Well… he isn’t wrong. It is indeed completely irrational to fight 17 months, lose hundred thousand+ soldiers, most of your somewhat modern equipment and damage your economy for decades to come while proving to be incapable of even remotely reaching the goals set for just a 3-day-long invasion. And Russia should finally pack up, go home and end this shit show.
And now let’s wait for his brilliant plan to actually get Russia to wake up from their insane fever dream and delusion of grandeur… That is his plan, isn’t it? *cough*
It is indeed completely irrational to fight 17 months, lose hundred thousand+ soldiers, most of your somewhat modern equipment and damage your economy for decades to come while proving to be incapable of even remotely reaching the goals set
But enough about Ukraine’s performance in this war…
Which part of this is Ukraine, exactly? The “irrational” fighting, the “somewhat modern equipment”, or the “incapable of reaching the goals set”? Because afaik, Ukraine is still standing, fighting with modern equipment, and with unwavering support for future reconstruction from its allies
Try to keep the response coherent
The only person who said 3 days was some random US general, why are y’all using it as some sort of gotcha?
Given that Russia appears to be winning this conflict, seems that the fever dream and delusions of grandeur are in the west.
Are they? It’s difficult for me to tell given I have a language barrier and the vast majority of English-language information is obviously supportive of Ukraine. From what I have understood, it seems that Russia has gained a modest amount of land at significant cost in terms of human lives and internal political stability.
But I am also unsure how much I hear about the civil discontent is reflective of the actual Russian situation, beyond average pacifist sentiment. “Their society is in turmoil!” sorts of stories have been used in past conflicts to keep up public support for wars by making it sound like victory is around the corner.
Discriminating signal from noise in war media requires really active constant effort that I just can’t maintain long term when there are so many conflicts. As much as I want to. I also think the whole thing has been lose-lose for people and the environment, but that’s another topic altogether.
There is actually a lot of information you can read in English language media, but most of it doesn’t make its way into mainstream reporting. However, actual military experts and political scientists give us a pretty good insight into what’s really happening. For example, this analysis from U.S. Lt. Col. Alex Vershinin retired after 20 years of service and 12 years working as a modeling and simulations officer in NATO explains that Russian strategy is not about taking territory. Russia is fighting a war of attrition with NATO. The reality is that Russia inherited a massive military industrial complex from USSR, and it is currently able to outproduce NATO militarily. Furthermore, Russia has a much simpler logistics situation in terms of shipping weapons and supplies to the battlefront. Finally, Russia enjoys air superiority over Ukraine and is able to attack deep within Ukraine to destroy supplies and infrastructure. Ukraine has no meaningful ability to do the same within Russia. Furthermore, this is primarily an artillery war and Russia enjoys a huge artillery advantage over Ukraine. This summary of the state of things John Mearsheimer is a very lucid explanation of where the war is at.
Another huge problem for Ukraine is that it’s entirely reliant on western support at this point both militarily and economically. This means that Ukraine has to continue showing results to the west in order to keep support going. This is how Ukraine got pushed into the current disastrous offensive they’re forced to conduct. Russians clearly expected this given that they spent the past 9 months preparing complex multilayered defences that Ukrainian military is throwing itself against as we speak.
Once this offensive burns out, Ukraine will have spent a significant amount of weapons they received from the west, and lost large numbers of their experienced soldiers. This is already happening and it’s being admitted in mainstream western media fairly openly at this point. Russia is already starting a counterattack of their own in the north, and they’ve taken more territory in the past couple of weeks than Ukraine has taken in two months of their offensive. Russia is increasingly fighting against a depleted and demoralized army. All of this was known before the war started, Obama even quipped this in 2016:
Regarding political stability, it’s pretty clear that it’s much higher in Russia than pretty much in any western country. The government is consistently polling between 75% and 80%, and most dissidents have fled at the start of the conflict. We also saw evidence of this when Prigozhin’s attempt at a coup happened. All of the government and military immediately pledged loyalty and denounced Prigozhin. I can guarantee you that anybody who appeared to even remotely support the coup has been rooted out at this point. On the other hand, there is significant political instability in Europe, and anti war parties are polling increasingly high.
The reality is that that people care about their economic situation first and foremost. The economy in Russia is doing well, and even IMF is projecting growth. The war has little impact on day to day life in Russia. On the other hand, Europe is now in recession and people are seeing their economic conditions decline. This is the primary driver of political unrest. I expect we’ll see anti war sentiment to continue growing going forward. I recall seeing that Czech president Petr Pavel say that he expects that Ukraine only has around 6 months left, at which point there’s likely going to be collapse of public support in the west. Once western support stops, Ukraine will have no way to continue fighting the war and will have to accept Russian terms. Russia understands this perfectly well, and this is why they’re conserving their resources and fighting a war of attrition instead of making big and costly offensives to take territory. If Russia can grind down Ukrainian army then they can dictate terms.
You have to move the goalposts further than even Putin has, in order to come up with the conclusion that Russia is winning the conflict.
That’s the conclusion of anybody who’s been paying any attention and has at least a couple of brain cells to bang together. Soon enough this will become obvious even to the most imbecilic members of western public. In the meantime feel free to keep regurgitating the propaganda you’ve been fed for the past two years like a parrot.
