When you say "invest," you really mean "spend," and when you say "$100 billion," count on "$200 billion" by the time everything's run through the Ukrainian/USG grift machine.
But more to the point, why am I supposed to be paying any money to Ukraine at all? I don't really care which group of Slavic oligarchs rules which group of Slavic serfs.
The only possible reason I can see is that we are better off if we can maintain the principle that taking territory by force is old fashioned and déclassé. Slowly bleeding the Russians by giving just enough financial/military support is doing the trick. Of course some people might consider the nearly million casualties morally questionable if this principle is all there is to it.
Someday the world will go back to fighting wars of expansion, but I prefer that happen after I am dead.
But yeah, maybe the Europeans can handle this one? I notice their hypocrisy when they actually feel threatened.
The Red Army was hopeless in defense throughout the First World War. They were hopeless in 1941 right up until the winter saved them. They got manhandled in 1942 right up until Stalingrad, where they performed very well indeed. They did very poorly at Kharkov and took advantage of the Germans telegraphed punch at Kursk.
They then went on the offensive and swept all before them.
The Soviets also smashed the Japanese at Khalkhin Gol in 1939, again in an offensive operation.
Can’t say I blame them, lots of free goodies. The current Irish government is hell-bent on abandoning its long-standing policy of strict neutrality. They currently have the lowest rate of defense spending in the EU. The Irish Defence Forces have 7500 members.
The government wants half a dozen fighter planes. I’m sure they’d like us to pay for them. Looks like they’re angling for NATO membership as soon as they can bring the population to heel.
Putin and Russia probably do not have the military/logistic/economic capability to conquer and hold the entirety of Ukraine. Robert Wright at Nonzero postulated that an eventual peace could see Russia holding the Russian speaking enclaves of Ukraine while the Ukrainian speaking districts formed a rump state.
For Russia trying to take and hold that rump state, even if it was achievable, could easily result in a prolonged campaign of guerilla warfare, targeted assassinations of Russian troops and Ukrainian collaborators, bombings in Russia proper, etc. Plus it's not really necessary for Putin's primary goal of securing Crimea.
I doubt that the West will commit boots on the ground to enforce a ceasefire given the long history of tit for tat provocations between Ukraine and Russia over the last few years--an artillery strike here, an armed skirmish there, some dam building thrown in for flavor. There is simply too much potential for something that escalates into direct conflict between Russian and NATO forces. The Ukrainian rump state will be an economic basket case anyway--one of my dinner partners likes to say that it will be a client state completely dependent on Western charity whose primary export back to its benefactors will be crime and instability. At that point the West will de facto be responsible for Ukraine's defense anyway in the form of military aid, training, and weapons shipments even if actual troops are verboten.
The only lesson to be drawn from the current war is that a mouse can roar as long as the US is willing to put its thumb on the scale. See also the UK 1941-45, South Korea in 1950 and South Vietnam 1960-75.
It’s just unbelievable that we have to keep re-learning that lesson.
On another note, the Irish “charity”, Concern (famous from a Saw Doctors song) has just laid off 400! Staffers. The reason: withdrawal of funding from USAid.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians wanted to enter normal relations with the Western nations and even join NATO, but were rebuffed. An enemy was needed to keep the grift going. While Russia was too weak to do anything about it, NATO, contrary to promises made to get Moscow to pull out of East Germany, expanded up to Russia's borders in the Baltics, but the subsequent threat of Ukraine in NATO, only 200 miles from Moscow was a step too far. Our senior statesmen including Kennan and Kissinger warned against this gross provocation, but neocon greed for "defense" grift prevailed, and the eventual result was the Russian invasion, which we were repeatedly told was "unprovoked." To paraphrase Bismarck, one can't believe anything until its opposite is asserted in the media. Whatever happened to the notion of national self-determination? I guess it has been superseded by Globalism and the laughably misnamed "rules based international order." Under self-determination, the Russian ethnic and speaking portions of Ukraine, including the Donbas and Odessa, would be a separate self-governing nation or might choose to join Russia. It is interesting to note that when the Soviet Union broke up, it was not under people asserting their individual rights, but rather their national identities. President Putin has said, and this is believable, that Russia doesn't want additional territory; they already have plenty. The idea that they want to occupy western Ukraine or even invade other countries is not credible, and their difficulties in Ukraine to date show this to be only a grifter fantasy.
