Thanks for doing the good work! I don't see such fearmongering in my bubble (another big issue is how the society is split into layers, and I have no idea what information most people are exposed to).
>On that note, if you have your own estimate of the current numbers for military civilian fatalities, that would be of interest also.
Ukraine doesn't publish these numbers for opsec reasons, so it's a wild guess.
About a million people have been mobilized. There's an immense amount of casualties, but Ukraine has been fighting hard to bring the wounded back, so many wounded return to service after recovery.
2022 has seen a huge number of civilian fatalities, particularly in cities like Mariupol, where the estimates range up to 100,000. Evidence of massacres and mass graves have been found in areas reclaimed from Russia, e.g. Bucha and Izyum.
But the war has enetered a different phase as of fall 2022. The civilian casualties are remarkably low. This is both because Ukraine is pretty good in evacuating civilians from places where the fighting is going on, and because both sides have zero interest in wiping out the civilians. Cynically, people are still a resource for either side.
On the level of people actually involved in combat, it's not an ethnic conflict, so they have no incentive to inflict civilian casualties. Mariupol's high casualty figures are more due to Russia's disregard for human life rather than deliberate goal of inflicting such damage. They weren't treating their own much better (they have since started caring about that more, but given that they're using NK soldiers, it looks like it was a bit too late).
Russia still resorts to occasional terrorism, like the strike on Okhmatdyt children's hospital. But the entire point of terrorism is inflicting minimal damage with minimal resources and causing maximum amount of fear and outrage. Russia's terrorism fails in the latter aspects; so far, it only strengthened the resolve, while costing Russia expensive rockets that are in limited supply.
Other than that, Russia doesn't have the reach to do much damage to Ukrainian civilians. Air defenses keep the bombers away, and drones on either side don't allow artillery to get anywhere close to the cities.
We're back to WW1-esque situation where the fighting is happening 100km away in the trenches, and you're sitting there sipping tea like nothing is going on, while the number of crosses at the cemeteries and people without limbs is growing, and the number of men of fighting age you can spot in the streets is shrinking.
From talking to soldiers, it's also impossible to gauge the losses. Assault units that storm the trenches have high casualty and loss rates. Bad commanders can send units into an area without recon, condemning them all. Hell is hell, and war is worse. But there's simply no data.
It's safe to say that combat casualties and deaths are much higher than reported. It's also safe to say that it's not nearly as high as the fearmongering you cited suggests: Ukraine is struggling with mobilization, and needs those 1M mobilized to hold the line (Zaluzhny's article in the Economist talks about the need to mobilize 500K a year ago - a task which is still ongoing).
So fatalities in the "hundreds of thousands" range would simply mean a frontline collapse. Meanwhile, we see the opposite happening: Ukraine's incursion into Kursk demonstrates that Ukraine has enough manpower for offensive operations, while holding up against Russian advances in the East (more or less).
On the other hand, Russia is advancing in the East; slowly, but advancing. That means that so far, their manpower losses have been sustainable. Whether they're sustainable because Russia has North Korea as a resource or another reason is beside the point - they can find people to do combat tasks somewhere, and that's all that matters.
As far as Ukraine's ability to have capable armed forces, manpower shortage due to fatalities would be very low on the list of issues.
The #1 issue would be losing experienced veterans, and not being able to train mobilized people effectively. The situation is improving, but is still dire. The numbers alone won't tell the story.
Losses alone don't demoralize the civilians (or would-be recruits) either. The fear of being thrown into combat with an AK and three clips, with training amounting to "point in the direction of enemy" does it. The fear of having a commander without any regard for human life or common sense does it.
I'd say that the fate of Ukraine hinges on whether Ukraine will be able to solve these problems and alleviate fears (the fears will be there in any case). Ukraine has enough resources, both manpower and economic/military, to fight this war (including foreign help - but both Russia and Ukraine rely on it, the world has gone global a while ago).
It's the ability to utilize the resources that is lackluster. Not an F level, but B- to C-. Enough to get by (so far). Occasional glimpses of brilliance (like the Kursk incursion, most recently). All riddled with careless mistakes that are systemic enough that resolving them is a very hard task.
