Russia has lost a staggering 87 percent of the total number of active-duty ground troops it had prior to launching its invasion of Ukraine and two-thirds of its pre-invasion tanks, a source familiar with a declassified US intelligence assessment provided to Congress told CNN.
Still, despite heavy losses of men and equipment, Russian President Vladimir Putin is determined to push forward as the war approaches its two-year anniversary early next year and US officials are warning that Ukraine remains deeply vulnerable. A highly anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive stagnated through the fall, and US officials believe that Kyiv is unlikely to make any major gains over the coming months.
The assessment, sent to Capitol Hill on Monday, comes as some Republicans have balked at the US providing additional funding for Ukraine and the Biden administration has launched a full-court press to try to get supplemental funding through Congress.
Frankly I don’t care. The US wastes trillions of dollars on military spending. We have the most advanced military in the world by a mile but all too often it ends up using it to defend someone else’s financial interests or to pad the pockets of people that make their money through a war economy.
Russia can get fucked. Every cent spent on the defense of Ukraine is a fully realized fuck you to our enemy. Ukraine did what we could never do. They essentially removed Russia from the equation. Yeah they have many poorly maintained nukes but they know we will fuck their ass if they touch them. They will not be posing a real threat to anyone for generations.
We aren’t spending this money on the American people and we never were going to do that anyway. Our choices are we fund people actually fighting for their life or we allow that money to get sucked into the military industrial complex for no real return. They’re already getting theirs out of this, the only question that remains is do you back Republicans that have made up a nothing burger about this money because they’ve arbitrarily decided this is the 96th hill they’ll die on, or do you you want to see the money you pay in taxes actually get put to a meaningful purpose.
Saying that it doesn’t go to the American people isn’t strictly true. It’s not like it’s cash shipped across the Atlantic. The money spent on weapons to Ukraine is injected into local American economies where weapons are produced, as wages that let people consume products which goes to the wages of people who sell those products wages in turn.
Frankly, it may come to be seen as, in terms of bang for the buck, the single most effective use of US military funding in history.
Think about it: Russia went from being considered a peer-state of the US to the second most effective army currently conducting combat operations in Ukraine. That’s embarrassing any way you spin it. They have utterly destroyed any real vestige of conventional military power they had, and Ukraine is the one who shattered not only that reputation, but also the capability.
And not just in terms of physical assets - Putin called up training officers and sent them to the front. You just… you don’t do that. It means that instead of taking another year or two to train a new generation of officers to competence… it takes 10, and even then they’re not very good, because all the institutional knowledge those instructors had was lost. The only reason they’re even considered these days is because they’re a nuclear state.