Russian Losses
Russia's population in 2024 has been estimated to lie between 143.6 and 146.15 millions.
During World War Two, the former Soviet Union is estimated to have lost about 27 million people (8.7 million military and 19 million civilians).
The Russian population never recovered. Russia has had significantly more women than men for decades: only 86.8 men per 100 women. This gender gap has probably widened again since the war in Ukraine began. (Globally, there are 101.8 men per 100 women).
Western intelligence puts the number of Russian WOUNDED in Ukraine at 400,000 - 700,000.
The number of Russia's DEAD soldiers in Ukraine has been reported to have reached a staggering 730,740 (plus 1,020) as of November 24, 2024.
Russias's military is estimated to have had about 1.5 million enlisted men (active military personnel) in total.
It is obvious: With more than 730,000 dead and up to 700,000 wounded, Russia is running out of soldiers.
It thus comes as no surprise that Russia has started to depend on troops from impoverished North Korea; for which North Korea, as it seems, has been receiving crude oil from Russia. Crude oil for manpower! Victory does look differently.
During the Cold War, the former Soviet Union had between 500,000 and 600,000 Soviet troops stationed in occupied Eastern Germany alone; plus 175,000 Soviet troops in Poland, the former Czechoslovakia and in Hungary.
How would today's Putin-Russia attempt to project man-power within parts of Eastern / Central Europe following the Ukraine war with up to 50 % of its active personnel dead and the other half wounded?
Russia has basically lost the war in Ukraine.
The only alternative remaining to Putin, as it seems, are threats to resort to the use of nuclear weapons as means of assured mutual destruction.
700,000 plus Russian men not returning home: husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, best friends for ever gone - missing on farms and in industry. The loss in sociological and economic terms is nothing but monstrous.
What does Putin's willingness to sacrifice more than 700,000 men within two and a half years, say about the worth of human life in today's Russia? Here goes Russia's soft-power capability! Does the construction of a so-called 'multi-polar' world look like that?
America and the West need to heavily engage and rely on international diplomacy / global public diplomacy within the United Nations and outside of it, to unmask Putin's Russia for what it obviously is: a pariah-state in moral terms. Of course, it would help - with regard to international credibility - if US foreign policy and diplomacy alike were to apply credible ethical and moral standards vis-à-vis Israel, too.