.
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Russia is corrupt, weak, and incompetent, and their forces are entirely unmotivated. The entire country of Ukraine is united against Russia, and fighting with skill and competence. Russia has no chance to win this war.
Your optimism is unwarranted. Russia has to win ths “Special Operation”. The stake of the nation rides on succeeding here. If they fail, the very foundation of the Russia Empire will crack like a Crimea Bridge pier. Vlad absolutely must win or history will see him as the man who caused Russia to fall (which it probably will anyway).
There is a difference between the Russian Empire, and Russia.
There is a difference between other countries re-conquering areas that the Russians had previously conquered, and other countries conquering Russia.
Russia is so big, both in geography and population, that it would take a world war for it to be conquered. (Even in the absence of nukes.)
Big is kind of the opposite of naturally stable. If the Kremlin cannot maintain strict control of the national narrative and outlying areas start to perceive Moscow as somewhat weak or irretrievably corrupt, internal conflict is a possibility.
So does Ukraine’s.
Rather more so than Russia’s. There will still be a Russia remaining if Ukraine wins the war; just a rather different Russia. It’s pretty clear that if Russia wins there won’t be any Ukraine.
Is inevitable is more like it.
same was true for nazi-germany …
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good news: that did not change the course of WWII
+1
and if you throw twice as many soliders into the war, your problem gets twice as big, and not SMALLER (as the russians seem to believe)
It’s Putin, not Russia, who has to win this war he started. It’s not Russia that won’t survive the loss, it’s him.
This doesn’t change what I said. Yes, Putin has to win. He still won’t. Nukes won’t change this.
IMHO.
True, but I can’t think of anyone who has any interest in conquering Russia, just rendering it impotent in aggressing against its neighbors.
Or for some (I’m lookin’ at you China) making into a client state.
Russia has had the same problems its entire history, and somehow they still win wars. They do this by picking on much smaller opponents and overwhelming them with numbers. This is how ALL Russian wars go, they lose and lose and lose until eventually the other side can’t fight any more. Ukraine has very little chance in this war, better today than in February for sure, but they will run out of fighting men long before Russia does.
Their record seems best when the rest of the world takes a hands off approach and leaves Russia to bumble its way through to a bloody victory on its own terms. Here, so far, it seems there is just enough outside interference to forestall that.
I remain unimpressed with the Russian military, and see this as another example of the inherent weakness of authoritarian (corruption-laden) regimes: they’re great at invading countries that desperately want peace and subduing the truly isolated, but they’re shit when it comes to sustained opposition with international support. So it was with Hitler’s Germany, and so it will be with Putin’s Russia, provided the US and the bulk of Europe hold fast in their resolve.
There is a Russian boogeyman. His name is Putin. Only it’s the Russian people who should be afraid of him.
You should be unimpressed, they are weak and mostly by design. A dictator cannot ever be safe around a strong military. But they are still magnitudes larger than Ukraine’s military and for all the help the world is sending them (which all combined is still less than what they themselves have stolen from the Russians in the past few weeks) we are not sending them any troops, and they will run out before Russia does.
How’d that work in Afghanistan?
You think this is a war of attrition? And can you point to any other wars that have been won, by attrition, where the end goal was wholesale annexation—or even maintenance within a sphere of control—of large swathes of territory?
I am a professional military logistician. Without competent logistics, a country cannot win an offensive war. Russia has shown no signs of developing anything close to competent logistics, and it takes years and sometimes decades to develop competent logistics for an offensive operation against a large force. Ukraine is huge, with millions and millions of people willing to risk their lives to defend it. That requires very good logistics, as well as good equipment and millions of motivated soldiers. Russia has none of this. They could mobilize their whole country and they still wouldn’t get millions of motivated soldiers who are willing to fight and die for Russia, much less a competent logistical capability.
They have no chance. I was saying this would be very difficult for Russia since the very beginning, unlike the conventional wisdom. You’re incorrect about what it would take to win this kind of offensive war.
