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Comment by otherme123 | Hacker News Reader

There was a saying in falling Germany in 1944: "each day our victories are closer to Germany than the previous day".

You can follow the bombings, for example: if Kyiv is being shelled (and reported in Russian media), it's not under Russian control. If the shelling last for days, the city is holding.

If some city was being shelled, but there are no more news about it, but the news are a nearby and further city is being shelled, the first city is probably under Russian control.

Following that kind of info, it seems the Russian invasion is crawling, and not running as intended. Russia is not doing much better (but not as bad as "reported" in Reddit, for instance).

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"It seems the Russian invasion is crawling"

During WW2, the siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days. Ukraine has only been under attack for 13 days.

US invading Iraq (OIF) is probably a better comparison; that took about a month. And that had openly sympathetic forces, the Kurds and some Shias, willing to tap out quickly. Plus previous wars (Gulf War I) had shown US airpower was absolutely dominant and had fried much of Iraq's hardware on the "highway of Death".

I'm not in favor of Russia but it's clear they're running into much harder resistance than expected, and are really just warming up.

The Russians had to fight two brutal wars in Chechnya, lot of false starts and screw ups... but ~30 years later the Chechens sent 10000 men to fight in Ukraine for the Russians...

This isn't WWII. The cost of war these days is insanely high and depends on a constant stream of materials. Losses also occur at a much faster rate. 800 days of drones flying over you with IR scopes means you'd run out of people to shoot at much sooner.

Instead you see things like the US does where you gain air superiority, take out all command and control via decapitation attacks, and then remove all the armor from the map with missiles and aircraft.

> Losses also occur at a much faster rate.

USSR in WWII was losing on average about 5000 (five thousand) soldiers per day. So no.

Russia's losses today would be much higher if they could figure out logistics. Ukraine might be running out of targets on the front lines. /s

More seriously, think about it percentage wise. Russia is losing resources (tanks, missiles, etc) in a hurry. And the floor is not "zero XYZ remaining" otherwise they would have nothing left in the entire country to defend themselves with. They only have what they allocated for their idiotic invasion and no more. Russia may already be running low on cruise missiles based on the relatively peaceful night in Kyiv.

GP was referring to material loses.

Ukraine shot down 4 Su-34. Russia has 134 of them. It takes years to build them.

In WW2, there were thousands of planes and tanks, but they were unsophisticated and quick to build.

The number of soldiers is also not comparable since modern armies aren't so large anymore.

Exactly! Once the bombardment is over, the waiting part, which is the most horrible part of the siege will begin.

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