As I’ve said before, this war will only end when NATO troops deploy openly in Ukraine, and not before. They could be there to fight, they could be there to guarantee a peace agreement - it doesn’t matter. Until they arrive, the war will continue.
What’s the difference between a Ukrainian with NATO weapons and a member of a NATO country with the same weapons? None as far as I can see - except perhaps a Ukrainian soldier might have a greater will to put themselves through the hardship of fighting and surviving.
There isn’t a difference. The problem is we don’t currently have Ukrainian troops with the same types and numbers of weapons that NATO would have. There’s no Abrams tanks. No Apache attack helicopters. No Navy of any sort. No F-16s, F/A-18s, F-35s, B-2s, A-10s, etc. and air fields in Western Europe or even the US for those planes to take off and land. No ATACMs. No Paladin howitzers with Excalibur rounds. Give Ukraine all that stuff (plus stuff from the European allies), in large numbers, and a few months of training and they’d have the war won by the end of this year regardless of who the leader of Russia is.
I recall the joke where a small country that wants an unwilling US to join their side in a war asks for advisors.
“How many do you need?”
“Just one, we’ll be sure he gets killed.”
Except that results in WWIII. For decades, NATO has said ‘We are not the aggressors,’ and the Soviet Union and Russia said, ‘We need to defend ourselves against the NATO aggressors!’ NATO declaring war on Russia gives Russia the appearance (to them) of having the moral high ground.
This war is actually what the UN peacekeeping forces are supposed to get in the middle of.
But can’t since Russia has a veto in the UN Security Council (likewise China).
Whether a Korea-style manoeuvre would work, I don’t know
It will only result in WW3 if the Russians choose to attack. What I hope to see happening: three-way peace talks between Russia, Ukraine and NATO, with Russia agreeing to withdraw to an agreed-upon border, and NATO deploying in Ukraine as soon as the fighting ends to guarantee the peace.
It’ll have to be NATO; the UN is about as useful as wet tissue paper when it comes to peacekeeping. The Ukrainians aren’t idiots.
That seems unlikely in the extreme, and that’s even assuming a NATO intervention for the sake of argument. The very idea of a voluntary Russian withdraw in the face of “NATO aggressors” seems anathema to everything Putin is supposed to stand for. If NATO were to intervene, I cannot imagine it ending any way but by a bloody fight all the way to whatever Ukraine is willing to unilaterally settle for (which isn’t all that different from what I can foresee happening now, it’s just a difference of how Ukraine’s expectations for unilateral settlement might be more conservative if NATO doesn’t put boots on the ground), and that’s assuming it doesn’t broaden into a wider conflict, in which case you can forget about Ukraine.
Even then, I don’t see how this can end. Suppose Ukraine fights till exhaustion , manages to take back a lot of its land, and then declares unilaterally “okay, that’s enough, we are finished fighting–you Russians can keep all of the rest.”
Even then , Russia won’t stop fighting. They want all of Ukraine.
What they can’t conquer with boots on the ground they will utterly destroy with artillery and missiles until no buildings are left standing, and no electric generation plants remain functioning.
Russia can keep fighting for 10 years- with unlimited numbers of draftees and tens of thousands of 1950’s era artillery pieces. Everybody loves to dismiss those artillery pieces as silly and old-fashioned .But there aren’t enough Himar smart missiles on the planet to destroy them all.( Look how successful they have been in Bakmut. )
One hopes the Russians will eventually do what they did in Afghanistan; declare victory and go home. Prigozhin has already suggested the “Afghan Solution”.
No. Not Russia. Putin. Like I said the only path to a Ukraine victory is a dead Putin. Mind you a negotiated peace with a Live Putin is possible, but no doubt he would be planning another invasion of somewhere…
Best estimate is just under 5,000 artillery pieces as of 2022, not tens of thousands. And even if they had ten of thousands on hand, they have an ever-shrinking ammo supply which would make the older stuff redundant and worthless. Russia has a fair degree of industrial output for shells, but they simply can’t keep up with the usage rate of a modern high-intensity war. No single country has that capacity.
Nor are “unlimited draftees” a reality or a solution. What Russia needs are more experienced quality troops, not cannon fodder. While quantity has a quality all of its own, if you can’t equip them properly you can’t make much use of them.
None of which is to say that Russia can’t keep slugging it out for years, or that Ukraine is guaranteed to win or that Ukraine doesn’t face a dire situation in terms of large-scale devastation and destroyed infrastructure. I think the overly optimistic are…a tad overly optimistic 
.
But you’re leaning way out on the other extreme with doomsaying based on dubious assumptions. Anyone who is sure how this all ends is fooling themselves. The situation remains very much in flux and there are plenty of grim realities facing both combatants.
