The infuriating thing is how easily the West could have won this thing. Just supply more arms, and earlier, than it did. Instead we pussyfooted about and Neville-Chamberlained and “oh no what if Russia does the red button”'d a perfectly winnable war into defeat.
The fuck you say?:
You want to play literal Russian roulette with the world’s second-largest nuclear arsenal?
Stranger
Right.
Afghanistan. Russo Japanese war. First Chechen War
Polish–Soviet War
The Russians win defensive wars,
There is zero basis for believing this. Absolutely zero. More arms, quicker, may have been a help. But they weren’t going to suddenly make Ukraine’s army larger than it was in the early months. Russia was not going to suddenly fold with a slightly bloodier nose - Putin clearly doesn’t give enough of a shit about casualties to this point to want to pack it in.
Russia has shown itself to be very, very weak. We’ll see, this is far from over.
I understand that feeling, but reading this week’s the Economist it seems the bottleneck is not the amount of weapons, but how fast you can train the soldiers to use them:
Konrad Muzyka, the founder of Rochan Consukting, says that the number of would-be recruits for the [Ukrainian] armed forces is so high that there is a waiting list of over a month to be inducted.
With hindsight it looks like the decision to invade in February, just in the middle of the mud season, was an inept one. If the war started today Russia, all other things being equal, would have it easier.
Adding and correcting my post #5 in this thread: On reflection there is something Russia and particularly Putin has lost that is important to him: respect and the ability to project fear. He is slipping into “stable genius” territory. You have a problem when tanTrump is the last one who publicly declares that he admires you.
Time lapse of territory gains and losses (red is Russia) over the last weeks:
There hasn’t been some massive Russian gain, or anything close to that. Barely any at all, in fact, and Ukraine has had some gains too.
No one wins in war
The USSR was given Berlin in 1948. The Allies were in a position to take it, Patton wanted to take it. But since Roosevelt had bargained away Berlin to the USSR at Yalta, Bradley and Eisenhower judged there was no point in spilling American blood to take it, and ordered the Allied advance halted.
And don’t forget that the USSR wouldn’t have even been in position to receive that gift had they not been receiving steady shipments of American Studebakers and other material in the lend-lease program.
I don’t know what’s going to happen in Ukraine. I know that whatever it is, is going to happen a lot more slowly now that the conflict has put Russia defending close to its railheads. It will likely be a grinding war of attrition. The Russian Army has proven itself to be horribly inept and corrupt, and are running dangerously low in resources. But Ukraine is also running low.
No matter how valiantly Ukraine fights, Russia will always have the secret weapon of having more bodies to throw at this, and less compunction about doing so. And those bodies are, ironically enough, Russia’s marginalized people, ethnic minorities and dissidents who would otherwise be opposing Putin.
I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen. If I had to guess, I would guess stabilizing battle lines in the east, something like a stalemate. Ukraine will be hoping for Russian political instability, and for the West to find political will that they haven’t yet shown. Russia will be waiting for Ukr decide its losses are unsustainable, plus for signs of collapse in Western political will. The US midterms are coming up, and they favor Russia’s allies (Republicans), so Russia has very good cause to hope for collapse of Western support for Ukraine.
I thought of the OP when I read this article.
[quote=“Stranger_On_A_Train, post:42, topic:966035, full:true”]
Somewhere (here? elsewhere?) I recently read the comment that if Russia wins it will send a message to every dictator in the world that nukes are gold: if you have nukes you can do anything you want and no one will dare oppose you.
Putin has achieved that now without victory, and he can keep this war going for a long time. If he eventually loses and pulls completely out of Ukraine the message might change a little. Unless Russia is crushed and denuked this situation doesn’t change much from the way it’s been since day one.
The United States has been teaching the world that lesson for over 75 years, and we’ve done such a good job that regimes will bankrupt themselves and starve their own people to develop a nuclear arsenal and the means to deliver it.
This is not a novel concept.
Stranger
I hadn’t seen any articles about upgrading the Ukrainian Air Force. I knew the Mig deal in Poland fell through.
These articles are very informative , thanks for posting.
Bingo. Anyone who knows even a little bit about military logistics knows the invasion of Kyiv failed entirely due to a logistical collapse, more or less. It was proof positive the Russian military and its battalion level operating scheme simply cannot conduct logistics at the ranges involved in the attempt at taking Kyiv.
