News Related To The Ukraine / Russian War

[sear]

Bombshell Report Finds Putin Lost Twice the Number of Troops In January as the Soviets Lost In 10 Years Fighting In Afghanistan​

Alex Griffing / Fri, February 13, 2026 at 6:14 PM EST·2 min read

Russia’s Vladimir Putin lost twice as many soldiers in January of 2026 as the Soviet Union lost during its entire campaign in Afghanistan in the 1980s, pointed out CNN’s Jim Sciutto this week.
Bloomberg reported on the stunning numbers in a Thursday article, noting that Russia is now losing more men than it is able to recruit.
Alex Wickham, the UK Political Editor for Bloomberg, shared the report on X and noted, “ Russia sustained around 9,000 more battlefield losses than it was able to replace in January, according to assessments from Western officials.”

Bombshell Report Finds Putin Lost Twice the Number of Troops In January as the Soviets Lost In 10 Years Fighting In Afghanistan

Bloomberg reported on the stunning numbers in a Thursday article, noting that Russia is now losing more men than it is able to recruit.

news.yahoo.com

 

[Rigby5]

Bombshell Report Finds Putin Lost Twice the Number of Troops In January as the Soviets Lost In 10 Years Fighting In Afghanistan​

Alex Griffing / Fri, February 13, 2026 at 6:14 PM EST·2 min read

Russia’s Vladimir Putin lost twice as many soldiers in January of 2026 as the Soviet Union lost during its entire campaign in Afghanistan in the 1980s, pointed out CNN’s Jim Sciutto this week.
Bloomberg reported on the stunning numbers in a Thursday article, noting that Russia is now losing more men than it is able to recruit.
Alex Wickham, the UK Political Editor for Bloomberg, shared the report on X and noted, “ Russia sustained around 9,000 more battlefield losses than it was able to replace in January, according to assessments from Western officials.”

Bombshell Report Finds Putin Lost Twice the Number of Troops In January as the Soviets Lost In 10 Years Fighting In Afghanistan

Bloomberg reported on the stunning numbers in a Thursday article, noting that Russia is now losing more men than it is able to recruit.

news.yahoo.com

The similarities between 1980s Afghanistan and the Ukraine now are obvious.
They are both wars created by the US, using entities we paid and armed.
In Afghanistan it was the Mujahideen being given the latest US Stinger missiles.
While in the Ukraine Hunter Biden was the bagman for the bribed to the ethnic Polish generals for the Maidan Coup in 2014, and clearly we are sending hundreds of billions worth of our latest weapons there.
In fact, I doubt we could have trained Ukrainians in time, so I believe it is US soldiers who are actually guiding US missiles and drones, to fight the Russians, and not Ukrainians.

The difference is that almost half if the Ukraine are still ethnic Russian natives, since the Old Polish invasion was defeated around 1700.
And that unlike Afghanistan which Russia could just close off from, the Ukraine is inside the Russian defense grid, so can never be abandoned to the west.
So we easily won in Afghanistan, but it should be obvious we can not possibly win in the Ukraine.
The Ukraine is a life or death struggle to Russia that would force the use of nuclear weapons before Russia could give up the Ukraine.

 

[sear]

"The Ukraine is a life or death struggle to Russia that would force the use of nuclear weapons before Russia could give up the Ukraine." R5 #262

Perhaps.
BUT !
According to my monitoring of the news on this topic from numerous sources including Pravda, al Jazeera, and more familiar venues,
the view you offer in #262 is an extreme minority view not shared by m/any of our NATO allies, or m/any of our trade partners in Western Europe or elsewhere.

Russia is a basket case. Her economy is substantially 3rd world, meaning natural resource exploitation (Gazprom), and industrially significant mining,
leaving value add / 1st world economy to Asia and elsewhere.

Putin is a troglodyte, lacking even rudimentary understanding of economics.
Putin's world view reveals only what Putin can glimpse through his Cold War peephole. He has no practical grasp of how to advance Russia, other than by primitive previous millennium standards, bloodshed on the battlefield.

I will tell you R5, Russia has very little to offer any military power with the ability to plunder Russia, simply not worth the effort.
So your portrayal of Russian vulnerability in superlative terms, "would force the use of nuclear weapons" does not seem to be a position presented at the bargaining table by anyone except perhaps for Russia.
And even if that, not persuasively so.