I mean honestly, it's pretty bad either way — even the 15% estimate you cited would be enough for me to make the point.
I just wanted to emphasize that the situation is worse than most people — and specifically, most Ukrainians — think, because the country really needs to start figuring out how to incentivize people to move to Ukraine (including, but not limited to, getting people to return to Ukraine), and both the government and the people need to be on the same page (as long as people don't care, the gov't won't lift a finger).
Take it as less me arguing with you, and more of ringing the alarm bell everywhere I go until enough people have heard it.
>More like about 15 percent as of Feb 2024, per the UNHCR.
Please, do some due diligence before making comments like this. You are incorrect.
Your link counts refugees.
It does not count:
- people who left Ukraine and permanently settled abroad
- people who left Ukraine on work visas
- people who ended up under Russian occupation
etc.
Ukrainian population has plummeted by 25% due to the 2022 invasion alone[1].
The war didn't start then, either. Crimea and Donbas were occupied since 2014. 3 million people in occupied territories[2], technically, never left Ukraine.
Another red herring is the phrasing as refugees or asylum seekers.
The latter does not nearly account for everyone. With millions of Ukrainians having family abroad due to war, and, at this point, millions of those settling permanently abroad, millions of Ukrainians are eligible to immigrate to reunite with their families abroad. Working families, mind you, Ukrainians integrate well, and not refugees anymore.
I am a Ukrainian living in the US. I have evacuated my MIL from Kyiv the first week of the 2022 invasion. She ended up living in the US until her death from cancer this year, and she is not counted in your stats.
As all Ukrainians, she had a 90-day right to stay in the EU, visa-free. She didn't cross the Ukraine-Polish border as a refugee. She had an active Canadian visa from a couple of years ago when she visited her daughter there, so she didn't enter Canada as a refugee. From Canada to the US, we used the United 4 Ukraine program when it was instantiated[4], a remarkable achievement of Biden's administration.
You may note that it is distinct from "temporary protection" status, and requires someone in the US to sponsor you. It is a parole status; my MIL didn't enter the US as a refugee or asylum seeker.
Her friend, whom we managed to get onto the same evac train, remained with her daughter in Spain. She was eligible to do that years earlier. Reuniting with a family member doesn't make her a refugee or asylum seeker.
I can go on and on with examples, that's not the point.
My point is that the only accurate measure of the population drop is looking at the number of Ukrainians who remain in non-occupied territory of Ukraine to gauge the impact of the war on the population.
You will not find this number. If the government of Ukraine were to publish it, there'd be panic. You will only find estimates. And when you add up the estimates of how many people ended up abroad, you'll see that a third of the population is quite reasonable (a quarter of prewar 44 million is a lower bound estimate).
>And you only have to connect to their servers once every 30 days. You don't even need a 4G connection for that, it's just a few kilobytes exchanged to renew the offline period.
So, if I have a playlist in Spotify to listen to on long hikes, I will find out that I can't play it when I get to the hike (unless I use Spotify all the time, or think about this crap in advance).
Thanks, I understand that I can jump through hoops to make it work.
But an MP3 works 100% of the time, every time, without any of that crap, or thinking; I copy the file to a memory file once, and that's it. No passwords, no accounts, no internet, no logging in.
Many bands I listen to have Bandcamp/SoundCloud accounts, which offer DRM-free audio downloads. I use that when it's an option - and it pays the artists orders of magnitude more than Spotify ever will.
If I have a CD from a local show, I will rip that.
Otherwise, I am not going to make my life more inconvenient for the sake of a major artist getting $0.000002 from my Spotify subscription. I'll pirate their work.
>I suspect there's a cost associated with licensing the Ukrainian version that will not be recouped in markets outside Ukraine.
About a third of Ukrainians are currently outside Ukraine due to war.
Even setting that aside, [citation needed] that providing additional soundtracks comes with an additional cost to the streaming service, and if so, that this additional cost is upfront (and not per stream).
If the publishers are so idiotic as to kill Ukrainian language distribution outside Ukraine with their fees, that just shows that piracy is necessary.
Knowing people in Ukraine, it's less likely to be stupid greed than plain old stupidity (like Daenerys, the officials and executives in Ukraine kind of forgot that Ukrainians outside Ukraine exist). This is a discussion for another time, though.
