Your fear is Putin’s hope.
He probably wanted the western Alliance to fall apart debating over what to do about his invasion from the onset - but he’s sure that it will do so over time, as disparate interests assert themselves and governments taking a hard line on Russian expansionism fall and are replaced by those who are a little more… flexible… on the issue.
Hopefully, we can prove him wrong.
The USA announced Ukraine was gonna join NATO?
Yes, during the end of George W. Bush’s Presidency.
We’re thinking about this from a distinctly Western point of view, where it’s unimaginable that a country would suffer 30,000 dead, and probably something like 100,000 wounded just for the sake of forcing the issue on the Donbas. But the Russians clearly don’t think like that- they’re probably thinking in more WWII terms, where this would be the cost of doing business (so to speak).
That’s the thing; the Russians can keep this up more or less indefinitely; they’re just trying to slowly gain ground and outlast the Ukrainians, even if it takes a lot of casualties on both sides. And they have the old crap in storage to keep it up for a LONG time. Something like 10,000 tanks on the Russian side in fact. Sure, it may be T-62s, T-64s, and T-55s, but when those T-62s outnumber your modernized T-64s by 4 to 1, it’s not a winning proposition.
My guess as to what’ll happen is that the Russians will slowly grind the Ukrainians out of the Donbas, and then declare they’re part of Russia, and probably threaten to nuke them if they try and regain them, as they’re Russian territory now.
I kind of think as odious as it sounds, the Ukrainians might be well served to negotiate some sort of imperfect peace that doesn’t give the Russians everything they want, but doesn’t give up everything they’re liable to lose if they don’t come to the table. Because right or wrong, they’re on the losing side of this one, so they may as well negotiate while they can.
They’re nowhere near a WW2 footing whatsoever.
No… I meant in terms of casualties and how they perceive them. The Russian military likely isn’t looking at this as the bloodbath that we are; they’re likely comparing to their own previous wars, where they suffered heavy casualties by our standards.
So far, they’re saying roughly 25,000 Russian troops have been killed in Ukraine in 109 days of fighting. That’s ~229 killed per day.
Historically these are relatively moderate casualty rates especially for attacking forces; in the same universe with that of Operation Overlord(~431 KIA per day) and the Battle of the Bulge(~475 KIA per day on average), and dramatically lower than Russian historical casualty rates in WWII offensives, which often averaged 1300-2400 KIA per day.
Stars & Stripes usually has good military sources.
Russian thieves are stealing grain that’s supposed to feed the world. It’s frustrating that NATO has their thumb up their butts. People will be starving in undeveloped countries by the end of the year.
The question always goes to this though–what exactly would you have NATO (which is essentially the same thing as saying “the United States”) do? I understand it is frustrating, but we have a system for delineating which countries we are willing to fight for–we sign alliances and mutual defense treaties with them. We have explicitly chosen to not do that with Ukraine.
The latest news is Ukraine is running out of Soviet era artillery shells. Seems like that caliber could still be manufactured.
Or dramatically increase shipments of the standard caliber Howitzers the West uses.
Seems a lot cheaper to make the Soviet caliber shells. Instead of replacing all those guns. I doubt NATO could replace hundreds of artillery guns with Howitzers without hurting their own stock.
Just maintaining the ability to fight back is the minimum that NATO should meet.
I feel that NATO has been given an unparalleled opportunity and thus far has played its cards amazingly well.
We’ve entered a proxy war. We’re in a position to repel and punish Russian aggression (not only economically but militarily). We’re in a position to substantially weaken Russia.
Taking advantage of this opportunity, we’ve given Ukraine a huge amount of sophisticated weaponry and intelligence, which has been a decisive factor in the country’s defense.
Prudently, we have not put our own boots on the ground, or let our weapons be used to attack Russian territory, or responded in kind to Russian nuclear threats.
So all the while, the Russians see what we’re doing… and feel they cannot retaliate against us. Not with nuclear weapons or conventional weapons. We haven’t even seen a significant cyberattack!
It could easily have been much worse if NATO countries had been divided, if the West had opted not to give lethal aid, or if a certain pro-Putin personality had still been in the White House.
It is. But Ukraine itself has very limited artillery munitions production capacity. Artillery ammo have been an issue for years before this war. After the fall of the USSR, Ukraine concentrated on major arms systems which could produce export revenue. Munitions production capacity was allowed to decay to virtually nothing which turned out to be a serious issue when the separatist conflict blew up in 2014. It’s only in recent years under threat that they’ve started to reverse that, but production is still pretty light - Forbes quoted 14,000 152mm shells/year in 2021 before the outbreak of fighting. Which isn’t enough. Nowhere near - I mean that is literally a couple days of supply. It is another area of production capacity where Russia has a big advantage. And unlike guided munitions Russia is likely not particularly reliant on imports to keep the factories running.
Well said.
I think the war will end if Ukraine cedes Russia the territory it needs for a secure land bridge to Crimea and its Russian naval base, through a slice of southern and eastern Ukraine. I believe that will satisfy Putin, a land route to its deep-water port at Crimea for commercial shipping use as well as for restocking Russian warships.
