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MidnightPale3220 t1_j83vmph wrote

Reply to comment by 6548996 in Claimed (by Ukraine) casualties inflicted correlate strongly with verified officer deaths (offset of 1 week) by Tamer_

I agree about presentation, but as regards obviousness of correlation, in war, it is a tendency for sides involved to inflate other side's losses.

So a correlation between what Ukrainian officials say, and some other independent source is actually a good sign of trustworthiness of that conflict side's data, which is not necessarily true for a country in war.

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6548996 t1_j83wd8n wrote

I see what you’re saying - but it doesn’t really show anything beyond a quite vague correlation at best. OP furthermore states that the ratio has increased from 30:1 to an estimated 70:1 , which could hint at Ukraine exaggerating the casualties if you’d assume a linear correlation.

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MidnightPale3220 t1_j840x9w wrote

Unfortunately it is not as simple as that. Russia has trouble with replacement officer count, especially since it drafted a huge number of conscripts in a very short time, for which they have mostly provided minimal training. To me the increase in ratio actually corresponds to what I would expect when reading about situation on front lines.

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Tamer_ OP t1_j84n7g5 wrote

Russian tactics have changed dramatically and officers in particular have gotten increasingly more afraid of getting killed by leading from the front and being in HIMARS range. You can literally tell when HIMARS strikes hit officer concentrations (HQ buildings mostly) by the peaks in July and August.

More specifically, for the last few months (at least on some 50km of front line), Russian troops are sent (~10 at a time) on mindless assaults to locate Ukrainian positions and relay the information to artillery. They repeat the operation once artillery need more targets or to validate if the last shelling was effective.

All of this is widely reported by Russian troops on the ground.

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