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Notes -
Ukraine.
By now, wise people, people who avoid reading the newspapers (newspaper generally lie) have noticed that the news out of Ukraine is bad. After years of relentless and very stupid propaganda, even 'The Sun' ran an article which was basically fine. Torygraph ditto. A bit of lying around the end, some lies by omission but generally thoughtful and not grossly incorrect.
That's means something. Not at all clear what. Obsessive observers of the war believe Ukraine is likely to hold out until end of '26, early '27. However:
1- There's a financing issue, sure - Americans, unwilling since Trump inauguration to keep paying for what they started now only want to deliver weapons if Europeans, who were against it initially, pay for them.
Europe, as everyone knows, is mostly broke, with the exception of Germany, which isn't only because it typically doesn't shower money around. Paying through the nose for overpriced weaponry like e.g. Patriot or Aster 30 missiles ($ 2mil per unit) which then are going to be fired, best case, at cruise missiles of equal worth doesn't seem like a winning strategy, especially with the Geran spam being able to destroy anything that doesn't have a rare cannon SPAA sitting on top of it. If there's 50 of them in Ukraine, that's probably too much.
There was a plan of 'magicking' up money by making a loan to buy more weapons, covered by the frozen Russian assets, thus 'risk-free' because 'Russia is going to release those assets as war reparations'. Belgium, which would have ended up having jurisdiction over it refused to go along..
2- Materially, it's bad. We know the gist of the situation: Ukraine has too few men -line infantry is at 20-30% staffing , is outmatched in drones, artillery and air attacks. Russia, being larger, is able to mobilize troops and sustain operations. There is shortage of everything on the Ukrainian side. Civilian cars, drones, men. -save perhaps small-calibre ammunition which is barely used in this war. (allegedly <5% of wounds are from gunshot). Why there is a shortage of cars seems.. mysterious. Germany surely should be able to keep Ukrainians knee deep in cheap trucks. E.g. Dacia Duster cost €20k and there's 100k made per year. A mere 2 billion € a year could give Ukraine 1 4x4 car for every 5 servicemen. What gives?
Ukraine drops some bombs using their few planes, possibly even daily , but Russians sometimes delivers up to 300 a day, although the mean is 160 in 2025. Any bunker, HQ, supply dump close behind the front can be hit. That's pretty modest- just 40 sorties in an Su-34. Ukraine doesn't have what to use - France supplied 800 glide bombs... for the whole of 2024. Promised 1200 for 2025. 4 a day. If Americans have given more, we'd have heard about it. If GDP so high, why so few bombs? Where's the American UMPK? Does US have no huge pile of old bombs you can stick sheet metal & gps modules to? Are cheap, effective, good enough weapons only something despotic alcoholic nations can make ?
The true rate of attrition is unknown. Ukraine armed forces, internally seem to believe it's 8 Ukrainians for 10 Russians or something along those lines, if we go by the testimony of this International Legion guy who deserted earlier this year after being allocated to an especially dire 1st rifleman battalion with 50% odds of surviving one rotation. (or so he says). In any case, as Europeans and Americans have shown themselves unwilling to go and risk death, the required rate needed to have been something like 2:10 just to break even, demographics wise.
3- the front. right now, a some amount of troops is encircled at Pokrovsk. Supposedly very few (AMK_mapping, an autist who follows the war hourly says Ukrainians mostly withdrew), but then, it's unclear how dire the situation is, however GUR fed their spec-ops team to the front near Pokrovsk, in an effort to make evacuation easier, to probably little avail (there is an FPV montage of these guys getting blown up already). They operate 3 Blackhawk helos, one of them was apparently downed.
Overall, as you probably know, the situation on the front is bad. Ukraine cannot hold territory, cannot counterattack effectively. Previously, Russia was only being able to push one place at a time, now it's multiples. If you want an overview, here's an interview of AMK_Mapping, a rare pro Ukrainian OSINT account respected by people on both sides. Honestly he seems autistic. The 'mapping' means he's one of the people keeping track of the war online by obsessively reading Telegram channels, geolocating etc. The interviewer is pro-Russian, somewhat overly optimistic I think.
