r/LessCredibleDefence

We Are The Mighty profiles retired Sgt. Maj. Mike Vining through the smaller personal details behind a much larger military résumé: Vietnam EOD work, Delta Force, Operation Eagle Claw, and later life outside uniform. The article uses the “sardines he never ate” story to humanize someone usually presented as a meme or legend.

Vining served as an explosive ordnance disposal specialist in Vietnam, where he recalled multiple near-death moments, including being left behind at an abandoned Special Forces camp and helping destroy the massive “Rock Island East” enemy weapons cache in Cambodia.

The profile also connects Vining to Delta Force’s early history. A related We Are The Mighty piece says he joined Delta in 1978 as an EOD specialist under Col. Charlie Beckwith, making him one of the unit’s original members.

The article’s strategic value is not just biography. It shows how specialized technical skills, especially EOD, became central to elite special operations as missions grew more complex and politically sensitive.

Vining’s post-service life, including mountaineering, historical writing, veteran community work, and distance from his internet fame, adds a useful contrast to modern military celebrity culture. The profile suggests that some of the most consequential operators may be least interested in mythmaking.

Do stories like Vining’s help preserve serious military history, or do meme-driven portrayals risk flattening complex service into legend?

There is a recent claim by Ukrainian Social Policy Minister Denys Ulyutin that the current Ukrainian government controlled population is only 22-25 million people. I found this strange because no statistics I’ve ever seen indicated this. What’s even worse it fits perfectly into the long-running Russian propaganda myth that everybody already died in Ukraine. (At this point they all died three or four times in the past four years if we believed these narratives) 

Even for seasoned followers of the war it might seem like they have no men left in the country, as we keep on hearing about their manpower issues. Even JD Vance repeated this misconception during the infamous White House clash with Zelensky. But this is simply not the case. Ukraine will not run out of men anytime soon. The military’s continuous manpower constraints are more of a political-organisational issue than a physical limitation.

These claims have led me to dig into this topic and come up with my own guesstimation on how many people live in the government controlled territories, and the full territory of Ukraine. As a TLDR, the aforementioned numbers are off by at least 4-10 million, and Ukraine’s total population is still over 35 million.

Ukraine’s recent historical demographic development

Ukrainian history consists of several tragic events, even just in the past 120 years. Population exchanges, ethnic cleansings, border changes. Two large scale genocides and three major wars. Many of these shook the demographic situation to the core. Today the country is living through such a period again.

After World War I Ukraine’s first big demographic hit began immediately in the 1920s when the Soviets deported 150,000 Ukrainians to Siberia they deemed as “Kulaks”. They were the most productive farmers of the country. This act paved the way for the horrors of 1932-1933, the Holodomor, where between 3.5 and 5 million people died of starvation in Ukraine alone.

During these devastating times, the Ukrainian demographic picture still looked relatively rosy from today’s western population-decline anxiety’s perspective. The population was growing rapidly due to high fertility rates, and even the deportations and the Holodomor couldn’t stop it rising from 28 million in 1925 to more than 33 million in 1939. This increased to more than 41 million with the Soviet annexation of Eastern Galicia-Volhynia from Poland, and Bessarabia and parts of Bukovina from Romania after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

Following this came an even larger demographic catastrophe, the largest industrial war and genocide the world has ever seen, and Ukraine was among the worst hit regions. The country lost between 7 and 10 million people, including approximately 4 million military personnel, 5 million civilians, and 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews. More than 20% (some estimates claim up to 25%) of the country’s population perished in World War II, and around 40% of total Soviet losses were Ukrainians. 

Many like to repeat that it was Russia that beat the Nazis in World War II. The claim itself is deeply flawed. Even the Soviet Union’s top general Marshal Georgy Zhukov admitted that the Soviet Union couldn’t have defeated Germany without US and Allied military and economic aid. And let’s not forget that the Germans were fighting on several fronts simultaneously. Crediting even only the Soviet Union and its many nations (not just Russia) is a disservice to the partisans on the Balkans and Italy, and the French and Polish resistance. At the same time the Brits, Canadians, Australians, Poles, Indians, Americans all fought the Germans on the seas, in the air, and on the grounds in North Africa, Italy, France, and all over Western Europe. It wasn’t called a World War by accident.

