Russia's Vietnam -- We've Seen This Movie Before -- November 8, 2023

Locator: 45991UKRAINE. 

There have been many, many stories with regard to Russia and its military draft. This may be one of best. Link here.

A day after President Vladimir Putin announced a call-up that could sweep 300,000 civilians into military service, thousands of Russians across the country received draft papers on Thursday and some were being marched to buses and planes for training -- and perhaps soon a trip to the front lines in Ukraine.

Putin's escalation of the war effort was reverberating across the country, according to interviews, Russian news reports and social media posts. As the day wore on, it became increasingly clear that Putin's decision had torn open the cocoon shielding much of Russian society from their leader's invasion of a neighbor.

Mothers, wives and children were saying tearful goodbyes in remote regions as officials -- in some cases, ordinary schoolteachers -- delivered draft notices to houses and apartment blocks. In mountainous eastern Siberia, the Russian news media reported, school buses were being commandeered to move troops to training grounds.

Russian officials said the call-up would be limited to people with combat experience. But the net appeared wider, and some men decided it was best to head for the borders.

Yanina Nimayeva, a journalist from the Buryatia region of Siberia, said that her husband, a father of five and an employee in the emergency department in the regional capital, had been inexplicably called up. She said he received a summons to an urgent 4 a.m. meeting where it was announced that a train had been organized to bring men to the city of Chita.

Track the body counts on a daily basis, but the fact is, Russia has an endless supply of potential draftees. 

To put that in perspective, the US Civil War:

The war resulted in at least 1,030,000 casualties (3 percent of the population), including about 620,000 soldier deaths—two-thirds by disease—and 50,000 civilians.

Binghamton University historian J. David Hacker believes the number of soldier deaths was approximately 750,000, 20 percent higher than traditionally estimated, and possibly as high as 850,000.[

A novel way of calculating casualties by looking at the deviation of the death rate of men of fighting age from the norm through analysis of census data found that at least 627,000 and at most 888,000 people, but most likely 761,000 people, died in the war.

As historian McPherson notes, the war's "cost in American lives was as great as in all of the nation's other wars combined through Vietnam."

Based on 1860 census figures, 8 percent of all white men aged 13 to 43 died in the war, including 6 percent in the North and 18 percent in the South.

About 56,000 soldiers died in prison camps during the War.

An estimated 60,000 soldiers lost limbs in the war.