This is exactly right. Ukraine doesn’t have a choice; they must keep fighting. They can, and should, do everything in their power to get aid from the West; but their capability to influence the amount of aid coming in is limited.
Aside from that… they don’t have a choice. Russia has made it clear that they are not interested in peace (when they invaded Ukraine despite having been given Crimea last time around). Without a regime change in Russia, a negotiated settlement just buys Putin time to prepare for his next invasion.
Obviously Ukraine doesn’t have the capability to impose regime change in Russia; but what they can do is continue to fight, and to make Russia pay for every inch of Ukrainian soil in blood. By imposing a severe enough cost on the Russians, they might change the equation enough that Putin can no longer keep up this invasion.
Or maybe they won’t. There is a very real possibility that Russia will eventually break grind down Ukraine’s forces. In that case, the Ukranian people will be in serious trouble.
The US does have pretty robust production capacities- they’re gearing up to produce just shy of a million 155 mm artillery shells a year, up from a current rate of about 336k per year. Europe also has the capacity to produce about the same amount, and are actually slightly ahead of the US right now.
As far as small arms go, maybe the US military doesn’t have huge stocks, but the US small arms industry could easily crank out enough rifles- ISTR that they produce millions of civilian AR-15 type rifles annually right now.
But the question is money, more than capacity. Who’s going to pay for all this? Certainly not Ukraine, and everyone seems to be looking to the US to fund this whole war, and Congress isn’t exactly eager about that.
Ukraine doesn’t need rifles or other small arms, of which it has a surfeit. It needs long range missiles or heavy drones that can strike well behind Russian lines to destroy fuel depots, munitions and drone factories, and distribution lines; missile defense systems to protect against Russian ballistic and hypersonic cruise missiles; tanks and tank-killers to blunt Russian advances; ammunition for howitzers and heavy mortars to strike at Russian forward and near-forward positions; and anti-radiation missiles that can take out Russian air defenses which would permit them to use the F-16s and MiG-29s they’ve recently received to gain air superiority over eastern Ukraine. They also need fuel, food, secure comms, et cetera. Above all, though, what they need is the morale from being assured that Europe and the United States will continue to back Ukraine, provide adequate supplies of materiel, and step up against Russia internationally by restricting fuel sales and preventing arms transfers to the extent possible.
So for just a minute allow me some gloomy pessimism here. I don’t think Ukraine is going to achieve air superiority over eastern Ukraine this decade. Not in the usual Western sense anyway. Building an effective air force is a very slow process. Acquiring sufficient air craft is just step one and so far Ukraine isn’t acquiring sufficient air craft. Russia has a big lead in both numbers of planes and in trained pilots and their own problem is less quality of technology than it is doctrinal and apparently some inadequacies in their pilot training due to that doctrine.
The best Ukraine can hope for is something closer to a very limited (and probably irregularly localized) version of air parity where they can better launch stand-off munitions to hit strategic targets like you mentioned and maybe help just a little in keeping the Russian air force from completely blunting Ukraine’s own ground attacks.
But I think NATO-style air superiority, where the air force actively participates in punching big holes in enemy lines under heavy fighter cover, probably isn’t going to happen. We’re not going to give enough planes and munitions and even if we could Ukrainian pilots aren’t coming to come up to speed quickly enough in large enough numbers to pull something like that off in the near term.
Ukraine still really needs those planes for the reasons mentioned, but I think realistically Russia will probably continue to enjoy at least some limited version of air superiority until this war ends (unless it really does drag on for a decade). Though it would be nice if I ended up being wrong .
IMHO a two pronged approach is called for. They need to ask for even more ammo from Europe, as much ammo that the European countries have available, with those countries then backfilling stocks from the United States and South Korea*
I think there should also be some kind of plan to end the war where Ukraine trades currently occupied territory for a peace that includes NATO membership and stationing of NATO troops in Ukraine.
*. Yeah, I know they may very well need it in the future, but Ukraine needs it now, and saving Ukraine now might prevent a need in Korea in the future. AFAIK South Korea is probably the only western aligned democracy other than the US that has massive quantities to spare.
There is no “trad[ing] currently occupied territory for a peace”, and especially not one that includes NATO membership for Ukraine. Even if Ukraine were agreeable to this as a ‘solution’ (they’re not), Putin has made it clear that he views Ukraine as legally and culturally Russian territory, and he will not allow for any agreement that includes Ukraine entering into the NATO alliance, as the belief that this membership would occur was his ostensible rationale for the ‘preemptive invasion’.
Nor could Russia be trusted to adhere to such a negotiated peace; what they can be expected to do in such a case is to continue their routine of sending ‘green man’ partisans into Ukraine to create the pretext of ‘civil war’ between ‘persecuted’ Ukrainians of Russian descent and the ‘neo-Nazi regime’ of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. All this would be for Russia is an opportunity to entrench, rearm, and train more conscripts in preparation for another attack.
The solution is clear- get rid of Putin. If he dies, or their is a coup (which will mean his death anyway), etc, the people of Russia seem to be tired of this war. I think with Putin out of the way, there would be a ceasefire and true negotiations.
Unfortunately, I don’t think it is nearly that simple. Even Alexei Navalny who was close to a pro-western politician that Russia has had in the last 20 years supported the annexation of Crimea. He mostly criticized how the war was being fought instead of criticizing that it was being fought at all. Putin has had him killed of course so he is no longer an option.
