As I was trying to think of something else besides Roe v. Wade, it occurred to me this afternoon to wonder how long the Ukraine war was likely to last. We fought the Soviet Union as proxies in Vietnam for about a decade. We fought them as proxies in Afghanistan for five or six years. Now we're fighting them as proxies in Ukraine, and the harder we (and NATO) fight the longer the war is likely to drag out. This is especially true since this time the Russians are actually fighting instead of simply supplying their clients, and it's become clear that the Russian army is sorely incompetent.
On the other hand, the Russian objective seems to have shrunk considerably, so that should speed things up. But on the other other hand, the Ukrainians seem willing to fight for the Donbas pretty competently for approximately forever (eight years and counting at the moment).
But there are more hands in this argument than an octopus could handle. I've read dozens of reasons on both sides why this war could end fairly quickly or could turn into a long stalemate. And we'd be supplying weapons and sanctioning Russia the whole time.
My view of Russia is a pretty conventional one: I have nothing against the Russian people, and don't really blame them for being angry about how we handled economic reform in the 1990s and then pushed NATO almost to their new borders. Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, is just a thug. Even leaving his territorial ambitions aside, he just has no redeeming qualities.
So how long would we be happy fighting him? A year? Sure. Two years? Probably. Three? Four? More? We just finished up fighting two far more expensive wars that lasted more than a decade, so I suppose we could go at least that long in Ukraine.
But will we? Will Russia? Are we in for another forever war? Comments?
"the harder we (and NATO) fight the longer the war is likely to drag out"
Surely it's the other way around, no? The harder we (via Ukraine) fight, the shorter the war will be (with UA winning). Unless you think it's a foregone conclusion that Russia wins.
I agree with Kevin about the Russian people, as opposed to Putin. I'm not sure we get to chose how long to fight, i.e., have our Ukrainian proxies fight. Russia has a lousy conventional military but Putin can quickly even the score with nuclear weapons, of which he has more than us. And what with the hawkish rhetoric from our leaders, the possibility of nuclear escalation seems all too real. I've read that in war games, the use of "tactical" nukes often leads to all out nuclear war. So then the war would end, as Kevin says, fairly quickly, as would much of Western civilization.
There exist underground cities, Petra, etc., from our past, one with nuclear signatures. I wonder if what goes around, comes around.
Petra was not an underground city. It has some religious sites carved into the cliffs in the surrounding mountain, but the principal city now in ruins was a conventional out in the open one. The false impression of underground comes merely from the cliff carved religious sites being preserved visually.
Correct. I recall one room that was carved into the cliff and the far wall had some intricate carvings. The room wasn't all that big.
I am certain cities were established after the threat. I was thinking of the settlements of Kaymakli and Derinkuyu, in Turkey. Mohenjo-Daro is the city with evidence of a nuclear event.
and, from Google (yeah, I know):
'"We have uncovered just 15 percent of the city," he says. "The vast majority—85 percent—is still underground and untouched." Numerous scrolls in Greek and dating to the Byzantine period were discovered in an excavated church near the Winged Lion Temple in Petra in December 1993.' Dated Apr 2020.
What are you suggesting, that ancient civilizations had nuclear weapons?
Apparently. And not only that, despite having nuclear weapons (and all the metallurgical, mining, machining, and computational technology that would entail), the ancients somehow still built cities out of mud bricks and the occasional collection of stacked stones, with *walls* for defense.
I think that there is also a problem with the Russian people here. They have this sense of themselves as a great imperial people, distrust individual freedom and democracy, and feel perpetually vulnerable (even though they have nukes) so that they do not trust their neighbors not to attack them and thus must control them (this is a bit of a generalization wit exceptions and details omitted for brevity, but largely accurate). Putin is authentically popular in Russia because a lot of them like this sort of thing.
When Russians roughly behave this way under Tsars, Commissars, and kleptocrats, well, something ain't right.
The problem here is that that is also a fair description of a large part of the US population. And even if you are generous in granting America an idealism that we genuinely believe (i.e. a commitment to liberty for all, not just a few castes), it is still pretty disquieting that we fought forever wars long after their due date just because we felt the need for "dignity." If we can be that involved in these kinds of fights, I'm not sure we could depend on Russians in general to be willing to disengage.
If there is anything we need to learn, it is that choosing the end date for conflict is not in our power.
Ukraine is not our proxy.
They did not start fighting at our urging. Their capability to fight was not based upon our help.
"it's become clear that the Russian army is sorely incompetent."
But this isn't going far enough. Their military-industrial base is .... a fraction
of the size of NATO's. In any protracted conflict that NATO takes seriously,
we'll swamp their military with our munitions of all sorts. Another reason that
the more seriously NATO takes this war, the sooner it'll be over.
Which is why it's been crazy to watch these talking heads on Russian propaganda outlets claim that what *really* needs to happen is for Russia to just drop the pretenses and take NATO head-on rather than just pussyfooting around in Ukraine. Really? The poor Ukrainians have thrown you back on your heels for over two months now, including sinking one of your premier naval flagships, but if only you could just confront all of NATO, including the US, you would show 'em who's boss?
Completely delusional, but also pretty scary, because Putin is apparently high on his own supply and marinating in this kind of rhetoric from his inner circle day in and day out.
