Hostomel is a crucial airport outside Kyiv that the Russians have been trying desperately to secure from day 1.
Video posted online on Friday, supported by Ukrainian reporting, indicates that Russian mechanized infantry formations are being destroyed as they move against Hostomel objectives. Graphic video shows a Hostomel road littered with Russian armored troop transport and infantry fighting vehicles. Dead soldiers lie around them. The damage to the vehicles and the injuries to the soldiers suggest they were ambushed under heavy fire, including from antitank weapons. The video shows that some Russian soldiers were unable even to dismount their personnel carriers before being killed.
The video is just one testament to a tragic war. For the Russian military and Vladimir Putin, however, this situation encapsulates an escalating crisis.
It is now clear that the Russian military lacks the troop capacity, combined arms coordination, logistics trains, and morale to sustain a high-tempo war throughout Ukraine.
By this point, I am highly confused by two contradicting narratives.
One says that Russian forces are slowly but inevitably closing a stranglehold on Ukraine and it’s only a matter of time.
The other points to rampant Russian corruption, mass desertion, bursting tires, low morale, conscripts punching holes in fuel tanks to evade duty, and seems to be celebrating an imminent Russian collapse.
For what it’s worth, there has been some discussion here of an alternative: any Russian soldier who surrenders and defects may be allowed passage to a bordering EU country for temporary residency during asylum processing. As far as I’m aware, this is just discussion, with no official policies or procedures yet in place, but it would provide at least a bit of a release valve.
Disagree. It’s both. The inevitability of the former, except the timeline is impeded by the dysfunction of the latter. Still inevitable, just meaningfully slowed.
Which enables a potential third path in which Russia itself destabilizes and cannot continue prosecuting the war. This is still more unlikely than likely, I think, but it’s not implausible either.
I’m not sure what your point is. There is a substantial difference between a peaceful transfer of territory in accordance with treaties, and a military invasion to overturn a government and annex territory by force, in violation of the UN Charter. It’s not surprising that the reaction of Western countries will be different.
Clausewitz famously said that war is the continuation of politics by other means.
If the political goal is not achieved, then the war is lost. End of story.
The American goal in Afghanistan was to remove the Taliban from power and install an American-friendly government in their place. Today the Taliban are back in charge – and that means the war was lost, regardless of what happened militarily.
In Afghanistan, America had a situation hundreds of times more favorable in every possible way than Russia has in Ukraine.
Even from a purely military point of view, Russia is failing abysmally, and that’s unlikely to change. Time is not on the Russian side. They do not have long to turn the situation around, before Russia collapses economically, the army refuses to fight, and the Russian population turns against Putin. And even some kind of military victory would be very far from winning the war.
The outcome will never be that Ukraine is incorporated into a greater and more powerful Russian Empire, while the world sits back and accepts that.
Winning versus losing is not a binary proposition. There is a vast range of outcomes between “Ukraine’s military handily defeats the Russian invaders in the field, and Russia accepts the defeat and withdraws” and “Russia’s military crushes Ukraine in the field and takes a sufficient level of control as to make an insurgency untenable.”
My point in my reply to @Velocity was to observe that the formulation was a false binary, that a more accurate representation of reality blends together elements of the given exclusionary perceptions, and that further consideration would be more productive if it recognizes a much wider variety of possible futures.
Well, if we’re all Nazis according to the Russians, I’m going to need to go get me some Hugo Boss. Could use a new suit.
"Lawmakers and pundits essentially debunked Putin’s claim that he invaded Ukraine to remove what he said is a “Nazi” government—which is, incidentally, headed by a Jewish man. Instead of demystifying the Kremlin’s agenda for the masses, state media demonstrated that in Putin’s Russia, anyone who dares to oppose Putin is described as a “Nazi,” to the point where the term is devoid of its original meaning.
On Soloviev’s show, political scientist and professor of history Elena Ponomareva asserted: “We’re fighting not only against NATO, but also against the Nazi European Union.”
Two days earlier, on a state TV show 60 Minutes, journalist Andrei Sidorchik rode the concept all the way down the hill when he exclaimed: “Joe Biden is a Nazi. The U.S. congressmen—Democrat and Republican—are Nazis… German chancellor is a Nazi… EU leaders are Nazis… because their sanctions are attempting to preserve neo-Nazism in Ukraine.”"
It’s seemed to me for a while that for this conversation to work, everyone needs to be clear on what they define as “winning” the war. Like what if Russia takes Kyiv and arrests Zelensky. Has Russia now “won” the war, regardless of what happens next? Some folks, by my reading, seem to think the answer is yes, and some no. But I’m not certain.
One thing that China has to re-consider is the cost of conquering Taiwan. While it’s a smaller country than Ukraine, it seems to have a lot more military power, and most of that appears to be more modern and thus more capable than what Ukraine has. So even if China does eventually swamp Taiwan just by overwhelming numbers, we can expect that Taiwan will take a much greater relative toll on the invading forces than we’ve seen in Ukraine.