Going by the aphorism 'If you're reading this, it's for you', it looks like the American press is preparing the public for a closing act of the majestic capeshit arc that started with the Maidan massacre. Ukrainians are generally eager to negotiate, nobody believes in winning anymore, though the demands Russia has are not viewed as acceptable. I wonder what the frontline troops and officers would say in private.
To rephrase/edit a comment I posted here 3 months ago: I think this whole sh*tshow is yet another consequence of Western Europeans generally lacking a perspective on their own continent’s history and acting accordingly. It has been true in almost all cases that the Russian army blunders and stumbles during the initial phase of any war, even regardless of it aggressing or defending, but then shows itself to be capable of gradually learning and adapting even if the final outcome is defeat, as in WW1 for example. See the Brusilov offensive of 1916 in that case, characterized by John Keegan as “the greatest victory seen on any front [of WW1] since the trench lines had been dug on the Aisne two years before” (as quoted in Wikipedia). And there are cases when the important lessons are only learned after the war, such as the war against the Japanese in 1904-5 (which, by the way, wasn’t a cakewalk for the Japanese army by any means). I assume this is the consequence of the intellectual sloth and naïve romanticism that generally characterize the Russian people, the legacy of languishing as slaves for centuries etc., probably the Mongol yoke also has something to do with it, but this is largely beside the point. There are also a few cases when that initial period of incompetence is rather short, like during the naval war against the Ottomans in 1788-91, whom were soundly beaten.
In the case of WW2, the Red Army clearly demonstrated an ability to gradually gain competence, although the results generally appeared only in the final phase of the war. The offensives in the territory of present-day Belarus, Moldova, Romania and Poland in the summer of 1944 or the invasion of Manchuria in 1945 were impressive by anyone’s standards. The Russians are slow to learn maybe, but they do learn. Even the Afghanistan war wasn’t just a series of one blunder after another, just look at the battle for ‘Hill’ 3234 for example.
It seems that Western Europeans apparently have this usual tendency to concentrate on Russian blunders while ignoring every other factor and then assume that winning against them will be easy, and also have a way of convincing their big American brother of this.
What a garbage theory. Astrology for geopolitics. "And on the second moon of the third year of war, the russian, as always, will have learned his lesson and win". Predicting future events from nothing more than the eternal essence of the participants.
So, do the americans, or the french, not learn, in war? You say his essence makes the russian learn slow, yet, sometimes, against the turk, the russian still learns fast. And the theory predicts the russian ends up winning, but of course, russians lost quite a lot of wars, even in wars where they appeared to be slowly learning at first, in accordance with their eternal destiny.
Such as?
It doesn't. I never claimed that. What I did claim is that it's grave folly to look at the initial blunders of the Russians and then assume it's all they will ever keep doing and thus expecting final victory over them as self-evident.
Judging by the German campaign of 1940, the French indeed do not learn, and we don't have later examples to judge. With respect to the US, unfortunately we can conclude that learning anything from Vietnam was quite difficult. American politicans also appeared to have learning from the Panama and Kuwait conflicts that making war can be made easy and bloodless, which is also just hubris.
The customary reward of defeat, if one can survive it, is in the lessons thereby learned, which may yield victory in the next war. But the circumstances of our defeat in Vietnam were sufficiently ambiguous to deny the nation (that) benefit. – Edward N. Luttwak
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Was there a serious core of people who believed in a Ukraine victory though? And by serious, I mean people who don't solely read or work for the likes of NYT or BBC. Mottizens or similar. Outside of a hope that sanctions might eventually force Russia to the table, I would be surprised if anyone believed in a Ukraine military victory.
