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We're sitting on a > 48 hour interval with no top level posts which might be some kind of record. It's been awhile since we talked about Ukraine, so here we go..
It would seem that Ukraine is still slowly losing a war of attrition. Of course, the big news is Ukraine's incursion into Kursk, in which they managed to capture some Russian territory after catching the Russians with their pants down. Coupled with that, Ukraine has also been mounting more long-range attacks against Russian oil infrastructure. Neither of these actions is really what Ukraine's western allies want to see, but what can they do? Ukraine's best bet may to escalate in order to draw in more Western support without which they will collapse. But it's looking quite grim. Germany has vowed to stop new aid.
https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-halt-new-ukraine-military-aid-report-war-russia/
In response to Kursk and the oil infrastructure attacks, Russia has attacked Ukraine's energy grid.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russia-strikes-ukraines-power-grid-in-most-massive-attack-of-war/ar-AA1pt39P
What many people don't realize is that the Ukraine/Russia conflict has been in many ways quite limited. Life goes on in the cities. Casualties have largely been limited to combatants. The longer things go on, the more this might change. People in Kiev are now facing the real possibility of a winter without heat and electricity.
Here in the West, people's enthusiasm for the war seems to be waning as the news cycle covers newer, shinier topics. But the war grinds on and every day men die at the front.
Edit: As usual, the cure to a stale front page is to post about Ukraine which inspires another post on a different topic moments later.
So, anyone have a read on what a realistic ceasefire deal looks like? Does one exist? Is anyone serious mooting one around in the world of think tanks?
Ukraine's winning scenarios have run out at this point. The abortive and telegraphed offensive ate up too much time and material for them to win in any conventional sense. Prigozhin might have been the Black Swan they needed, but he pussied out. The Russian economy is showing no signs of collapse. Some point to a Wunderwaffen or to some chart that shows NATO production coming online at a faster pace from 2025 onward, but I doubt that will make a material difference. Ukraine is basically hoping for a Russian collapse as a result of some as-yet-unknown cause, which is not impossible, but not much of a strategy.
Russia's odds of winning much more than what they have so far seem longer still. They're hoping Ukraine just gives up, but that might be longer odds than a Russian collapse, as Ukrainian psychopathic nationalism seems more systemic rather than oriented around a single individual.
Neither side is going to win the kind of victory that will make good their losses. So how is a ceasefire outlined that will deliver a lasting peace?
I still haven't come up with a better idea than putting Harry and Meghhan on the throne in Kiev.
No, because this is a war in which the rest of the world benefits from the suffering.
The U.S. regime is apparently quite happy with how the war is going, as Ukrainians and Russians kill each in roughly equal numbers, exhausting themselves over thin strips of economically useless territory. China is happy as well, having gained a resource rich ally at no cost, and cementing themselves as the second pole around which the world revolves.
The leaders of the countries involved are no better. Zelensky and Putin are happy to prosecute the war until the last man. The world cheers as Ukrainian and Russian soldiers die, are maimed, and are captured and sometimes tortured.
By contrast, there are Hamas/Israel peace talks literally every week, with Blinken cheerleading every development as a cease-fire right around the corner.
Trump winning the election is probably the only hope for peace at this point.
The US is trying to sustain a global empire in which its share of GDP has gone from 50+% after WWII to 17% and falling. The US is overstretched and in a situation in which the US is running from one crisis to another. US military recruitment is way down. The age of equipment is higher than ever and the manufacturing base in a poor state.
The US is now sustaining a force the size of the force in Vietnam at the war's peak for a multi year war far more intense than Vietnam. Ukraine is consuming SAMs and SAM systems at a much higher rate than they are produced. The US army trains 60k recruits a year. Japan trains 10k. Ukraine is going to have to train many tens of thousands per year for the next decade or two, both for this war and for the next. Germany about 200 tanks, Ukraine has lost around a thousand. Comparing the size of the Ukrainian army to NATO militaries shows how Ukraine absolutely dwarfs the UK or Germany. Sustaining, training arming and then reconstituting this massive military is going to be an endless black hole for resources for several decades.
Meanwhile the US is stuck with a bunch of conflicts in the middle east and is trying to outcompete the world's manufacturing super power in an arms race.
Russia doesn't have to defeat the US, they just need to make it impossible for the US to handle all the problems at the same time.
The US wanted to pull out of Afghanistan, regime change Russia and focus on China. Now they are stuck in a massive war against a Russia that is ramping up arms production by several hundred percent, they are sustaining a large force in the middle east and the pivot to Asia isn't really happening.
The USA is able to maintain this level of investment in Ukraine while keeping a large force on station in the Middle East. Russia is throwing everything it has at that one theater.
No doubt the USA is stretched fairly thin, but it has the ability to maintain a much bigger force on multiple stations compared to the competition.
Even the thinness of the US is questionable. What, specifically, is being thinned out here? The naval power that would go to the Pacific in a China war? The armies not swarming into the middle east's latest conflagration, and with minimal use in a China conflict?
There are absolutely limits to what the US military can do... but in a very real sense, the Ukraine War is freeing up large parts of the US military, because one of the main missions of the US Army and Airforce is to fight the Russians in Europe. That's, uh, not necessary as long as the Russians are committed to Ukraine. And depending on how much longer it continues, quite possibly not necessary for several years afterwards, even as the military-industrial expansion justified on grounds of helping Ukraine can be utilized in other ways.
In military-economic terms, Ukraine is a very cost-effective fixing action- something that is the antithesis of an overextension.
Strongly agree.
America is not more overextended by the Ukraine war than Russia is, and “War against Russian-led forces in Eastern Europe specifically” was the stated design purpose of decades of generations of American equipment development, military organization, and even internal (and external) propaganda.
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