The premise is that we do not have the slightest certainty, as regards the invasion war of Ukraine, about the dead, the wounded and the prisoners: the only number that has a high probability of being true is that of refugees, because Kiev and neighboring countries count who leaves one side and who enters one of the other.
It is not even wrong to say that Moscow was caught off guard by the Ukrainian resistance: as written by Al-Jazeera in recent days, "There are echoes of the Russian intervention in Chechnya at the end of December 1994, when the Russian leadership planned a massive armored offensive against the Chechen capital, Grozny, with the intention of organizing a decisive attack with air support, relying on speed. to take the Chechen leadership by surprise and ensure that Russia holds the lead. But the Chechen forces had long been prepared for an attack on the city and the aggression was a sad failure".
So far, the certain or the very probable: the rest is the realm of opinion, doubt and propaganda.
Could it be true, as Ukrainian President Zelenski argues that Russian soldiers are like confused children who have been used and deceived by their bosses? Could it be true that Ukraine no longer has air defense capabilities? There will be true news of low or expired food stocks, of the dramatic die-off of tires, engines and vehicle transmission systems, with impossible or unnecessary maintenance, of entire units used to moving easily with trains in Russia and today stuck in the mud. Ukrainian?
Impossible to say: one should be on the spot, but this is a war in which the physical destruction of the adversaries, their organizations, their equipment and infrastructure counts. Hence, it is a war that historians will be better able to evaluate than reporters will testify today.
However, the Russian death figures do debate. If we take into consideration the six days of operations between February 24 and March 498, the Moscow defense ministry declares the deaths of 5.800 men, compared to almost 83 Russian deaths counted by the Ukrainians. Whether it is a Russian propaganda figure or not, whether or not we keep in mind the (expected and hoped for) shortness of the "special operation", suffice it to say these 9 deaths a day are very many when compared - always on a daily basis - to the 2 and 1994 deaths among Russian forces during the first and second Russo-Chechen war between 2009 and 4, to 1979 Soviet forces per day in Afghanistan between 1989 and 2 and to less than 2014 Russian and local forces in Donbass between 2022 and 11.000. Even if we do not want to believe the estimates of Kiev, which speaks of XNUMX Russians who died after ten days and we want to trust the official Moscow data, assuming that the intensity of the fighting remained the same as in the very first days - but in reality it has begun to increase exponentially - the Russian casualties in Ukraine would exceed those of the second Chechen war at the end of May and those of the entire Afghan war before the next August XNUMXth.
Why so many Russian victims?
But why are Putin's soldiers dying so much? There are no certainties: however, it is legitimate to think that it does not depend only on the ambushes of the combative Ukrainians, but also and above all on probable organizational and logistical deficiencies due to the way in which the war has been planned and conducted so far.
Imagine being seriously injured in the wide corridor where the mechanized and self-transported forces of Moscow have to dive about 25 km north-west of central Kiev: unless you remain a prisoner, you will have no definitive treatment until arrival. in a well-equipped medical center inside Belarus, in short, more than 100 km away, most of which are muddy, cluttered with broken-down vehicles or under fire from Ukrainian drones. Do you think you have a lot of chances to stay alive? The same happens in the east, behind Sumy and Kharkiv.
In short, in these conditions, as claimed by Antonella Scott in Il Sole 24 Ore, "Knowing the exact number of Russian losses ... it's impossible", even not wanting to give credit, in order not to take a side, to the words of Lyudmila Narusova about the hundreds of Russian soldiers who lie on Ukrainian land without burial; with wild and stray dogs gnawing on bodies which in some cases cannot be identified because they are horribly burned.
A planning problem?
Let's just count the dead according to the official Kremlin figures. There are so many, more than any other conflict fought by Moscow since 1945. It will be no coincidence that a European entrepreneur, whom I heard in recent days, made this comment: They have blatantly failed to achieve their initial goals and are trying to salvage a disastrous project. Had they been my employees, I would have put them at the door long ago. The objective of a good planning and execution of a project is to guide the work of a team, in this case the Russian Armed Forces, to achieve all the project objectives within the limits given at the beginning and with the utmost satisfaction of all stakeholders. In this sense, all the stakeholders (Russian elite and population of Russia, members of the armed forces and public administration of that country, Russian-speaking populations that should have been "liberated", the Belarusian partner, etc.) were seriously damaged and left without no benefit, no matter what; in short, the Russian leaders have already lost and will be - better sooner than later - fired!
Photo: Russian Federation MoD
