Re:Finland will seek NATO membership immediately
by trasz on Thursday May 12, 2022 @02:44PM
(#31358437)
Back then Russians had the will to fight. They knew what they were fighting for. Nowadays very few would want to fight for another oligarchs yacht.
Re:Finland will seek NATO membership immediately
by bzbarsky on Friday May 13, 2022 @12:54AM
(#31363485)
Just to make the numbers clear, Leningrad had something like 2.5 million residents in 1941. Depending on who is counting, somewhere between 600 thousand and a million died during the siege of Leningrad (largely from hunger, which is a separate long discussion).
There were also somewhere on the order of 350-400 thousand Soviet soldiers killed in the battles around Leningrad.
It's pretty hard to "take" a multi-million person city if the residents are willing to accept double-digit-percentage fatality rates to prevent it... The big unknown is always whether they will be willing to accept it.
Ah...if I recall, the Germans - with a very large, experienced, and well-equipped army, at the time - assumed that St. Petersburg could be taken fairly easily back in 1941. That turned out not to be the case.