So it looks like Russia is going to win this war after all

In My Humble Opinion
1

.McDonalds restaurants are all re-opening in Russia.
(though without the arches). They are covering the McDonalds logo with the Russian flag.

paywalled cite:

Two months ago the news was optimistic.We all smugly enjoyed seeing:
TikTok videos of Ukrainian civilians towing destroyed Russian tanks
Long lists of dead Russian generals.
Long lists of destroyed Russian equipment
Stories of vehicles stranded with no fuel.
Stories of bad morale among unmotivated Russian soldiers, with no winter clothes, eating spoiled food.

But now Russia seems to have conquered the eastern part of Ukraine. They haven’t lost anything of value to them (lives of soldiers have no value to Putin.) And ,despite some destroyed equipment, they still have almost all their artillery, with massive quantities of shells to fire. Even if it’s old World War II technology, Russia is using it to do a good job of pulverizing everything within range and leaving Ukraine in ruins.
And they seem to have the ability to keep this up for as long as they want.

The average Russian citizen is not suffering in any way. The sanctions have not caused any real problems…
So nothing has really changed for Russia, other than a couple of oligarchs who may,( or may not), have had their yachts seized.

Ukraine has lost 10 or 20% of its population as refugees flee. Their economy is in ruins. And although they have shown incredibly bravery in saving their capital city and half or more of their country, they appear to be losing the rest of it.
I am sad today.

2

Yeah it seems these sanctions have been hurting the rest of the world more than Russia.

3

You think a company buying the old McDonald’s (which happened a while ago, when McDonald’s had to leave because of sanctions) means that no one in Russia is feeling the effect?

I don’t see any sign that Russia is winning. They still don’t have enough troops to hold anything. Damage doesn’t take over countries.

4

It has been sad all along. Too long politically to sustain. We have to enter the fight in a real way or appease Putin somehow. The early success of Ukraine stemming the initial invasion has given people a false sense of confidence. We should be better prepared to make the sacrifices that lie ahead in order to stave off far worse consequences. I am not merely sad, I am also bewildered and angry that the world is in virtually the same place it was a century ago with despots asserting a right to persecute their own people and conquer other nations. It is as if no one has learned anything from recent history. Very recent history, most of it happened in my lifetime.

5

That sounds like Tacitus’ description of Roman Rule: Where they make a desert they call it peace / ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. Plus ça change… Bewildering and depressing indeed.
Particularly considering how long the Roman Empire lasted. It is by no means certain that Putin has lost. Nothing he cares about anyway.
But it could be worse: imagine all that with a president tanTrump…

6

All of the positives you list for Russia have been true since day 1. Not much has changed recently.

7

I’ve been pointing out since this invasion began that even with the logistical, training, and morale problems that the Russian Army can keep throwing young men and materiel into the grinder indefinitely. As self-professed experts keep predicting that Russia is all but done and will be force to abandon Ukraine in a week or two at most, the Russians just keep digging in like a tick on a coonhound. And as much as people wanted to see the Russian Army retreating from their assault on Kyiv as evidence of impending failure, it was clear to actual strategists that this was a regrouping to consolidate control over the Donbas region and regroup their efforts to take the south, ensuring a land route to the Crimea and assuring control over Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant which provides more than 20% of the electrical power to Ukraine.

The human tragedy in Ukraine is almost unimaginable in a scale not seen in Europe since WWII, and all the more horrific for how unnecessary or futile it is, because however much of Ukraine the Russian Army manages to temporarily take control of, it will almost certainly lose it back as quickly. Even if the takeover of Ukraine was as quick and effortless as the Russian military commanders were doubtless advising Putin that it would be (in fear of his wrath of the truth of the state of the Russian military forces), the Russian economy simply cannot afford the costs of a long term occupation even before external sanctions are imposed upon Russia. The analysts who actually understand the Russia economy and Russian society are pretty much unanimous in agreeing that this will materially hurt Russia in the long term, likely to the point of eliminating Russia as a major economic or conventional military power, leaving only with its extensive nuclear arsenal as its single claim to “superpower” status.

The Ukrainians, for their part, have a long cultural history of the repression and brutality by Russian overseers, most recently in the last century with the planned famines culminating in the Holodomor and the repression and exploitation by Soviet Union up until its dissolution in 1991. Ukraine will never again agree to be a “protectorate” or “client state” of an imperialist Russia even if the NATO alliance were to turn its back upon the nation. Ukraine will ultimately prevail in this conflict regardless of the cost, but the cost they are paying are in the lives of not just fighting men and women but children and the elderly who are even prevented from fleeing, as well as the destruction of their modern industrial infrastructure.

