Counting abortions? Why stop there? You could include road deaths, homicides, suicide, accidents and deaths from poor health care systems.

LoukBongThom wrote: ↑Tue May 03, 2022 4:48 am

bong.kuit wrote: ↑Tue May 03, 2022 3:43 am Sounds like pure speculation, not to say bullshit, to me. All reports I could find are by dubious tabloids like the dailymail or the nypost that refer to a mysterious telegram channel.

True. But, there are many sites were saying the same thing. When was the last time we heard something with definite certainty related to Putin?

Australian site below:
https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/le ... 2e3ac41e4d

And the source for the Australian site >> https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/18356517/ ... rs-easter/

newkidontheblock wrote: ↑Tue May 03, 2022 11:00 pm Saw in the news that Putin might formally declare war on Ukraine in May during the annual parade.

This would then allow Russia to fully mobilize to feed more troops into Ukraine.

Translation. The war will continue.

There’s been discussion about this for several weeks, now, though yet to happen. I wonder what the pros and cons are, for both sides?

That aside, given their recent track record, it would as likely be for keeping Russia onside (in-line) internally, and heating up the rhetoric. They’re the only people (for this, also the former Soviet slaves in Belorussian and Chechnya) that believe their own propaganda. But as living ex-POWs are fed back to their families and into society, with their tales of reality vs putin’s reality, it would be reasonable to expect internal stability to be at risk. Nationalistic fervour would be better than having the poor people asking why? Gotta keep the serfs inline.
That’s assuming that surviving POWs aren’t treated as anything other than traitors, cowards, deserters, disloyal, 5th columnists, or simply in breach of contract!

But what would be fed into the war machine? There’s been little or nothing decisive so far, except maybe the sinking of the Moskva.
It appears that many of the troops were given less than minimum initial training. Many/most are conscripts, then erroneously lured by a ‘contract’, but the common theme is continual deception right up until they crossed the border.
Their own phoney war, during which the fragility of their logistics started to show before the shooting even began in earnest.

A significant amount of their highest technology has been damaged and destroyed. Some of that will be repaired, once what’s left of their comrades has been hosed out, but is going to be at best only as good as the first time it failed.
Their materiel spares are being used, and replenishment badly compromised. The source of fresh meat is the same one that already supplied the initial ranks.

If they’ve got a well disciplined, professional, capable standing army available to mobilize, they may have been better advised to use them while they still had some grade A kit to equip them with.
In two long months, what might have been one of the biggest military capabilities has been reduced to a war of attrition against a much smaller but better disciplined opponent. An opponent well versed in tactics and capabilities that they themselves would have been employing were they still part of the Soviet machine.

Historically, there are parallels with the issues that Tsarist Russia was affected by, 100-120 years ago.
Forget May. Maybe the date they need to focus on is the October revolution.