Dmitry Medvedev the last ruler of Russia in between Putin’s two different stints as ruler if anything is quite a bit more unhinged than Putin is. He regularly talks about invading NATO or Nuking different members every time a new aid package is announced. The other Russian leaders in the inner circle aren’t any better.
Yeah, anybody who deposes or replaces Putin—even if more rational and informed—is going to be highly nationalistic and is going to have to make a show of standing up to the US and NATO on Ukraine. The Russians prefer a ‘strong’ leader over an honest or amenable one, and any leader is going to be faced with the same existential problems (demographic collapse, petrostate economy, lack of useful industry or trained labor force to staff it, all of the problems boiling just under the surface of a multi-ethnic state that has been maintained by force and famine), for which the only real response is to create distractions in the form of saber-rattling or actual conflict that the public will get behind.
But Putin has eliminated anyone who will actively challenge him, purging the ranks of government and military of an obvious successor or would be upstart. And while there is a continuing stream of unsubstantiated medical problems and inexpert ‘analysis’, he continues to keep going like the Energizer Bunny.
Ukraine spilt from Russia in 1991. that means for over two decades, no one tried to take Ukraine back. This is a weird and fairly recent brain fart from Putin.
Putin has expressed the ambition to essentially rebuild the Soviet Union (insofar as it could be recomprised), and also needs to distract the public from just what dire economic and demographic straits the Russian state is in. It might seem like a “weird and fairly recent brain fart” but from the perspective of appearing to be strong, taking Crimea (which Putin did with virtually no opposition and little comment by the West) was a canny move. Invading Ukraine was perhaps less so in retrospect, although no doubt Putin was being told by his military commanders that their readiness was far better than it turned out to be.
Despite all of the recent celebration of Navalny, he wasn’t really “pro-Western” in any way. He was an avowed Russian nationalist and opponent of NATO expansion, and as @Caldar noted he supported the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula for its strategic advantages for Russian expansion. Even if he had somehow managed to take over power from Putin (which was never going to happen) he would almost have certainly continued on the same course, albeit perhaps negotiating a temporary cease-fire in Ukraine to regroup and rearm, and also try to develop divisiveness among NATO members.
Crimea, by the way, is not “a different issue”; while it was not part of Ukraine prior to the transfer of the territory as an oblast to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954, it was retained upon the 1991 independence and is sovereign legal territory of Ukraine. The ‘annexation’ (invasion and occupation) is just as illegal as the current war. Navalny’s support for this territory grab is part and parcel of the view he shared that Russia should dominate the region including Ukraine and the Baltics.
Well:
1.) After years of tense negotiations over a semi-fait accompli (Russia was squatting and not budging), a treaty was signed in 1997 allowing Russia to retain a lease on the vital Crimean naval facilities and also to station 25,000 troops there to defend them. Initially it was to be for twenty years until 2017, with negotiated five year renewals thereafter. In 2010 that was extended until 2042 by Russia’s pet, Viktor Yanukovych.
2.) Ukraine has veered this way and that but was at least semi-placidly under Russia’s thumb under Leonid Kuchma (1994-2005) and Viktor Yanukovych (2010-2014). When it was a little less so under Viktor Yushenko (2005-2010) and Ukraine started making initial noises about not renewing that treaty in 2017, Russia started rumbling. Hence the new treaty when Yanukovych took charge.
3.) When the pro-Russian Yanukovych was forcibly ousted in the 2014 Revolution, Putin read the room (probably correctly) and said “fuck it, no more treaties” and grabbed it.
Basically no one tried to take Crimea because Ukraine was either submissively cordial or Russia thought they could become so again by the next electoral cycle. The Ukrainian Revolution though was a dramatic break - hence the Crimean seizure and the attempted secession of the Donbas. It’s always been a trigger point between the two.
And his entire inner circle. Who are the crowd from which his replacement will be chosen.
It might have been Putin’s idea 30 years ago, but he’s spent the last 30 years essentially turning it into deep seated elite dogma, believed in by everyone who matters, not merely his personal preference.
And probably the Russian public as a whole, although it’s always hard to know what they really think.
I know Americans like to believe in what I call the “BBEG Theory of History”, but in reality, wars are always greater than one person, no matter who they are. Wars are between nations, not individuals.
It is not “all Putin”, or even the inner circle of Putin supplicants; there is broad support across the Russian population for both the invasion of Ukraine and the confrontational tact with NATO, a position bolstered by Russian media (which of course is all essentially government controlled but is the only ‘news’ that most Russians can access). While Putin’s reputation with the public has slumped post-invasion when the ‘special military operation’ didn’t go as smoothy as advertised, it has since risen, and anyone stepping into the role would almost certainly continue this conflict because again, the Russian public prefers a ‘strong’ leader to a fair, amenable, or rational one. Russia will retreat when they don’t have the people or resources to throw into the grinder, of which they unfortunately have more of than Ukraine without Western support.
This is correct. There’s no bench of “better” Russian leaders. The so-called “dissidents” don’t want to replace Putin with someone better, they just want to be his replacement. Navalny would’ve eventually followed Putin’s path.
Putin’s removal would of course cause some internal chaos, as well as economic disruption due to shifts in the dynamics between oligarchs and their gangs. But this would be temporary. Russians care more about building an empire than modernization or liberalization or acceptance in the international community. Nothing can be done for that, other than maximal economic sanctions and military violence whenever they venture outside their borders.
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