Other differences between Afghanistan/Vietnam and Ukraine:
in Ukraine, the majority of the people are on our side (not as true in Donbas, but getting more true with every day of Russian indiscriminate slaughter).
Russia is much much weaker than they were during the Cold War (even accounting for them being weaker than we thought back then)
I don't really know how many more months Russia can keep this up... they are losing men and material rapidly, and while Ukraine is also losing men, they are actually gaining more material from the West than they are losing. How much can Putin afford to lose? How many casualties will his poorly trained army put up with?
So I'm going to put the over/under at 6 months from now. Though, unfortunately, if it gets close to the US election, I could see Putin keeping it going for a bit longer so as not to help the Democrats...
At this point, his backup plan may be simply to hunker down and hold on to whatever gains he has in the Donbas in hopes that another Republican cockholster he can manipulate like Trump wins in 2024 and will stop NATO from resupplying the Ukrainians (and press for a "peace plan" of course totally to Russia's advantage), at which point he can begin pressing his invasion again and eventually take Kyiv and/or topple Zelensky's government.
It's important at this time to recall that the one -- the one -- change the Trump campaign insisted on making in the 2016 Republican Party platform was to withhold military aid from the Ukraine.
The idea that NATO expansion 30 years ago somehow pushed Putin over the brink and explains his obsession with Ukraine is a canard we really need to dispense with. Putin's obsessions with rebuilding the Russian Empire from the Black Sea to the Baltic and reclaiming Ukraine as both a spiritual and ethnic homeland of the Russian nation (and exterminating Ukrainian identity in the process) has nothing to do with NATO and everything to do with his own unique brand of twisted ethno-religious nationalism.
I agree. We did behave badly, especially on the economy--to transition a state directed economy in one day is a recipe for corruption. And corruption is what we got (I am less certain about NATO expansion, I was opposed to it at the time but the present situation makes it looking prescient).
While the transition of the Russian state to a non Soviet basis certainly was not well thought through by the American side, Soviet economic culture is the primary driver of the Russian results
Americans and the West rather take on both too much credit and agency on themseves for what was a Russian result.
Russians and other foreigners were and are not little children wide-eyed waiting for American or other advisors to teach them X, Y or Z. and really the Leftist trope of the imperialists being The Reason for such failures is nothing more than an inversion of the bankrupt colonialist trope denying any economic agency (or politicla or socio-culture) to the "primitive" subjects.
The failures of Russian economic 'reforms' post-Soviet Union look very much like the earlier failure points in the Soviet and before that the Tsarist economic development efforts. That is to say, there are some very deep rooted Bad Habits in over-arching Russian socio-economic culture that are at once profoundly rooted in their history and hard to change. Particularly when not really dealt with.
The failure of Western Advisors was to ignore the reality the socio-economic institutions and historical culture matter (the development of Behavioural Economics has begun to address this blind spot). This is of course hard to analyse and address sans falling into simple prejudice and racism (thus why many abstract away from it). But the deeply rooted hisotry of abusive political super structure in Russia back to Tsarist times and transmitted with only modest reworking by the Soviets is a hard thing to change and overcome. And that is not Western fault nor something they could have changed.
Thank you, well stated. My short version is that there is a too-common point of view which is the inversion of the ‘white man’s burden’; the ascription of all the bad outcomes in the Second and Third Worlds to Western action, as if only Western Europeans and Americans have agency.
Agree entirely. Putin's reason for the "fight" is to revive the USSR empire. That is all.
Entirely. NATO had its hand out to Russia and at first it was accepted.
NATO expansion indeed neither forced nor triggered Putin's empire rebuilding obsession.
Yes. It surprises me that supposed experts (looking at you, John Mearsheimer) could espouse the NATO-expansion story. Western European NATO members have undershot their own military-spending targets for decades; that hardly suggests an alliance planning to attack a country that spans eleven time zones. There was never a NATO threat against Russia; there was only barely-adequate NATO opposition to Russian neo-imperialism.
Absolutely agree. If you go back and read what Putin had to say about NATO expansion at the time, he did not express any strong objections. It's a *good* thing NATO expanded, otherwise there would be a much higher chance that countries like Poland or the Baltics would be finding themselves in a similar situation to Ukraine right now.
America won't have the dominant voice in this decision. That will belong to the Europeans, especially those that may be threatened by Russian covert warfare and/or depend on Russia for their energy. If Poland or Romania, for example, decided to block further transhipments of armaments, that would make it much harder to keep up supplies.
But if Putin decides to stop his offensive once he's consolidated his control of the Donbas, there's no reason low-level conflict shouldn't continue indefinitely. Yemen's civil war started eight years ago and shows no sign of ending. Russia's been at war with Chechnya, on and off, since the 18th century.
If any European allies here wuss out and stop supporting Ukraine militarily, it won't be Poland, the Baltic countries, Romania, et al. They will continue supporting the Ukrainians NATO or no NATO because Russia is an existential threat for them. I agree that it's possible this whole thing degenerates into a guerilla war of attrition over the Donbas for years at which point the Russians, as they did in Afghanistan, are going to have to ask themselves how much blood and treasure they're willing to pour into the adventure. The current Russian military is a shadow of Soviet army that held on in Afghanistan for the better part of a decade. Finally, Chechnya has been in the hands of a compliant pro-Moscow stooge for some time now who is showing his loyalty by sending fighters to Ukraine to help with war crimes.