They really aren’t. Russia started the war with something in the neighbourhood of 850k active duty personnel in the armed forces, including army, navy, air force, and strategic missile forces. Of those, some 300k were ground forces. This force has suffered extensive losses, and prior to the “partial mobilization” Russia was struggling to recruit sufficient replacements to keep their numbers even. Add in to those the roughly 300k who are said to be mobilized in the past couple weeks. There are still plenty of military-age men available for mobilization, but given the shambles that the current “partial mobilization” has been it’s not at all clear that Russia can produce effective combat units from that population on a time scale relevant to this war.
Ukraine started out much smaller (though not a full order of magnitude smaller), but pushed the full mobilization button back in February and now has some 700k people in arms, almost all in ground forces. They are still struggling to train and equip these numbers, unsurprisingly, but are receiving considerable foreign assistance in both training and equipment. Compared to Russian forces, the average level of training will be superior, and relative to the newly mobilized Russian units, vastly superior. And Ukraine is still not anywhere near to tapping out their pool of military-age people. Given the foreign support in training and equipment, they can probably increase the size of their army faster than the Russians in the near future, and that only changes if the Russians make fundamental changes to how they’re going about mobilization. In terms of raw numbers of in-theatre personnel, Ukraine likely now has an advantage over Russia, not vice versa.
That said, while light infantry is critical to being able to hold territory, without support its not much use on the offensive. And heavy support is something of a different story. The Russians have a large advantage there, but even there it’s nothing like an order of magnitude advantage. Let’s look just at tanks as a proxy for all combat vehicles, because the numbers are easier to find and while various categories of other materiel have different ratios of relative strength the trends are the same across the board.
The Russians do have a lot more tanks than Ukaine. Or did have a lot more tanks. The Russians have lost a staggering number of tanks - 1337 visually confirmed on the latest Oryx tally, 2500 claimed by Ukraine MoD, actual number somewhere in between. These losses total over half the Russian pre-war active tank fleet (~2800). To make good these losses, they’ve stripped out-of-theatre units of their tanks. For example, satellite shots show bases in Kaliningrad with almost no equipment left compared to pre-war images. And they’re activating old tanks out of storage, of which there are supposedly 10k or so. But clearly these old tanks are not easily made operable, or we wouldn’t be seeing older and older tanks reaching the front lines. There’s been an absolute explosion of destroyed/captured T-62’s in the past few weeks (no pun intended as they’ve been mostly captured not blown up), mostly in the Kherson region. The variants of T-72’s which have shown up in the loss lists has skewed further and further away from the recently updated variants. The Russians are now reported getting a donation of old T-72A (40-year-old variant) out of deep storage from Belarus.
Ukraine, on the other hand, has captured more Russian tanks (visually confirmed tally) than it has lost on reasonable estimates, and has additionally received significant numbers of tanks from other old Warsaw Pact allies. The in-theatre tank fleets are likely now close to on par in numbers, and whatever edge Russia had at the beginning of the war in its fleet being newer tech than the upgraded T-64’s that form the core of Ukrainian forces has gone by the wayside. And beyond the numbers, as this war progresses the average Russian tank crew is less and less experienced, with less and and less training, while the opposite is true of Ukrainian tank crews, just in virtue of the relative loss rates and the atrocious state of Russian training.
I submit that at this point, Russians cannot rely on superior numbers to win a war of attrition in Ukraine, unless the West completely withdraws its support of Ukraine. The current Russian army is not the old Soviet Red Army with inexhaustible reserves, and cannot return to those days on a time scale relevant to this war as it would require fundamental changes to the structure and organization of the army in a way that is not compatible with the kleptocracy that is modern Russia.
USA 
is sending Ukraine 
new military aid worth $725 Million
It Includes
-200 Humvee’s (HMMWV’s)
-500 Excalibur Artillery Rounds - 155mm guided projectiles
-23,000 155mm Artillery Rounds - High Explosive
-5,000 Anti-Tank Weapons - could be mix of Javelin, AT4, LAW, TOW
-5,000 Remote Anti-Armor Mines - these are more 155mm rounds with anti-tank submunitions RAAMs
-HARM 88 Anti Radar Missiles
-Additional HIMARS Ammunition - We’re not saying how many or what type. Perhaps a mix of unitary warhead and the bazillion tungsten BB warhead.