The Ukrainian military has created an application to show users live updates of just how many Russian soldiers are dying in Ukraine.
The name of the app? “Russian ship, go fuck yourself,” an homage to the famous soldier who said the words to a Russian officer shortly before getting captured.
The app, which the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine created in concert with Alty, a Ukrainian tech company, can be downloaded by looking up Русский корабль иди нах@й, or Ркин, in the app store. The app also includes information about Russian equipment, the military said.
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Leonid Goriev, the CEO of Alty, said the company created the app to help bring Ukraine a victory sooner.
“We were inspired by the daily work of the specialists of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, who diligently formulated information on the damage of enemy personnel and the Russian Federation technology in their infographics,” Gorev said in a statement shared by the Ukrainian military. “Therefore, on a volunteer basis, we created a handy app with a set of beautiful widgets to track the occupant's losses and bring our victory closer.”
A spokesperson for Alty confirmed to The Daily Beast the company made the app.
The cheeky app includes instructions for users on how to make the app’s information and latest stats appear on the iPhone’s “Today View” (the side screen with multiple widgets users can access by swiping all the way to the right on the Home Screen) so users don’t even have to click into the app to get the latest information on just how poorly Russia’s military is doing.
The casualties for Russia have been staggering. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization estimated in March that up to 40,000 Russians were killed, captured, missing, or suffering from wounds during just the first months of the war. Overall, approximately 24,700 Russian troops have died since the beginning of the war, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said Thursday.
Although Russian forces have been committing atrocities throughout Ukraine, the Russian military hasn’t been performing very well from an operational standpoint. They’ve been having trouble coordinating plans from the top-down. Russian forces weren’t able to capture Kyiv at the outset of the invasion as planned, and instead were stuck outside the capital without proper sustainment supplies. Eventually, they had to just up and leave because they couldn’t get the job done.
Russian military leadership has even been lying to Russian President Vladimir Putin along the way, misleading him on just how poorly the armed forces are performing, a senior White House official said in March.
And along the way, Putin’s apparent interest in helping provide life-sustaining tools on the battlefield to keep the war going as much as he can has been dismal. A photo comparing Russian first aid kits and Ukrainian first aid kits that Russian fighters shared on social media last week shows the Russians are not nearly as prepared to provide life-saving care in crisis situations as Ukrainians are, which is certainly not helping the military keep up the numbers necessary to fight the war.
The app comes at a potentially pivotal moment in the war where tracking casualties might provide up-to-the minute information on which way the wind is blowing. Although Russia has had to regroup and move off the goal of taking Kyiv, Russia has instead set its sights on fighting in Eastern Ukraine in the Donbas. And in the coming days, as Victory Day nears in Russia, the day Russia celebrates the victory in World War II against the Nazis, senior Biden administration officials are warning that Putin might be working to escalate the war, as The Daily Beast reported. Ukrainian officials have suggested that Putin will seek to declare war formally and mobilize even more troops to take on the fight in Ukraine by Victory Day, May 9.
And more mobilization means, inevitably, more Russian troops sent home in body bags.
For now, there is no clear way out of the war, Russian military analysts tell The Daily Beast.
“There is nothing to suggest to us that either country is going to make major concessions for peace or that either military is likely to quit the fight in the near future,” Michael Kofman, research program director in the Russia Studies Program at CNA, told The Daily Beast. “If the Russian leadership declares a state of war and begins mobilizing the population, that mobilization… is a very strong indicator that this war is likely to go on much longer and be more costly.”
Regardless of whether May 9 leads to massive escalation, all signs point to this war dragging on with no end in sight, according to Rob Lee, a Russian military analyst at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
“The bad thing for the occupier is that Ukraine gets a vote on this and… they have no reason to stop the war at this point,” Lee said. “There are more than a few Ukrainian people who want to take back all the Donbas.”