Ukraine keeps its own deep-water port at Odessa and can resume shipping its wheat. The fighting stops, Ukraine starts rebuilding, and the sanctions on Russia are lifted.
…until things start going badly for the Russian autocrat and he gets ideas about the Baltic.
Maybe for a few years, until Putin decides it’s time to invade again.
If what Putin wanted was a land route through Ukraine, he could have negotiated a throughway agreement to ensure legal access. Instead, he launched a “special military operation” to attack Ukrainian cities and other civilian-occupied areas, grab Ukraine’s largest nuclear power plant, and push forward to Kyiv to force capitulation by the current Ukrainian government to any and all demands from the Kremlin. Putin and his spokespeople have made it abundantly clear that it is their view that Ukraine is legally and ethnically a territory of Russia and that Ukrainian sovereignty is a legal fiction that must be corrected by the use of military force.
Negotiating a “land bridge” through eastern Ukraine might be a way of allowing Putin to save face and claim victory while he pulls back his troops to lick their wounds but it will just be biding his time, as likely will any successor to the Russian presidency. This is not a dispute about property rights; it is a fundamental conflict intended to show the world that Russia is still a great power to be feared if not respected, and Putin is quite willing to spill the lifeblood (both in economic and literal terms) of Russia to make that point to the world.
Stranger
I think that Putin thought that Trump would be re-elected. And made the invasion plan. Trump had already extorted Zelenskyy trying to prevent needed defensive weapons. And of course getting himself re-elected.
I very much doubt that this was Trumps plan. It was Putin’s.
If Trump was re-elected, I very much doubt that Ukraine would get much help from the US. And it may have given Europe pause to help as well.
Putin’s plan was in place though. And Putin pulled the trigger.
The Chechens also have a long cultural history of repression and brutality by Russian overseers, most recently in the last century with forced deportations that the EU officially recognizes as a genocide and, as with Ukraine, a full-scale military invasion and war. And yet Chechnya has long since agreed to be a “protectorate” or “client state” of an imperialist Russia. Russia effectively won the Chechen wars, reintegrated the secessionist republic into the Russian Federation, and for the last 15 years or so has managed to keep any lingering civil unrest down to negligible, or at least manageable, levels. Keep in mind that Putin was able to do this despite the considerable linguistic, religious, and other cultural differences between the Russian and Chechen people. What makes you so sure that the result will be any different with Ukraine?
Putin’s experience in Chechnya must have given him confidence to take Ukraine by force and reintegrate them into Russia.
He underestimated the training of the Ukrainian military. The Western response of sanctions and weapons had to be a unwelcome surprise.
Russia continues to inflict a horrific amount of damage. Their own territory is basically untouched. They’re coming out way ahead regardless of how much territory they gain.
First of all, Chechnya has never been a recognized nation independent of the post-Soviet Russian Federation, unlike Ukraine which declared its independence right after the abortive Soviet coup d’état attempt even before the Soviet Union was formally dissolved. Second, Chechnya is essentially a minor hermit kingdom with a population of 1.4 million people and negligible foreign trade or relations. While the primarily Sunni Muslim ethnic Vainakh peoples of Chechnya have resisted Russian czarist and Soviet rule, there are plenty of people who see a ‘cooperation’ with the modern Russian Federation as being to their benefit.
In the case of Ukraine there is a long history of independent rule prior to the Soviet Union. Their exploitation and planned famines during the early Soviet Era are well remembered as recent history even though most of that generation has passed. Ukraine has very strong economic ties to Europe that are almost entirely independent of Russia, and a political desire toward liberal democracy. Ukraine may end up ceding some modest amount of territory in the east to end the war quickly (even though Zelenskyy says that they won’t) but there is absolutely no way all of Ukraine will agree to become a ‘protectorate’ of Russia regardless of what the ‘realpolitik’ talking heads think they should do as some kind of ‘balance of great powers’ thesis notwithstanding that Russia does not have the military strength and logistical means to occupy Ukraine indefinitely and bend it to Putin’s will.
Stranger
I think that is a contentious argument depending on how rigorously you define ‘independent rule’. Ukraine has a long history of being a region in contention between Poland-Lithuania, Russia and the Ottomans in the far south and only loosely under centralized control during most of that time. The Crimean Khanate in particular and the various Cossack hosts functioned autonomously to various degrees and sometimes played games of shifting allegiances. But they were always (at least from the late-15th century) subject to those larger powers rather than independent in their own right. It was the land of proxies.
Might seem like picking nits, but I think a unified Ukrainian national consciousness is far more recent and more reactive to imperial Russian dominance. That is as imperial Russia slowly reigned in the various disparate players in the Ukraine region - the old The Ukraine - I’d say a sense of Ukrainianess separate from say, the Zaporzhian Sich, began to develop.
None of which matters a whit today of course - purely an academic digression. Ukraine is an independent country and should remain so.