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To add an actual thesis to Mushroom’s unhinged screed, I would steelman it as:
Ukraine has a decent chance of continuing attritional warfare until Russia gives up.
Even if part or all of Ukraine falls, it performed a valuable service in keeping Russia from advancing further into Eastern Europe.
I don’t think either of those theses are inherently ridiculous (especially not the second one), but they both rely on Russia really being as banged up as Mushroom thinks they are. Which who knows. I know for a fact that previous popular estimates of vast Russian men and vehicle losses were quietly and sheepishly exposed as bullshit by all the actual intelligence agencies that were keeping track (CIA, SIS, Mossad). I am really looking forward to reading some assessments of the war 20 years from now when it’s not a live political issue.
I also suspect that China has a much stronger interest in keeping Russia whole and threatening Eastern Europe than they publicly let on. That threat is what’s keeping a lot of US attention and resources flowing to places other than the countries of the South China Sea.
Its pretty clear from satellite imagery that Russian vehicle parks were drawing down rapidly, but the pace of drawdown slowing is largely to do with tactical evolutions. Russias strategy of infiltrate and airstrike identified strongpoints has no place for armor partially because armor has many more limitations but simply because there isnt anything useful available to call up: vehicle parks are dry, the vehicle operators suck shit, and generals cant coordinate for fuck.
I am curious as to what the CIA Mossad SIS info you cite is, because all evidence shows that Russia has lost the thousands of vehicles cited byOryx and has not meaningfully replenished their TOE, and there is no statement from any of those entities to the contrary. If the claim is that Russia has a strong reserve that it can spring forth when the moment is right, there us no evidence for that still: the 1st Guards Tank Army and 4th Guards Tank Division (fuck Russia for their inconsistent nomenclature) are not on the front and are still functionally degraded, sitting pretty in the LMD for propaganda purposes. Russian C2 is degraded by institutional incapacity and the adhoc nature of any push being scraped from whatever is present. There is no actual reconstituted Russian Bear waiting to roll over once Pokrovsk breaks.
Chinas support of Russia seems the most hilarious part to me. China is buying up Russian oil continually, but it is RMB-effected (nominally presented in USD terms) so the actual levers of international finance to punish either China or Russia are limited. Yet China does not provide explicit military equipment to Russia, instead selling dual use components and forcibly adapted shitty golf carts or ebikes for Russia to get blown up. If China was kinetically supporting Russia like North Korea did, Russia would get its thousand tank fleet immediately: there are about 2000 type 96 idling in mongolia visible from Russia, pristine tanks preserved in sandy but dry terrain, needing less to reup than even tanks atmosphere protected facilities.
Instead Russia gets alibaba Desertcross jeeps and suicide tier dirt bikes. If Russia had better frontline electrification they would get the fields of Light Electric Vehicles with 40 mile range that China produced in the hundreds of thousands back in the 2010s. I don't doubt that China is happy to see western treasure expended on internal conflicts far from its border, but China didn't need to start this fight. Its not like the US seems to care about China given that the US is busy preparing for a Venezuela regime overthrow (Monroe is BACK baby!) while China is gearing up for a new Sino Japan war.
I’m referring to a specific incident about a year into the war, when the Ukrainian MoD claimed that Russia had suffered 140,000 KIA so far, and the White House started trumpeting that figure. The CIA quietly said that they thought the number of Russian KIA was more like 20,000, and you actually had the White House press secretary ridiculing the CIA’s estimate, even though British and Israeli intelligence had similar figures.
From what I remember this was a very common confusion between Ukrainians reporting casualties (still probably overestimated, but not really that egregious) and some newspapers reporting KIAs
Meduza confirmations of Russian KIA based on orbituaries were far more in line with Ukrainian estimates for casualties based on a 4:1 wounded to dead ratio, while Russia was just hilariously reporting "no casualties to glorious Russia, Kiev quakes in fear as we approach". Russia only started reporting casualties when Wagner untouchables were being killed. Ukraine also underreports their own casualties by massive amounts but the zigger smugposting about "well we still have missiles and tanks and people to throw so the west is clearly wrong about how much we are losing" is just neener neener loser shit. If you've got the resources then fucking win you useless shitheads. Either you're facing a tough opponent which explains your abysmal pace of advance or you're gassed out against a weakling. Dean writes that "all we have to do is wait for the enemy to lose the will to fight" is a great example of Bad Theories Of Victory, but "we can win but just choose not to" is a strong contender for the top prize of copesnorting. Its fucking Ukraine, a flat open land that used to be your own fucking territory and with compatible rail gauges. If fucking ziggers can't take on their bumfuck rural cousins then they aren't a great power exercising regional strength they're just the dying office boomer bullying juniors while whining about the good old days.