Ukraine offered the opportunity of a land war, fought by Ukrainians, that the neocon grifters thought could bleed Russia through sanctions, confiscation of reserves, and ground combat, and thereby "queer the Donbas" and bring about regime change in Moscow. No US casualties to cause political problems here. There is no comparable opportunity with China. The war has destroyed Ukraine, and killed and maimed hundreds of thousands. It appears that it has only strengthened Russia as they now have a battle hardened army trained in the new warfare, which we don't, and they far outproduce us in munitions. There is something deeply immoral about a project that pursues spurious ideals at the cost of the lives of others.
I'm not buying your implication that this war has strengthened Russia militarily. Yes it gave them some experience in a kind of warfare that probably won't be next time but it also exhausted their regular soldiers. Russia doesn't have enough young population to be waging war
How could that be? I get that practical experience is great, but they have lost 100s of thousands of military age men and thanks to demographic trends they didn't have a lot to start with. They were getting volunteers from prisons. Are they holding their real soldiers in reserve?
1) Both sides are exhausted, but a cease fire helps the Russians more if Ukraine keeps receiving support from the West. A ceasefire helps the west as well, as ithe war is getting very expensive for limited value. Why in the world would I care who controls Russian speaking luhetsk or crimea? It’s a tough pill to swallow for Slava Ukraine as it obviously means that Putin wins and is not punished for his evil.
2) Ukraine did better than expected. They kept Odessa as Steve points out and thus any anaconda strategy by the Russians won’t work. Imagine if the confederates had kept New Orleans. Borrowing fron an old sports analogy, if you had told the Ukrainians in February of 2022 that the current frontlines would have been the outcome of the invasion, would you have accepted it? In contrast to losing Odessa, Kherson and having an installed puppet regime in Kiev?
3) finally, I think it would be very difficult for Putin to restart the war for many reasons. But mainly because (1) internal resistance to starting a war that has led to the death of thousands of young Russians and which the Russian has shown very limited capacity for offensive operations would be very high, not withstanding the crazy Russian patriots and (2) Ukraine would be much better prepared the next time, the front is shorter/more defensible and presumably the cease fire will include security guarantees by both Europeans and American mining companies. (Make up your own mind as to how facetious I am being on that last point. I’m still unclear myself.)
Call me out in five years or even fifty years to see how prescient I am.
I've assumed from the beginning that this was about Russia controlling the Black Sea region through which an enormous amount of trade goods and energy products can pass without American influence if they can secure Crimea and most of the north coast.
The Black Sea is to Russia what the Gulf of Mexico/America is to us. I don't think they want the rest of Ukraine. This is why they withdrew in the north and concentrated on Mariupol then Kherson at the critical moment early on.
I wrote a long time ago on Unz that the fight in Kherson (really for Odessa) was worth it for Ukraine, because without it it's game over. I'm sure the Russians want it, but wrapping up the entire Sea of Azov is still a pretty big deal. Basically puts Novorossiysk - the big Russian logistics port on the Black Sea - out of tactical range and puts big constraints on NATO navies and aircraft.
This topic does not, unfortunately, play to Steve's strengths, and he has wisely avoided it for the past couple of years. This war continues to be misunderstood by most Americans. While it certainly seems to be mostly a stalemate judging by changes in territory, it is anything but that. Our press has generally done a terrible job of independent evaluation of what is going on in this war, though they are slowly and reluctantly coming to the realization that it is going badly for Ukraine. I realize that many will dispute the following, but I believe time will bear this out. The West doesn't understand the Russian approach to war in general, and this war in particular. They are patient and engaging in a war of attrition, to which they have made significant progress. They have long stated that a major goal of this war was to destroy the Ukrainian military. That has taken priority over territorial gains. While the rate of their territorial gains has significantly improved over the past year, it is still miniscule compared to the scale of Ukraine. However, when the Ukraine military is sufficiently diminished, the rate of territorial gains will increase rapidly.
Current independent estimates of the number of Ukrainian soldiers killed range from at least half a million to over a million men. Many have surrendered or just deserted. And many have just left Ukraine to avoid being conscripted. Furthermore, it is not generally recognized that Ukraine had a very skewed population distribution, with a dearth of people ages 20-25, which is behind their reluctance to draft young men. Ukraine claims that Russian casualties have been higher than theirs. This is completely without substance. Russia doesn't publish the statistics of their casualties, but estimates put the number of dead in the rough range of 100K to 140K (including ethnic Russian Ukrainians and men from the Wagner Group). Ukraine has lost most of their most best soldiers, and many of their replacements have very little training.