>Frequently subtitles are available for every language except the original on many services... which seems insane.
I didn't even bother bringing up accessibility, since it's so laughably broken (if not outright ignored) with all current streaming services. It is, at best, an afterthought.
None get even close to matching the functionality of a plain old DVD.
Or, since we are in 2024 - an MKV file with multiple audio and subtitle tracks, which the pirates care about providing, and the streaming services do not.
_______
PS: if you're trying to learn a language, US companies often refer to subtitles in the language of the audio track as "closed captions" rather then "subtitles"[1], with the target audience being hearing impaired people.
Look for the "CC" button, or "accessibility" options, and you may find what you look for.
YouTube provides automatically generated subtitles for many videos (of varying quality) with the [CC] button in the video controls.
>I also am drawn to piracy just so i can get a high enough bitrate to look good on a modern display!
Then there's languages and subtitles, and publishers still don't get that shit right.
FFS, I can't watch a Ukrainian movie in Ukrainian outside Ukraine, because the publisher only released the English version on US streaming services.
And if I want to watch a film with a soundtrack in one language (the original, perhaps) and subtitles in another (out of the ones I speak that it better translates to), sayonara, we're hitting the torrents.
Oh, and go figure, sometimes you just don't have a reliable Internet connection where you want to watch a movie. Unbelievably, but it does happen if you go outside the house.
>I don’t know a single person who pirates music anymore. It’s way too convenient to pay $5-10/month for unlimited access to nearly every record ever created.
Do you know any single person who travels outside of 4G coverage?
Because the $5/$10 mo doesn't do much for you in a National or State Park in the US two hours away from a major city.
Sure, but I remember pirating La Maman Et La Putain specifically because it was yet-to-be-released by Criterion in any form - and it was Jean Eustache's masterpiece that made a splash at the Cannes back in 1972, not an obscure film by any measure (even if not mainstream by any measure either).
Piracy still remains a supremely important means of both accessing and archiving content after it stops being a moneymaker, or simply when it pauses being one.
Case in point - plenty of stories about games on being officially published by the content owners... with cracks, after the source code was lost (or wasn't in a shape to be rebuilt), and officially selling the pirated version was the only thing the publisher could figure out how to do[2].
The killer feature of Organic Maps is that you can download the maps for the entire world (yay OSM!) and not have to depend on signal or having a data plan.
Super important for intentional travel or nature (National parks often have no signal).
It's blazing fast — far snappier than other map apps I've used. And OSM data is better than Google's for hiking and biking.
The POI database isn't as detailed, and you wouldn't use it to find an espresso shop near you (...yet). But it's much better as a map app.
Yous said all that, and it's still not a justification to introduce a non-obvious and unique UI/UX paradigm just in one place that prevents user from accomplishing the task they need to do.
Something like a progress bar going around the button in a circle, I could give them a pass for - at least you get the indication of beginning and end, and a suggestion that letting it fill would make something happen.
>The users who don’t need these features don’t have to know about them, don’t have to click through tutorials, or be pestered by hints.
Welcome to the new iCalculator!
To simplify your experience, the only operator button is "+", which now takes half of the screen, and is therefore easy to find and press, adding to the pleasure of using the calculator.
You might ask, where's the "-" button? Was it stupid to remove it? No, it's brave! Don't be so negative about it; our UX studies show that "+" is statistically the most used button, and so your needs don't matter.
If you need to subtract, swipe "+" button down; to multiply, swipe "+" right, and to divide, swipe "+" down. Swipe "+" up to raise to an exponent.
To quickly square numbers, hold "+", then perform a square gesture clockwise aronud the button. To take a square root, perform it in reverse.
You may notice that we have removed the digit buttons as well. That's because you don't need to type the numbers in - just say them out loud! Swipe the screen diagonally from the bottom left corner to the top right one to activate voice input.
Note: digit buttons can still be enabled from the accessibility options in the system dialog.
Note 2: voice recognition of operators is coming in a future upgrade.
To clear your input, you can simply restart the app, no buttons needed.