If by "Western Europeans" you're referring more to the governments than the people, I think the answer is less learning from history and rather the same as for every modern crisis: a large number of incompetent and completely bubbled officials, unable to deal with the complexity of modern life
Western establishment has been knowingly going along with project THD despite knowing it's ultimately futile ?
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I’ve been getting lit up by various Mottezens for two years for saying Ukraine would lose. They’re still mocking me up upthread for saying that Ukraine is going to lose, even now.
As far as I can see, a couple of posters have taken issue with your claims around territorial gains for Russia, with no posters suggesting that Ukraine will turn around and reconquer lost territory.
The line is currently collapsing in five different places, I don’t think predicting major territorial gains by Russia is particularly loopy or controversial at this point.
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Yes, I believe most of the goons in leading positions in the EU, most heads of state and members of government of EU member states are convinced that Ukraine will be able to push the Russians out of the occupied territories and de facto restore the pre-2014 border.
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Back when we were on reddit, I offered multiple times for people to bet that Ukraine would win the conflict and I got no takers whatsoever. If there were people on here that believed Ukraine would win, none of them were willing to put money on it.
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I would say it is a result of hyper moralism, a view of history that reads francis fukuyama as a prophet and the dumbing down of politics. The way Russians are being treated is similar to how transphobes were treated during peak wokeness. They can't be acknowledged to have any legitimate concerns, they are motivated by evil and we all have to performatively show our disgust on social media. It becomes impossible to have a sane, rational and calm debate regarding topics when they go BLM 2020.
We can't have a debate regarding war aims, what the security architecture of Europe should look like, whether pax Americana is feasible in a world in which the US is 17% of global GDP or whether Ukraine in NATO even makes sense. Just like we couldn't have a calm, rational debate about what defund the police will actually look like. There is just people performatively screeching slogans.
This has some roots back to the Afghanistan war. We could never have a debate or calm discussion. It couldn't be treated like a normal war because we were fighting "terrorists" and that apparently justified anything. Nobody could explain a path to victory, just slogans. It is amazing that it took five months from 20 years of Afghanistan fiasco to the start of the next forever war. At least after Vietnam there was a long cool down period.
Also it took years for the true scale of lying and issues in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq to be revealed by whistle blowers. During those wars the media was far more critical than they are now. Sooner or later there will be a Daniel Ellsberg of Ukraine and most likely we will find out the lies and propaganda for this war were at least as spectacular as they were in the previous wars.
There’s no need for moralism when we’ve got tribalism.
The average Ukraine sympathizer sees something like this or this and turns into the staunchest of partisans. No philosophy required.
Honestly, after years of your doomsaying, I still don’t know what you expect to find out. There’s no real equivalent to “saddam has WMDs.” No real wargoal, seeing as we aren’t at war. No American casualties to cover up. So what’s the big reveal? What undermines the premise of “we’ll pay you not to give that guy what he wants?”
Most likely massive exaggerations of Russian incompetence, a massive downplaying of Ukrainian successes, huge depletions of western stockpiles, wild levels of corruption and a war based on slogans rather than reality. It will be hard to sell Russia is collapsing, Ukraine are uber mench as Ukraine is falling apart. They are way more loudly invested in this fiasco than some fiascos in the Middle East. It will be embarrassing when the charade falls apart.
Where exactly are you getting sold that narrative?
Looking at CNN or WaPo or the NYT, they aren’t selling a Russian collapse or obvious Ukrainian superiority. That’s a sucker’s bet. They’re playing the underdog angle where Ukraine is barely (but admirably!) holding out against the aggressor. Supporting Ukraine as an “ought” rather than an “is.”
I think you’re conflating the armchair generals on Twitter with the broader base of support. It’s like assuming that all Christians are about to deconvert because the Branch Davidians got a prophecy wrong.
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Thermostatically relevant moral cause offers avenue for posturing. Its proximate to "demand for racism outstripping supply" and thus every small incident needs to be emphasized as maximally as possible within the attention window before people stop caring.