"Are we in for another forever war?"
Don't think so. For one reason the Ukrainians continue to acquire higher quantities of better weapons. In time they will have more capability to go on the offensive. Also, Putin knows this and is surely concerned he could lose nearly everything over time. Thus he may seek an exist strategy soon, like a peace agreement to give the Donbass region some sort of independence. Ukrainians might agree just to end the damn war destroying their country.
I think the amount of damage inflicted on Ukrainian cities, the war crimes, and the sheer brutality of this war has pretty much foreclosed the desire for any concessions or a quick peace on the part of the Ukrainians. As you observe, they're getting resupplied with state-of-the-art weapons on a daily basis while Russian soldiers are running around stealing food and looting homes while they still can because they know they're pretty much dead men walking. The war will end when the Russians withdraw completely and recognize Ukraine's sovereignty and borders. Or when someone in Putin's circle decides that his delusions of grandeur have done enough damage and decides to remove the problem, as it were.
The sanctions really haven’t hit Russia yet. In six months they’ll have no sweaters replacement parts, and their entire industry will start creaking. Europe will shift their energy supplies, and Russia won’t be able to export to other countries—they’ll have to start shutting down production, which they’ll never be able to get back up again.
Every time Russia tries to up the ante, they will be met with stiffened resolve.
Putin was never betting in NATO actually holding together, biting the bullet, and hanging tough. But every year, month by month, it will get easier for NATO, and harder in Russia.
"Europe will shift their energy supplies…"
The only "good" I can see coming from this. The transition costs are horrible.
We've been avoiding doing it for too long. Just for the climate.
I heard from Seth Meyers that Putin will be having an operation for cancer. The only other reference I can find is:
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/vladimir-putin-may-undergo-cancer-treatment-handover-power-claims-uss-new-york-post-2941085
According to the article, the next in line would be even worse than Putin...
Haven’t there been cancer rumors for the last few days? I haven’t paid much attention but a quick look reminded me I’d seen this article which shows him apparently looking like shit:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10742521/Putin-seen-gripping-table-amid-cancer-battle-rumours-meets-slurring-defence-minister.html
But I’ve seen plenty of videos of Trump looking like he had dementia and then looking “fine” the next day.
Don't know about cancer, but the holding onto the table (or anything), the slurring (I'd call it more like slow or heavily paused talking), the tapping of the foot, and the overall kind of frail looking appearance, seems more like Parkinson's to me.
There have been cancer rumors for years, but Vlad's puffy face and need to isolate, whether 40 feet down the table at his cabinet meetings or staying out of Moscow at his dacha during the height of covid, suggest someone who is on steroid treatment.
Once the news of how crappy the Russian military is performing leaks out to the populace there is going to be a big drop in Putin's approval ratings. This could provide a convenient time for him to die of cancer, either real or brought on by a Polonium spiked cup of tea. Starting a war can give an authoritarian leader a big boost, but losing a war provokes an even larger negative reaction. Ask the Argentinian Colonels about this.
I'll be bold and say this reaches either a conclusion or a stalemate much sooner than anyone is talking about, like maybe a couple more months. With the proviso that I'm not a military type, just a hobbyist at best, I don't think there's a general appreciation just how serious a military disaster Russia is pushing itself into.
Just in terms of equipment, the Russians have already reached the point where they're dusting off 40- and 50-year-old artillery, which is out-ranged by what the Ukrainians are getting, and trying to use same-era ammo that has something over 20% failure rate and is much less accurate when it does work, so it'll just be target practice for the new radar-aimed long-range Ukrainian gunnery (it's accurate enough to hit individual vehicles at range and cheap enough to fire off a whole shitload without worrying about cost). They're losing tanks, armored equipment of all types, supply vehicles, precision munitions, at rates that can't possibly be made up and that will have to be back-filled with stuff from before the Sino-Soviet war, maybe even WWII surplus, from which any value has long since been looted.
The Russian personnel situation is no better. They've taken horrendous losses at rates that have historically caused many armies to just disintegrate, and the troops they have now are, by any doctrine, stretched way too thin to hold the less ambitious lines they're working on now, let alone sustain offensive operations. Really, it isn't too much to say they're sustaining epic slaughter of their troops. Adding new trained troops would take half a year or more and some legal changes that would shift Russia to a war footing.
But without foreign-sourced parts they can't build the weapons they need to fight a long war anyway. So ultimately all they'll have left is human-wave attacks by conscripts equipped with moth-eaten old gear that doesn't work (one of Zelensky's advisors has actually talked about this prospect).
The old Soviet Union was at least serious about the prospect of fighting wars. The kleptocracy of the past 20 years or so has been all about selling off the assets that were built up then and diverting as much of the Russian Federation military budget to their own pockets as they possibly could-- I believe Bill Browder and Kamil Galeev on this.
OTOH we have the Ukrainians. They've spent the past 8 years purging their old Soviet-trained officer corps, developing a new generation under NATO tutelage, getting effective training in combined-arms and small-unit tactics, and blending it with advanced IT, and they've added real innovations in using drones and other informal tools. Russia gave them the exact approach and tactics they've been training and war-gaming for over at least the past 5 or 6 years-- walked right into it. And they have very good propaganda, or PR if you prefer, to advance their cause to the world. It has by no means been easy for them, been pretty dicey at times, but they are getting stronger as time goes on. And they have the plans and tactics and enough control of the skies to ramp up the pain on Russian and "separatist" forces.
