Into the Russian Meat Grinder: Conscripts and Mercenaries in Ukraine
Data visualizations of what numbers we have with context and analysis.
The Russia-Ukraine conflict has turned into a war of attrition which considerably favors Russia. Given Russia’s pronounced superiority in air power, artillery, and number of troops on the ground, Ukrainian counter-offenses have made marginal to no gains at horrific costs of life and equipment. Current Ukrainian efforts to hold key positions have likewise suffered from the slow but relentless grinding Russian offensive. Even a few of our MSM experts have begun reluctantly acknowledge this reality.
Qualified non-MSM commentators have expressed their concerns about a possible collapse of Ukrainian defensive lines — a general rout of the Ukrainian military in key strategic areas. Contrary to what my fellow Americans have heard repeatedly, Ukraine is not winning — and has no realistic prospects of taking back by military force the territories already lost to Russia. Instead, poorly trained conscripts are being rushed to the front lines and fed into the Russian meat grinder.
Conflicting Estimates of Dead, Wounded, and Missing
We have no reliable estimates for the number of military personnel who have died on behalf of Ukraine. On the two-year anniversary of the invasion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky put the number of KIA (killed in action) at 31,000 (Al Jazeera, 25 Feb 2024). The NYT (25 Feb 2024) reported the same figure from Zelensky, but immediately clarified that American military officials have estimated the KIA count at 70,000 — over twice that reported by Zelensky, with an additional estimate of 100,000 to 120,000 troops wounded in action.
The Russian news source RT (27 Feb 2024) has estimated the Ukrainian military has suffered over 440,000 casualties — an estimate which includes both the KIA and the wounded in action. Rajmund Andrzejczak, the former chief of the Polish General Staff, recently offered a far bleaker assessment (RT, 19 Mar 2024):
They [Ukraine] are missing over 10 million people. I estimate that the losses should be counted in the millions, not hundreds of thousands. There are no resources in this country, there is no one to fight.”
The bottom line according to Andrzejczak: Ukraine “is losing the war” and “there are no miracles in war” (RT, 19 Mar 2024).
For the record, Andrzejczak is staunchly anti-Russian, and has been calling for Poland to prepare for war with Russia. His bleak assessment above obviously counts the Ukrainian diaspora among the people missing and lost, but Andrzejczak is correct to suggest that many Ukrainian expatriates will not be returning. This will have devastating consequences — at least in the short term — on Ukraine’s tax base, economic productivity, and hence efforts to rebuild the war-torn nation.
Presumed Hard Data on Ukraine’s Military Age Men & Foreign Mercenaries
If we lack an accurate death count, we do have two recent efforts describing the mobilization challenges faced by Zelensky regime. The first is by the Financial Times (14 Mar 2024; paywall-free version, NewKontinent), “Ukraine needs 500,000 military recruits. Can it raise them?” The second by RT (14 Mar 2024), “Moscow estimates number of foreign mercenaries killed in Ukraine,” which also reports on the total number of alleged foreign mercenaries active in Ukraine. The quick and the dead, so to speak. FT versus RT for our official sources.
FT has estimated that Ukraine had a total recruitment pool of 11.1 million men between the ages of 25 and 60. Although in the USA, one can join the military at 18 years of age, in Ukraine the starting age is 27. The recent proposal to lower the age to 25 has “sparked a fierce backlash from politicians who argue it would be suicidal for the nation to send its youngest into the trenches” (14 Mar 2024), but FT has calculated their numbers assuming such is a done deal.
To their credit, FT has also noted that “Ukraine has a smaller pool of millennials and Gen Zers compared with other nations, given a drop in birth rates after the collapse of the Soviet Union” (14 Mar 2024), and hence many Ukrainian parents are not eager to see their children sent to the front lines.
In truth, in Ukraine support for the war is far from universal. In fact, of the potential 11.1 million military-age men, an estimated 7.4 million are unavailable: these men are already serving, or are disabled, or have fled the country, or are in Russian-occupied territory, or are considered critical workers. The breakdown of Unavailable Ukrainian Men for the Military as follows:
The Tragicomedy Revealed
According to FT (14 Mar 2024), Ukraine has an estimated 1.2 million men currently serving in the military — twice the number of those men deemed critical workers, at 0.6 million. But Ukraine has an estimated 1.3 million men currently expatriated — living outside Ukraine, with most of them in neighboring European nations. So the army of draft dodgers, to use an old-fashioned term for men who leave their home nation to avoid military conscription, exceeds the total size of the Ukraine military.
The “army” of Ukrainian draft dodgers exceeds the size of the Ukrainian military.
The comedy or rather tragedy does not end here. The 1.5 million disabled men — some whom are veterans of the conflict — exceed in number the draft dodgers. But the number of Ukrainian men living in the Russian occupied territories is almost twice that of the disabled men, and 2.4 times that of the entire Ukraine military: 2.9 million to 1.5 million and 1.2 million, respectively.