Stranger

8

As the article says, most of the ingredients come from inside Russia. But that is because of huge investments Mcdonalds made to make it so. They sent in teams to introduce new crops (such as the potatoes used in their fries) and teach farmers how to grow them.

Out of all the companies pulling out of Russia, Mcdonalds probably lost the most in doing so.

9

No shit.

10

[quote=“Stranger_On_A_Train, post:7, topic:966035”]
the Russian economy simply cannot afford the costs of a long term occupation [/quote]

I don’t understand this logic. Russia has an army of a half million men already in uniform and no extra burden on the regular Russian economy. Add maybe a half million more reserves who can be easily drafted, which of course removes them from their civilian jobs and production in the economy.
But removing a half million out of 150 million total population shouldn’t make a huge difference
.
So Russia has one million soldiers available to control, say, half of Ukraine’s territory which they can conquer within the next few months. That’s a lot of farmland, and a couple of port cities whose inhabitants fled, so maybe 10 million people. A half million soldiers should be easily able to carry out their duties and control those 10 million unarmed and unorganized civilians. Sure, a few soldiers will die from brave Ukranian snipers, etc—but their lives are disposable, and irrelevant to Putin.

Plus acquiring for free a nuclear power plant to provide electricity to those port cities, and the economic benefits of using those ports.
Why do the economists think Russia is doomed? It seems to me that the russian economy will actually grow from the productive farmland and the new shipping routes.

11

They are actually rebranding as McMarriot.

12

Were you asleep post 9-11?

Every major war in Russian history. They fuck up badly at the start. Then get better once sense prevails. No reason this will be different.

As self-professed experts keep predicting that Russia is all but done and will be force to abandon Ukraine in a week or two at most, the Russians just keep digging in like a tick on a coonhound.

Yup.

And as much as people wanted to see the Russian Army retreating from their assault on Kyiv as evidence of impending failure, it was clear to actual strategists that this was a regrouping to consolidate control over the Donbas region and regroup their efforts to take the south, ensuring a land route to the Crimea and assuring control over Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant which provides more than 20% of the electrical power to Ukraine.

The general view oif the Kyiv battle amongst the military experts I have interacted with has been
WTF were they thinking. Most charitably, they thought the shock of the Kyiv assault would make the Ukrainians lose heart and give up. Didn’t happen.

Ultimately might well be measured in centuries

13

Way to soon to conclude Russia is going to win. Ukraine is in an existential fight – Russia is not. Maybe this will become some protracted insurgency that will last for decades, but that seems about as good as Russia could hope for. Ukrainians appear to realize that losing this war, even a “peace” agreement that cedes territory, just means Russian domination, and so far they’re willing to lose thousands of lives to fight that horrific possibility.

Holding territory with an angry population is really, really hard. Russia can launch a lot of shells, but I’m still skeptical they can actually hold territory for months (much less years) on end.

14

The Chechens say hi.
Some people really seem determined to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.

15

The Russian army revolted in WWI.

16

They took Paris in 1814. Berlin in 1945.

17

As someone who spent the vast majority of my military life in the Cold War Army, and attended senior officer training on Cold War strategy etc, I have largely avoided commenting on almost any Ukraine related thread on this forum. Largely because I think the general understanding and discourse about both Russia and Ukraine is so low in America, and the journalism around it has been so poor, that I think most people who have never had to look into these issues significantly simply aren’t able to properly analyze the situation.

But I will weigh in now.