Much of this disparity in casualties is due to the preponderance of Russian weapons. It is sobering to realize that despite how much the US spends on the military, that a country of Russia, long derided as a gas station with nuclear weapons, can out produce (often by large margins!) the US in nearly all categories save space surveillance. Considering the difference in spending, and the amount produced, it appears the Russians produce military effectiveness at an order of magnitude higher efficiency than we do. That is a sobering fact. Furthermore, American weapons have generally not fared well against the Russian ones, being overly expensive, complex, and hard to maintain and use.
I see few Americans giving much thought to the scale of this war. For example, the Ukrainians have probably lost almost twice as many men as the US did in WWII with a population much smaller than ours at that time. In Vietnam we lost less then 60,000 men.
The belief that the Russians will agree to a cease fire is delusional. They are winning, and know it. They are not about to give up their advantage by stopping to allow Ukraine to rearm and train more men.
As far as the Western press goes, reflect on the all the past claims that have now proven ridiculous. The Russians are about to run out of shell, missiles, men, etc. And yet there has been no dimunition of any of these things, but rather increasing quantities. Putin was crazy, sick, about to be overthrown, etc. All proven false. The sanctions would destroy the Russian economy. Yet it is doing better than the western economies, despite the war.
Whether you think Russia was justified or not in invading Ukraine, they will win. It is time to get over it and stop throwing good money after bad.
The situation in Ukraine reminds of the Ypres situation in Belgium from 1915-1918. Lots of dead, little movement of the lines. Hopefully peace can be made and an ethnically pure Ukraine will have independence. Ukraine will be rebuilt and, over a period of several years, probably $1 trillion and more will be spent by Europe and America to pay for Ukraine's weapons and for Ukraine's rebuilding.
This is a comment about Ukrainian fortifications as a reason for the initial failure of Russia's 2022 invasion. The failure of the Russian offensive in 2022 was due in part to very poor planning by the Russian high command; in part to vulnerability of tanks and ground-attack aircraft to shoulder-fired missiles. The loss of the 40-mile convoy was a dramatic illustration. Another aspect was that the biggest donor of tanks to the Ukrainian army was the Russian army. The Ukrainian counter moves were delayed by the implicit policy of NATO states to supply and equip the Ukrainians just enough to keep the war going; for example, provision of anti-minefield vehicles was delayed until the Russians and their Chechnyan allies had more strongly fortified their defenses in eastern Ukraine.
Steve seems to have said the obvious thing that very few pundits will say out loud: that not much has changed since May 2022. We’re talking about 0.1% of Ukrainian territory changing sides these days.
There is some combination of both sides either not wanting or being able to battle harder.
I’ve been reading around on the Reasons. Russian born commentator Konstantin Kisin explains like this: part of the right sees the West as played out, decrepit. Russia appears to them as a white Christian redoubt.
Even though Russia has lots of Muslims and is an authoritarian dictatorship. These people haven’t actually been there.
There’s a handful of people like Tucker Carlson who is pretty much a Putin mouthpiece. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s on Putin’s payroll.
Ukraine was looking West, which these people see as losers. Hence Ukraine would be better off in tender embrace of Putin than in NATO, the club of losers.
Russia is not really expansionist. They get invaded at least once a century from their Western border so they want a ring of friendly buffer states.
The low-hanging fruit has been picked for imperial expansion. The US could take over the Caribbean tomorrow but we don't; lousy human capital, mosquitoes, hot, poor soil. We couldn't even give Puerto Rico away if we wanted to. Russia doesn't want Europe because the place is filling up with Arabs and Africans and the pension obligations are too large.
The large size of Russia is almost entirely due to Siberia, which it conquered in 1778. Siberia makes up approximately 75% of the land area of Russia with only about 25% of the population. For a long time it was considered mostly an undesirable place by the rest of the world with a very low population density (about 1/20th of the rest of Russia). Take that away and the rest of Russia has less than half the land area of the US.
If you're 65. the USSR existed through your formative adult years and that's how most people in that cohort think of Russia. If Russia wanted to reconstitute the Soviet Union it could just send the tanks back to Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, the Baltics, et al., or just roll through the Fulda Gap now that Donaldmir Putrumpsky is in office.