The reason it might seem that the Soviets did most of the heavy lifting were the staggering losses they suffered. This - besides the obvious brutality of the German invasion - was in large part due to Moscow’s barbaric military tactics that Russia still continues to employ today. This can be summed up as “men are expendable resources”. In the later stages of the war the enormous losses had a clear imperialist reason. The Soviet leadership rushed to conquer as much of Europe as they could in preparation for the post-war world order.

Still, just as the Soviet Union couldn’t have beaten Germany without western aid, it couldn’t have beaten Germany without Ukraine.

World War II has devastated Ukraine. It gained significant territories, but even considering all of that, according to some estimates, by 1945 the country’s population fell below 28 million from the initial over 41 million.

Ukraine’s pre-invasion population

After World War II there was a rapid population growth across Europe and in Ukraine as well. We commonly refer to this as the baby boom. From the lows of less than 28 million in 1945 the country’s population peaked at 52 million in 1993. From this point, the gradual then sudden decline of Ukraine’s population began.

Even before the war it was difficult to find accurate demographic data on Ukraine. The last census was conducted in 2001, this is the only point in time for which we have precise numbers. It was 48,457,100 people. Anything after this is only an estimate.

According to projected figures, by 2014 the population declined to approximately 45,430,000. At this point, it gets even more difficult to have a clear picture because many statistics only count the government controlled territories without Crimea, but often with the already de facto Russian administered Donbas mockublics.  

At this point, I’ll enter with my own dubious estimation to the full population of the internationally recognised territory of Ukraine, and also for the parts that are controlled by the government. Since data is impossible to verify and I’ll make lots of deliberately pessimistic assumptions, these numbers could, of course, be some ways off.

First of all let’s assume that the estimation for 2014 is correct, and Ukraine starts the Russian military aggression in 2014 with 45,430,000 people. Then to begin with let’s assume that the rate of decline remained constant, and by 2026 the same amount of natural decline would have happened as between 2002-2014. This would put the population at 42,400,000 in 2026 if there were no other events occurring.

But other events did occur. Even before the full scale invasion the Covid pandemic caused the death of 112,418 people in the country. As of today, nearly 6 million Ukrainians are refugees abroad. (Most claims suggest that this number is lower today, but I will use the overestimated rounded number) These immediately drop the population to nearing 36 million people.

The casualties of the war

This is a complex and highly sensitive topic with widely different calculations.

Between 2014 and 2022 the war in Donbas killed nearly 15,000 Ukrainian citizens.

After 2022 estimating gets much more challenging. I will attempt to be the most realistically pessimistic with my calculations.

According to the UA Losses project at the time of writing, there are currently 97,869 people confirmed dead and 95,162 people missing with 4,454 captured. This is the absolute floor, the minimum military losses of Ukraine. If we add this all together it is 197,488 people. According to the project, the actual deaths are likely much higher than the nearly 100,000 confirmed here. 

While the people missing are certainly not all killed, but it’s likely that the majority of them are. Similarly, the 4,454 POW’s will most likely be eventually repatriated, but since we’re talking about how many people live currently in Ukraine, I’ll consider all of these as losses, so altogether I will be counting with 200,000 people. Once again, this is on the pessimistic end, other estimates suggest that Ukrainian forces KIA as of 2026 May might be closer to 150,000 people.

The UA Losses project doesn’t count civilian casualties, which is another unknowable element. 

The Mariupol problem brutally illustrates this. UN officials verified around 2,100 civilian deaths in the city, while Human Rights Watch using satellite imagery of mass graves estimated at least 8,000 civilians killed there, admitting that the true figure was likely significantly higher.

Other estimates for Mariupol range from 22,000 to as high as 87,000, with AP journalist Mstyslav Chernov, who was there during the siege and directed the Oscar-winning documentary “20 Days in Mariupol” estimating 70,000–80,000. Comparing these to the UN verified casualties, it’s a ratio of roughly 1:10 to 1:40 between verified and plausible actual deaths in one occupied city alone.

The OHCHR’s nearly 16,000 verified figure is almost certainly off by a factor of 3–10x for direct conflict deaths alone. Independent researchers often project a 20,000–40,000 range, which is probably a cautious mid-estimate, but the more than 100,000 figure from Ukrainian official sources isn't implausible when we factor in Mariupol's likely toll alone.

The core epistemological problem is that this war's worst civilian atrocities happened in places that became inaccessible immediately after. We'll only know the true toll if and when Ukraine regains control of those territories. Even then, only if the research work can be done before the evidences deteriorate.

