There is a particularly idiotic ad circulating around TEH YOOTOOBZ from the Banderites – never a particularly intelligent bunch to begin with – boasting about how the FUSA is spending 5% of its total military budget on aid to Ukraine, which has resulted in the destruction of 50% of the Russian Army.

I am not making this shit up. Take a look:

This is not only profoundly stupid, it is tragic as well. Let us examine why, in some detail.

First, there is the claim that the FUSA is spending “only” 5% of its total defence budget on supporting 404 – Country Not Found. Is that true?

Well, as of Dec 23, 2022, the Department of (Bombing the Shit Out of Goathumpers and Innocent Villagers in the Name of) “Defence” received an allocation of US$816.7B for the 2023/24 fiscal year. So, when calculating the percentage of the US defence budget going to Banderastan, we have established the denominator quite well.

For the record, 5% of this amount comes to… drop the 3, carry the 1… US$40.835B, near-as-dammit.

What about the numerator? This is a bit more tricky, because the data concerning how much the FUSA has allocated to Banderastan’s futile war are not straightforward to find. Estimates vary substantially, not least because some count simply what has been set aside, and others count what has actually been delivered.

For the purposes of this brief analysis, we will use the Kiel Institute’s dataset from their Ukraine Support Tracker project. This is a very useful dataset indeed – you can download it yourself, for free, and use it in various analytics suites. One of my (far too many) side projects, for which I have never found the time or discipline to get off the ground seriously, is an attempt to create a Power BI dashboard that allows for some seriously cool-beans trickery to display military support by type, etc.

Anyway, the dataset contains a tab called “Country Summary ($)”, where you can see how much military aid the US has committed – or, at least, what the Kiel Institute identifies as direct military aid. In reality, the FUSA literally pays for the salaries of the Ukrainian military and almost all of the government, and supplies it directly with C4ISR capabilities to replace the ones the Russians destroyed in the opening days of the war. So, the fact is the number listed in that tab is too small, probably by at least 50%.

Nonetheless, let’s go with what they have listed. The dataset shows, as of Jul 31 2023, the FUSA committed US$46.6B.

This is about 10% higher than what the Banderites would have you believe. However, it is within the realm of belief, given timing discrepancies, etc., provided you accept the Kiel Institute’s definitions of what constitutes military aid (which I do not).

In reality, the FUSA has spent a total of well over US$100B, if you add up everything – “financial” aid, which is really just laundered straight through the world’s most corrupt and broken country; military aid, which the Russians are now merrily turning into scrap metal; training, which is proving totally useless; and C4ISR assistance, which is about the only thing the FUSA can do to make a bucket of warm spit’s worth of difference in the war.

Nevertheless, the Ukies are SORT OF right when they claim the FUSA has spent “5% of its military budget” in supporting Ukraine.

What about the other side of the equation? Have the Russians truly lost 50% of their fighting power?

No.

The very idea is idiotic on its face. When they went in, the Russians used a total force of about 200K – much smaller than most people thought they would – and only about 90K of them actually got involved in the heavy fighting. That was a tiny force, relatively to the much larger Ukrainian military and territorial defence forces, plus the substantial paramilitary forces and reserves they had available.

This was out of a total military force, nationwide, at the time, of about 1 million men. The total composition of Russian forces in 2022 can be found from, for example, Global Firepower or Military Watch Magazine.

These show the Ukrainian claims are utter garbage.

The Ukies, via Oryx and other sources, claim to have destroyed over 12,000 Russian vehicles, of which at least 2,300 are tanks, and claim to have killed over 300,000 Russian soldiers. Never mind that Oryx’s calculations have been audited repeatedly, and found sorely lacking in terms of accuracy – we will take them as given for now.

Yet, today, the Russians have, by the West’s own best estimates, at least 8,000 tanks at the ready, with some 12,000 in reserve. There is absolutely ZERO evidence, across all of Russian social media, to suggest 300,000 dead – the BBC/Mediazona tracker project shows, as of today, “only” 32,656 dead Russians – though they estimate the true number of dead at more than 47,000.

Personally, I would put the number of Russian dead at around 50K. This is by no means a small number – it is the worst death toll the Russians have ever suffered since the end of WWII. But it is NOT half of Russia’s overall military strength. It is not even half of the military force that originally went into Banderastan.

This does not account for the steady, inexorable growth of Russian forces over the past year, since the Neo-Tsar announced a partial mobilisation of 300,000 reservists. In addition to those 300,000, the Russians almost immediately picked up 80,000 volunteers – and then, since the beginning of this year, have incorporated at least 350,000 more volunteers into their ranks.