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Drones have made armored assaults extremely difficult. It's just too hard to amass a strike force without being spotted, much less crossing the killzone. That's why they switched to light 'vehicles' like golf carts and whatnot - the best survivability is speed and concealment. The idea behind "Line of Drones" was to remove the need for frontline infantry - it hasn't lived up to those goals, but it's the reason they haven't collapsed when they have such a manpower crisis.
I honestly think that excuse from Russians (and Ukrainians) about not massing armor due to drones is just cope. They aren't massing vehicles tread to tread, mobility kills on vehicles are still overwhelmingly mines and artillery is for (great) effect. No, the slavs just suck at coordinating multi prong advances whether it is armored or unarmored, and doing ATV spam is proof of incapability not prudence. Russians certainly effected multi prong armored pushes in Kursk when the ground wasnt mined and torn to shit, and any massing being within artillery range is fucking criminal since you shouldn't be massing within 5km of a first line of contact and if you're rushing to wait under an enemys artillery range then you're fucked whether you're sitting in an ATV or a BMP.
I believe this, but I also believe that drone ISR and resulting drone directed fires (to say nothing of drone strikes themselves) have made armored assaults, and worse breaching a minefield (already one of the hardest ops) an order of magnitude harder.
I am confident that in some sort of US Army vs Russian Army showdown, while the US Army would probably eventually prevail, as they are much better at independence and adaption (and importantly, course use more smoke and EW due to less micro from generals in the back). But they would get fucking SHELLACKED in the process.
Now of course they wouldn't breach the minefield without first airstriking everything remotely enemy shaped within 100km, and then go on to airstrike anything remotely shaped within 1,000km before they even contemplated the breach.
So the real lesson here is that if you don't have air superiority, offense is really really fucking hard. Defense was always powerful in the modern era, but with drones it got even better
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The Russians have actually tried a bunch of large armored assaults recently and they got shredded by drones and arty directed by drones immediately.
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I agree that neither of these are ridiculous.
I actually think it is reasonably clear that some version of #1 has been correct ever since the attempt to seize Kiev failed: it would be extremely hard for Russia to seize all of Ukraine and this has been acknowledged by the Russians in their negotiation proposals (and I don't even think their attempt to seize Kiev was an attempt to do this). Thus, if by "Ukraine continuing attritional warfare until Russia gives up" we mean "until Russia comes to the table and negotiates," that's already happened.
If however we take "Russia gives up" to mean "Ukraine accomplishes their war goals" - yeah I don't think Ukraine is getting Crimea back.
Ukraine isn't achieving any of their headline goals. DPR and LPR are basically North Korea, unreintegrable and a net drain on the patron. Russia also can't achieve its goal (rapid overthrow signalling rebirth of the empire) and is just seeing how long they can keep throwing racial minorities into the meat grinder to get a mission accomplished banner. I maintain that the Wests continued interest in Ukraine is not (just) to continue poking the bear but to ensure the bear doesn't get kidney punched and does a nuclear spergout. Leashing the dog is better than letting it run wild in its dying breath.
I don't see the need to stretch for some 4D chess signalling goal when Russia's actual and obvious goals (ceding territory, neutralization, demilitarization, "denazification") have been stated openly and repeatedly and are borne out by their actions.
What nobody seems to have contemplated is how Ukraine is going to feel about all of this in the aftermath, although quite possibly they will be so reduced to a nonentity that it will not matter if they grow to hate the West for precisely this attitude.
There’s certainly been some selective pressure against those with strong feelings in favor Ukrainian of identity.
If the Ukrainians can claim victory, which at this point may be just keeping their identity and an independent state, they could conceivably go through a reconstruction boom (baby and economic). Few things catalyze identity formation like resisting a bully.
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I think the second point still is ridiculous, because there is neither the means (unless you really flog your brain into accepting the "the enemy simultaneously weak and strong" pattern that is every propagandist's dream goal) nor really the motive (unless the Baltics really decide to force it by blockading Kaliningrad or the like) for them to take on NATO. Ukraine really was, in many ways, sui generis: at the outset it was almost 50% culturally and politically Russian, it hosted the best European warm-water port Russia had (and if you accept that the Russians did not want to surrender it, that alone almost made the path to the current situation inevitable - the Maidan government wanted to tear up the lease so Crimea had to be taken, and the post-Maidan governments wanted to starve out Crimea so more territory had to be taken), and it's a single-authority transit country linking Russia to the easternmost loyal hydrocarbon customers it has in Europe (Hungary and Slovakia), which the pro-Atlanticist forces in Europe and Ukraine were very keen on using against them through out the 200Xes.
