin had warned.
NATO under estimated Russia’s capacity of resilience. Ukrainians paid the price with million dead / incapacitated.
Trump is trying for peace but the Europeans are more interested in persuing the war . I believe they might even do a red flag event to damage the peace process.
Trump, trying to takeover the war and prove himself to be the ultimate peacemaker and negotiator has now become victim of his own narcissism.
The road Trump should have taken, was to blame the war on Biden, and simply walk away, taking all forms of support for the Ukraine with him.
The Europeans wpuld be in a fluster as they have been, promise to support the Ukraine to the bitter end, not gotten done and eventually also walked away.
This would have brought Zelensky to his knees and his senses, instead he now thinks he's in the driving seat calling the shots, and most probably almost another million Ukrainian men will die because of the West's failures, and Zelensky's hubris.
Wow! I’ve not read any of your work before - v impressive! I’m assuming you must have been exiled from the Empire narrative complex…….. Cherish the truth tellers, I say. 👏
What may help change the narrative would be to release to the public the negotiations before the war, three days of zoom calls between Biden and Putin.
Though reported on at the time, they seem to have been memory-holed, likely because they complicate the "unprovoked" framing. Putin wanted to fly over for face-to-face meetings but was refused. Politico did a large piece on it at the time, saying how Biden spent his time in between talks lining up what were to be "crippling" sanctions with European leaders. But all I can find of the story now is a short, empty white house statement about "the importance of negotiations" but a refusal to hear any talk of invasions.
Surely the public would be interested in hearing what was said? History deserves to know.
We are headed to global nuclear war by psychopaths, no doubt about it. Anything which makes peace likely must be denied, any speech which advocates for peace must be punished through Stalinist terrorism legislation.
"The sheep spends its whole life fearing the wolf, only to be eaten by the shepherd"
I’m so glad this article showed up in my Substack feed but, why don’t you have 7,000 subscribers? An excellent piece Michael, the truth of the Ukrainian catastrophe. I know a good bit of background on the decades-long grooming of Ukraine to be the упир Russia has been forced to stake. That story would benefit from your telling.
Thanks for your reply. The truth will come to light only with a new census. Up to that point, It is very easy for Ukrainian authorities to conceal any casualties. They are the first not knowing the true numbers of inhabitants where to start the reckonings. I agree, it is a tragedy of enormous proportions and when I read about lowering the draft age down to 18, nothing good could ever come out of it and my stomach churns. First the age section between 25 and 18 years is the shortest branch in the Ukrainian demographic tree, a clear sign of desperation. And second it means to send to their death the persons that should become parents in the next few years. In other words it is a ricept towards the abyss.
The scariest part is how the carnage has been so completely concealed from the public! Despite the Internet and a supposed free press, there has been a complete blanket surrounding information on the true state of the war for the last 1,000 days.
The Western media did their best to conceal as much as possible, but if you, like I did, have had the patience to collect information (the equivalent of 4 - 5 A4 pages) from serious Telegram channels and articles that here and there inevitably came to the surface, ranging from the volume of firepower applied, the status of the healthcare system, the wounded to killed ratios, the total numbers of war invalids, the invalids as a percentage of the total wounded, critics to the misuse of tourniquets, too slow times of evacuations of the wounded, exchanged corpses ratios, and so on…you can gather enough information to be able to estimate (of course with a certain level of uncertainty, but also with a high level of confidence) that the Ukrainian losses are around 3 millions, including about 1 million dead and 420 thousands war invalids. All these informations have been written in the last 3 years, and with numbers provided by Western and Ukrainian OSINT sources alone.
Yes, but in the UK, US, Canada, etc there is still a complete traditional and online media blackout around this. You are a special case of person doing all their own research. It is frightening that reporters aren’t doing the same work, or are doing it but not allowed to publish.
This is an analytical difficulty that US/NATO voices fear to parse. The key variable here is the longstanding incapacity of Ukraine to extract its wounded from the forward edge of the battle area [FEBA] in time to save their lives. Thus, there is for Ukraine, an unacknowledged descent into ancient casualty results. Whereas in Modernity, the KIA-to-WIA ratio might be 4:1 — or in the 'golden hour' dispensation of Americans in Iraq, 16:1 — for Ukrainian troopers their prospects, frankly, are worse than those of World War I, or even the American Civil War. Hence, I would expect, when it all comes out, that there are something like a million Ukrainian wounded. Many crippled, many amputees. Ukrainian amputees are already greater in number than what the German Empire suffered in World War I!