Therefore, Russia’s total military force, dedicated to the tasks of the SMO, now numbers in excess of 700,000 men.

That does not translate into “50% of their military strength” destroyed.

And that is before we get to the fact that Russia can produce at least 1,600 new and refurbished tanks a year, plus, at minimum, by Western estimates, 2 MILLION 152mm artillery rounds produced every year.

That last number is surely a severe underestimate. The more reasonable estimates I have seen, indicate total artillery production across the Russian Federation in excess of 3.5 million shells a year – and rising.

Do a little mental MAFF, and you will quickly realise the Russians are producing in excess of 290K arty rounds a month. By comparison, the FUSA and EUSSR, combined, are barely producing 28K rounds per month. The FUSA reckons it can get to a million rounds a year – about 83K rounds a month – of 155mm artillery, by 2025. At that point, there probably will not even be a Ukraine worth sending shells to, such will be the scale of the destruction inflicted by Russian forces.

And all of that is before we get to the horrific realities of Ukrainian losses.

There has been a lot of debate about how many KIA and WIA the Ukrainians have sustained by this point. The Ukies themselves, like the Russians, do not publicise their losses. However, there is NOTHING on Russian social media – which is considerably more free than Western media, at this point, and vastly more so than heavily censored Ukrainian channels – indicating the kinds of packed-to-overflowing cemeteries we now see all over 404.

Yesterday, the Telegram channel DD Geopolitics – the rebranded “Donbass Devushka” channel – produced a series of pictures and videos of the latest KIA losses of the Banderites. Start at this post and just keep scrolling down. That will give you some small idea of just how bad things really are over there.

The most conservative figures I have seen indicate a minimum of 280K dead on the Ukrainian side – using similar methodology to what the BBC-Mediazona project uses, counting actual obituaries and publicly available information. The Russian war correspondent/propagandist Rybar puts the total number of AFU dead at this point at around 493,000 – though, Rybar is not a particularly reliable source, so I would take that with a heaping helping of salt.

This is on top of Russian officials, such as Shoigu, claiming over 83K Ukrainian losses thus far into the 4-month-old counterploink. There is considerable debate in the various alt-news communities about exactly what the RuMoD means by “losses” – Alexander Mercouris insists this means both dead AND severely wounded, whereas Grandpa Grumpuss (who is Russian, and who served in the Russian military) notes that уничтожено means exactly what it says, “destroyed”, i.e. KILLED BY DEATH.

Personally, I am inclined to take the latter view – the RuMoD gets plenty of things wrong (e.g. the capture of Maryinka, the fall of Ugledar, the capture of Soledar, etc., earlier in the SMO last year), but they are not generally known for wild exaggeration. In fact, they tend to be quite inept at public messaging, overall. So I do tend to view their estimates of Ukrainian losses as being on the conservative side.

This means the true losses are far, FAR worse than anyone wants to admit – on either side. And there is more evidence coming from Ukraine obliquely pointing to this fact.

Their top medical officials admit (page in Russian) to “huge” losses and casualties, with no hope of victory. A senior conscription officer in the Poltava region – home to the relatively small but important industrial cities of Kremenchug and Komsomolsk – admitted a few weeks ago that, of every 100 recruits mobilised from the region last year, only 10-20% of them are still able to fight.

And that is before we get to the fact that Ukrainian officials themselves have now admitted the total population of Ukraine is barely 23 million. Given how often and thoroughly Ukies lie, the true number is almost certainly below 20 million now. Ukraine now has the lowest fertility rate in the entire WORLD, with a TFR of just 1.2 children per woman.

Put all of these data points together – mass slaughter on the battlefield, huge losses behind the front lines due to lousy medical evacuations, collapsing population numbers and fertility rates, and the extreme rate of destruction of Western-supplied equipment on the battlefield – and you see a picture of a catastrophic investment.

The bottom line is, the FUSA has invested well over US$100 BILLION into a collapsing country that cannot stand up to Russia. The Russian military machine is stronger today than it was 20 months ago – its leaders have learned from their initial mistakes, and are now relentlessly and inexorably building up a force that will simply smash through whatever is left of the Ukrainian military after their Khlearly Khatastrophic Khollapsing Khreat Khokholite Khumvee Khounteroffensive khulminates by the end of this month.

The FUSA would be far better off simply cutting its losses and getting out. This is not a war it can win – and nor can Ukraine.

If only the Fake Administration had recognised this in February 2022, the world might have been spared incalculable suffering. But, taking a broader view, I think the “suffering” was the point all along.