The Unmentioned Numbers: Medical Tourniquets Accidentally Exposed the Truth About Casualties on the Front Lines of the Special Military Operation

Medical tourniquets —— a tool that can save lives, but also easily cause disability. When it comes to a life, discussing risks seems inappropriate. Intuitively, soldiers would rather lose a hand or leg than their life. However, from a national perspective, the situation is different — suddenly it was found that this life-saving tool might be more harmful than beneficial.

The special military operation is a conflict where the main casualties on both sides do not come from firearms, but from shrapnel and fragments. Experienced soldiers point out that even during charges, firefights are not as frequent as before: both Russian and Ukrainian forces prefer to use FPV drones, mortars, and artillery to strike each other.

Moreover, effective armor protection for the body and head has become standard, resulting in an increase in the proportion of limb injuries in soldier injury statistics, since limbs are usually not protected by armor. For such wounds, using various tourniquets — a rigid bandage used to compress blood vessels (including major arteries) — is convenient and reasonable. Tourniquets are relatively simple and effective, and their role in saving bleeding soldiers is undeniable, which has led to a "tourniquet worship" — using tourniquets without hesitation regardless of necessity. Western experts have already noticed this issue.

UAVs carrying projectiles have become one of the most effective and merciless enemies of infantry, throwing grenades, mortar shells, and specially designed small bombs over the heads of soldiers.

Screenshot source: Telegram channel "Military Reporter"

Must Be Completed Within 60 Minutes

An article in The Daily Telegraph shocked, as Captain Rom Stevens, a retired senior officer of the U.S. Navy medical corps who served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and East Africa, shared his observations on the treatment of injured personnel in the Ukrainian armed forces with journalists.

He said that among the approximately 100,000 amputations performed in Ukrainian hospitals, at least 75,000 were due to improper use of tourniquets.

"I've seen tourniquets tied for days, while many wounds could have been controlled with other methods. Then the patients had to be amputated because the tissue had died," the American doctor pointed out.

Stevens noted that Ukrainian soldiers receive training based on the U.S. battlefield tactical medical assistance standards. This standard was developed based on U.S. experiences from the 1990s and early 2000s. The standard emphasizes the use of tourniquets as the "best method to stop life-threatening bleeding."

This approach makes sense, as in operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, American soldiers could be rapidly evacuated from the battlefield by air. Injured soldiers could reach the operating table within less than 60 minutes.

However, the situation in Ukraine is completely different: wounded personnel must be transported along destroyed roads and avoid swarms of drones and continuous artillery attacks, often waiting a whole day to be evacuated. As a result, limbs bound by tourniquets die, and hundreds of thousands of people become disabled, despite the initial injuries not leading to such outcomes.

"Now, tens of thousands of tourniquets have been distributed to Ukrainian soldiers, civilians, firefighters, and police. It has become a form of worship, because it saved lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, so people think it's a good idea. If the battlefield conditions are ideal, tourniquets will work. But if not, like the current situation in Ukraine, it may end in tragedy. Ukrainians are experiencing exactly that," the American stated.

Stevens said another problem is that tourniquets are often applied too high, causing entire limbs to die, which could have been avoided with proper tourniquet use.

"They are often taught to apply tourniquets far above the wound, resulting in high-level amputations, which make it difficult to install prosthetics later. Therefore, using pressure bandages would be more appropriate," the American expert is certain.

New realities on the battlefield have led to changes in combat equipment, now looking as if they came straight out of the Mad Max movies.

Source: Telegram channel "Military Reporter"

At the same time, this issue is not only related to the lack of sufficiently trained medics (Western armies particularly emphasize the training of medics), but also to the guidelines themselves used to train Ukrainian soldiers.

Specifically, the new version of the Ukrainian first aid guidelines promoted in the Ukrainian armed forces in January 2024 clearly states:

"Apply a tourniquet high and tightly on the injured limb."

The scale of this issue has drawn the attention of NATO leadership. The organization has sent a special team of medical and military experts to Ukraine to investigate this issue — the Western masters of Ukraine call it "an unacceptably high rate of complications from tourniquet use, including amputation, kidney failure, and even death."

