A Damning Admission: Zelensky’s Call for Fresh Draft Reflects Grim Realities

by Simplicius The Thinker

Putin and Zelensky both made a series of interesting, contrasting statements. Zelensky’s PR team forced him to hold a town hall type presentation to buoy his sagging image, particularly in light of Putin’s recent high-visibility events of this sort.

The general direction is that Putin has been signaling more and more ‘realpolitik’ admissions of late. What with yesterday’s confession that he was ‘naive’ in the opening portion of his presidential career. This time he delivered some unfiltered and quite candid explanations for Russia’s involvement in Ukraine:

 
This likewise extended to what appeared as a frank admission that Russia will take what’s rightfully hers in Ukraine, and will no longer seek to appease the West. Any future negotiations will be done purely on the behalf of Russia’s interests:

 
Zelensky for his part finally officially announced that ~500k new men will be drafted:

 

 
But the news that shocked the world most was a figure floating around which stated Ukraine requires 20k men per month just for upkeep of losses, which would obviously serve to give us an indirect insight into their true casualties:

 
At first the 20k/month seemed unsourced as it wasn’t part of the official announcement for the new 500k mobilization.

However I dug around and found the source, which was Rada Deputy Maryana Bezuhla who, perhaps unwittingly, gave up a state secret in a post that was meant as a condemnation of Zaluzhny (he’s the one linked in blue at top):

 
Keep in mind a similar figure was reported many months ago, but this appears to be the first ever high level official confirmation from Ukrainian authorities. That means Ukraine is losing minimum 20k per month and needs this amount of mobilized just to keep at parity. This amounts to a precise 666 casualties per day, though she did mention the problem ‘growing in the summer’ so perhaps it’s meant to represent post-counteroffensive loss trends.

Then again, I’ve been posting the official numbers from Russian MOD on AFU’s manpower losses whenever I happen to see them, and they’re always roughly in that range.

Example of past month:

 

 
825, 605, 635, 695 men lost per day. It matches up with the 20k per month figure remarkably well.

Recall that at 20k a month, after about 22 months of war, they would be at around 22 x 20k = 440,000 losses, which is roughly where a lot of tallies peg them now. After all, Zelensky’s own announcement is for exactly 450-500k new men, as per the video I posted—so this would line up perfectly with how much they need to replenish.

Another corroboration is Budanov’s new video, which I posted last time, where he states that a steady 1.1M armed forces figure has to be maintained “at all times”—which tells us that Ukraine’s doctrinal principle is to always maintain the same equilibrium of men, which logically explains why 450-500k total losses would require 450-500k new men, as opposed to 500k new men for an ‘expansion’ of some sort.

I make this distinction specifically because Russia itself famously announced its own ~500k new enlistments for 2023, but these are precisely for an expansion of several new military districts, rather than to make up for losses like in Ukraine’s case. In fact, below you’ll see that Shoigu announced exactly this:

➡️Due to Finland’s NATO membership and Sweden’s imminent accession, the formation of the Leningrad and Moscow military districts continues.

In light of that, we have a slew of new videos pretty much confirming the insanely high losses. For instance, this AFU officer recounts how his battalion commander drove 350 Ukrainian soldiers to death in only 8 hours of time during a particularly hot fight:

 
350 dead in just a single battalion, in a single day, in a single tiny sector of the theater. It becomes very easy to imagine 600+ total daily casualties over the entire front.

Another Ukrainian soldier outright says they’re losing in every conceivable way:

 
Read more