I guess an exception to this would be Chechnya to whom the Russians pay lots of money not to be independent, for which the world should be grateful.
In late Czarist times, the Russian Foreign Office celebrated the Czar's birthday by reporting with pride that they'd gone through the archives and determined that of Russia's last 38 wars, Russia had started 36 of them.
I'm thinking expansionist like Hitler's Reich, not everyone's tendency to expand to oceans, mountains, until they meet other peer nations. What other nations do you think would be located where Russia is now?
When you say "invest," you really mean "spend," and when you say "$100 billion," count on "$200 billion" by the time everything's run through the Ukrainian/USG grift machine.
But more to the point, why am I supposed to be paying any money to Ukraine at all? I don't really care which group of Slavic oligarchs rules which group of Slavic serfs.
Gold box comment. I should care which bunch of corrupt plutocrats is on which bank of the Dnieper? Or which group gets the racket money from Odessa?
The only possible reason I can see is that we are better off if we can maintain the principle that taking territory by force is old fashioned and déclassé. Slowly bleeding the Russians by giving just enough financial/military support is doing the trick. Of course some people might consider the nearly million casualties morally questionable if this principle is all there is to it.
Someday the world will go back to fighting wars of expansion, but I prefer that happen after I am dead.
But yeah, maybe the Europeans can handle this one? I notice their hypocrisy when they actually feel threatened.
We spend more in Defense than the entire Russian GDP, there's no doubting the dominant Force.
Russians have always been an attritional army, far better suited to dogged defence.
The Red Army was hopeless in defense throughout the First World War. They were hopeless in 1941 right up until the winter saved them. They got manhandled in 1942 right up until Stalingrad, where they performed very well indeed. They did very poorly at Kharkov and took advantage of the Germans telegraphed punch at Kursk.
They then went on the offensive and swept all before them.
The Soviets also smashed the Japanese at Khalkhin Gol in 1939, again in an offensive operation.
I said "attritional" and "dogged", nothing you've said disagrees with my post.
Putin is @ 72. Looks healthy to me. Robert Mugabe lived until he was 95.
I doubt Putin is going away soon, and his mission to restore Russian glory has significant support.
I predict a pause.
It’s been laughable how the western press has been simultaneously claiming that Russia is about to collapse and also about to invade Western Europe.
They also fail to concede that historical precedent is for the invasions going in the opposite direction.
Finland and Sweden thought enough of a threat to join NATO.
Can’t say I blame them, lots of free goodies. The current Irish government is hell-bent on abandoning its long-standing policy of strict neutrality. They currently have the lowest rate of defense spending in the EU. The Irish Defence Forces have 7500 members.
The government wants half a dozen fighter planes. I’m sure they’d like us to pay for them. Looks like they’re angling for NATO membership as soon as they can bring the population to heel.
Putin has significant, chronic health issues. Nonetheless, you are right to suggest he might live and be quite functional until age 95.
It’s doesn’t really matter. There’s plenty who could take his place.
Putin and Russia probably do not have the military/logistic/economic capability to conquer and hold the entirety of Ukraine. Robert Wright at Nonzero postulated that an eventual peace could see Russia holding the Russian speaking enclaves of Ukraine while the Ukrainian speaking districts formed a rump state.
For Russia trying to take and hold that rump state, even if it was achievable, could easily result in a prolonged campaign of guerilla warfare, targeted assassinations of Russian troops and Ukrainian collaborators, bombings in Russia proper, etc. Plus it's not really necessary for Putin's primary goal of securing Crimea.
I doubt that the West will commit boots on the ground to enforce a ceasefire given the long history of tit for tat provocations between Ukraine and Russia over the last few years--an artillery strike here, an armed skirmish there, some dam building thrown in for flavor. There is simply too much potential for something that escalates into direct conflict between Russian and NATO forces. The Ukrainian rump state will be an economic basket case anyway--one of my dinner partners likes to say that it will be a client state completely dependent on Western charity whose primary export back to its benefactors will be crime and instability. At that point the West will de facto be responsible for Ukraine's defense anyway in the form of military aid, training, and weapons shipments even if actual troops are verboten.
The only lesson to be drawn from the current war is that a mouse can roar as long as the US is willing to put its thumb on the scale. See also the UK 1941-45, South Korea in 1950 and South Vietnam 1960-75.
