And when a man named Putin is riding his bear into battle, shirtless, slightly out of shape but majestic.

There's a level of nuance here. Initially, as with most wars, they had a lot of volunteers. Ukraine had one of the biggest standing armies in Europe. They positioned that army in the east of the country poised to level Donetsk and Luhansk (the original two breakaway provinces). That's why Putin pulled the trigger. He knew 130,000 men were about to come in and wreak havoc on the ethnic Russian communities there. He flattened that army in about 2 months.

Ukraine then set about to recruit and train a second army. They sent tens of thousands of men overseas to the US and Europe for training. We gave them months of training of NATO weapons' systems, tactics, combined arms warfare, etc all at the taxpayers' expense. While they were training, Putin pushed out and secured the land bridge to Crimea, conquered Mariupol and Melitopol, secured Europe's largest nuclear power plant in Zaporozhia, and occupied pretty much everything south of the Dneiper River. They did push forward beyond that, but ceded it in a controlled retreat when Ukraine's 2nd army showed up and started pushing back.

Now, both of these armies were staffed with men predominantly from Western Ukraine where the nationalist sentiment is stronger. These guys were the "Neo-Nazis" in the vein of Stepan Bandera, etc and who really hated Russians. They were more than happy to sign up and fight and they fought reasonably well, despite the incompetent command structure, terrible leadership, shitty supply lines, mishmosh training and equipment, and some pretty ugly battlefield conditions (ie mud, deep winter combat, etc). Estimates of the dead around this time were 150-200K "casualties" (KIA and wounded)

What we're seeing now is a third army. It's got very few highly trained members and few combat veterans to lead them. Those people have all been killed in action by now. They're mostly conscripts. There are tons of videos of unwilling men being effectively kidnapped off the street, out of buses, university classes, restaurants, gyms, etc by the Ukrainian army commissars. They have minimal training, no will whatsoever to fight, and they're being slaughtered as fast as the Ukrainians can send them in.

The losses have been staggering. Estimates regularly top 500K Ukrainian KIA, with common understanding being 3x that number wounded. The fights for Mariupol and Bakhmut/Artemovsk were particularly bloody with tens of thousands of Ukrainian dead. Avdiivka looks to be the latest holdout that Ukraine is paying for in tens of thousands of lives. Russia now has it surrounded on three sides and they've had several breakthroughs of the Ukrainian defenses that make it look like it may soon fall.

This latest combat looks like a "Volksturm" (they actually use this term, believe it or not) where Ukraine is literally just throwing meat at the Russian army. This is why they're racking up such huge casualty numbers and why we're seeing these massive cemeteries. There are cemeteries like the one in this video popping up on satellite photos all over the country. It's truly remarkable to see. But, it seems the decision-makers still think the terms of ending this war are "unacceptable," so they'll keep paying in other peoples' blood. Ghouls. All of them.

If this vid is true, they're literally sending to the front anyone with all their limbs and a heartbeat and not much else...

https://rumble.com/v44fcgc-ukraine-is-sending-men-with-downs-syndrome-to-the-front-line.html

I mean the middle east has been a bloodbath for my whole life not to mention Africa, but I get it, more and more Caucasians.

Yes, Nazis tend to be caucasian.

The relative size of the populations matter. France, Germany, and Russia have substantially higher populations than Ukraine. On a per capita basis, Ukraine has suffered egregious casualty rates. Keep in mind also that half of the Ukrainian population fled the war and now lives abroad. It is unlikely they'll return, especially the men, who'd be drafted and sent to die the second they showed up at the border. Also of note is that there's a big difference in the birth rates. Europeans used to have much larger families and much more young men relative to old people in their populations. Now, they're not making enough babies to maintain their current populations, and Ukraine has some of the worst birth rates in Europe.

You're comparing raw numbers outside of some really important context. Yes, the world wars were absolutely devastating, particularly for Germany and Russia, but Ukraine's getting absolutely mauled right now in ways that it'll feel for generations to come. They have no intention of changing course either, which makes it all the worse. Just for context, when Russia saw casualty rates like this in 1917, they had a little revolution.

UNFORTUNATELY more civilians died than military in WW2.