The “army” of disabled Ukrainian men exceeds the size of the Ukrainian military.
The 2.9 Million “Army” of “Occupied” Men
So why don’t we have a massive insurgency by the 2.9 million Ukrainian men living in Russian occupied territories? In other words, what about the men living in Crimea, and in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts? Well, Crimea is overwhelmingly pro-Russian politically and culturally; and Donetsk and Luhansk voted to secede from Ukraine and become independent republics.
Please do recall that Ukrainian government starting using cluster munitions against the Russian-speaking eastern areas of Ukraine as early as 2014, just months after the Maidan coup. Yet despite the consistent demonizing of Russian speakers and Russian culture, loyalties in eastern Ukraine are complicated. It is not a given that the majority of these men would rather fight for Russia than Ukraine. But the ultra-nationalist campaigns against the Russian-speaking Ukrainian citizens have not convinced the majority of these men that the Banderite cause is worth dying for.
The Big Question: Would More Men Make a Difference?
So out of the original 11.1 million men, FT (14 Mar 2024) has estimated that Ukraine has a remaining pool of 3.7 million men, age 25 to 60, who could be mobilized for the war effort. This comes at the cost of destroying Ukraine’s tax base and general economic productivity. But given Ukraine’s lack of military equipment, and Russia’s fortifications across the front lines, one must ask if adding more Ukrainian citizens to Ukraine military would make a difference. According to one group of highly qualified but non-MSM experts (Diesen, et alia, 17 Mar 2024), the answer is “No”: Ukraine has no military victory going forward. (See also Andrzejczak 2024 cited earlier).
It is worth recalling that as soon as the hyped Ukrainian counter-offensive of 2023 started going south, the NYT (18 Aug 2023) infamously reported: “American officials say they fear that Ukraine has become casualty averse” and that the Ukrainians were effectively wasting “formidable Western fighting machines — tanks and armored personnel carriers” by not following the NATO (American) doctrine and simply punching through the Russian defensive lines. Just shock and awe them.
The Obvious Failure of NATO Doctrine
Where to begin? For land warfare, NATO — more truthfully, American — military doctrine now requires and so presumes air supremacy. Not just air superiority, but air supremacy. (This doctrine known more formally as “Full Spectrum Dominance”: for a start, see Mahajan, 2003; and Romaniuk & Burgers, 2017).
During the Gulf War (aka, the First Iraq War, 1990-1991), the USA-led coalition did NOT engage in epic El Alamein-like tank and troop battles with the army of Saddam Hussein. General Norman Schwarzkopf might have appeared as a modern-day Patton, but he had no Ernest Rommel to face off against. The USA-led coalition achieved air supremacy over Iraq, bombed the hell of the Iraqi forces, and then sent in the tanks and troops to mop up the remains. The Iraqi Highway of Death entered into modern military legend, becoming an exemplar for future conflicts. Provided the attacking force controls the skies.
(Demolished vehicles on “Highway of Death” in Iraq, 18 Apr 1991. Public Domain).
Without air superiority, let alone air supremacy, the Ukrainian military counter-offense was fated to fail. Moreover, when attacking a defensive position, the rule of thumb is that the attackers should outnumber the defenders by at least 3 to 1. Instead, the ratio as even the NYT (18 Aug 2023) confessed was 1 to 3. The Ukrainian counter-offensive encouraged by NATO and endorsed by such luminaries as David “the Surge” Petraeus, former CIA Director and retired Army General, was both a collective suicide mission and a publicity stunt. Our leaders knew this.
A Suicide Mission to Keep the Money Flowing
Even if the Ukrainian military leadership at first foolishly committed to it, American military doctrine remained unworkable given the battlefield conditions. So we slandered the Ukrainians as “casualty averse” and wasting our “formidable Western fighting machines — tanks and armored personnel carriers” (NYT, 18 Aug 2023). The same “formidable Western fighting machines” which were blown apart by Russian airstrikes, drones, and artillery fire since Russia had air superiority from the start of the conflict and retains it even now.
But that the Ukrainians failed us, obviously, is the only acceptable talking point among the MSM experts and Beltway pundits — and NYT merely reported the consensus. The Ukrainian people are catching on to their Western advisors, and so are less willing to die for pointless talking points. Military recruitment in Ukraine understandably faces increasing challenges. This brings us neatly to the matter of foreign military advisors and foreign mercenaries in Ukraine.
A Body Count for Foreign Mercenaries
It would be a dereliction of duty NOT to send military observers to Ukraine. The USA should have highly qualified military experts on the ground reporting what is happening. We cannot rely on second-hand reports and signals intelligence. Moreover, this is a time-honored practice: governments sending qualified personnel to observe (what are nominally) other people’s wars.
It should go without saying that spooks and military observers from the USA and elsewhere are on the ground in Ukraine — but Russia is saying something else. Beyond foreign observers, there are foreign participant-combatants actively involved in the conflict. This is demonstrably true by even by American MSM accounts, with some of these men and women celebrated as heroes. But the sore point with Russia: under the guise of foreign mercenaries or freelancers or volunteers, NATO is sending personnel to maintain and direct the advance weapon systems supplied by West.