Does China want to risk being seen as a paper tiger, like Russia is being revealed as? Even if they eventually win, a costly win makes it that much more likely that the next country they try to bully will tell them to buzz off.
This is what I was thinking. Based on how Russia has historically treated a lot of returning prisoners of war, it’s not even a question that the soldiers who are surrendering face a significant risk if they return home, particularly those who have shown up on videos, calling their moms and whatnot. A decade in a gulag is probably the best they can look forward to.
As others have said, it’s both.
From before the actual invasion, this was what a lot of people thought the Ukrainian plan was always going to be. No one thought they’d be able to meet the Russians in a stand-up fight in the countryside, so the plan was to fall back into the cities, to try to grind them up in street-by-street fighting, where having a lot of tanks gives you much less of an advantage.
That plan still has merit, even if, as it turned out, the Russians don’t have the expected overwhelming advantage in the open country. They still have the numbers on their side, and so can absorb the current losses as they slowly push forward, but make no mistake: as bad as the Russians are having it now, it will get worse once they start pushing into the cities.
In the east and south, where the mud isn’t causing so much maneuver problems, the logistics tail seems more resilient for some reason. Russia is still progressing down there.
In the north, the advance is bogged down. It’s advancing, but at a slower and slower pace. It seems like this effort is days or weeks from exhaustion. They may partially encircle Kiev but they lack the numbers for an airtight encirclement.
There are still ugly days ahead. As for ground units, there is no “cavalry” riding to the rescue for Russia. But as those ground forces get exhausted, Russia will resort to more indiscriminate shelling and bombing (unless the UA air force maintains parity). Chemical weapons are possible. At a widespread level, the Russian economy is not on a footing to keep these efforts thoroughly resupplied. Those seem to be the wildcards about how the mid-game and endgame will play out.
I suspect that folks who expect an inevitable Russian victory are simply having trouble believing the widespread level of neglect and incompetence in the Russian army, that they’d invade with such an unprepared force. It’s a shocking thing to process, but IMO it seems to be proving out.
Moscow rails against “fascists” on its border and insists on territorial concessions for its own “security.” These are refused, and the Red Army invades.
Despite their military superiority, the invaders suffer five times as many losses as the defenders. Moscow gains some territory in the end, but it’s a Pyrrhic victory; the defenders maintain their independence, and their bravery is celebrated worldwide.
That, in a nutshell, is the 1939-1940 Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland. It’s well worth reading about, not least for the parallels to the current war in Ukraine.
I’ve read stories of the Eastern European countries sending Ukraines their old Soviet era planes. Things like Su-25s and MiG-29s. My guess is there’s a limited supply of such planes. Sending western made planes has the problem of the Ukrainian pilots not being trained on their operation. That and it would be obvious that they weren’t originally Ukrainian.
I suppose that puts to rest the stories I had read that I was basing my above statements on the sending of fighter jets.
I wonder where the limits are. Would NATO send old tanks? Artillery? Helicopters? Or are we limiting the supplies to ammunition?
I’m hopeful that those countries are sending planes and then publicly denying that they’re sending planes. The US could support that by sending US planes and air defense equipment to the countries that are sending their own planes to Ukraine.
True, but to qualify as a neutral country for the purposes of the Hague Convention, a country can’t provide arms to one of the belligerants and not the other. If Poland, Rumania and Hungary are providing arms to Ukraine and not to Russia, they are not a neutral country, unlike Switzerland during the two world wars.
I’ve seen several reports and videos that show advance weapons are making a difference in defending Ukraine. Helicopters and planes are getting shot down.
It reminds me of Vietnam. US forces lost a lot of planes in that war. The supplies from Russia could never be completely shut down.
There were Russian advisors in N Vietnam and US forces had to avoid bombing them.
I doubt it. NATO is frightened of getting into direct conflict with Russia, especially after Putin hinted at a nuclear response.
Russia will be able to see and monitor planes flying in from NATO countries. Russia has no way of knowing whether they are being piloted by NATO pilots or Ukrainian pilots. If NATO pilots are involved then NATO is at war with Russia.
However, NATO countries seem to be providing plenty of MANPADS, and Ukraine is making good use of them, as well as of the more sophisticated anti-aircraft systems they already had. Ukraine has also captured three modern Russian Pantsir anti-aircraft systems intact.
As of today they are claiming 39 Russian planes and 40 helicopters shot down.
Two more reports this afternoon (Ukraine time), from southern Ukraine:
14:30 Mayor of Mykolaiv: three Russian helicopters were shot down and enemy vehicles were captured in the ongoing defence of the city from Russian armed aggression.
15:33 Ukrainian air defense destroyed a Russian military plane over Odessa. — Operational Headquarters of the Odessa Regional Military Administration