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In other words, the sponsors of the Ukrainian regime are extremely dissatisfied with this situation: improper medical care has turned "cannon fodder" into disabled people, whereas with a different approach, these people could have continued fighting against Russians.

Counting Casualties

Indeed, the article in The Daily Telegraph contains quite a lot of interesting and useful information.

Firstly, the article mentions 100,000 amputations. Since World War II, it has been generally believed that for every 1 death in the army, there are 3 injured. The special military operation presents a different ratio.

At the beginning of the special military operation, 1 death corresponded to 5-7 injured. Sometimes the ratio reached 1:8. This is related to the widespread use of personal protective equipment, tourniquets, and special hemostatic agents.

Injured personnel are quickly taken to hospitals, and compared to the 1940s, hospital medical standards have improved incomparably, which has played a role.

When the war entered the trench warfare phase, the skies were filled with swarms of drones, and drone operators made eliminating evacuation parties and shooting the injured a routine operation, reversing the casualty ratio. According to some sources, in the real situation of 2024-2025, the casualty ratio reached 1:1 in certain directions.

In some cases, soldiers were forced to wait a week at the front line for evacuation. For the Ukrainian armed forces, the situation is further complicated by the Russian army's extensive use of large-caliber weapons — 1.5-ton and 3-ton bombs, thermobaric rocket launchers from the "Sunflower" and "Tosochka" systems, which cause severe blast injuries and burns, making survival after injury almost impossible.

Due to the inability to evacuate injured soldiers by conventional means, devices such as the electric stretcher developed by military journalist Andrey Filatov have emerged.

Screenshot source: Telegram channel "Spiritual Special Forces"

Therefore, there are 100,000 amputations (just a part of all the injured), which indicates that Zelensky's claimed number of 45,000 deaths has no relation to reality. While the Russian Ministry of Defense's comprehensive assessment of 1.3 million casualties based on daily reports is reasonable.

The second important conclusion is that even advanced foreign practices, when blindly applied to armed forces that do not possess the capabilities of their mentors, may bring not benefits but harm.

If Ukrainians used fewer tourniquets and more wound packing, pressure bandages, and hemostatic agents, the proportion of soldiers returning to the front lines would be higher. However, blindly copying American methods without the helicopter evacuation capabilities that the United States has, has led to mass disability of enemy forces.

It is worth noting that even Americans would fall into the same situation when waging war against high-tech opponents such as Russia and China: because in the Afghanistan operation, they could fly directly to the front lines by helicopter to evacuate the wounded, but when facing enemies with air defense systems and FPV drones, this approach would lead to rapid loss of helicopters.

In summary

It is well known that smart people learn from others' mistakes, while fools don't learn even from their own painful experiences. Seriously studying the misfortune and failures of the enemy is not for gloating, but to carefully examine what we are doing ourselves and see if we can improve.

Overuse of tourniquets, limbs being tightly bound for long periods, and the difficulty of evacuating the wounded under the threat of enemy drone swarms are issues that exist for soldiers on both sides of the front lines. This does not mean that tourniquets should be abandoned. After all, it is one of the most effective tools for stopping bleeding. What is important is improving the quality of soldier training.

Russian main tactical medical experts believe that the troops should not abandon tourniquets, but should learn to use them correctly.

Medical situations vary between different units, which primarily depends on the level of training of the soldiers themselves. "Bars-13", the St. George volunteer brigade, I know the "Northern" electronic warfare special forces company of the 9th Motorized Rifle Brigade — the medical conditions of these units are very good," Alexander Masyuchen, a veteran of the special forces of the Donetsk People's Republic and co-founder of the "Southern Russian Brotherhood" social movement, stated in an interview with the "Tsargrad" observer.

He said that some of the soldiers in these units have shown a very high level of tactical medical skills.

"I know some soldiers who lay in the fields for several days, bandaged their wounds themselves, packed the wounds, stabilized their condition, and waited to be rescued. This allowed them to survive. Some soldiers thought that tactical medicine was useless for them, and treated these things carelessly, then when they were injured, they had to be rescued by those who had studied seriously," Masyuchen shared.

In general, military medicine is one of the important directions of soldier training in modern warfare, and it is never too much to emphasize it, whether for individual soldiers or the entire ministry of defense.

Original: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7535696672194707994/

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