Staying power is all on the Ukrainian side. In 1918 the German war effort collapsed because the German economy couldn't sustain materiel production or move it effectively to the front. They didn't lose a decisive battle. In 1917 the Russian war effort collapsed because its army dissolved in political turmoil while the economy couldn't sustain war production.
These both sound like dramatic thunderclaps, but they happened over several months and the eventual outcome in each case wasn't that easy to foresee. Here it's been what, 6 weeks? I think Russia is approaching a similar situation now. It's already overextended and can't sustain what it's trying to do.
I don't know what this means in terms of particular events. It could be some kind of palace coup in Russia (Putin defenestrated!). OTOH maybe Putin remains Maximum Leader to his last breath and decides at some point that he wants something like protracted negotiations over Crimea after Russians are cleared out of the rest of Ukraine. Who knows. It will have to be up to Russia to decide when to talk seriously; nobody else can make that decision for them, and what happens on the battlefield is the predicate.
The one thing that is clear about it all is this-- Putin is completely confident that his information control over Russia is secure enough that he doesn't have to worry about selling to the Russian public whatever he decides to do. Public opinion is not an independent variable in Russia. And that's the difference between Russia and Ukraine, and us, and the EU.
Guess I lost a month-- it's been 10 weeks, hasn't it
It ends when he’s dead, or, we re-elect Trump.
1/2 Sarcasm
2 Years at least. 4 years at most. In either case, drawing the line at direct involvement or a nuclear confrontation.
The war is terrible, and months feel like years now, but Putin embodied the inevitable advance of authoritarianism for years up through late February.
Now, he's stuck and doesn't look like a rad, 5D chessmaster anymore. He can't be the same patron of neo-fascism or nexus of destabilizing ops.
That matters, because this isn't just a war for Ukraine's independence. Whether Trump was paid, kompromated, or just awed, he was Putin's stooge. Trump remains the leader of the GOP and is an existential threat to our democracy.
We don't seem able to prosecute Trump. But helping Ukraine hold out (besides being right) makes his idol look like a destructive, paranoid loser. By extension, there's a chance to remind reachable voters of Trump's fawning grotesqueness.
Unfortunately, the GOP also really, really hates voters determining elections, so in about 2 years the fate of our democracy (AKA the North American front), should be decided either way.
Russia is now experiencing a huge recession. No way this drags out for two more years. There would be a full blown revolution before then.
One question I haven't seen addressed: If the war drags on, what will be the effects on neighboring countries of the refugee crisis? Everyone discusses the costs of the war to NATO and Russia, but what about the costs of resettlement?
We (NATO) aren’t fighting Russia. Ukraine is fighting Russia, and we/USA/NATO/Europe are helping Ukraine fight. The destruction will continue until one side gives up, or Russia and Ukraine agree to terms that include stopping the fighting.
If the USA, NATO, and other countries stop the supply of weapons, ammunition, and other supplies, that would weaken Ukraine and make them more willing to make concessions in negotiations. But my hunch is that weapons manufacturers have enough political influence to keep the money flowing to them, and the weapons etc. to Ukraine.
...And a weaker Ukraine gets what, then?
That leaves us with a now bitter and unstable country being influenced and pushed around by an authoritarian regime which has successfully invaded several of its neighbors.
I don't really forsee a weaker Ukraine. Ukrainians look determined to fight off the aggressors, and "the west" will give them almost anything for that end.
I would love to see a strong, prosperous, uncorrupt Ukraine enter the EU after they kick the Russians out and build their own defenses to keep another invasion from happening again. I expect a modest "Marshall Plan" for Ukraine when this is done; some of it funded by confiscated Russian oligarch wealth, some by USA/EU.
If Ukraine is abandoned by the west, it most definitely would be weaker.
But on the other other hand, the Ukrainians seem willing to fight for the Donbas pretty competently for approximately forever (eight years and counting at the moment).
I think this is potentially an emerging, thorny issue.
That is, I believe sooner rather than later Putin's likely to be amenable to some kind of face-saving,* messy truce.
Which in my view the West would be wise to seize upon, to cement the victory over Russia. Because the thing is, realistically, Russia has indeed lost. Even if they manage to hold onto a portion of the Russian-speaking, eastern part of Ukraine, the Putin regime will have paid a horrific price: massive casualties, gigantic economic hit, failure to extinguish Ukraine's independence, expansion of NATO, brain drain of top Russian scientific talent, huge losses of military equipment, and so on.
I hope if the opportunity rises to pocket the victory over Putin, NATO can seize it. But the Ukrainians might understandably not be so eager to settle for anything less than a complete humiliation and crushing defeat of Russia.
*By "face-saving" I mean: short of obvious, abject humiliation and total failure. The world will know what the real outcome is (Russia has lost) even if the final outcome doesn't quite reach the level Tokyo Bay-style surrender ceremony followed by a ticker tape parade for Zelensky.
Manage to hold onto what size piece of eastern Ukrainian? Larger than before? Smaller? Same size?
Certainly the optimal outcome (if not a complete withdrawal) would be number two.
The armistice ending World War I was signed with German troops still occupying parts of France. That didn't help them much when the treaty of Versailles was finally signed.