Well I was trying to steelman OP’s thesis so I had to accept at least some of his assertions. I meant it’s not unreasonable to assume that Russian forces have possibly taken enough damage to make it not feasible to mount an invasion of Poland even if they wanted to. I don’t agree but I don’t laugh in his face for making the argument. Personally I think this whole boondoggle has probably increased the capability of the Russian army and made them more likely to go for Poland or the Baltic states, like one of those self-fulfilling prophecies from a Greek tragedy.
Well, we shouldn't forget that Poland, too, has actually greatly increased the size and funding of its army since 2022. Besides, how likely is it really that there would be no NATO response in case of a Russian invasion of the Baltics/Poland? (even if it's not immediate, the rest of the EU certainly would get involved, and if it possibly goes badly for them, I don't see a world in which the US stands by idly)
It seems to me that you just need to believe a lot of fairly peculiar (and likely unacceptable to any in the pro-UA camp apart from people like Julian Roepcke who went off the deep end in contrarianism) things to imagine a Russian invasion of Poland or the Baltics being successful: either you really think that NATO is already lending Ukraine most of its power (and so Russia is really currently barely prevailing in a stalemate against the collective West) and so Poland and friends will be weaker when Russia comes for them because they were already stripped bare, or that NATO is not giving Ukraine that big a fraction of its power and so the current stalemate means that Russia and Ukraine alone are about evenly matched and each stronger than NATO.
(Mind you, technically I think the picture is more complicated than that because the non-entry of the West has currently kept Russia several steps below the top of the escalation ladder, e.g. by leaving NPPs and civilians alone. However, to use this in your argument, you would have to concede that Russia is not currently evilmaxxing, which is also taboo for pro-UA.)
I think it’s plausible for a few reasons:
Since the Maidan revolution, Russia has had every paranoid fear of NATO being out to get them validated by NATO. I think Russia genuinely views it as an existential struggles. Both the leadership and a good chunk of the people.
Poland just isn’t as well suited to turning into a four year grinding trench war. It’s geographically a lot smaller, it’s land army manpower is somewhere between 15 percent and 50 percent the size of the Ukrainian Army. Most of the modernization went into magic beans (F16s, M1 tanks) that are serviceable but apparently not that magical in modern warfare.
God only knows what the hell is going to be going on in Burgerland in six months, much less three years. They may or may not get involved.
Europe is in pretty good shape to drip-feed equipment to Ukraine. But if that turned into “immediately mobilize 115 divisions and rush them into Eastern Europe while hypersonic missiles are crashing into every railway station and airfield Between Paris and Warsaw” they would be up Shit Creek.
If Ukraine really does fall I suspect a lot of countries are going to rapidly revaluate their commitment to the cause.
I don't think this is as clear-cut as you want it to be: maybe it is, but we also just saw a brief war between Israel and Iran in which the former was seemingly able to establish air dominance with modern "magic beans" against a country equipped with largely modern Eastern bloc air defense systems. I don't think Iran even claims to have shot down a manned aircraft (compare to this years' India-Pakistan skirmish, which had several).
I don't think it's completely crazy to suggest that a Russia-NATO conflict might look, in the air, like a scaled up version of the Israel-Iran conflict, and I'd expect air dominance to make it pretty one-sided. It's also believable that it'd fall into something looking more like the present Ukraine conflict where manned air assets are of limited utility. But for anyone thinking it's a good idea to start such a conflict, to steal a good movie quote: "You've got to ask yourself one question, 'Do I feel lucky?'. Well do you, punk?"
Israel is a country the size of New Jersey, with one of the strongest air defense networks in the entire world. They burned through their entire interceptor stockpile in about a week. After that, they were looking at having their airfields and critical infrastructure systematically dismantled by Iranian missile strikes. Burgerland had to force Israel into a ceasefire because Burgerland didn’t want to have to spend 1/3 of its entire national stockpile (that took 30 years to build up) refilling Israel’s interceptor batteries for another week. Air Defense is just generally on the back-foot in this century. Now picture Europe, an area about 500 times the size of Israel, with hardly any air defense batteries. They would be getting systematically diced up from day one, including all those airfields and hangers that NATO air units are supposed to be flying missions out of.
Also, this all hinges on the United States actually entering the conflict, which nowadays I would call a pretty big if.
I think "dismantled" is overselling it here. Sure, burning through interceptors isn't great, but you seem to be comparing "Iran got in a few good hits" to "Israel was free to hit all but the hardest targets for as long as it cared to." There seems to be this common bias towards seeing Western nations as glass cannons, where only a few good hits are required to bring them to their knees, and you can win as long as you can tank whatever they throw at you (which is maybe limited by "moral" concerns about indirectly harming civilians) until you manage that and negotiate an outcome that favors your objectives. I think if you're against the West fighting a war they got involved in by choice, maybe this works to convince democracies to choose peace (see Vietnam, et al). I don't think it immediately follows that this applies to something more existential (see Israel vs. Gaza, or Yamamoto at Pearl Harbor).
