But they sucked despite their preparation. Russians are just bad at war. They're brave, but their leadership and training is often abysmal. (Fortunately, Ukrainians are also Russians.)

I think you mean "slavs" and not Russians specifically, but again, this is because of communism. Name 1 communist country that actually fought well in a war without relying on hordes and meat grinder tactics? Even the vaunted North Vietnamese had like a 1:20 to 1:40 KD ratio against the US. Communism is anathema to things like elite forces, aces, and military genius. If Rommel was born in Russia, Stalin would have purged him.

I honestly don't believe Russians are inferior the way Sub-Saharan Africans are inferior or the French are inferior [kek], I think communism did them in.

That's a myth. Just compare the population numbers of German-controlled areas and the areas still under the control of the USSR by then - it had lost most populated areas and the industrialiazed regions that Kaganovich was not able to move. The USSR barely had an advantage, and that's disregarding the millions taken prisoner and killed by that point.

Umm, Soviet areas recently and temporarily occupied by the Germans are not actually productive or useful for the German side. This isn't like a video game or the HoI series.

And no, ACTUAL DEPLOYED STRENGTH and INDUSTRIAL CAPACITY were HUGELY on the Soviet side. I have read detailed sources on this, but here is a quick and dirty version I can pull up in seconds on wikipedia:

The Soviets outnumbered the Germans [2:1 in 42 and 43, increasing to 3:1 after.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_(World_War_II)#Forces) Locally on fronts it was often worse. In industrial production the disparity was far worse. In 1943 Germany made 2,983 pz4 while the USSR made 15,700 t34s.

Politicians are evil. Face it.

I don't think Rand Paul, or Ron DeSantis, or many other politicians are evil. I think most Democrats are only stupid, only a relatively small number of hard core activists are what you could call evil.

Dude, 50k dead means about 200k casualties - more than Putin's whole army. Is this your pro-puppet copium or what?

200k casualties is not outside of the reasonable range. A lot of wounded can go back into deployment later. Russia has been scraping the barrel for replacements since March/April just to try to replace losses, and has not been able to keep up. This is why Putin had to order a "partial mobilization" of hundreds of thousands of people, just to throw bodies into trenches to slow down the Ukrainian offensives.

By all accounts the Russian units on most parts of the line are still understrength. The area near Kharkiv was admitted to be severely understrength at the time of the Ukrainian offensive in September, and even pro-Russian sources cite this as the reason for the loss of that region.