1 of 2 (been a while since I needed two…)
Found this neat graph. Primary source is said to be a leak from an unnamed medical service in Russia.
Top graph: Recorded Russian suicides.
Bottom graph: Admitted casualties by severity. Green is light injuries. Yellow is moderate. Red is critical.
We can see that critical injuries are only a tiny fraction of admitted casualties throughout the entire war. This means they're just not admitted to medical care. So either they're abandoned, or they don't make it in time until they're stabilized.
We can also see an increasing number of suicides occurring, probably as they realize none will come rescue them.
A recently increasing share of moderate injuries and reduction of light injuries means there are probably more injuries overall and that soldiers with light injuries are turned down more often. Which isn't a good thing because light injuries can sometimes quickly develop to life threatening ones.
Thanks for the link, Big Z.
To note right away, I may have worded the question improperly, but I was asking about the abandonment in the sense of most casualties from “meat wave and wounded being abandoned” or whatever was claimed. Sorry for the confusion.
Here is the original article the graphs in the tweet you cited are pulled from, in Russian:
Радио Свобода публикует анализ базы данных Главного военно-медицинского управления Министерства обороны РФ (ГВМУ). В ней содержатся сведения о 166 тысячах пациентов, прошедших через военные госпитали в России и аннексированном Крыму с января 2022 по середину июня 2024 года. В базе есть также...
www.svoboda.org
The source for the data is claimed to be the Ministry of Defense database that was obtained from the field medic and a commander of an evacuation team who defected to France. It is an interesting read, but there are a few things to note.
It is if the article was not edited, as there are grammatical mistakes, many charts appear twice or more in random places, etc (at least on my phone). This is not a reflection on the dataset, by the way, just some poor writing/editing by Radio Liberty.
Some claims are straight up weird and kind of stick out at you. For example (via Google translate):
According to the GVMU database, alcohol and drug use remains a serious problem at the front. Hundreds of people from 2022 to mid-2024 were admitted to hospitals with diagnoses of "acute oral poisoning with an unknown substance", "poisoning with unknown narcotic substances", "acute poisoning with alcohol-containing liquid".
So the conclusion that the alcohol and drug use is a serious problem is derived from “hundreds” of people being admitted to the hospital with alcohol, drug, and unknown substance poisoning. That would be in 2.5 years. And out of the sample of 166,000 people. And considering that the article mentions in the same and next paragraph that the locals may be providing poisoned supplies, be it alcohol, food, etc. to the Russian troops. One example provided by the source (the defector) is a lightly wounded lieutenant being brought in, who drank 4 shots of cognac (noted that it was of an unknown origin), with severe diarrhea, later swelling lungs, etc. Hardly survived. A case of acute poisoning, clearly. No consideration is given to the fact that tens of thousands were recruited from prisons, for example. It is safe to assume that many were convicted on drug related charges and many of those who weren’t probably have drug or alcohol… if not dependencies, but certainly issues. So considering only the latter, if there were hundreds of such cases just among the convicts, I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest.
This is not saying that there are no issues because there have to be. Any war as horrible as this one had these exact effects on the personnel. Look at the American vets of the recent wars and the severity of engagement is not even comparable, however horrific. Vietnam anyone?
According to a 1971 report by the Department of Defense, 51 percent of the armed forces had smoked marijuana, 31 percent had used psychedelics, such as LSD, mescaline and psilocybin mushrooms, and an additional 28 percent had taken hard drugs, such as cocaine and heroin.
Substance abuse in the Vietnam War wasn’t just limited to the marijuana and heroin enlistees could buy on the black market. Military commanders also heavily prescribed pills to help improve soldiers' performance.
www.history.com
So there are problems, no doubt. It would be weird if there weren’t. But the premise for the author’s conclusion is extremely weak in this case. Which again, is not reflective of the dataset, but the authors’ interpretation.
I am not going going to go into other things that I do not see as kosher that, in my opinion, greatly reflect the authors’ intent, but yeah, they could do better.
For the dataset itself though. First thing to note is that it includes 166,000 injured that went through the system at various hospitals in Russia, occupied territories, and some in Belarus (at the very beginning of the war, injured around the Kiev area). Where are another couple hundred thousands? Is that data different from this set? Why are some of the wounded included in this set and others are not? And so on. The article only says the following about the set:
It is sent to military units so that the wounded who are sent away for treatment do not "get lost". The document was shared with Radio Liberty by military medic Alexei Zhilyaev, who deserted to France.
They say they verified it, by basically drawing random names and verifying the service and, if possible, injuries via social media and official reports. I have no reason to suspect otherwise or doubt the validity of the database. Its completeness and quality is highly debatable though.
On the quality, the authors themselves reflect:
- often columns are left blank;
- wrong information written into various columns;
- includes military personnel not directly participating in the war - that is, personnel hospitalized due to influenza, chronic ailments of the older personnel (read higher rank, they note generals in particular), etc;
- it straight up says that the severity of the injuries often was made up or intentionally reduced;
- it is stated that the light injuries are not accounted for in the database, while talking about the light injuries in the database;
- duration of hospitalization calculated by the authors is somewhat suspicious provided the three groups of severity of the injuries;
- etc.
I will only comment on a few things here. One is the inclusion of “normal” hospitalizations. The authors make a reasonable assumption that these would normally not fluctuate year to year, so they can be ignored. Normally, this would be a reasonable assumption. Here, however, no consideration is given to the fact that the beginning of the war directly corresponds to the last wave of the covid pandemic and hospitalizations of the senior rank in particular would differ greatly compared to normal seasonal fluctuations. I do not disagree with their general observations in this section though.
Next is how is the severity of the injuries defined? Is there a scale used to define the severity of the injuries? Firstly, the article indicates that lightly injured personnel is not included in the database at all. Most of the lightly wounded are possibly treated in the field hospitals and these people are not counted as hospitalized, which is what this dataset is about. However, the lightly wounded category represents nearly 50% of the entries in the database.
Then, the article also states that the severity of the injuries is not only often made up on the fly, but is also “encouraged” (or forced?) to be downplayed, possibly due to the monetary compensations paid to the wounded personnel based on the sustained injuries or, rather, severity of those injuries (360K vs 80K, severely vs lightly). At the same time, the authors say that amputations are one of the indicators of the severity of an injury and those who sustained such injuries do not get sent back to the front. Yet, they talk about how sometimes amputations are regarded to as light injuries and sometimes as moderate. To note, of the 166,000 entries in the database, only 3,200 involved amputations (including toes and fingers), which causes a bit of further confusion as to the validity of the dataset. Validity does not necessarily argue against authenticity in this case, by the way.
The next thing to note is how long the wounded personnel stayed in the hospitals.
Radio Liberty calculated the average length of stay in hospital for these three categories of wounded. For the seriously wounded, it is almost 60 days, for patients with moderate injuries – over 37 days, for the slightly wounded – 18.5 days. These figures do not include the time that the wounded spend in field hospitals and other places of initial evacuation, as well as the time spent on further rehabilitation, for example, in sanatoriums of the Russian military department.
lemz.ru
, I thought it was a website opened recently. In fact it's a 107 years old institution.