It’s just unbelievable that we have to keep re-learning that lesson.
On another note, the Irish “charity”, Concern (famous from a Saw Doctors song) has just laid off 400! Staffers. The reason: withdrawal of funding from USAid.
Whats the Russian term for Maginot Line?
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians wanted to enter normal relations with the Western nations and even join NATO, but were rebuffed. An enemy was needed to keep the grift going. While Russia was too weak to do anything about it, NATO, contrary to promises made to get Moscow to pull out of East Germany, expanded up to Russia's borders in the Baltics, but the subsequent threat of Ukraine in NATO, only 200 miles from Moscow was a step too far. Our senior statesmen including Kennan and Kissinger warned against this gross provocation, but neocon greed for "defense" grift prevailed, and the eventual result was the Russian invasion, which we were repeatedly told was "unprovoked." To paraphrase Bismarck, one can't believe anything until its opposite is asserted in the media. Whatever happened to the notion of national self-determination? I guess it has been superseded by Globalism and the laughably misnamed "rules based international order." Under self-determination, the Russian ethnic and speaking portions of Ukraine, including the Donbas and Odessa, would be a separate self-governing nation or might choose to join Russia. It is interesting to note that when the Soviet Union broke up, it was not under people asserting their individual rights, but rather their national identities. President Putin has said, and this is believable, that Russia doesn't want additional territory; they already have plenty. The idea that they want to occupy western Ukraine or even invade other countries is not credible, and their difficulties in Ukraine to date show this to be only a grifter fantasy.
Peter Zeihan claims that Russia wants to control the three choke points to prevent invasion, one of which is in eastern Hungary just west of Ukraine.
The Carpathians are there. A much better barrier than any river; though it must be said it didn’t do the Germans much good in the last big go-round.
Better than open steppes and there’s also the Fulda gap in Poland on their list.
The Fulda Gap is in Germany.
Gotta go through Poland
No ones going to invade Russia. Except perhaps angry Ukrainians.
Mongols, French, Germans and US have all done it so I am doubtful the Russians are blasé about the possibility.
I've often wondered why they picked Russia as the bogeyman rather than China.
Ukraine offered the opportunity of a land war, fought by Ukrainians, that the neocon grifters thought could bleed Russia through sanctions, confiscation of reserves, and ground combat, and thereby "queer the Donbas" and bring about regime change in Moscow. No US casualties to cause political problems here. There is no comparable opportunity with China. The war has destroyed Ukraine, and killed and maimed hundreds of thousands. It appears that it has only strengthened Russia as they now have a battle hardened army trained in the new warfare, which we don't, and they far outproduce us in munitions. There is something deeply immoral about a project that pursues spurious ideals at the cost of the lives of others.
I'm not buying your implication that this war has strengthened Russia militarily. Yes it gave them some experience in a kind of warfare that probably won't be next time but it also exhausted their regular soldiers. Russia doesn't have enough young population to be waging war
The war has been terrible for Russia (although much worse for Ukraine). *And*, per Thucydides, it has strengthened Russia militarily.
How could that be? I get that practical experience is great, but they have lost 100s of thousands of military age men and thanks to demographic trends they didn't have a lot to start with. They were getting volunteers from prisons. Are they holding their real soldiers in reserve?
Here is my worthless opinion or set of question?
1) Both sides are exhausted, but a cease fire helps the Russians more if Ukraine keeps receiving support from the West. A ceasefire helps the west as well, as ithe war is getting very expensive for limited value. Why in the world would I care who controls Russian speaking luhetsk or crimea? It’s a tough pill to swallow for Slava Ukraine as it obviously means that Putin wins and is not punished for his evil.
2) Ukraine did better than expected. They kept Odessa as Steve points out and thus any anaconda strategy by the Russians won’t work. Imagine if the confederates had kept New Orleans. Borrowing fron an old sports analogy, if you had told the Ukrainians in February of 2022 that the current frontlines would have been the outcome of the invasion, would you have accepted it? In contrast to losing Odessa, Kherson and having an installed puppet regime in Kiev?
3) finally, I think it would be very difficult for Putin to restart the war for many reasons. But mainly because (1) internal resistance to starting a war that has led to the death of thousands of young Russians and which the Russian has shown very limited capacity for offensive operations would be very high, not withstanding the crazy Russian patriots and (2) Ukraine would be much better prepared the next time, the front is shorter/more defensible and presumably the cease fire will include security guarantees by both Europeans and American mining companies. (Make up your own mind as to how facetious I am being on that last point. I’m still unclear myself.)
