Bernhard About VSU Losses.

He refutes obvious BS from Financial Times:

I follow and like Adam Tooze. His Chartbooks have always good materials. This recent one on the Silicon Valley Bank crash is also fine. But I was somewhat disturbed by a recent tweet of his:

Adam Tooze @adam_tooze - 20:11 UTC · Mar 9, 2023

"Some experts worry Ukraine may be expending high-quality troops and equipment to kill mere Russian prison recruits as “cannon fodder”." Wow the language around the attritional battle at Bakhmut is getting grotesque! 7:1 ratio not good enough for you?

Link: ft.com Military briefing: Ukraine’s battle of diminishing returns for Bakhmut

Was that satire?

Moon of Alabama @MoonofA - 20:14 UTC Mar 9, 2023
Replying to @adam_tooze

7:1 to whose advantage?

He did not respond. But no, it was not satire. The linked Financial Times piece, reprinted in the Irish Times, actually quotes the Ukrainian national security chief Oleksiy Danilov as saying that the kill ratio was one to seven in Ukraine's favor.

I want to reiterate my position here: ANY, I underscore, ANY Western MSM ranging from BBC and Financial Times to WSJ, NYT and MSNBC is a propaganda outlet tasked with disseminating lies and fake "facts". Most people who work there, they are either psychopaths, or down right evil. Few ones who still retain some redeeming human qualities, work there after making the deal with own consciousness out of pure material (mortgage, car payments, life style) or even fear (family, own well-being etc.), or lack of any useful professional skills reasons. They are also slaves of the circumstances and only very few of them have enough integrity to challenge the lies, including by means of declaring that "I am not going to do this shit anymore". 

So, Bernhard counters this BS with a purely professional approach (I would have done the same):

When I was in officer school the number estimated for a big war in Europe was 75% of casualties due to artillery and aerial bombing.

Data from the European Commission, quoted by El Pais, says that Russia has a 10:1 advantage in artillery:

According to data from the European Commission to which EL PAÍS has had access, Russia fires between 40,000 and 50,000 artillery shells per day, compared to 5,000-6,000 Ukrainian forces expend. The Estonian government, which has been one of largest contributors to Kyiv’s war effort, puts the average use of artillery at between 20,000 and 60,000 Russian shells per day, and 2,000 to 7,000 Ukrainian rounds, according to a document sent to EU Member States by Tallinn, to which this newspaper has had access.

The Russian forces fire ten times the number of shells the Ukrainians can fire. In a modern war artillery fire causes 65+% of all casualties. It is thus impossible that Ukraine is losing less soldiers than the Russians.

The total ratio may well be 7 to 1 but it will certainly be to the advantage of the Russian forces side.

But minimizing the losses Ukraine has in Bakhmut seems to be a current propaganda scheme. A recent Newsweek piece quotes similar nonsense.

But this is the whole issue, honest reporting and knowledge of all relevant facts is not just not in the plans, it is physically impossible even if to assume that some people in MSM would want to report thing right and try to fight own biases the way real journalists are supposed to do. Simplest example? Sy Hersh, he repeats the same utterly incompetent BS about Holodomor, which is a mathematical and demographic impossibility, same goes even for highly respected by me Douglas Macgregor who speaks about "a million Red Army soldiers" executed by "Stalin's hedge detachments (zagradotryads)", when in reality their main task was anything BUT executing anyone, unless we are talking about open panic-mongers and saboteurs. That is why the number of "executed" is two orders of magnitude smaller than Macgregor's "million". 

But in the world where such grotesque lies continue to perpetuate, anything is possible. And Russia, for all her immense size and military power still remains the great unknown in the Western World, because it is the ONLY country which time after time beat the shit out of the best West ever could master and intellectual class in the West lives with it, whether it is aware of it, or not. That is why any iota of common sense and actual news reporting in the West becomes the event of a huge significance, because it is so rare. West views Russia same way Marshall Zhukov warned about: "We liberated them, and they will hate us for that".(c) In Russian-American case, it goes even further since Russia wasn't supposed to steal American thunder of the 19th and 20th century but she did, from battlefields to space, to education and that, especially today, underscored America's status as a newcomer. American elites cannot take it, for all truly amazing and admirable America's achievements. And "they hate us for that"(c). I am on record: America's "elite-making" machine is broken and cannot be fixed any time soon. And I am not even talking about British desperation of a pip-squeak.