Similar conscription amounts have been inside the current numbers as well.

These 160 000 are not an addition to the troops. They are just an explanation of where the steady recruitment of new soldiers comes from this year. This means that they are no longer able to find enough suitable prisoners to send to the front and must slightly increase the yearly amount of conscripts to keep things in balance.

The 0.7 % considers only Ukrainian territory, and completely ignores everything that happened inside the Russia

In the end of 2024, Ukraine controlled an area in the Kursk province that equaled about 0.2 % of Ukraine’s total territory. If that area was taken into account, the Russia’s net territory gain would be about 0.5 % of Ukraine’s total territory. At the peak of the Kursk province operation , Ukraine controlled about twice as big an area of the Kursk province as in the end, so an area equalling about 0.4 % of Ukraine’s total territory and 4/7 of the area the Russia managed to temporarily gain from Ukraine.

(Edit: and, my understanding is that the 4200 km² does not contain the territories Russia reclaimed, but now I’m getting a bit unsure, as I don’t remember the exact phrasing of the text telling how much area the Russia gained)

I’m not really sure what’s stopping Putin, but at least all the previous times he’s declared how many new soldiers the Russia will recruit, they’ve fallen very short of that number.

What is known is that the Russia’s recruitment capacity is 25 000 to 35 000 new soldiers per month. It is not able to reform during wartime, because that reform would cause a mess for a few years, lowering the capacity for first.

He’s saying he’ll recruit those soldiers within 4 months. That translates to 40 000 per month, which vows over even the pessimistic estimates for its recruitment capacity. And that would mean that they only recruit conscripts and nobody else during those four months. Of they recruit others than conscripts, they have that much less capacity for the conscription.

Nobody is reporting the 0.7 %. What they’re reporting is that the Russia gained about 4200 km² of Ukraine’s territory in 2024. That is reported by several sources, such as this one: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/8/russia-gained-4000sq-km-of-ukraine-in-2024-how-many-soldiers-did-it-lose

Ukraine’s total territory is 603 628 km², and 4200 km² of that translates to 0.7 %.

Some sources talk about just over 2000 km², which would be around 0.3 %, but the rough measurement I made on the map was around 4000 km², so I don’t trust the lower number.

You can search for “how much Ukrainian territory did Russians gain in 2024”, and 4200 and 2000 are numbers you will find.

This 4200 km² does not include the areas inside the Russian Federation around the city of Sudzha. There Russia lost a land area that equals about 0.2 % of Ukraine’s total land area, and if you count that in, then that brings the Russian gains down to 0.5% instead of 0.7 %.

Why do news media have to repeat this kind of weirdness:

Russian forces have slowly made territorial gains in Ukraine over the past but that has come at a cost.

What kind of “territorial gains” is it that during all of year 2024 the Russia managed to gain 0.7 percent of Ukraine’s total area. Less than one percent! That is in no manner significant. Taking over 0.7 of a country’s land means the frontline having frozen in place, not the country gaining territory.

And of course, if we take the events in Kursk province into account, the percentage gets even lower…

Also, this article says “will conscript”, while in reality it is “wants to conscript”. Putin can want whatever. Being able to get what it wants is a whole different question.

But only one really knows how to give commands to Trump. That’s a huge difference!

I’ve got autocorrect switched off, but these kinds of corrections have lately started happening.

Anyway, corrected “need” to “mean”.

But many kinds of medicine can induce Parkinson’s.

A puppet is someone whose actions are fully steered from the outside.

Putin is a person chosen by KGB/FSB because he makes decisions that are very useful its leaders, but he retains a large amount of autonomy.

Yup. He had a cancer and mostly healed from it.

Happens.

Defending from something doesn’t really mean opposing something in this sense.

Most importantly, it takes rewriting their school books… The Russian school books on mathematics and on Russian language rant about Russian supremacy.

And I hope Putin outlives the Russian Federation.

…and dies as soon as possible, anyway. Preferably before April.

This will be a clash between organizations, not between people per se. KGB/FSB will fight other branches of the Russia’s junta for whose candidate will get the job.

He won’t plant anyone as long as his legacy isn’t flawless. It will never be.

For now, anyone who could became the next vladelets (🤮) is seen as a threat by Putin, and handled accordingly.

But… Putin was planted by KGB, and KGB/FSB does have a plan for whom to plant.

Thay was Zelenskyj’s original suggestion that Trump twisted into this monstrosity.

Still useful, though. It has made Trump show his true intentions much more clearly, rallying civilized countries more firmly behind Ukraine.

EU should just cut banking connections to USA if USA allows the Russia back in SWIFT… I know EU would never do that, but it absolutely should.

There hasn’t really been that much going on at the Black Sea. Ukraine retains the right to sink Russian warships that leave the eastern corner of the sea. Beside that, there are grain ships and oil ships. This agreement should (but, I guess, probably won’t) completely guarantee the safety of any grain ships, regardless of country.

Then there’s the idiocy about “energy sector”. Apparently nothing concrete has been agreed about that and there’s agood chance nothing will. It’s such a stupid initiative. I hope the lost submitted by Ukraine has been very extensive. That way, it won’t be a list of “these are the targets we really do not want to lose.”

I think what must have happened is that I wrote a comment on Voyager, my android killed the app and when I restarted it, I accidentally opened a wrong link to send the mostly written comment to. Heh.

And no, I don’t think the Russia can win, unless EU explicitly decides it should. And I don’t think EU will do that. Trump can do a quite a bit to help the Russia, but most likely not enough for it to win.

But, we’ll see.

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