A little confused as to why the news cycle is making a big deal out of the "\/\/ar losses/ death counts"
We literally just lost 1-3 Million Americans to covid, courtesy of the Republican party. No one bat an eye.
Think Pudz cares about 10,000 soldiers?
Death is bad, but we're still in the small potatoes range.
The U.S. switched to a body count as a means of judging a war back in Vietnam, it was a stupid metric but it hid the fact that we were losing, our media still makes a big deal about it because old lessons die hard. It's also the media, on a slow news day they will act like losing two soldiers means we're losing a war.
It can be an important metric when put in perspective, it wasn't in Vietnam, the kill/death ratio which was inflated kept a positive spin on the war, anyone saying otherwise was labeled a commie/pinko/dirty hippie (Nixon coined that last one just for this purpose). 1-3mil people is 1% of the population and it was over the course of 2+ years, meaning it would take more than a millennia to kill us off at that rate, 15k soldiers (current NATO estimate of Russian dead) is 10% of the Russian military
in one month, that is not small potato range, by any means, and that is just dead, not missing or injured which is usually 3 to 5x that (Belarus hospitals are supposedly over flowing with wounded, keeping it hidden from Russian public).
While Putin/Russia doesn't care about his soldiers (does the U.S. really care either?), he does care when he loses so many in such a short time because it not only shows they're not the super power everyone thought and that he's not the tactical genius people thought but it leaves them incredibly vulnerable. Worse, it's not just the number of dead making them vulnerable, if an "inferior" force like Ukraine can take down 10% of their forces in just a month what the heck would an equal or better force do to them? It's not like they can claim it was superior weapons, some of the best weapons at Ukraine's disposal have been cell phone tracking soldiers phones on Google Maps (they showed up as traffic jams) and Grindr (seriously!) and ordinary farm tractors to steal tanks. Even if they lose, Ukraine has made them (and Putin) look completely incompetent. So yeah, he cares, just not about the troops.
To give an idea how serious those numbers really are though and what they mean,
Russia had to move troops from the east coast/south east to the Ukraine front, leaving that area exposed. While there's little risk of NATO invasion (we all knew that) how much does Putin trust China? Yes, they have a treaty, but there's never been a time where China was this capable and Russia was this weak and with the world turned against it. If China invaded now, claiming it was to help Ukraine, would the world object or would they cheer them on?
And yes, China could absolutely win that war no matter the weapons used.