Well unfortunately the first part is starting to be proven right, the Ukrainians are starting to give in to the sheer pressure of the infinite manpower of the Russian army.
Infinite how? Both countries have millions of military aged men, before either country actually runs out of manpower there would have to be a hundred Stalingrad battles. Clearly the population amount is not the bottleneck here. For either of them to use manpower as a “weapon” they’d have to throw naked men at machine guns hoping that bullets can’t be resupplied faster than they can draft.
Russia like any other nation has a very limited amount of manpower that they can leverage before consequences start to hit. So far they have avoided another mobilisation, but if the numbers dwindle enough they’ll have to do it and that is going to be very unpopular. They can’t afford to grind their men the way they’re doing but they’re doing it anyway, probably because they want to project the image of “endless manpower Russia” - if they can keep the farce long enough then maybe Ukraine’s allies will give up.
By believing this tankie nonsense you’re helping them. Don’t.
Russia has already started to try to find new sources of conscripts - estimates peg that between 40 to as much as 75% of the originally eligible are dead or got the hell outta Dodge. This is potentially why they just criminalized homosexuality - “you’re gay, you either go to prison for life (where you will likely be killed) or you get conscripted. Your choice”. Shit, they asked North Korea of all places for soldiers.
No, the makeup of the Soviet military in WW2 was pretty proportional in terms of Ukrainians (and other minorities) to Russians. However, much of Ukraine was denied to the Soviet Union as a recruiting ground due to early Nazi successes, so one could argue that Ukrainians were overrepresented in comparison to the overall manpower that the USSR had at its disposal.
This seems unlikely given the population disparity between the Russians and Ukrainians (which was similar then as it is today) and the casualty figures. I can't find actual estimates of the ethnic breakdown of the army, but there are breakdowns of casualties by SSR. Obviously SSR is not a perfect analogue of ethnicity, but the numbers are far enough apart that I think it does the job here. Roughly 65% of military casualties were from Russia, 15% from Ukraine. Ukrainians were one of only two groups to be overrepresented as a proportion of casualty figures relative to their population though, the other being Belarusians.
There actually have been recent disputes over this, as the WW2 Soviet army and the Soviet army crushing the 1956 Hungarian revolution with tanks (the origin of the word “tankie” BTW) were largely the same armies. Hungarian propaganda was blaming the Ukranians, but the army based on the deaths was proportional to the demographics of the Union, 30% UA, 60% RU, 10% mixed other IIRC.
Nah, “if D-Day failed” implies everything up to that point being unchanged save for bad planning, in that scenario the Soviets would have had the war materials the US had been sending them and which they had turned the invasion around using by that point.
You’d need to have failed landings along the Mediterranean as well before we get to the point where the Nazi commanders who didn’t have their heads up their own asses last estimated they could turn the momentum back against the Soviets, and at that point the question isn’t if Germany could win, it’s how far Stalin would be willing to go to take the initiative back again, because the earth is a globe, and if needed, the US and Canada could have deployed their troops into the Soviet Union to mount a reinforcement operation while the UK doubled down on supplying asymmetric resistance against the Nazis, and now we’re dealing with what Japan’s role as an acting defense against such a maneuver would be or if they’d even be willing to mount a defensive operation against such a troop movement purely for Germany’s benefit.
Then again we’ve gone so far down the rabbit hole now that we’ve run into the fact that the US would probably have deployed the bomb since Germany was their intended target in the first place anyways, so does Japan just fold seeing that the US can make nukes now after Berlin becomes a glass floor?
WWII is just so all over the damn place that any point falling the other direction spirals half a million what ifs, none of which end up being answered really well in alt-hist media purely because people just have a really hard time picturing all the angles of attack in a war that truly encompasses the whole world in scope.
Russia would have had a fair shot if history repeated identically until the instant before d-day. Germany had had its supply lines crumble and their men were approaching child soldier levels of experience. Not to mention Hitler going partway down the path of the god complex and fully down the path of the meth addict after cancer ravaged his system. Not a historian but Russia would have had a fair shot if they were alone. Coin flip or better.
There's a reason Stalin demanded a western front be opened, and it wasn't because he wanted to share credit for the victory over Nazi Germany with the Western Allies. Without D-Day or a similar opening of a western front, the Soviet advance would have been much slower, much bloodier, and the final outcome of their offensives much more dubious.
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