Call me out in five years or even fifty years to see how prescient I am.
I’m sure the Russians have their eyes on Odessa.
I've assumed from the beginning that this was about Russia controlling the Black Sea region through which an enormous amount of trade goods and energy products can pass without American influence if they can secure Crimea and most of the north coast.
The Black Sea is to Russia what the Gulf of Mexico/America is to us. I don't think they want the rest of Ukraine. This is why they withdrew in the north and concentrated on Mariupol then Kherson at the critical moment early on.
What about Odessa?
I wrote a long time ago on Unz that the fight in Kherson (really for Odessa) was worth it for Ukraine, because without it it's game over. I'm sure the Russians want it, but wrapping up the entire Sea of Azov is still a pretty big deal. Basically puts Novorossiysk - the big Russian logistics port on the Black Sea - out of tactical range and puts big constraints on NATO navies and aircraft.
This topic does not, unfortunately, play to Steve's strengths, and he has wisely avoided it for the past couple of years. This war continues to be misunderstood by most Americans. While it certainly seems to be mostly a stalemate judging by changes in territory, it is anything but that. Our press has generally done a terrible job of independent evaluation of what is going on in this war, though they are slowly and reluctantly coming to the realization that it is going badly for Ukraine. I realize that many will dispute the following, but I believe time will bear this out. The West doesn't understand the Russian approach to war in general, and this war in particular. They are patient and engaging in a war of attrition, to which they have made significant progress. They have long stated that a major goal of this war was to destroy the Ukrainian military. That has taken priority over territorial gains. While the rate of their territorial gains has significantly improved over the past year, it is still miniscule compared to the scale of Ukraine. However, when the Ukraine military is sufficiently diminished, the rate of territorial gains will increase rapidly.
Current independent estimates of the number of Ukrainian soldiers killed range from at least half a million to over a million men. Many have surrendered or just deserted. And many have just left Ukraine to avoid being conscripted. Furthermore, it is not generally recognized that Ukraine had a very skewed population distribution, with a dearth of people ages 20-25, which is behind their reluctance to draft young men. Ukraine claims that Russian casualties have been higher than theirs. This is completely without substance. Russia doesn't publish the statistics of their casualties, but estimates put the number of dead in the rough range of 100K to 140K (including ethnic Russian Ukrainians and men from the Wagner Group). Ukraine has lost most of their most best soldiers, and many of their replacements have very little training.
Much of this disparity in casualties is due to the preponderance of Russian weapons. It is sobering to realize that despite how much the US spends on the military, that a country of Russia, long derided as a gas station with nuclear weapons, can out produce (often by large margins!) the US in nearly all categories save space surveillance. Considering the difference in spending, and the amount produced, it appears the Russians produce military effectiveness at an order of magnitude higher efficiency than we do. That is a sobering fact. Furthermore, American weapons have generally not fared well against the Russian ones, being overly expensive, complex, and hard to maintain and use.
I see few Americans giving much thought to the scale of this war. For example, the Ukrainians have probably lost almost twice as many men as the US did in WWII with a population much smaller than ours at that time. In Vietnam we lost less then 60,000 men.
The belief that the Russians will agree to a cease fire is delusional. They are winning, and know it. They are not about to give up their advantage by stopping to allow Ukraine to rearm and train more men.
As far as the Western press goes, reflect on the all the past claims that have now proven ridiculous. The Russians are about to run out of shell, missiles, men, etc. And yet there has been no dimunition of any of these things, but rather increasing quantities. Putin was crazy, sick, about to be overthrown, etc. All proven false. The sanctions would destroy the Russian economy. Yet it is doing better than the western economies, despite the war.
Whether you think Russia was justified or not in invading Ukraine, they will win. It is time to get over it and stop throwing good money after bad.
"This topic does not, unfortunately, play to Steve's strengths, and he has wisely avoided it for the past couple of years..."
I can't imagine this fact being expressed more diplomatically.
The situation in Ukraine reminds of the Ypres situation in Belgium from 1915-1918. Lots of dead, little movement of the lines. Hopefully peace can be made and an ethnically pure Ukraine will have independence. Ukraine will be rebuilt and, over a period of several years, probably $1 trillion and more will be spent by Europe and America to pay for Ukraine's weapons and for Ukraine's rebuilding.