Thanks James! I will read Mettan's book. I have also highlighted this overarching issue, a decade past, here:
https://www.theglobalist.com/putins-and-russias-quest-for-identity-and-belonging/
Dr. Vlahos is absolutely correct about the urgent need for a permanent peace agreement; a ceasefire will not be sufficient. Russia has alway made clear what are its security objectives (no NATO membership for Ukraine and a pan-European security agreement). However, the US War Party has always hidden its prime objective to weaken Russia with moral rhetoric designed to manipulate and control American public opinion. The question is how do we break free of the assumptions and beliefs imposed by such elites which have resulted in so much death and destruction?
Thank you so much for reading, and for your penetrating comment!
Excellent analysis and insight. It’s a shame that truth is the casualty when narrative rules.
Thank you for reading!
Excellent indeed.
Posted about it on X yesterday:
https://x.com/ingolfeide/status/1877903845881524677?s=46&t=rkrvYEs4rPHnskyeeLxSjg
Thank you so much for reading, and commenting!
My pleasure.
Dear Luca, I was being deliberately conservative. Personally I feel that your higher total, tragically, is probably closer to the true number. I have 'irrecoverable' casualties at ~1.2 million, you have it a couple hundred thousand higher. Our 'invalid' wounded figures are the same: 420k. However, you put KIA considerably higher, and ~1 million. This is very distressing, and almost certainly true.
This is an analytical difficulty that US/NATO voices fear to parse. The key variable here is the longstanding incapacity of Ukraine to extract its wounded from the forward edge of the battle area [FEBA] in time to save their lives. Thus, there is for Ukraine, an unacknowledged descent into ancient casualty results. Whereas in Modernity, the KIA-to-WIA ratio might be 4:1 — or in the 'golden hour' dispensation of Americans in Iraq, 16:1 — for Ukrainian troopers their prospects, frankly, are worse than those of World War I, or even the American Civil War. Hence, I would expect, when it all comes out, that there are something like a million Ukrainian wounded. Many crippled, many amputees. Ukrainian amputees are already greater in number than what the German Empire suffered in World War I!
Let me add a few informations here:
About the wounded to killed ratio.
Acoording to NYT article of August 18th, 2023 the most optimistic ratio was 1,71 (120k wounded and 70k dead). A very close ratio was given by Ukrainian Telegram channel Resident on November 5th, 2024 where, commenting the Kursk incursion, they wrote about 30k casualties and they specified that 11k were the dead and 19k wounded. In this case the ratio was about 1,73.
The association of American military surgeons wrote an article about the misuse of tourniquets in Ukraine that were justified only in 25% of the cases.
If we consider the last 8 exchanges of corpses, the Ukrainians received 3547 bodies against 380 Russian ones.
At the beginning of December 2024, again Ukrainian Telegram channel Resident claimed about 420k war invalids.
A couple of humanitarian organizations (including houp) confirmed such numbers.
In July 2023 Hanna Malyar wrote that 18% of the wounded became invalids. That percentage of invalids grew to 30% in September 2024 according to Anatoliy Kazmirchuk, Commander of the Medical Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, due to the use of more powerful bombs by the Russian aviation like the FAB-1500 and FAB-3000.
A roughly average gives the % of invalids at 25.
420k invalids equals to about 1,68 millions of total wounded.
1,68 millions of total wounded divided by a ratio of about 1,72 wounded to killed brings the number of Ukrainians dead soldiers at around a million.
A count of obituaries (like Mediazona does for the other side) kept by Slavyangrad stands at 559k Ukrainians dead soldiers. WarTears, an Ukrainian site and Telegram Channel, places it’s latest estimate at 663k Ukrainians dead soldiers.
If, like Mediazona does, we consider the numbers found as lower than the real numbers, we easily reach the million mark explained above.
By collecting in the last 3 years the equivalent of 4 or 5 pages of A4 of OSINT “evidence” from Ukrainian and Western sources, I was able to gather what I wrote here.
The war against Russia is historic by Europe going back over 700 yrs .
Russians have always defeated those ideas and wars .
