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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.
I will free-form list my thoughts:
The current Ukrainian retreats do look more like a rout than an orderly retreat, and there is talk of quite a lot of operational chaos in Ukrainian command at the moment. Pro-Russian opinion sources are definitely very gleeful in a way I haven't seen since the well advertised Ukrainian offensive imploded with massive casualties. In a couple days we will get a better view into how much of this is true.
Ultimately it is very difficult to predict anything about the future of this war (without clowning yourself) without a good insight into the casualty rates of both sides and Russia's military production/import ramp-ups.
I suspect that Ukraine is actually facing a low ceiling in its overall conscription capacity. I base my suspicion on increasingly brutal videos coming out for months where conscription officers are beating up men unconscious to drag them to the barracks or having to fight a large community resistance. We simply don't know how many eligible Ukrainian men are even left in the country at this point.
I suspect that Russia is having some problems ramping up and adapting its military production. I base my suspicion on its constant reliance on North Korean/Iranian weapons imports and inability to scale up precision bombing campaigns to truly devastating sizes and the fact that they appointed basically a logistics czar as the Minister of Defense after spending years failing to adapt their hardware to the battlefield conditions.
I still expect that a Ukrainian front collapse is very much possible although I am impressed by how long they held out. They have relied heavily on "ideologically motivated" brigades (other words might apply), a general manpower advantage over the lean professional pre-war Russian army, and Russia's slow adaptation to the drone/precision-guided dominated war. Those troops are dead, Russian military recruitment seems to have equalized things, and Russians more or less adapted to these technologies and even gained an upper hand. All these observations support the theory that Kursk offensive has been a failed Hail Mary attempt to trigger some black swan event through forcing a massive error from the Russian command.
I think anyone who still word-cells "this is how Ukraine is actually winning" theories are basically delusional or worse. The war perhaps developed as a win for the NATO command (debatable imo), but Ukraine is a dead country busy with auto-cannibalization in the hands of a desperate leadership.
This is culture war stuff, you basically just said " The nazi's in ukrane are losing". This isn't an analysis, it is a hit piece.
So? What’s your point?
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