Russia does not have the capacity to maintain this war for years.
Under the Soviet Union, they had a vastly larger vertical logistics capacity (a big trade union) to replace equipment and personnel. Russia is but a shadow of the USSR. Its foreign-held reserves have been blocked, its oil output has been slashed by as much as 30% (which has long-term consequences of cutting production capacity), and its access to advanced equipment has been shut off.
It's been weeks since its tank manufacturer had shut down production on account of a lack of supplies, primarily from Germany, Japan, and Taiwan/China. It's not just tanks. They can't replace Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs), either. They're suffering from shortages on Precision-Guided Munitions (PGMs) -- just yesterday Russia published video of their launching of anti-ship missiles against land targets. Ukraine's intercepts of Russian military refer to personnel losses of 25K+. They've already lost 20% of their total operational tanks, forced to transport more from throughout Russia. They've lost at least 6 ships from their Black Sea fleet.
As a result, Russia is extremely risk-averse right now. Their ships are all hiding beyond the horizon, resorting to using their subs to fire off missiles, and have ceded lands immediately after seizing them, so as to avoid getting separated from their supplies and battalions isolated/cut-off.
And they're still having logistics problems, even as fuel depots and supply line tracks inside of Russia are mysteriously blown up.
The harder Russia pushes to speed the war up, the faster their attrition. You have seen the eye-popping $33B request Biden made to support Ukraine for the rest of FY2022. Even as the US is signing contracts to ramp up production of munitions and equipment, Russia's manufacturers have stalled.
This war will be over in a matter of months.
The US has the economic and military capability to fight one or more Vietnams or Afghanistans indefinitely. The domestic morale might eventually collapse but Russia is a much bigger bugbear than Vietnam or Afghanistan and anti-Russian sentiment is very high now.
So assuming that Ukraine does not collapse militarily, it will be up to Russia to decide whether continuing the war is worth the economic cost. It could continue at a low level, as formerly in Donbas, for a long time.
Domestic morale in the USA and EU will not collapse unless citizens of USA and EU are dying on the battlefields or in the occupation. As long as it's only tax dollars flowing to arms manufacturers with the arms flowing into Ukraine, the lobbyists will keep those flows going, and no one will care enough to stop it.
I lived in europe for 26 years…I remember very well the dissolution of the USSR…the debacle of Yeltsin..the very hard times for the Russian people and the entrance of Putin . Sympathy was great for Russia…hope was high that Russia too would become part of the EU…the former states freed from the tyranny of the USSR…were in general delighted to be able to join the rest of Europe. But as Putin increased the prosperity of many Russians..( they vacationed in Phuket and shopped at IKEA) his power grew and so did his resentment. Putin is a thug…you could see it from day one..I don’t believe NATO mis stepped…nobody wanted to stay in the USSR and they don’t want to today either..
Well put. Nobody went out and forced the Baltic states, Poland, Romania et al. to join NATO -- they did because they sure as hell didn't want to ever be pushed around by Russia again. As they see now, it was a wise decision.
NATO expansion is some high octaine bullshit.
Also I blame the Russian people almost as much as I blame the MAGAs. Not everyone but a large chunk are at fault.
"NATO expansion is some high octaine bullshit."
I was not aware that NATO was "selling" itself to other countries.
Maybe what SpecialNewb meant is something like, *As a reason for invading Ukraine,* NATO expansion is some high-octane bullshit? That's how I took it, anyway. Nice phrasing, regardless.
A big difference between Ukraine and Afghanistan is GDP. Ukraine has approximately 10 times the GDP. Which means that a small wealthy elite has a *lot* more to gain from stability in the Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the lesson of Afghanistan is hard to avoid: It's very cheap to supply a country with defensive weapons, and very expensive to stay in a country that is well defended. Pressure will continue to mount within Russia to withdraw from the Ukraine.
Pushed?? Didn't resist the pull/reject the requests perhaps, but that is hardly pushing.
"Today there are two great peoples on earth who, starting from different points, seem to advance toward the same goal: these are the Russians and the Anglo-Americans. All other peoples seem to have almost reached the limits drawn by nature."
That was de Toqueville in 1835. His remark on "the limits drawn by nature" holds as true today as it was then. Russia has the gas, the oil, the wheat, the land, just about everything Eurasia and North Africa need. Methinks they'll prolong the conflict until everyone remembers it, no matter the shorter-term pain at home. It would be different if the aggressor were, say, China.
The war will be done before this year end. This is not Afghanistan. Russian will have no where to hide when Ukraine decides to counterattack with a vastly superiors equipment and moral.
The only open question is on Crimea and Eastern territories. Will the Ukrainians push the militia and Russian army behind Russia's border or agree to a ceasefire that should come when Moscow smells total disaster.
I doubt and hope the Ukrainian wont be forced to lay down their guns by German and other mislead Russian appeasers.
Very good comments above. It seems to me that the most significant fact is that Putin is overextended with a declining capability of maintaining his economy and production. The Ukraine on the other hand is increasingly being resupplied with modern weapons. And after Putin's war crimes, they want to fight.
Putin's ace-in-the-hole, Trump, is no longer in place. It is arguable that he might want to hang on for two more years until someone equally compliant is in place in the US. There is a path for Putin to prevail in Ukraine. A very narrow one.
