It's just too bad there's no word in the English language for a situation that's worse than a stalemate.
Dumb question, but the word is "losing" right?
At this point I think their escape strategy is a full Russian annexation so that Russia has to deal with the Nazis themselves for eastern NATO countries for free.
By also for getting to claim "we warned you!!!" about Russia absolutely definitely wanting to annex the entirety of Ukraine from the start, historical development be damned.
It's been a while since I haven't checked the lib instances and Reddit, how are they dealing with the war now?
That is indeed the word I had in mind. Based on what Russians are saying, it sounds like they're not interested in western Ukraine in the slightest. My expectation is that the west will be stuck with a dysfunctional rump state in western Ukraine.
And from what I've seen libs in the mainstream are still convinced that Ukraine is winning.
Thing is, if Russian troops don't enter western Ukraine they can't really remove its government or get anything but a Korea divided armistice situation where there's no permanent legal cessation of hostilities, no international or even local recognition of new territorial realities and the prospect of continued terrorism against Russia by groups that they will claim to not control. They also wouldn't achieve de-nazification or de-militarization as that western side would be built up to be bristling with arms and NATO trained, Russia-hating Nazi-loving troops. Under that situation the west will declare victory including the media and liberals, they'll claim they didn't expel Putin but they did stop his march west and that if they hadn't stood with Ukraine he'd be in Paris by now or something.
I don't think they need to remove the government there. And international recognition of new territories doesn't really matter in any practical way. Russia also absolutely doesn't care what narrative the west is spinning as they've shown over the past two years. Neither people in Russia or any country aligned with Russia pay much attention to that.
On the other hand, a dysfunctional rump state of Ukraine would present a huge problem for the west. Either it becomes an black hole that the west has to keep pouring money into in order to prop it up, or it collapses and there's a massive refugee crisis in Europe. The economic situation in the west is already shaky with Eurozone going into a recession. Either scenario is going to make the economic situation even worse.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian nationalists are already starting to say that the west betrayed them, and there will to be just as much animosity towards the west as there is toward Russia going forward. The fascists from Ukraine have already been linking up with far right groups across Europe, and we know that around 70% of the weapons shipped to Ukraine went missing. I imagine a lot of these made their way into the hands of terrorist cells in European countries.
In fact, Naryshkin has already alluded to Ukraine becoming another Vietnam for US. So, I very much think that Russian strategy will continue to be to do attrition and to create an unsustainable economic situation for the west.
This is all so much confusing and anger-inducing. I get the headaches of strategy though, so many layers to this. Part of me thinks that Russia should go on a true offensive soon if Ukraine doesn't agree to a peace deal, but that might backfire and inspire the Amerikkkan and UkraNazi imperialists to add some money from the U.S. black budget and begin to throw more hordes of bad guys at Russia, economic stability be damned.
Exactly, it's a fine balancing act where Russia doesn't want NATO to provoke a major escalation with NATO, and they're just dragging out a war of attrition because it's working in their favor. A big offensive would also be a lot more costly, so I really think that the plan is to just slowly keep ramping up pressure until Ukrainian army starts to collapse.
Mearsheimer had a pretty good analysis of the situation in my opinion. He points out that vast majority of casualties in the war come from artillery and Russia enjoys a massive artillery advantage over Ukraine. So, attrition ratio favors Russia in a big way.
Experienced and motivated soldiers are the core that holds Ukrainian army together. And as these soldiers are lost and replaced with new conscripts who lack experience and motivation the army effectiveness keeps decreasing. Eventually it will hit an inflection point where it's simply not capable of holding the line.
When do you expect the next major Russian offensive? It has to be this Winter or the next right? Are they waiting full withdrawal of the west or will they attack before that?
I am still not sure there will be a "major Russian offensive" in the way that most people are imagining it. I think they will simply continue to incrementally dial up the pressure at all points along the line until the ability of the Kiev regime forces to mount a cohesive defense collapses. I think this is the smart play as Russia is only getting stronger while Ukraine and the collective West are getting weaker, so it's only a matter of time until a tipping point is reached.
Then again I might be completely wrong and the Russians could decide to go for a big flashy offensive just a month from now. Or a year. Who knows. The whole point in a war is keeping your enemy guessing and not telegraphing if, when or where you're going to attack. And that means that casual observers like us sitting on the sidelines are also incapable of predicting with any certainty what they will do.
My expectation would be that we'll see one within the next couple of months. It looks like Russia is already doing offensive operations all across the front, and one likely reason is that they're probing to see where the weak spots are. The front around Avdievka looks to be collapsing right now, so we might see a major push there. Another big factor is the deadlock in US over funding. If the money doesn't get passed in the next few days, then Ukraine likely won't see anything till the end of January at the earliest. This seems to be a good window of opportunity for Russia to exploit.
Just saw this on reddit, is this just a cope?
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/12/politics/russia-troop-losses-us-intelligence-assessment/index.html
I don't think there's any way that russia lost 300k troops but I could be wrong... Then again it's CNN so they are never going to follow up and do their own research, they are part of the propaganda arm of the US.
It's a cope, the funny part is that BBC set up a project to track Russian losses based on publicly available evidence, such as funerals, social media posts, etc. This is the only western count that has any methodology behind it, and it comes up with around 38k in losses. So, even if they're under counting, we could assume around 50k, that's still vastly below the wild numbers other western media keeps quoting.
https://en.zona.media/article/2022/05/20/casualties_eng
