Cautionary note on Russian morale
Hinging the offensive on a collapse of Russian morale would be folly. Given enough time and pressure, it's highly likely that it will happen, but when is unknown.
I have seen in several places and it's a truism repeated throughout history that dictatorships look strong until everything comes apart at once. Russia will hold everything together and then there may come a breaking point where it all unravels in a matter of days.
Ultimately this war will end in Russia. Ukraine will not stop until the last Russian is off their territory and Putin can't back down now. In different ways it's an existential fight for both sides. For Ukraine it's a fight for the existence of the country and for Putin it's a fight to stay in power and possibly a fight to hold the country together.
Tell you what lets give the Russians all your property, land, machinery etc and that of all your closest relatives. Oh and they can keep any of your children they've already kidnapped.
All the Russians need to do in return is stop where they are for a year, regroup, then they can kick off again.
Sounds fair ?
The rest of the world tried to appease Hitler and Hitler just kept taking. We're in that same cycle again.
There are people who would want to take Putin's job who would be worse for the world than Putin. But Putin has the deadly combination of territorial ambitions beyond his borders and the means to build his own military. That combination is dangerous to the entire world order.
Putin has always had these ambitions, he has maintained the military presence in Transnistria, invaded Georgia in 2008, he's been undermining Lukashenko in Belarus for years, and Ukraine in 2014, but before 2022, he only took small bites. He did the boiling frog type of territorial grab and got away with it. His grabs were out of the headlines within a few weeks and things went back more or less to normal.
Now he crossed the line with a full scale invasion and the world is taking notice and not backing down this time.
I'm not sure what your point is. Are you giving Putin a discount for past performance, even though he is a mass murderer now ?
There is a difference between mass murder (Putin) and genocide (Hitler, Ukraine, Turkey etc) but the lines get blurry pretty quickly
Genocide actually has a broader definition than most people think. Last fall Timothy Snyder gave a lecture at Boston University about genocide and what it is.
The War in Ukraine & the Question of Genocide Featuring Professor Timothy Snyder | Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies
What the Russians have been trying to do is genocide.
Actually Putin has a consistent track record of being this bad, the west just turned a blind eye. Grozny Aleppo etc- Horrible mass destruction and murder.
The previous massacres didn't get the media coverage that Ukraine is getting. Ukraine has been very savvy about making sure the war is in front of everyone's eyes.
I wasn't going to reply and will stop now I think. But the selfish bit got to me. Firstly, selfishness or capitalism got us all here so that we can ponder on these concerns. Secondly, we are all united here on climate threat. Elon is rightly concerned about AI. These are not selfish concerns and neither is 490m Africans in poverty which gets zero airtime whilst this war continues.
I don't really see where capitalism got us here. What got us here is refusing to see that Russia had territorial ambitions and failing to stop it early on. If the first time Putin acted outside Russia's borders he was thumped hard, he might have learned to be more cautious about sending his army outside Russia's borders and we wouldn't have gotten here.
Maybe capitalism did play a role in that so many in the west wanted to get back to business as usual that they turned a blind eye to what Putin was doing? They continued to do business in Russia despite the atrocities.
Arguing that there are other problems in the world is what-aboutism. All those other problems exist and they are also things we need to pay attention to, but an out of control dictator with a large army that wants to take over his neighbors is also a freakin big problem we need to deal with now or it's just a cancer that will get much worse.
Unless you were born before 1945, you have lived your entire life in the post WW II world order. It has become the wall paper to most people who don't study history. But it's an anomaly in world history. Throughout world history borders were fluid and kingdoms (later nation-states) poured a lot of energy into maintaining the borders they had, or shrinking their neighbors borders when they got an opportunity. The post-WW II order enforced by the United States was a new concept that turned out to be good for the world.
Russia has been straining that world order for some time and they broke it in 2022. Ensuring Russia does not get to keep any of its gains from the war is how we return to that world order.
Ukraine knows who they are dealing with far better than anyone in the west. They know what they are up against. They officially broke away from Russia in 1991, but most of the world still viewed them as a vassal state of Russia until recently. This war has highlighted that Ukraine is a separate nation (separate culture with separate identity) from Russia. They aren't just Russia-light, they are a separate people and a nation in their own right.
The attitude of the vast majority of Ukrainians at this point is that the can't stop until they get all their territory back. Zelensky has outlined other criteria such as reparations and return of Ukrainians kidnapped. Those should happen too, but are more problematic. Ukraine may have to settle for return of their territory.