But Kevin, Putin is more than a thug. In my view, his desire was (is?) to destroy the Ukraine, because he feels (with good reason) that they foiled his plan to keep Trump in power. Despite Trump's threat to withhold military support for Ukraine, Zelinski did not throw Hunter Biden under the bus like Trump and Putin wanted. As a result, Putin lost control of the US.
Pure retribution with a side of territorial ambition.
We've been hearing a lot about the devastating losses suffered by the Russian Army, but very, very little about the current condition of the Ukranian forces. The news this morning is that the Ukrainians are now deploying Territorial Defense Units to fight on the front lines in the east. These are civilian volunteers with little to no training that were thrown together as a last-ditch defense. If that's who is getting sent up now, it suggests the Ukrainians might be suffering from the same manpower depletion as the Russians.
Legitimate questions, but my bet would be that they'd be moving territorials in so they can move regular forces around for what I think will be slow and careful advances in other spots. Also on the off-chance that Russian advances could link up, to spare them from potential encirclement (but that seems very unlikely).
A few weeks ago Zelensky said Ukrainian losses were about 2500 dead, and someone I saw more recently, maybe Phillips O'Brien, thinks that may have doubled by now. That's a lot, and they may have a higher proportion of wounded than the Russians because they have a far better system for getting them to medical care so more of them survive.
That said, they've had a universal-service system going for several years now that rotated conscripts into the eastern confrontation zone, so they have a deep reservoir that amounts to more than 100,000-- maybe multiples of that-- who have at least some level of combat experience. I think that's who the territorials are. They may be volunteers, but most will have military experience that gives them the confidence to volunteer and means they've been trained in the basics.
The Ukrainians have been incredibly smart about this war and I don't see any reason why that would change. They don't waste manpower. And right now instead of trying to mount hasty mass counterattacks, they're moving carefully into lightly-held areas like around Kharkiv, and in the east they're busy blowing up Russian supplies and equipment wherever they can find it, so when they do decide to attack, the Russians won't have much to shoot at them. Textbooks are going to be written just about the way they're running this war.
Gilgit below points out that the Russians are attacking infrastructure and transport. They are, but a) they're running low on precision missiles (recently had to use submarine missiles intended for other targets), b), they've never been able to hit anything while it's moving, unlike the Ukrainians. Aircraft could theoretically do that, but they'd have to contend with effective air defenses and the Russian command hasn't been willing to allow it.
Let us suppose that the Ukrainian Army is preparing for large scale counterattacks. If they were doing that, a natural preparatory step would be to have "second rate" troops hold defensive positions on the front lines while the "first rate" troops are pulled back, rested, re-equipped, re-organized and generally made ready to attack.
In central Ukraine, the Ukrainians carried out a lot of agile, small-unit attacks against Russian forces that had difficulty maneuvering. Given that, it’s likely that Ukraine’s losses were relatively smaller. Also, I think defenders generally have the advantage over an attacking force.
There are so many unknowns here. Will Russia start running out of munitions or are the predictions wrong? Will their economy be destroyed or just take a hit similar to the one it took in 2014? How decisively will the new weapons NATO is arming Ukraine with change the picture? Will Ukraine be able to push back Russian to its borders or will we have static lines?
I read various sources that I believe to be reliable (or as reliable as can be expected) and twice I’ve read we are training Ukrainian pilots on F-16s. Don’t know if that is true, but will we give Ukraine F-16s and other more modern fighters? Russia is hitting Ukraine’s infrastructure (electricity and water) and transport network (oil and munitions). Will Ukraine be able to keep their front lines supplied? Will we sometime in the next few months start sending them Patriot and other anti-missile systems so Ukraine can defend the cities and supply lines? All of these factors will determine how long the war lasts and who will come out the victor.
I watched a video a couple of weeks ago. It was about how munitions plants in America, plants that had been shut down, were coming back on-line. So that is good to know - seriously, why would some goofy youTuber have to tell me this instead of the major news networks? But it was a strange video. The producer kept saying we don’t know why this is happening or what it could mean even though it was very obvious what was going on. I checked the comments and there were a lot of things about how our government was looking to start world war III and other anti-government statements. Nothing about fighting Russian aggression. For all I know there is some gigantic pro-Russian, pro-fascism movement brewing in the heartland that will make everything pro-democracy people do complicated. (Yes I know Trump promoted fascism and his supporters started loving Putin, but I at least thought that support had died down a lot after the invasion. We will see.)
I think the Russians have been low on munitions since this war started. Remember, they weren't expecting much of a fight and so weren't prepared for much of a fight. With the single exception of Mariupol, Russian artillery and missile fire has had the flavor of harassing fire rather than serious bombardment. Transportation targets like rail yards and airports are big tough targets. You're not going to put a rail yard or an airport out of action for more than an hour or so by hitting it with two or three or six non-nuclear missiles; hundreds of them are required.
By the same token, a few dozen artillery rounds are not going to do significant damage to a city the size of Kyiv; if the intention is to do more than just intimidate the inhabitants a bit, thousands or tens of thousands of rounds are required.
My guess is that Russian munition supplies are very limited and they have used almost everything they've got bombarding Mariupol, with small numbers of shells and missiles fired at other targets for purposes of intimidation rather than to do serious damage.