  1. Most pundits got this war incredibly wrong on Day 1 when they predicted a quick and easy Russian victory
  2. Most pundits got this war incredibly wrong when they understood Russia’s complete, and abject, lack of capacity to sustain long range logistics and deep force projection, to mean Russia was “whipped.” [What this did reveal is the Russian military is manifestly worse than even most well-informed experts thought, this isn’t a paper tiger military it’s more like a paper tiger cub.]
  3. Most pundits got it wrong when they expected that Ukraine would be able to as effectively resist a more limited war in the East, where Russia can maintain very short supply lines and concentrate artillery, the same way they could resist the war in the other theaters where Russia was operating at severe disadvantages.
  4. The idea that Russia has not been harmed by sanctions is simply not true. Do not confuse the ability of the Russian Central Bank to literally wall the ruble off from the global currency market with immunity from consequence. Russian job losses have been significant, more importantly Russia has had many markets closed to it, it is having long-term channels for moving its oil and gas closed to it likely forever. This means it will have to sell its product at lower prices because it no longer has access to an open market, countries like China and India when they know they are the only major buyers, simply won’t give Russia premium price out of the goodness of their heart. Russia is suffering right now a serious brain drain, a huge flight of capital. Western industry and expertise that has been very important in Russian economic growth is now gone. Advanced goods that Russia needs for both its military and its petroleum economy are now massively curtailed and will likely be for the rest of our lives. This is a resumption of almost a Cold War situation, where Russia will not have a significant capacity to import lots of things it needs. Much of the real pain of these sanctions isn’t coming today or tomorrow, but down the road.
  5. On the flipside, the idea that a country like Russia is just going to “go away” or “collapse” is hilariously stupid. All of the things I mentioned in 4 are going to mean a huge loss of Russian GDP potential, the country is continuing to get older and older, its population growth rate is poor, it is now going to face serious disadvantages for growth basically for the rest of Putin’s life and maybe beyond. But Russia is a huge country with vast natural resources and a big population. Russia isn’t “going anywhere”, and it is not going to “collapse.” Russia has survived far worse than these sanctions. It’s a misunderstanding of reality to have ever thought otherwise. But it is also a serious misunderstanding of reality to think that Russia, with its Imperial Nationalist goals of greatness, is not going to suffer from all these disadvantages. Just like Crimea, this war whatever its outcome, even Russian victory, is going to be a net loss for Russia and an albatross around its neck.
  6. The idea that Russian losses so far have been meaningless is silly and wrong. Russia has suffered significant casualties of men, importantly officers, and material that cannot be easily replaced. That’s simple reality. If someone doesn’t want to believe that they are just refusing to believe reality.

Now where does that leave it? Largely the same place I knew it was by about day 21 of this war. The war will end most likely whenever Ukraine is willing to let it end. Russia has failed at its stretch goal of regime change in Ukraine, and has additionally failed at its goal of keeping Ukraine in Russia’s orbit. By about day 21 of the war I had said the most likely outcome is a peace settlement in which Russia gets some of Eastern Ukraine (some of which had already been occupied by Russia since the Crimea Annexation and subsequent insurgent wars.)

Russia will not be able to push significantly far into Ukraine because the problems limiting its logistics and long range maneuver simply cannot be fixed in a year or even 5 years. They likely cannot be fixed at all with a military that is mostly run by Putin loyalist politicians who structure it for political purposes instead of for purposes of appropriate military doctrine.

It is also not possible that the war does not end for many years, but enters a low intensity period in which Ukrainian and Russian forces are engaged in low level fighting in the east basically for many years.

This war was a tragedy for the Ukrainian people from day one. Nothing was ever going to change that. A country of 200m rolling hundreds of thousands of soldiers into a country of 40m, one willing to indiscriminately bomb civilian targets to advance its war aims, guarantees a tragedy for the smaller country. Nothing could have ever stopped that, that was locked in from day one of this conflict.

If you were at any point optimistic about this war you were wrong–but not because Russia is clearly going to win, there isn’t likely to be any obvious winner in this war. Optimism was wrong because Russia isn’t going anywhere, and however this develops the vast amount of suffering will be born by the Ukrainian people.

Something worth reiterating is how massively stupid and wrong Putin is about how the world works, by the way. Putin stupidly invaded and annexed Crimea, and now he has stupidly invaded Ukraine and is seeking to annex at least parts of Eastern Ukraine. In Crimea, he annexed a peninsula that since that day has been a net economic loss for Russia, and that he largely enjoyed all the benefits of controlling prior to invading. There is an important Russian naval base in Crimea that had always been there, and had a permanent lease (akin to our control of Guantanamo Bay.) Russia already had “Crimea” as much as it mattered strategically and economically. The invasion just added massive costs.

Likewise a decent portion of Donetsk and Luhansk were already under quasi-Russian control. Even more importantly, before Putin’s childish and stupid invasion of Crimea, the reality is Russia was able to invest in, and derive almost all the meaningful benefits from, Ukraine, that it could ever do by controlling Ukraine directly. Actually controlling Ukraine directly, given where Russia was positioned in the country, largely just adds serious economic, strategic, and political costs onto Russia, with no actual real gain.

These Russian wars are ego projects by a man who spends too much time reading 19th century history, and who has confused pride with strength.

18

Chechnya is 1/40th the size of Ukraine.

Historical wars that have little bearing on this conflict. Every recent Russian conflict has shown a Russia with a very limited capacity to wage large scale, long term war. Why that capacity is limited is a combination of lack of political will, lack of desire to spend the money etc. The current regime doesn’t have nearly the iron will that Stalin did, nor frankly do the Russian people have the stomach for that kind of thing either.