Note 3: you can enable a haptic shortcut in system acessibility settings: "Clear input by shaking phone".
Finally, you can read this instruction manual by telepathically tuning into the lead engineer's mind, as it's not available anywhere else.
>On that note, if you have your own estimate of the current numbers for military civilian fatalities, that would be of interest also.
Ukraine doesn't publish these numbers for opsec reasons, so it's a wild guess.
About a million people have been mobilized. There's an immense amount of casualties, but Ukraine has been fighting hard to bring the wounded back, so many wounded return to service after recovery.
2022 has seen a huge number of civilian fatalities, particularly in cities like Mariupol, where the estimates range up to 100,000. Evidence of massacres and mass graves have been found in areas reclaimed from Russia, e.g. Bucha and Izyum.
But the war has enetered a different phase as of fall 2022. The civilian casualties are remarkably low. This is both because Ukraine is pretty good in evacuating civilians from places where the fighting is going on, and because both sides have zero interest in wiping out the civilians. Cynically, people are still a resource for either side.
On the level of people actually involved in combat, it's not an ethnic conflict, so they have no incentive to inflict civilian casualties. Mariupol's high casualty figures are more due to Russia's disregard for human life rather than deliberate goal of inflicting such damage. They weren't treating their own much better (they have since started caring about that more, but given that they're using NK soldiers, it looks like it was a bit too late).
Russia still resorts to occasional terrorism, like the strike on Okhmatdyt children's hospital. But the entire point of terrorism is inflicting minimal damage with minimal resources and causing maximum amount of fear and outrage. Russia's terrorism fails in the latter aspects; so far, it only strengthened the resolve, while costing Russia expensive rockets that are in limited supply.
Other than that, Russia doesn't have the reach to do much damage to Ukrainian civilians. Air defenses keep the bombers away, and drones on either side don't allow artillery to get anywhere close to the cities.
We're back to WW1-esque situation where the fighting is happening 100km away in the trenches, and you're sitting there sipping tea like nothing is going on, while the number of crosses at the cemeteries and people without limbs is growing, and the number of men of fighting age you can spot in the streets is shrinking.
From talking to soldiers, it's also impossible to gauge the losses. Assault units that storm the trenches have high casualty and loss rates. Bad commanders can send units into an area without recon, condemning them all. Hell is hell, and war is worse. But there's simply no data.
It's safe to say that combat casualties and deaths are much higher than reported. It's also safe to say that it's not nearly as high as the fearmongering you cited suggests: Ukraine is struggling with mobilization, and needs those 1M mobilized to hold the line (Zaluzhny's article in the Economist talks about the need to mobilize 500K a year ago - a task which is still ongoing).
So fatalities in the "hundreds of thousands" range would simply mean a frontline collapse. Meanwhile, we see the opposite happening: Ukraine's incursion into Kursk demonstrates that Ukraine has enough manpower for offensive operations, while holding up against Russian advances in the East (more or less).
On the other hand, Russia is advancing in the East; slowly, but advancing. That means that so far, their manpower losses have been sustainable. Whether they're sustainable because Russia has North Korea as a resource or another reason is beside the point - they can find people to do combat tasks somewhere, and that's all that matters.
As far as Ukraine's ability to have capable armed forces, manpower shortage due to fatalities would be very low on the list of issues.
The #1 issue would be losing experienced veterans, and not being able to train mobilized people effectively. The situation is improving, but is still dire. The numbers alone won't tell the story.
Losses alone don't demoralize the civilians (or would-be recruits) either. The fear of being thrown into combat with an AK and three clips, with training amounting to "point in the direction of enemy" does it. The fear of having a commander without any regard for human life or common sense does it.
I'd say that the fate of Ukraine hinges on whether Ukraine will be able to solve these problems and alleviate fears (the fears will be there in any case). Ukraine has enough resources, both manpower and economic/military, to fight this war (including foreign help - but both Russia and Ukraine rely on it, the world has gone global a while ago).
It's the ability to utilize the resources that is lackluster. Not an F level, but B- to C-. Enough to get by (so far). Occasional glimpses of brilliance (like the Kursk incursion, most recently). All riddled with careless mistakes that are systemic enough that resolving them is a very hard task.