I think a scenario where two countries can both be said to have “lost” a war, is fairly reasonable. There has been a theory going around for some time now (at least 50 years), that wars of territorial aggression are almost always a net loss for the conqueror, because countries just don’t actually recognize that much real power out of accumulating acreage as was once the case. Ukraine is an amazingly good case in point, before Russia became hilariously belligerent to Ukraine, it had basically all the economic and trade control of important businesses and resources in Ukraine it could ever want. Even after the Crimea Annexation there was still a good bit of this going on, because the post-Crimea Ukraine hasn’t been entirely anti-Russian to begin with. If you believe a country takes land to exploit natural resources, these wars make no sense at all–Russia was able to exploit these natural resources without controlling the land.
They don’t have that many options. There are limited rail and pipeline links, and the only major buyers are, again, India and China. India and China aren’t going to pay spot price for oil from a country that they know can’t sell oil to 50% of the world’s oil purchasers, they’re going to bargain for a lower price.
Like any petrostate a time of generally high oil prices will be of some benefit (but maybe not as much as is assumed, a lot of Russia’s problems vis-a-vis Putin’s desire to see it be a great power aren’t related to a lack of foreign currency, but rather a lack of business, technological, economic, talent etc development. Receiving fat stacks of money for oil in and of itself fixes none of those issues, and as some countries have proven it can actually act detrimentally to those goals.)
Russia no longer has the capacity to do the sort of mass activities you are thinking of from Soviet times. Russia can’t depopulate Ukraine because it doesn’t have the capacity to do so. They are indeed shipping thousands of Ukrainians to Eastern Russia, but there’s serious limits to the scale of that scheme. Even in Soviet times Stalin wasn’t able to “De-Ukrainify” Ukraine, and he certainly tried.
I don’t think it’s that easy, it would have required a major strategic rethinking towards our interests in Ukraine going back to the early 2010s or even 2000s. There was not any actual ability to magic wand Ukraine into driving Russia out of all of its territory with “more weapons” post 2022 invasion, the timeline has been too short for that and it takes too much time to send and train soldiers on new weapon systems. I do agree that back when we made the (in my opinion) foolish decision to announce future Ukrainian NATO accession (which was at the end of Bush’s term), we should have followed it up with a consequent extreme hardening of Ukraine’s defense posture.
We did not do that because we were afraid of provoking Russia. But at the same time, making the statement that Ukraine is going to join NATO also provoked Russia. If you’re going to provoke Russia with Ukraine as the bargaining chip, you should damn well better make Ukraine able to defend itself. We didn’t really do that at all, and didn’t start to serious address Ukraine’s terrible defense situation until like 2016, at the very end of Obama’s Administration (and despite the impeachment drama around it, Trump did actually continue this policy and even increased arms shipments.)
Now of course the flipside of all of this is Ukraine actually, as a % of its people, never favored joining NATO until relatively recently according to opinion polling. On top of that the Ukrainian government was frequently very pro-Russian. For those reasons it was never going to be easy for us to “beef up” Ukraine’s defense, because Ukraine hasn’t been in a static pro-Western state since the early 2000s. Also, extreme levels of corruption in its defense system would have likely meant our efforts to beef up Ukrainian defenses would have likely facilitated immense graft.
I don’t really know what the right approach would have been, but I do think that announcing Ukraine is going to at some point join NATO, and then doing basically nothing for almost 10 years to help them improve their military was not the right approach.
Even if Russia succeeds in “occupying” eastern Ukraine for the somewhat distant future, how well will they be able to effectively live in and exploit its resources? Wouldn’t. the neighboring Ukrainians be able to lob missiles at any ship that docks, and interrupt bridges/water supplies/roads/and other infrastructure?
I do not see it as a necessity that Ukraine necessarily will agree to a Korean-style resolution, with a militarized but mutually respected border splitting what was Ukraine.
I don’t think conquering any or all of Ukraine “pays” in any economic sense. As others have commented the main motivation seems to be political/ideological: the Russian government wants to remain authoritarian and doesn’t like the example of western liberal democracy, especially on its borders.
I truly hope the western nations remain united in isolating Russia. But, I fear, capitalism has a short memory.
I thought that that lesson was taught by North Korea 10-15 years ago.
It isn’t really memory that is the problem; it is vested self-interest above incisive foresight. Everybody knows we need to get away from Russian oil and gas anyway, but like a priest with candy they just keep luring Europe back.
Stranger