This is a comment about Ukrainian fortifications as a reason for the initial failure of Russia's 2022 invasion. The failure of the Russian offensive in 2022 was due in part to very poor planning by the Russian high command; in part to vulnerability of tanks and ground-attack aircraft to shoulder-fired missiles. The loss of the 40-mile convoy was a dramatic illustration. Another aspect was that the biggest donor of tanks to the Ukrainian army was the Russian army. The Ukrainian counter moves were delayed by the implicit policy of NATO states to supply and equip the Ukrainians just enough to keep the war going; for example, provision of anti-minefield vehicles was delayed until the Russians and their Chechnyan allies had more strongly fortified their defenses in eastern Ukraine.
Steve seems to have said the obvious thing that very few pundits will say out loud: that not much has changed since May 2022. We’re talking about 0.1% of Ukrainian territory changing sides these days.
There is some combination of both sides either not wanting or being able to battle harder.
It could be that Ukraine might collapse at some point, especially if starved of American resupply.
Some people want that to happen for Russia is Good, Ukraine is Bad reasons.
I’ve been reading around on the Reasons. Russian born commentator Konstantin Kisin explains like this: part of the right sees the West as played out, decrepit. Russia appears to them as a white Christian redoubt.
Even though Russia has lots of Muslims and is an authoritarian dictatorship. These people haven’t actually been there.
There’s a handful of people like Tucker Carlson who is pretty much a Putin mouthpiece. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s on Putin’s payroll.
Ukraine was looking West, which these people see as losers. Hence Ukraine would be better off in tender embrace of Putin than in NATO, the club of losers.
That’s his theory.
I've been to Russia. It was okay, but, obviously, Western Europe is better.
It’s useful to judge a place by how attractive it is to immigrants.
Russia only seems to attract immigrants from poor, former Soviet places.
Ukraine prior to the war had a negligible amount of immigrants and had quite considerable economic migration to both eastern and Western Europe.
I think there are less people directly on Kremlin payroll than is made out.
During the Cold War there were lots of genuine intellectual True Believers in the west.
The same is likely today.
Perhaps.
Battlefield reporting is sparse and political reporting even more so in western media.
I presume there are factions in and around Zelenskyy. Some will want peace, some will want to fight on.
In the Cold War era there was at least some speculation about goings-on in the Kremlin but now it’s treated like a black box.
Again I’m not sure if western media is unable or unwilling to report this stuff.
Russia is not really expansionist. They get invaded at least once a century from their Western border so they want a ring of friendly buffer states.
The low-hanging fruit has been picked for imperial expansion. The US could take over the Caribbean tomorrow but we don't; lousy human capital, mosquitoes, hot, poor soil. We couldn't even give Puerto Rico away if we wanted to. Russia doesn't want Europe because the place is filling up with Arabs and Africans and the pension obligations are too large.
How did Russia get to be the biggest country on Earth without being expansionist?
The large size of Russia is almost entirely due to Siberia, which it conquered in 1778. Siberia makes up approximately 75% of the land area of Russia with only about 25% of the population. For a long time it was considered mostly an undesirable place by the rest of the world with a very low population density (about 1/20th of the rest of Russia). Take that away and the rest of Russia has less than half the land area of the US.
If you're 65. the USSR existed through your formative adult years and that's how most people in that cohort think of Russia. If Russia wanted to reconstitute the Soviet Union it could just send the tanks back to Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, the Baltics, et al., or just roll through the Fulda Gap now that Donaldmir Putrumpsky is in office.
I guess an exception to this would be Chechnya to whom the Russians pay lots of money not to be independent, for which the world should be grateful.
In late Czarist times, the Russian Foreign Office celebrated the Czar's birthday by reporting with pride that they'd gone through the archives and determined that of Russia's last 38 wars, Russia had started 36 of them.
I'm thinking expansionist like Hitler's Reich, not everyone's tendency to expand to oceans, mountains, until they meet other peer nations. What other nations do you think would be located where Russia is now?
The US has no interest in where boundaries in Europe are drawn as long as Europeans themselves are doing the drawing.
Well, the Balkan interlude in the 1990s argues against that point.
I have nothing to contribute to this other than the Bee Gee's "Odessa" is a magnificent song, and peak art-pop.