No, because they don’t want to be shot on the spot. If Russia didn’t have manpower problems, they wouldn’t be sending them in the first place, they’d be recovering.
Yes, but that doesn’t mean they’re taking ground. I have been paying attention, and they’re not even taking ground at the slow rate they were a few months ago. Ukraine seems to be at a point where they can generally hold the line and start taking back territory.
Well there are other signs of flagging morale, like the Wagner uprising, ever increasing amounts needing to be paid to volunteers and needing to bring in Korean troops.
We can dispute whether morale is going up or down one week compared to the next, but it’s pretty clear that the big picture is Russians generally don’t want to be there.
I’m no military historian, but both my own experience as a 5yr old youngster in the Rhodesian Bush War (won by guerillas) or the US involvement in Vietnam (won by guerillas) may beg to differ.
I’ve been reading the thread with interest.
My question is: Where do we go from here? To what kind of peace deal would both sides agree? Here are my thoughts on what both sides want at this point, and what they might be able to accept.
Ukraine
Ideal:
Might minimally accept:
Russia (i.e., Putin)
Ideal:
Might minimally accept:
The problem is that I don’t see Putin as willing to budge much. The point on which I think they really can’t and won’t agree is that of territory: Putin holds the ground and has little reason to leave. Ukraine can continue the war but is not strong enough to take back much territory, yet it rightly fears Russia having another go in a few years if it stops the war now.
If I were advising Ukraine, I would suggest giving up the Donbas and those areas that Russia insists are “really Russian” and try to have returned as much as the rest as possible, even if that isn’t much. Putin is old and won’t live forever. Try to negotiate with a better, more moral government down the road (if we are lucky enough to see such a thing happen).
From the perspective of the US and Europe, it is tricky. Under Putin, Russia is an evil country with a false vision of its past and future. It’s in our side’s interest to see it weaken further, but it’s wrong to have more people die to realize that goal. Russia is probably too weak now to make war on additional countries for a while. Here again, the long game is probably best: make some sort of deal now and hope that Putin dies sooner rather than later.
The bad thing about this war is that so many people died and so much destruction occurred (to people’s homes, to culture, to industrial and agricultural capacity, etc.). I would argue that Ukraine’s sovereignty and territory are not huge moral causes worth more death and destruction. If we could replay the whole and have Russia win early and have very few people die, would that be better? I would say yes if Russia would have been satisfied to stop with Ukraine–which is almost certainly not true. But has it been worth all the death and destruction to achieve the outcome we have now, i.e., a weaker Russia less capable of continuing the attack beyond Ukraine? Debatable.* The same calculus applies going forward.
*Note: Putin is evil and should never have attacked Ukraine. I am simply questioning the cost.
For a significant number of US ‘perspectivers’ none of that is true.
I think it just goes without saying that, for any issue, there will now always be a certain number of RWNJs that take the wrong side.
That’s a certain perspective of an outsider. Most Ukrainians don’t seem to agree, else they would have been decrying the war and hating on Zelenskyy.
Ukranians want to be Ukraine. They want the democracy they have fight hard to achieve in the face of the Russian kleptocracy they were left from the Cold War. They wouldn’t have appreciated a surrender to a Putin Puppet in the first few days or weeks of the war. Even with all the mass destruction and killing.
The cost in lives and infrastructure is abhorrent. The possibility Russia would commit massive war crimes is not a strong argument for the Ukrainian people to surrender early.
By that argument, no country should ever fight back if invaded, because the war might be more deadly than the occupation.
There is no point, from the POV of Ukraine, to any peace or ceasefire agreement without ironclad security guarantees that Russia won’t attack again.
I don’t think there is a simple answer to the question of “Has it been worth it?” whether one’s perspective is that of outsider or insider. Trying to weigh hundreds of thousands of lives against more abstract yet nevertheless valuable things like sovereignty, national pride, etc., is never easy.
I would also say that, as a general principle, outsiders have a right to disagree with insiders about their own determination of “worth it or not,” especially when they are providing support. As an example, we rightly look back on WWI and see it as European idiocy, regardless of what the people at the time felt about their level of sacrifice. The US got involved more or less to end the death and waste (and I think that calculation was correct). We have to make a similar calculation now about Ukraine (though it is about money and materiel, not about our own citizens’ lives). Personally, I think our goals should be thus:
But it will be hard to achieve all of these at the same time.
By that argument, some countries should not fight back if invaded. As an example, if you know that opposing Genghis Khan will likely result in the complete destruction of your city and its population and that surrendering to him will be bad but not even a fraction as bad, then it’s probably best not to fight him. (I’m not saying that the situation in Ukraine was the same or even similar. It’s just an example.)
Was the British and French abandoning Czechoslovakia in 1938 a wiser move than going to war over Poland in 1939? If Ukraine is not worth preserving in 2025, will Poland be worth it in 2028? What “moral cause” is big enough to go to war over?
Why not?
I believe it is peace in our time!
I have already said that stopping further invasions (and the resulting death and destruction) by Putin is an important goal.
There is an ongoing debate as to whether the Munich Agreement of 1938 was good for the future Allies. Chamberlain is often accused of “appeasement,” but some argue that it was smart to buy time and prepare better for war with Germany. If the Allies could have defeated Germany in 1938, that would have been great, ceteris paribus, but it’s not a given that that was possible. We also have the benefit of hindsight and knowing how destructive and genocidal Hitler was to become. I am agnostic on whether Munich was a smart move but want to point out that it was not black and white.
As for the calculation now, it is a good idea to continue the war in Ukraine if it wears Putin and Russia down so that they can’t attack others, but it is a bad idea if the cost is too high in terms of death and destruction. Again, not black and white.
Preserving Ukraine’s sovereignty and reclaiming its territory I don’t think should be the primary goals. Preserving life, property, and culture should be. Other concerns are secondary. That’s a matter of values and therefore opinion. I would apply these values to any war.
We already have a pretty good idea of what Putin is capable of.
It’s not really a good analogy for where we are today. The Munich Agreement averted the start of armed conflict, and it wasn’t known what Hitler would eventually do.
Wrt Ukraine, we already have hundreds of thousands of people dead and an insane amount of destruction, and both sides appear able to fight on for years to come.
Also, I am not arguing that we should stop supporting Ukraine. The real question is what we should encourage/pressure Ukraine to do at this point. If Zelensky is thinking (and I’m not saying he is), “We will fight forever until we reclaim our territory as it stood in 2014,” that might not be what we should support.
Precisely my point. That changes the calculation immensely. Putin is ready to lose pretty much as many of his own people as it takes to win the war. We also can’t trust him to keep any promises he makes. So, if we support continuation of the war as is, tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands more people will die, but if we try to force a settlement, Putin may regroup and just start the same thing up in a few years. I don’t see an easy solution.
If my neighbor killed my wife and kids, and moved onto my land, why would I agree to a ‘peace’ treaty???
Yeah, I just don’t know what the end game is for Ukraine. Keep pumping weapons into Ukraine until Russia gets tired and quits?
OK, what would you do in that situation?
It’s quite possible that Ukraine is closer to winning the war than we might think, and victory might come in the form of a sudden collapse of the Russian Federation.
If the Russian Federation and the Trump administration both collapse on the same day, what a wonderful day that would be – it should be declared a new national holiday! 