Mercenary vs Observer vs NATO Flunky vs Chaos Tourist
The recent leaked conversation between high-ranking members of the German Luftwaffe (AP, 5 Mar 2024) would seem to confirm this claim by Russia. But using Open Source Intelligence, your author has no good way of distinguishing who is an observer versus who is a participant-combatant. Although the Russian claim seems plausible, we must treat both this and their presented evidence with some degree of skepticism. Moreover, a gunslinger who originates from a NATO country cannot automatically be assumed a NATO operative, even if his actions may (or not) contribute to the overall NATO agenda. The world does not lack a shortage of desperate and dangerous men seeking cash, some of whom might be on poor terms with the authorities in their home nations.
This brings us to the recent RT (14 Mar 2024) expose, “Moscow estimates number of foreign mercenaries killed in Ukraine.” Yes, dear reader, Russia has also recruited foreign mercenaries to fight against Ukraine — but anyone who follows the MSM has heard these accounts already. So something new for you.
Based on the data made publicly available by the Russian Ministry of Defense (cited in RT and also released on Geopolitics Live, 15 Mar 2024), the choropleth map above shows all nations which Russia claims have sent mercenaries (participant-combatants) to Ukraine to fight against Russia. (American Exile releases this choropleth as CC0: Public Domain). Please note that Russia has identified mercenaries originating from the Global South as well as the West, from nations of BRICS as well as NATO.
Top Five Nations Contributing Mercenaries
Poland is number one: as of 14 March 2024, an estimated 2960 mercenaries sent; 1497 killed; and 1463 alive or otherwise unaccounted for. Second place goes to the USA: an estimated 1113 sent; 491 killed; and 622 alive or etc. Third place, Georgia: an estimated 1042 sent; 561 killed; and 481 alive or etc. Fourth place, Canada: 1005 sent; 422 killed; and 583 alive or etc. And to finish up the Top 5, fifth place goes to the UK, home of BoJo, the slayer of peace treaties: 822 sent; 360 killed; and 462 alive or etc.
Top Twenty Nations Contributing Mercenaries
Although Europe dominates this list, the Americas are well-represented.
Globally, Russia claims that at least 13,387 foreign mercenaries have traveled to Ukraine to fight on behalf of Zelensky regime, and at least 5,962 of these mercenaries have been killed. We can break that down further via European and non-European nations. (Please note that the Russian data set puts Turkey in Asia, not Europe: otherwise, Turkey at 188 sent would tie with the Czech Republic at 188 sent for last place in the Top 12 European Nations).
Top Twelve European Nations Contributing Mercenaries
Again, this is based on data released by the Russian Ministry of Defense. So caution advised — treat it as if you would data “leaked” by the Pentagon.
The nations which emerged after the collapse of Yugoslavia are well-represented in this list. Otherwise, we have the usual suspects.
Top Twelve Non-European Nations Contributing Mercenaries
The Americas, Eurasia, Africa and the Middle East are all represented.
World War III has not officially started, but the Russia-Ukraine conflict has been unquestionably globalized from the start, given NATO’s expansionism, and the current effort to redefine NATO’s mission as a bulwark against China.
Polemic Conclusion
What does it all mean? Your author holds (and has held) the position well-articulated recently by Diesen, et alia (17 Mar 2024): Ukraine has no victory on the battlefield. We need a diplomatic solution which recognizes the security concerns of Russia as well as those of Ukraine, and which allows the peoples of Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk to determine their own sovereignty as independent republics, or as largely autonomous regions within either Russia or Ukraine.
The borders of Ukraine which the West seems so eager to defend were created by the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in part to prevent the Ukrainian-speaking part of that region from becoming a majority. We need neither to respect the designs of Nikita Khrushchev, nor to keep alive at any cost his Frankenstein-state.
We should allow Ukraine to go the way of another former Soviet Republic, Czechoslovakia. When Czechoslovakia dissolved in 1992 to become the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic, respectively, the West did not cry out that the world was ending. Europe cannot only survive but thrive after the dissolution of Ukraine into two or more republics.
Yes, this will embarrass NATO and USA. But that concern surely takes second place to a greater shared peace and prosperity in Europe, and the de-escalation of a conflict which still has the potential to result in a nuclear World War III.
When a government such as in Ukraine chooses to use cluster munitions against its own civilian population, outlaws the religion which many of them practice, and represses the language which many of them speak, the people of that nation have a right to rebel, to secede, and to establish a new nation that will protect their rights and liberties. As Americans, we should be supporting the independence movements in Ukraine — and not the tyrannical Kyiv regime.
Addendum: The following data table as an image file was provided by Geopolitics Live, a Russian-backed Telegram channel, on 15 Mar 2024. Please treat it with the same caution as you would if the Pentagon had “leaked” it. Thank you.