Getting to present war which could have been avoided 2 yrs back which Zelenskyy was going to sign peace treaty with Russia in Istanbul.
Boris the nato puppet and promised money + weapons and got Zelenskyy to fight nato proxy war.
Though no fan of Putin , o agree with him as to how NATO has broken Minsk agreement made after breakup of ussr . And Ukraine was red line which Putin had warned.
NATO under estimated Russia’s capacity of resilience. Ukrainians paid the price with million dead / incapacitated.
Trump is trying for peace but the Europeans are more interested in persuing the war . I believe they might even do a red flag event to damage the peace process.
Trump, trying to takeover the war and prove himself to be the ultimate peacemaker and negotiator has now become victim of his own narcissism.
The road Trump should have taken, was to blame the war on Biden, and simply walk away, taking all forms of support for the Ukraine with him.
The Europeans wpuld be in a fluster as they have been, promise to support the Ukraine to the bitter end, not gotten done and eventually also walked away.
This would have brought Zelensky to his knees and his senses, instead he now thinks he's in the driving seat calling the shots, and most probably almost another million Ukrainian men will die because of the West's failures, and Zelensky's hubris.
Wow! I’ve not read any of your work before - v impressive! I’m assuming you must have been exiled from the Empire narrative complex…….. Cherish the truth tellers, I say. 👏
What may help change the narrative would be to release to the public the negotiations before the war, three days of zoom calls between Biden and Putin.
Though reported on at the time, they seem to have been memory-holed, likely because they complicate the "unprovoked" framing. Putin wanted to fly over for face-to-face meetings but was refused. Politico did a large piece on it at the time, saying how Biden spent his time in between talks lining up what were to be "crippling" sanctions with European leaders. But all I can find of the story now is a short, empty white house statement about "the importance of negotiations" but a refusal to hear any talk of invasions.
Surely the public would be interested in hearing what was said? History deserves to know.
A terrific point — I could not agree more!
We are headed to global nuclear war by psychopaths, no doubt about it. Anything which makes peace likely must be denied, any speech which advocates for peace must be punished through Stalinist terrorism legislation.
"The sheep spends its whole life fearing the wolf, only to be eaten by the shepherd"
I’m so glad this article showed up in my Substack feed but, why don’t you have 7,000 subscribers? An excellent piece Michael, the truth of the Ukrainian catastrophe. I know a good bit of background on the decades-long grooming of Ukraine to be the упир Russia has been forced to stake. That story would benefit from your telling.
Unfortunately I cannot imagine this ending without the functional equivalent of Ukrainian surrender.
There is just no way to sate Russia short of cleansing Ukraine under their supervision.
Thanks for your reply. The truth will come to light only with a new census. Up to that point, It is very easy for Ukrainian authorities to conceal any casualties. They are the first not knowing the true numbers of inhabitants where to start the reckonings. I agree, it is a tragedy of enormous proportions and when I read about lowering the draft age down to 18, nothing good could ever come out of it and my stomach churns. First the age section between 25 and 18 years is the shortest branch in the Ukrainian demographic tree, a clear sign of desperation. And second it means to send to their death the persons that should become parents in the next few years. In other words it is a ricept towards the abyss.
The scariest part is how the carnage has been so completely concealed from the public! Despite the Internet and a supposed free press, there has been a complete blanket surrounding information on the true state of the war for the last 1,000 days.
The Western media did their best to conceal as much as possible, but if you, like I did, have had the patience to collect information (the equivalent of 4 - 5 A4 pages) from serious Telegram channels and articles that here and there inevitably came to the surface, ranging from the volume of firepower applied, the status of the healthcare system, the wounded to killed ratios, the total numbers of war invalids, the invalids as a percentage of the total wounded, critics to the misuse of tourniquets, too slow times of evacuations of the wounded, exchanged corpses ratios, and so on…you can gather enough information to be able to estimate (of course with a certain level of uncertainty, but also with a high level of confidence) that the Ukrainian losses are around 3 millions, including about 1 million dead and 420 thousands war invalids. All these informations have been written in the last 3 years, and with numbers provided by Western and Ukrainian OSINT sources alone.
Yes, but in the UK, US, Canada, etc there is still a complete traditional and online media blackout around this. You are a special case of person doing all their own research. It is frightening that reporters aren’t doing the same work, or are doing it but not allowed to publish.