Lost in the awfulness of this entire pointless genocidal vanity revenge project is just how historically badly it is going for Russia. From an initial goal of total conquest, in a month their truce startping point has slid from 1) Total Capitulation to 2) All 4 ‘annexed’ regions plus Crimea, disarmament & constitutional neutrality to 3) Give us Donbas, and maybe our stooges in the U.N. can run Ukraine to 4) Please freeze the lines and give us something, and stop hitting our gas facilities. Trump, as always, overplayed his hand with leverage he doesn’t actually have, and now has nearly no sway over Ukraine - Zelensky is tellin him flat ‘No’. European and domestic support is probably enough to keep Russia from any meaningful strategic wins at this point against a severaly degraded and over rated Russian army.
SLAVA UKRAINI
Winter is going to be interesting.
I’m not a historian but I would expect that being an occupying/invading force in winter is always worse than being the force native to the land.
The logic for why Russia is in a losing position is simple at the heart of it. Ukraine is rapidly developing military industrial partnerships with wealthy foreign nations that similarly value the lives and thus professionalism of their military personnel. If Russia could only manage at best a slow grinding costly offensive before these additional capacities and partnerships, basic logic suggests Russia is running into a brickwall when they fully come online in Ukraine.
I am of course mostly talking about artillery here but other stuff too. I mean, just imagine fighting an army with domestic L119 howitizer production vs. an army without it? That right there is a MASSIVE shift in strategic power and it barely made the news.
https://defence-blog.com/ukraine-uk-agree-on-joint-artillery-production/
…this is some of the worst news a Russian general could wake up to, the L119 is a workhorse and it is very lightweight. It is the best towed infantry support howitizer on earth, period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L118_light_gun
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M119_howitzer
M119 direct fire drill
Just how bad things are for Russia is nearly impossible to grasp in the short term. They can’t advance in any meaningful way. That is, after having:
- Squandered the soviet hardware stockpile inheritance
- Destroyed the primary oil & gas market
- Pissed away the 30 year war chest
- Shown their army and it’s equipment to be hot garbage.
- Become junior vassal to China in the anti-west alliance of authoritarian shitholes
- Lost Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran got smoked by Israel in all-out missile exchanges.
- Lost power projection into the Black Sea and thus Mediterranean
- Lost influence over the Central Asian republics to China.
- Can refuse no demand China makes going forward
- Lost significant potion of the strategic bomber fleet. And the Black Sea Fleet.
- Lost any political credibility going forward
- Have assembled a shitty coalition of corrupt ally countries that only run on bribes
- Their entire Quantity > Quality Horde War philosophy is shown to be untrue, whether about men or machines.
The USSR used to have idelogical allies. Useful idiots in the west who would sell secrets to them for anti-capitalist sentiment. These days, it’s plain to see they are simply a debauched, corrupt mafia. That’s enough for some people, but maybe(?) less useful as a tool for finding new agents to do their bidding when money is the only motivator.
It’s not all bad for them - they control the U.S. Emperor and his party - just imagine the kompromat they have on the entire GOP going forward. And they are ultimately best at corrosive disinformation, and are having great success farting up democracies with their right wing populist franchises across the West. That’s probably where they will focus their energy going forward after having wasted their army in Ukraine.
If Biden had any guts he would have declared a no fly zone over unoccupied Ukraine.
He made many blunders. Broadly, I think the biggest ones were adopting a ‘salami slice’ strategy to bleed Russia long term to try and leverage their hubris about continuing this bloody war long after it was obvious it wasn’t going to go the way russia wanted it.
Incremental escalation of weapons systems to keep Russia expending it’s irreplaceable army hardware, so that they are neutered in the long run. As opposed to a quick, overwhelming NATO response where Russia retreats, gets the propaganda ‘win’ that they were indeed fighting all of NATO, and that their decision for restraint was to preserve global peace, and their defeat to an inferior ‘little brother’ race was not proof of their actual corrupt weakness. This isn’t a bad strategy at all - if it works. But that leads to the REAL blunder - never planning a successor when it was clear he would be a one-termer, and assuming that Putin’s cock-holster Trump could never win again. The classic Boomer problem, staying too long and failing to make plans for the next generation.
No-Fly zones are logistically significant, but not undoable. Totally agree with you, a no-fly zone is the end of the war. And Putin was not going to use nukes or attack anyone else, we can clearly see that now. Biden fell for escalation bluffs, but I also think his strategy was always going to be ‘let’s make them bleed themselves out’, but again, under the bad assumption that his party wouldn’t lose the next election to a brazen Russian asset.
Worked great in Korea. And Vietnam. And Afghanistan.
Not sure if I’m being sarcastic.
Didn’t work out great for those hosting the cold war pissing contests, anyways.
Have to constantly remind myself - this is not where Russia wanted to be. And that’s a good thing, even with all the suffering in mind.
We’d all like to have a movie-style exploding Death Star style ending where a fleet of A-10’s and F-35’s comes screaming across the horizon to the soundtrack of Rock You Like A Hurricane, and the Russians scurry back to mordor, but that’s not realistic.
Russia has effectively been stopped. They are the ones talking peace terms. Their negotiating position went from TOTAL CAPITULATION to 4 ANNEXED REGIONS, DISARMAMENT & NEUTRALITY to 4 ANNEXED REGIONS PLUS CRIMEA to “Let us keep what we have”, in about 6 weeks’ time. They aren’t mobilzing on a wide scale anymore, they are only continuing with terror bombing, and they’re taking counterpunches whose effects are impossible to hide even from their flaccid sheep population.
This is the endgame. Which is rarely viscerally satisfying to either side. The fact that Zelensky can reply with a flat “No” to absurd Russian & Trumpian demands to cede territory means that Ukraine is in a better position than Russia. Now, and going forward.
