Agreed. I expect this quagmire situation where nobody seems to be making any gains to last for an unknown period of time, followed by a span of about a week or two between “What the heck just happened there?” and Ukrainian tanks rolling in to Moscow to accept Putin’s surrender (or some other similarly dramatic end).
I don’t expect a government collapse. Putin would lose power before it gets that bad. But, Russia’s ability to fund a war will be lost for a few years.
They’ll always have the Nukes and pose a threat to NATO.
A lot of their Cold War stockpile of weapons has been used.
How would Putin losing power be anything other than a “government collapse”?
There is a plan for succession. Hard to predict if it would be followed. Could be like Yeltsin with crowds surrounding buildings. They came close to a bloody coup.
I don’t expect Putin relax in retirement. He would be too dangerous.
Putin could pull back his troops at anytime and declare victory. He’s already gained a lot of territory.
Isn’t that what that guy with the Charlie Chaplin moustache did? It only seems to have worked for a little while.
If he declares victory and pulls back troops, then Ukraine immediately reclaims all of the land that he pulled back troops from, and now Russia hasn’t gained territory. If he declares victory and leaves the troops where they are, then fighting continues and his declaration doesn’t mean anything. And while Russia might have a succession plan on paper, it’s on the same paper that says that they still have elections. At this point, Putin is the government of Russia, and when he leaves power (which he will eventually, one way or the other), there’s going to be a revolution of some sort or other.
It didn’t work out too well for Mister H. 
I don’t think it’s good comparison.
Germany had no oil supply, had run out of military-aged men, and it was being attacked by millions of enemy troops from two sides, who were successfully occupying Germany’s home territory.
Russia has plenty of oil, has almost unlimited cannon fodder military aged men, and it faces no danger of losing Russian territory to an occupying army.
I meant in the 1930s, before they started the war. The ‘defence’ spending (read: preparing-for-war spending) employed people, enriched businesses, and boosted the economy.
Bolding mine.
This is untrue both as hyperbole and as a statement of fact.
Regardless of how you define “military aged men*,” Russia has a very finite and dwindling supply. Russia’s population was already in decline prior to the war, and the number of able-bodied males has dropped considerably since it began – both due to the war’s depredations (killed or wounded in battle) and the flight of draft-eligible men once the war began. One 2023 estimate from the UK’s Ministry of Defense showed up to 1.3 million people had emigrated from Russia since the war began. That’s above and beyond the hundreds of thousands of men believed to have been killed or wounded so severely as to be unable to fight any longer.
Russia undoubtedly has more people it is willing to sacrifice in “meat-wave” attacks, but that tactic isn’t sustainable indefinitely. And regardless of how the war ends, Russia’s demographics and economic stability will be in dire straits for decades to come barring a miracle.
*Theoretically Putin could declare any male between the ages of five and 95 “military age” and draft them all. That would be unpopular in the extreme and likely would cause his ouster.
Seems to me that’s probably why so many Ukrainian children got kidnapped and taken to Mother Russia to be raised as Russians.
Nonsense.
You’re right that they can’t keep doing what they are doing forever. But IMO they can keep doing it for another 20 or 30 years at a level sufficient to have stalemate on the ground in Ukraine and simultaneously deter the West from steamrolling to Moscow. During which decades the rest of their economy turns back into Soviet-style peasantry.
All they have to do is outlast the West. Which is rapidly being suborned with Russia-friendly political parties everywhere in Europe and quite probably in the US too.
Putin is in real danger of winning this larger war with the West even as Ukraine turns into a sideshow stalemate.
They might not run out of cannon-fodder bodies, but they’re going to run out of everything else, including vehicles, fuel, ammunition, and weapons.
[
In the other MPSIMS thread about the war , (post #7213) there is a link to a British newspaper report
From 100 thousand to 690 thousand men is a huge increase. Wiki shows that about 1.5 million babies were born in Russia in 2006, and more in 2007 [1.7 million), now finishing school and ready to be drafted. Half of those babies are girls, so that leaves 750,000 potential new soldiers. If half of them avoid the draft, that’s still a huge pool of 300,000 new recruits, every year.
The only good news I’ve seen about Russian sustainability is that their massive numbers of artillery will not last. The barrels of the guns wear out after firing a few thousand shells, and Russia does not have enough industrial capacity to build new barrels.
But they have enough artillery to last about two more years.
I’ve been concerned that Ukraine could lose Western Support and the war with Russia.
The article I quoted comes from 8 European finance ministers that attended the NATO summit. They should have received extensive briefings that the public doesn’t know. I would expect that included economic briefings that would put me to sleep.
No one can predict what Putin will do. He stumbled into a war that he expected to win in a few months. Their commitment of resources and troops is still escalating.
I hope the finance ministers are correct that Russia’s economy is hurting more than their propaganda will acknowledge. Maybe that will shorten the war or maybe Putin is betting the Orange blowhard takes power and abandons Ukraine.
So far, Harris hasn’t shown the same commitment to Ukraine that Biden does. 
It’s still early days in her campaign. Maybe that will change if she gets elected and receives more security briefings. She’ll certainly be more supportive than the other candidate.
There’s also the matter that nobody ever wins a war, and almost never even a battle, by killing off all of the enemy soldiers. There’s a very small fraction that need to be killed before the rest are no longer effective: Fleeing, surrendering, or mutinying. Consider the concept of “decimating” an enemy: The Romans got a reputation as mean mofos, because they’d kill as many as one in ten of the enemy.
Decimating was killing a tenth…of the Romans… for punishment for fleeing or being “cowardly”. The practice was ended when the generals considered that forcing men who already had loose a battle to kill some of their battlebrothers wasn’t necessarily a good move.
For the Russian army, you have to kill the ones in the back with the knouts…the others will surrender or go home…
That’s a word didn’t want to learn.
Not sure how this works. Sounds like the EU is maybe giving Ukraine the interest but not the principal of frozen Russian assets. However it works is good with me.
This is an oversimplification by several orders of magnitude. You can’t just say 1/4 of the eligible population born each year can be drafted. For one thing, some of them will simply be unable to serve, for a variety of reasons. For another, you need a not-inconsiderable portion of draft-eligible males to serve other non-war-related tasks – everything that keeps an economy (and a country) running as smoothly as possible. In Russia, that means a significant chunk of them are needed in authoritarian roles – gotta keep the populace in line, you know.
Finally, in Russia, you’ve got a portion of them who will be excused from service, either due to connections, wealth, or other sociological reasons. Putin has been very careful not to institute a draft in the Moscow and St. Petersburg regions, because he doesn’t want to tick off the more affluent hoi polloi.
And if you’re drafting the dregs of your society, you can’t expect many of them to serve as soldiers in a cohesive sense. Russia has pardoned convicted prisoners and sent them into battle, with the result that at least one murderer served his time, rotated out, went home, and killed another person once they got there.
So, looking at it strictly from a numbers perspective, Russia does have a lot of guys – but Putin is hamstrung by who he can conscript, and who would actually do a halfway-decent job as a soldier. The demographics don’t support a long, drawn-out war in which Russia loses hundreds of men a day, because they were already facing a shortage of men over the age of 30 or thereabouts.
Meat-wave attacks might gain Russia some territory in the short term, but the long-term effect of all those young men dying or being severely wounded is going to hamstring Russia for a long, long time.