No one (in general, not the poster specifically but I won't care either way) cared about Maidan or whateverfuck other than its relevance as an anti-CIA USA bad bulletpoint. The relevance of Russia in 2022 due to the invasion is probably the biggest shot of adrenaline to the Russian national psyche because they are now a feared invading monster in the eyes of the west, not a dying gas station surrounded by rotting tank graveyards. Unlike (most) transphobes, Russians revel in being treated as scary enemies of the west, because they correctly calculate that the west is not interested enough in ruining their comfy lives by pocketbook or nuclear hellfire. Playing up the big bad unstoppable enemy is great especially if the only cost is a bunch of Buryats and Dagestanis that you were hoping to get rid off anyways.
The specific tactical strategic macro historical whateverfuck navelgazing about immutable historical characteristics or other personal pet explanatory theories are just fitting a messy situation onto personal prior beliefs. Russia Ukraine offers a delicious discussion ground for Grand Theory on (military/history/racial character/jews) without consequence, because Ukraine and Russia are irrelevant just as Sudan is irrelevant. A choice is being made to pay attention, and a choice can be made to ignore. Can't do that for Israel because of retarded domestic US politics, can't ignore China because Altman needs to justify his ascension to AI Godhood.
Russia being irrelevant implies that the whole of Europe is irrelevant which .. I'm not decided on but is probably true. After all, it's China that matters now. The developed world is no longer just Europe + Northern America and Chinese outsize those two regions by a factor of 2 in workforce and probably more in other ways.
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I think it's more people just not really being able to handle getting live footage of any bad thing happening in the world without wanting to intervene and completely disregarding any sort of a cost-benefit analysis or nuanced view of human conflict. Ukraine and Palestine are both dragging out beyond any sane historical need since there's an overwhelming need to keep rehashing them in the court of public opinion.
If live footage of atrocities motivated anyone at all there would have been a scorched earth campaign to clease Brazil and Mexico of gangs, followed by seperatists in Ethiopia and Sudan. Funkytown remains one of the most gruesome videos out there of human suffering being gleefully meted out by enthusiastic participants fully aware of what they were doing, and there are countless amputated corpses scattered in the vast Brazillian forests where the flayings and murders were filmed specifically to be shared with the families of the deceased. Ukraine and Palestine are relevant for retarded domestic political reasons in any country that professes to care, and for that reason livestreamed mass murders in Sudan are just dismissrd as sandshit.
It’s funny you should mention that. I vaguely remember the bygone days when ISIS captured the attention of the Western media for a relatively short period of time, and the antics of the ISIS executioner ‘Jihadi John’ were getting plastered all over television and online news. There was one TV report after another, segments, outrage, basically just an insane amount of attention, at least for a short time and I was like…really?! Not even 50 or 100 miles away from some of these TV studios, Mexican cartels were torturing, beheading, dismembering and flaying their victims on camera like it was just another Tuesday, and still pretty much nobody in the West cared besides the regulars of a few gore websites. I get it that their victims weren’t white but the imbalance was still sort of crazy.
The unspoken gentlemans agreement of western inviolability actually does hold some weight: do whatever you want to your own people just dont attack whites. ISIS hung up dozens of men on meat hooks and then slit their throats so that their blood ran in rivers down the drain, but its Kayla whateverherface that captured global attention because some white do gooder didn't enjoy the normal aura protection they had during the hippie traip era. Mexican cartels just slaughter paisas in villages so urban fresas (white girls) don't even pay attention. Ukrainians and Russians and that entire warsaw pact area aren't thought as White, they're slavs doing slavshit, so they're unimportant.
Jihadi John and ISIS mistake was to openly declare war on the west and encourage actual action domestically to kill whites. If they stuck with killing Sunnis and Kurds they'd be dismissed as sandshit barbarians unimportant to the west. Kill your own and don't kill the westerner and no media will pay attention. This obviously means Taiwans only line of defense is encouraging as many whites to migrate there as possible, and so their courting of MAGA influencers is to raise the hostage value of white sexpats.
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