Well, Kharkiv would like a word about that harassing fire, but in general I'd agree that Russian missile supplies aren't up to what they're trying to do. Artillery is a basic Russian MO, not only in Grozny lately, but also in WWII and I think going back even to Napoleon's time. A big problem for them now is their ammo is old and fuses unreliable, so a lot of duds. Plus the Ukrainians have this pesky habit of blowing up supply dumps lately.
We can provide the Ukrainians what, $30b a year, indefinitely, as long as they are willing to fight (and they seem a stubborn bunch). $30b is not nothing but it is a small amount of money for the US (see the Afghan War expenses...) As for the sanctions, well in a couple years everyone will have re-jiggered their supply lines and procedures to account for them so they will be decreasingly costly and decreasingly effective for all involved.
In other words, we can do this pretty much forever.
Someone probably already pointed this out, but we aren't fighting Russia in Ukraine--the Ukrainians are. For the U.S., financial/material support is easier to keep up than risking the lives of U.S. servicemembers. Moreover, Russia cannot sustain an offensive much longer--their offensives in the Donbas and in southern Ukraine are just about spent. The real question is can they establish a stable defense in Ukraine that can turn this into a stalemate? I doubt it. Ukrainians are determined, FAR more skillful, and are increasingly armed with superior weapons. The new artillery they are receiving now outranges Russian artillery by a factor of 2-3. I think the Russians will be driven out of all the territory they seized since Feb. 24--and perhaps out of the DPR/LPR "separatist" regions as well--before the end of the year. I do not think Putin will initiate a general mobilization, and I don't think it will gain him anything if he does. Indeed, it would destabilize his regime.
"How long will we fight the Russians in Ukraine?"
The question that you pose is completely erroneous. "We" are not fighting in Ukraine. "We" are not dying in Ukraine. "We" are not seeing our country being destroyed by missiles and bombs. The Ukrainians are. Not Americans outside of "war tourists".
So long as Ukrainians wish to fight for their country that is under attack, it is the only question which matters. All the U.S. and NATO countries are doing are providing the means for Ukrainans to defend themselves as they have asked and begged us to do. But I guarantee you the Ukranians would fight with sticks and bows and arrows if they had to to repel the evil invaders. And yes they are evil. You don't kill civilians, loot their country, forcibly take them from their homes and say its all about a "military operation". You can't expect any kind of negotiations between both sides if that shit is happening.
How long will this go on? I have no idea and neither do you nor anyone. But it go on so long as Russian soldiers are on Ukrainian soil and killing Ukrainians. They wish to resist. They want to resist this invasion. You want them to surrender just so you can move on and worry about "the woke" instead? Please do not become like Andrew Sullivan.
Again, this not for the U.S. to decide. So long as the resistance is maintained it deserves the West's support and the more it wrecks the Russian military and its economy and keeps it away from attack NATO countries like Poland and the Baltic States, so much the better (so the U.S. doesn't have to go to war). This is the debt that the whole world owes Ukraine. It is doing what the West should have allowed Czechslovakia to do in 1938 and that's resist Hitler. Maybe they wouldn't have won but they would have at least wrecked the German military to where a wider, larger war could have been avoided and perhaps led to Hitler's overthrow. Who knows? But one thing is for certain, the war of resistance is happening now like it or not and the result of the madness of one man. Unless he is stopped, that madness will roll over the rest of the world. It's sad that so many owe their fates to the lives of so few but unfortunately history is ripe with such examples. The least we can do, is make sure that what they're dying for is given every chance to live on.
Again, this not for the U.S. to decide.
Of course it's for the US to decide. Like it or not, Ukraine won't be able to fight for very long without massive aid flows from America and other NATO countries. Are you suggesting American taxpayers must commit to an open-ended lend-lease commitment with no say as to duration?
You seem to discount the elevated risk of a nuclear exchange that a hot proxy war between NATO/US and Russia on Russia's borders poses for humankind.
I'm not saying we should obsess over this elevated risk*. But that risk isn't zero. It's one consideration out of many that has to be taken into account. But it does indeed have to be taken into account.
A lot of people seem to be making the assumption that Putin is rational, or that he views the use of nuclear weapons as irrational. I think it's dangerous to assume this. Even if this is the case now, there's no guarantee Putin's view won't change if his back is against the wall. And there's certainly no guarantee Russia's military would mutiny, and refuse to carry out such an order. Perhaps more likely is Putin's turning to chemical weapons. Such a turn of events would generate massive political pressure in NATO countries for direct military intervention. And then the proxy war would be a shooting war. Make no mistake, these are dangerous times.
*And needless to say a lot of people are getting killed in Ukraine, and there also negative implications for the world economy and global food security. It really would be good to bring this thing to an end if it could be done in satisfactory manner.
The choice isn't 'how long do we right'. We aren't fighting.
Our choice is, 'abandon our friends to authoritarianism' or 'support their democracy'.
There is no amount of 'time' which changes that. Facts on the ground might change it, but no time does.
See also the two Koreas. How long have we 'fought' that battle? And often with our own troops. And often without requiring they actually vote on their government representation.
Our choice is, 'abandon our friends to authoritarianism' or 'support their democracy'.
There's another choice: tell them "It's obvious Russia has been gravely weakened, let's pocket the victory via the signing of a truce."
(I'm not claiming we're quite there yet, but soon we may be.)
