People in St. Petersburg call themselves "Muscovites"???
The power in the east for centuries was centered on Kyiv from the Viking era to 1240 when the Golden Horde sacked and burned Kyiv. A small vassal kingdom of the Mongols became the dominant power in the eastern part of Europe: Muskovy. I believe Muskovy included both modern day Moscow and St Petersburg. In any case culturally the two cities are closely tied and Putin is from a suburb of St Petersburg.
They won't take the whole country. But you continue to act like it's a foregone conclusion Russia will soon collapse and Ukraine will regain their land. As much as I'd love to see that happen, it's just wishful thinking.
The history of the last 150 years is that when Russia/the USSR has a war go badly there is some sort of rebellion. This war is going badly.
Fantasy leads to bad policy. Many in the west do not want Ukraine to win. A few are outright pro-Russia, but most are either 'peace in our time' fools, America First (or Britain/France/etc. First) types or self-proclaimed grand game players. This wrong-headed fantasy narrative plays right into their hands.
Why spend six months training pilots and ground crews on NATO jets if it'll all be over in three? Or if "sanctions will bring Putin to his knees"? Go back five months and read how Ukraine was on the verge of re-taking Kherson. And would hold Mariupol. And how every inch of ground lost in the Donbas was actually just a brilliant Ukranian "shaping operation". It's all BS, and it directly aids those who want to hamstring Ukraine.
Even if the war ended in three, Ukraine will be transitioning to NATO weapons and ditching their ex-Soviet gear. That will include switching the air force to NATO planes.
I never predicted Mariupol would hold, the city held out longer than I thought it would. The Ukrainians did play Donbas brilliantly, they took more casualties than they would have liked because of Russian artillery, but they tied down the bulk of the Russian army for months with the Russians trying to take ground the entire time, only to end up taking a few KM. The Russians fell far short of their objectives.
Retaking Kherson depends on Ukraine's offensive capabilities. They are receiving offensive equipment from the west, but they have yet to deploy it. They need at least a division strength, probably more a corps with modern equipment together with troops capable of combined arms fighting to really go on the offensive. There are a lot of things happening behind the scenes. We know some Ukrainians are training in the UK and more in Poland. Though we don't know what their training entails. It may be the Ukrainians are putting together an offensive force with western help.
What we do know is the western tanks and APCs that are going to Ukraine have not been seen on the battlefield yet, which indicates those are going to units that have not been deployed yet.
Something else could break. And I could soon enjoy a romantic evening with Natalie Portman. But neither is likely. And paradoxically, being 10x more aggressive about arming and training Ukraine makes it more likely 'something else will break'. So we need to do it in either event. And we need to stop playing into the hands of the go-slow crowd with all these wildly overoptimistic forecasts and overblown stories of Russian corruption and ineptitude.
Ukraine is the David fighting the Goliath. Russia has plenty of old equipment to burn through as well as lots of ammunition. A fast battlefield victory for Ukraine has never been in the cards.
The Ukrainians have time on their side. As long as the west keeps them supplied (and it's a small drop in the bucket for US. The war in Afghanistan alone cost the US $300 million a day for 20 years. The US so far has sent a few tens of billions to Ukraine. That's money lost in the couch cushions for the US. There is the danger that a pro-Putin president will win in 2024, but for the next 2 years the US will remain committed to helping Ukraine. The Europeans are also strong supporters of Ukraine, especially the UK and Poland.
The US public may be losing interest, but the government isn't. The US public lost interest in Iraq and Afghanistan too and they had no effect on the budgets for those wars.
As long as the governments stay the course, Ukraine will keep getting arms.
The Russian military has been the most corrupt large military in the world since the fall of the USSR. The Trent Telenko article I posted yesterday on Russian artillery ammunition supplies had an example. The Russians came to the realization that about 2/3 of the old Soviet ammunition had become unstable and was blowing up. They allocated money to build 500 state of the art facilities to store what ammunition could be saved and destroy the unstable stuff. All the money was stolen and none of the unstable ammunition was destroyed, nor any new facilities built.
Unfortunately it's looking more and more like a negotiated settlement with Russia taking a portion of Ukraine's farmlands. There will be skirmishes for years to come. Neither side wins and Ukraine will be lucky if Russian pays anything but a token amount for damages.
Now that oil prices are coming down many Americans have lost interest and the US media isn't getting enough clicks to cover the story.
Negotiations only happen when both sides are wanting to quit the war and at this point Putin can't politically afford to come to the negotiation table and Ukraine is dug in for a total war as long as it takes.
You would probably have been expecting a negotiated settlement between Japan and the US in 1942 also? Ukraine has the determination to see this war through that the US had in 1942. There are some Quislings among the Ukrainians, but the country is more united than it ever has been before. They are seeing what the Russians are doing to the POWs from Mariupol and they know what the Russians have done to other conquered peoples. They know that this is a war that either results in Ukraine getting its borders back or the end of the Ukrainian people. There is no middle ground as far as the Ukrainians are concerned.
Even Russia has quit with the ridiculous demands for Ukraine to disarm. They know the Ukrainians are not going to surrender. Ever.
When an aggressor in a war loses momentum, it's almost always the beginning of the end. The only times that hasn't happened is when something happened somewhere else that caused the defenders to be forced to withdraw from their positions and only if the aggressor has vast resources to draw on.
An example of this is the war in Italy which stalled in 1943. The Allies couldn't move further up the boot and the Germans were deeply dug in and refusing to budge. The Allies started moving in 1944 as the Germans had to draw off troops in the south to shore up for coming invasions in the west and the deteriorating situation in the east. The Allies captured Rome just before D-Day. But after D-Day and Operation Bagration in the east the Italian front really started collapsing for the Germans.
The US and Commonwealth alliance had no shortage of resources to pour into the Italian campaign, so when the Germans started pulled back, they could go on the offensive again and they rolled up the boot over the next several months.
In the Iran-Iraq War is an example of the more common situation when an offensive loses momentum. The Iraqis invaded in 1980, lost momentum fairly quickly. The front ebbed and flowed for 8 years, but they never regained the momentum. Same thing happened to the Germans in France in 1914.
As long as the defenders are willing to fight and they have the ability to fight, the aggressor is screwed. Ultimately for the Russians this is an optional war. It's a war of conquest for Putin. For Ukraine, this is an existential threat war. They win or they cease to exist. Ukraine has more will to keep going. We don't know what the Russian people really think because they won't tell pollsters, but support for the war is a lot weaker than in Ukraine.
Corrected. Happy Hour started early today.
Not to nitpick (as someone with lifelong aphasia I do it way too often), but it says Finland and Switzerland as I write this.