All things considered I will make the harsh estimation of 350,000 Ukrainian citizens killed by Russia’s invasion between 2014 and May 2026.

Abductions and deportations of Ukrainian children

I quote Swedish MP, Carina Ödebrink’s investigation on the Russian Abductions and Deportations of Ukrainian Children.

“Sources on the number of Ukrainian children that have been forcibly deported to Russia vary: 19,546 have been confirmed by Ukraine, while the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab places the number closer to 35,000. Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights (wanted for arrest by the International Criminal Court) has claimed that over 700,000 Ukrainian children have been “relocated” to Russia, while her Ukrainian counterpart, Daria Herasymchuk, estimates the true number to be between 200,000—300,000. Russia has consistently refused to provide Ukraine or other international parties with any records of transferred children, in violation of international law, which makes verifying the true number of deported children near impossible.

(…)Under any or multiple of these pretenses, children are moved to facilities in Russia, Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine, or in Russian-allied Belarus.”

Again, I will go with the seemingly excessively pessimistic estimates by Ukrainian official Daria Herasymchuk and assume that there are 300,000 children abducted by Russia, and that all of them are outside of Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders.

The question of “unborn children”

78% of the adult population of the nearly 6 million Ukrainian citizens who live abroad are women. Obviously, there are many men currently away from their families serving in the military. If we also factor in the enormous dangers and uncertainties Ukrainians are forced to live under, we have to recognise that many people are unable or unwilling to have children under current circumstances. This would naturally lead to my previous assumption of natural Ukrainian population decline following the 2002-2014 trend highly unlikely.

I am unsure what to do with this, so I’ll make another - perhaps the wildest and most pessimistic - assumption and calculate that there are 150,000 children every year that “cannot be born”. If we accept this, the natural decline has increased by 600,000 since the full-scale invasion began.

Adding it all together

42,400,000 - 6,000,000 (refugees) - 350,000 (killed) - 300,000 (abducted) - 600,000 (unborn) -110,000 (Covid) = 35,040,000

This is the total minimum number of current residents of the internationally recognised territory of Ukraine. Since I took the worst number on every occasion I’d assume that the real figure should be significantly higher. If we count only the government controlled parts, we have to estimate how many people might be under Russian occupation.

According to Ukrainian sources, there are approximately 2.4 million people living in Crimea, although many of these are Russian colonists who settled the peninsula after 2014. Between 1.2 and 2.5 million Ukrainians remain in the territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions controlled by Russia.

Other claims say the total number could be as high as 6 million. Considering that only Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts had a pre invasion population of more than 6 million people, I find this number plausible as the absolute worst case projection. 

Again, I will take this most pessimistic estimate into account:

35,040,000 - 6,000,000 = 29,040,000 in the government controlled territories of Ukraine. 

If we count it less pessimistically, with 2.4 million in Crimea and 1.2 million in the rest of the territories, the number would be 31,440,000 people.

So realistically even today there should be at least between 29 million and 32 million people in the government controlled territories, and at least 35 million total in Ukraine.

As to how many of these are loyal Ukrainian citizens and how many are ethnic Russians who would prefer to be part of Russia, newly settled Russians, and recent colonizers are much more difficult to tell. However, from a historical big-picture view the Ukrainian nation has serious reserves to repopulate its territories after the war is over, with the more than 6 million citizens abroad. 

Since I made a big assumption with unborn children, we must also presume that most of the adults in question didn’t suddenly lose the urge or the ability to have kids. After the war is over, we can probably expect some level of a national baby boom.

Ukraine has gone through similar massive demographic losses, and managed to recover. Other countries did too, the best recent example is Poland. No matter how this war ends the Ukrainian nation will remain numerous, will stay staunchly Ukrainian, and continue living on its historic lands.

[Chatham House] Aussie ex-PM Malcolm Turnbull laments on the lack of sub deliveries -

"It's a submarine deal with no submarines."

Mods: let me know/remove the post if this is too much geopolitics versus defence, but what drew my attention was this line below reeks of terrible strategy

>There are many unanswered questions about how Israel and the United States planned to put Mr. Ahmadinejad in power, and the circumstances surrounding the airstrike that injured him. American officials said that the strike — carried out by the Israeli Air Force — was meant to kill the guards watching over Mr. Ahmadinejad as part of a plan to release him from house arrest.