This is an analogy that few will understand because the US (even more than most countries) believes that history began about 50 yrs ago. BUT:
The single best frame for understanding our times is to look at The Reformation.
.............
The mapping is never perfect, of course, but essentially
- "classical Liberalism" is Catholicism
- we start with a bunch of academic Catholics who want to make Catholicism "better" and conclude that they have unique insights into "true" Christianity and the fact that Catholics supposedly won't listen to them (in fact Catholics DO listen to them, repeatedly, they just aren't convinced...) means Catholics suck and are tools of Satan
- even so this is still essentially an academic debate about theology and arcane details, but then the press gets involved in the printing of pamphlets and picture books that hold back nothing in terms of how they describe the Catholic enemy. Meanwhile the Catholics are still writing in Latin at an intellectual level because they genuinely cannot understand what is wrong with these people, why they cannot respond to reason, why everything is so emotional, about how Religion Makes them Feel, in a way that cannot be reasoned with or met with any sort of compromise.
Most politics is still in the hands of the Catholics. A few politicians claim (perhaps even honestly) to be Lutheran or Calvinist, and either don't see the background lunacy, or assume it can be controlled. A few small polities (think Strasbourg or Geneva) have been taken over wholesale.
[This is about where we are right now.]
- then the violent political entrepreneurs get in on the act and we move from lots of angry talking to lots of angry killing. We get people who have grown up their whole live being told the problem is xyz asking "OK then, why do we tolerate xyz?"
We get the Peasants Revolt, Thomas Müntzer, and the whole rest of the bloody mess which continues for another 100 years or so.
Digging even deeper, I think the root problem always boils down to a kind of Theodicy - Why do bad things happen?
"Safe" religion manages to answer this with a vague far away concept of a devil who's unclear enough that he can be anything and nothing, but is definitely not of this world.
"Unsafe" religion decides to answer the question with an answer in this world (and at hand). During the worst of the Reformation period, Catholic or Protestant could each imagine the other was the devil incarnate (with Protestants who didn't have any Catholics on hand occasionally calling a man or woman a witch as a substitute, and with the Spanish auto da fe of Jews or heretics performing the same role).
Woke I think has gone down that Unsafe religion path, asking the same Theodicy question (why do bad things happen? the "government" and "society" are so rich and powerful they could stop it if they wanted to) and has its answer in the usual suspects. Right now we are still at the stage of ranting and hating on those suspects. The Reformation took about a generation to move from intellectual hate to serious violence; I'd say that clock started probably around 2015.
In a way the arguments over Confederate statues (and similar things like the names of buildings at Harvard or Yale) are the equivalent of iconoclasm, of saying "we want to remove all these visible signifiers that are the work of the devil". And of course this sort of claiming of the public space for my (and only my) version of the truth is exactly how the violence gets amped up.
One can claim differences, but I think they are superficial. The battle of words happens at the level of "What does this line in the Constitution, or some law mean", rather than "what does this phrase in the Bible mean". Beyond the level of a few academics, it's meaningless, in that the positions have been chosen based on other reasons (my guess is peer group, with the Theodicy question as a background spur) not detailed examination of the texts.
And, like the Reformation, the fact that people are so obsessed by this, in a way that they are not moved by much else, begins to make it an important factor in political interactions. Currently mostly at the state to state level (one can imagine the US as superficially something like the Holy Roman Empire, with a nominal single ruler, but with very different on-the-ground territories with a great deal of political autonomy); but eventually this will spill out beyond the Holy Roman Empire to France, Britain, Sweden, etc...
.............
OK, now suppose we have this background, and we have this civil'ish war going on within The Holy Roman Empire. The obvious response of the enemies of the Empire is to stoke both sides of that civil war. It's not hard for Russia to spend a few rubles encouraging hotheads on both sides to push harder, to be (even less) tolerant, hell bomb a few buildings, kill a few people, stand up for what you claim to believe. I expect the gloves to come off in this dimension of the fight -- think people like William the Silent on the one side, followed by Guy Fawkes on the other...
A very good post, but its the Liberals who are the Catholics, debating in latin, and its the Trumpists who have already moved on to violence. "Wokeism" which does not even exist, is almost completely based on language and has very little action behind it.
Its assymetrical. There is no part of the Liberal platform, even now, when there should be, that says conservatives are the enemy.
For conservatives, liberals have been the enemy for a while, and Trump too, it to a whole other level. That's his legacy.
The most difficult thing in the world, the behavior that separates analysis (1% of the population) from dumbness (99% of the population) is resisting the urge to emote...
Try reading analyses like mine as future history, from a vantage where you don't especially care whether Shalmaneser defeats Shattuara or vice versa; rather than from a vantage of immediately trying to decide which team is "right" and which is "wrong". You'll find life much more interesting and, if done well, you'll attract a more sophisticated class of friend.
And don't be too certain about where the violence will remain confined. The lawbreaking impulse that led to the Supreme Court leak is only the first step. I would not be surprised to see some future John Brown step forward, convinced that his (or her, Bernadine Dohr and Ulrike Meinhof show us that girls can also be bloodthirsty lunatics) feelings justify a wave of violence.
The US has completely purged itself of all memories of the violence of the 70s. https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/
But I see no reason why this stuff won't come back, fueled by a larger and even more spiritually broken and nihilistic vanguard, with even more contempt for human life and most of the population.