I don’t know if I’m “sure”, but I’m very, very confident that Russia cannot win this war. Aside from wars in which one force is a couple of orders of magnitude larger (and/or more technologically sophisticated) than the other, war is almost entirely about logistics and morale. And Ukraine has a big advantage in both – the industrial capacity of the entire West, and the certainty that they are fighting for their existence as a nation. For this to change, something would have to destroy one or both of these big advantages of Ukraine, and it’s hard to imagine what that is. Nukes wouldn’t do it. Other WMDs wouldn’t do it. What would? I can’t think of anything realistic.
And even if Putin won’t ever give up, at some point that becomes irrelevant. Ukraine will eventually push them back to the border, and keep them there even when Russia pushes back.
A limited portion thereof. If the industrialized West was pouring ALL their resources into Ukraine that would be one thing, but they’re hedging and pouring some in for really what are arguably logical nationalist reasons. And they started pouring it in in dribs and drabs, slowly accelerating over time. There are for example real worries over Ukraine’s ability to maintain their ground-based air defense at current strength as their legacy missile stocks dwindle and what that could mean if suddenly the VKS can gain air superiority in Ukrainian air space as it starts to collapse.
It’s all well and good to say replace Russian GBAD systems with Western equivalents, but there aren’t completely comparable Western equivalents to be found in sufficient numbers. The USSR and NATO had very different air defense philosophies. NATO counted on air superiority and active interception with aircraft, with ground-based defense being a second-line and recently more focused on anti-missile defense. It’s one reason the Russian air force is not particularly well-trained or equipped for SEAD - they didn’t anticipate doing it as a priority. The USSR/Russia/Ukraine instead concentrated on large networks of integrated ground-based air defense, with interceptors as the back-up (as a result the US air force HAS prioritized SEAD). The West doesn’t manufacture comparable missiles in comparable numbers and the Ukrainian air force would take a longgg, very expensive time to get up to modern NATO air defense standards.
That’s just one serious issue. You could also make an argument that Ukraine might be vulnerable to a morale collapse. Let’s say take a worst-case scenario where the next assumed Ukrainian counter-offensive ends up performing very poorly for whatever reason. Western nations get pessimistic. Start pressuring Ukraine to negotiate, start hedging about/cutting back supplying arms and training. Trump wins the next election and says ‘hey, this ain’t our fight - no more aid - too expensive!’ Meanwhile the doomsayers worst nightmares about destroyed infrastructure comes to pass as Ukrainian air defense efforts flag. Casualties mounting, re-supply declining, cities going dark. Ukraine says ‘fuck it - we can’t maintain this anymore - we’ll surrender Crimea and the Donbas for peace in exchange for what Russia is still holding in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.’
It could happen.
Not saying it will. Honestly, I’m more on your side of the fence 
. I think the odds are better on Ukraine’s end of the equation. But counting unhatched chickens and all that. I prefer to pragmatically hedge my bets, because war is a chaotic system.
All of that is reasonable to consider, but from a much loftier perspective, logistics comes down to the following - are the soldiers at the front trained and supplied to keep fighting? Not just with the most advanced weapons systems and ammunition, but with food, clothing, fuel, tents, spare parts, radios, medical supplies, etc. Weapons are significant, but they’re just a part of that. And Russia has been failing, again and again, to keep their fighters supplied with the most basic needs of soldiers. Ukraine has not. And maybe the West isn’t all in on weapons, but we are all in on food, medicine, clothing, etc. We’re not hearing about Ukrainian fighters going hungry, or freezing to death, or dying from lack of decent medical care.
And if that doesn’t change, Ukraine will win.
6 posts were merged into an existing topic: Russian Use of Nuclear Weapons and Response rgd Ukraine
Based on past history that will have be a LOT of misery. Truly incredible amounts.
Keep in mind North Korea and the level of misery imposed there by sanctions, and yet they keep on with their system.
Close to a warning for bringing up Trump in this thread. {What Exit?
My doubts are in this area. Donald Trump winning in 2024 is a realistic outcome. That would take the US out of the picture and leave Ukraine to rely on Europe and maybe South Korea.
Even barring that, we (the collective West) seem to not be taking this as seriously as we should be. We should have already started on a WWII style increase in arms production. That we haven’t shows that we aren’t as serious as we should be despite the fact that this war is the de facto front line in the world wide war between democracy and authoritarianism.
But the old-fashioned artillery is relatively short-ranged.
While I have no idea where the post-war border will be, I’m pretty sure I know what the Ukrainian side of it will look like. There will be a 20-mile or so buffer zone, that is completely devoid of civilian targets, and very little critical infrastructure. This will be supported by a second military zone, with HIMARS and the like pre-positioned to counter the most likely Russian routes of attack should they try to invade again. Ukraine will basically ignore the weekly Russian shelling of a bunch of open fields, except for once or twice a year, when they decide to get Flagrantly Outraged At The Impertinence, and HIMARS the fuck out of a randomly selected Russian artillery unit, just to remind the Russians that they can.
Everywhere else in Ukraine will be installing the latest version of something like the Israeli “Iron Dome” system to shoot down missiles.
A conflict like this could persist for decades, should Russia so desire.