We’re not even a year into this war and it is already going much worse for Russia than its long war in Afghanistan went at this point, as an example.

FWIW the Napoleon Wars and WW2 were wars of “mass mobilization” (the Napoleonic Wars were the first such wars, WW2 was the last.) No country currently can easily go to that without massive systemic changes to their society. I have not seen anything even marginally close to that occurring in Russia.

Both Napleon and Hitler also had armies that essentially collapsed due to extreme strategic overextension. That has very little strategic relationship with Ukraine’s situation, where Ukraine is fighting basically an entirely defensive war.

19

It isn’t the paltry salaries of the men, or even the costs of producing war equipment that Russia should be able to crank out like they are making cheese sandwiches (although all indications are that they are in fact having a great deal of production issues) but the essential costs of supporting the logistical chain necessary to maintain armed forces in a hostile environment. Everybody underestimates this cost, but in fact the reason that Germany and Japan lost in WWII and the Allied forces won has little to do with better equipment or well-trained troops (the United States, and for that matter the other Allied forces started the war with neither) but because the US was able to ramp up its production and maintain supply lines. And in large measure this was because of the access to natural resources and production labor, both of which the United States had in spades.

Russia has natural resources, of course, but very poor means to efficiently exploit them—for all of their oil and gas reserves they are perpetually short of refined petroleum because of their lack of refinery facilities working at full capacity—and they are utterly dependent upon imports for the vast majority of high technology components and materials. By painting itself in an isolationist corner and not even trying to build strategic partnerships that might divide NATO (Belarus is less of a ‘partner’ and more of a puppet; Finland and Sweden could have been political neutral trade partners but Russia played that hand so badly that both countries are actively courting NATO membership) its only real industrial trade partners that are left are China and India, neither of which are likely to bend over backward to meet the needs of the Russian economy, and in fact you can pretty my rely up on China to take advantage of this near-monopoly to get access to Russian oil and gas as well as mineral reserves for pennies on the dollar.

The notion that “a half million soldiers should be easily able to carry out their duties and control those 10 million unarmed and unorganized civilians,” is also one of those commonly held truisms that don’t stand up to historical scrutiny. In fact, being an unwanted occupier of a resisting nation is an incredibly costly enterprise as the United States has discovered again and again, from the Philippines and Viet Nam to more recently Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, as long as there are weapons and materiel going in to Ukraine to support a resistance Russia will never have complete control over the country, because again, the Ukrainians have a long cultural memory of what it means to be under Russian domination and are not confused about appeals to Slavic brotherhood. Even if Russia could gain control of the central and western areas of the Ukraine, they will be hemorrhaging money to hold them while still trying to bolster their petrochemical export economy under continuing sanctions.

Russia is economically fucked regardless of what they do, but they are especially fucked because of this ill-conceived venture done to appease the dreams of an aging demagogue who wants Moscow to be “The Third Rome” of radical Russian nationalists.

Nuclear power plants are not “free” to operate; in fact, they are quite costly over the medium and long term, and it is clear that Russia is not sending its best and brightest to maintain them, notwithstanding the vastly reduced domestic capacity to produce enriched uranium fuel rods. Russia didn’t take over the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station to enhance domestic energy production or sell electricity to Eastern Europe; they did it to hurt Ukraine. As for taking over productive farmland and shipping routes, Russia produces far more grain and, prior to sanctions, was able to sell it freely on the world market at competitive rates. Certainly there is going to be a moral versus pragmatic debate over buying Ukrainian grain from Russia that the Middle East and North Africa are so dependent upon in the near term but an occupied Ukraine is not going to be a good agricultural producer nor does Russia have a surplus of farmers to take over Ukrainian lands as they did post-WWII, and if it comes down to it the United States could knock the bottom out of the grain market by subsidizing wheat and soy production and dumping it on the open market below cost. It is one area where the United States retains the capacity to undercut the rest of the world in an economic war, albeit with negative long term consequences.

The Russian economy was already in the shitter before this stupid exercise in nationalist pride and only going downward with its precipitous decrease in working population, decline in domestic production capacity, and the coming crash in the petrocarbon energy sector. With Ukraine, it basically just pulled out its Makarov from its belt holster and keeps shooting itself in the foot until the magazine runs dry.

Stranger

20

I don’t think it will take that long, mostly because I don’t think Russia (as it is currently constituted) is going to last for centuries, or even many decades hence. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that the rest of the world has a lot more time, either.

Stranger