If landing (conventional) ballistic missiles into enemy capitals was a decisive victory, the Germans would have won WWII.
Maybe true, but this is still a pretty big "if", and the existence of the question has prompted Europe to start actually investing in defense.
Iran only got in a few hits because the war stopped when the interception rate dropped to about 65-70 percent. Given the volume they were throwing at Israel that could have done a lot of damage if most or all them were getting through. And during WWII the weapons were a lot less precise. Now with Israel I doubt they were in too much danger because at worst they could throw a couple of nukes and scare the Iranians enough to call it off (not even getting into the probable US intervention that would probably come before that). When you’re fighting the country with the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet that wouldn’t be a reliable backstop.
That’s really the problem here. It’s not that western countries are glass cannons, in a lot of ways they are pretty capable. But when you are backing a huge nuclear armed world power into a existential corner it’s a much more difficult situation. And I’m sure someone will draw the right sigils in blood on floor to call forth @Dean and five other posters to explain to that this isn’t really an existential situation for Russia and that they wouldn’t do shit in response to their entire air defense network being glassed by NATO SEAD, but I’m pretty sure they genuinely feel that way and aren’t just being pricks for no reason.
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5: Which ones specifically?
4: Russia hasn't even managed to wipe out Ukraine's aviation or train network yet, and most of Europe would be rather further away.
2: It's about half the size (of presumably full-sized Ukraine), plus Poland and the Baltics have Russia by the balls due to Kaliningrad (whatever happens later on, it probably gets turned into a parking lot or occupied/taken hostage in the opening weeks of a conflict)
1: I mean, if Ukraine falls, what further ways does NATO have to validate Russia's fears? There will be no immediate Russian objectives like controlling Ukraine that NATO can actively prevent, so the ball will be in their court. If they then actually start something (like the aforementioned moves on Kaliningrad), then sure, all bets are off, but so far I thought the lizardmen were trying to be a bit more subtle about the whole "look how dangerous and unhinged they are, if we punch them they punch back" schtick.
Russian victim complex is as bad as SJW. Why is everyone mean to me after I belittled and degraded them at every opportunity. I am such a victim boohoo. Maybe thats why progressives love Russia, they love a victim narrative especially if its against the USA.
I thought progressives hated Russia now?
I think 2D3D is referring to the particular brand of leftist (of /r/stupidpol origin or similar) who are so anti capitalist and anti American that they love the old Soviet Union (including its gulags and glorious strongman and kulak-butcherer Stalin) and anyone opposed to the West today. Palestine, Russia, etc. They'll cry loudly about "the genocide" (Gaza) while also supporting a brutal conquest of Ukraine and their NATO allies.
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It's particularly egregious coming from such an abusive, macho, might makes right, corrupt imperialist culture with a 550 year history of aggressing against neighbors. Russia could unironically use a bit of Russian Guilt being taught in their schools.
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Strange that the nearly word-for-word identical pro-Russia post didn't pass your screed bar.
But yes, I think Ukraine will accelerate its economic damage to Russia in 2026.
Not sure about the deboonkings you're talking about, pretty sure there's an open source database with video or picture proof of the tens of thousands of destroyed Russian hardware.
China would also like to stay on Europe's good side presumably. Still, it's funny that we're back to accepting Russia-Ukraine as a proxy Chinese-European war.
Yes, Oryx, which abruptly shut down in late 2023 when it was about to become obvious how totally full of shit they were.
It took many years of way until Daniel Ellsberg released the true scale of the lying and failure of Vietnam. It took a decade of fiascos in the middle east before Bradley Manning revealed the scale of lies and propaganda in the middle east. Those wars at least had some critical media that put some pressure on participants not to behave as if they were in a banana republic. People are naive if they think this war isn't at least as corrupt and as lied about as any of the previous neo con debacles.
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I mean, if your goal was to actually make a mirror image of that post by @No_one, you didn't quite succeed. He didn't resort to putting crass quotes in the mouths of those he argued against implicitly or explicitly, said what he meant rather than engaging in ironic snark, and most importantly the sources he linked to bolster his point were all pro-Ukrainian, while yours were also mostly pro-Ukrainian.
I'm quoting such pro-Ukraine sources as Putin, Izvestia, Moskovsky Komsomolets, and Komsomolskaya Pravda
he concern trolled without abandon, built consensus and had so many air-quotes he may as well have been winking to his pro-Russian fanbase over here.
You're quoting the latter for the economic argument, which is indeed the more solid part of your post (though I think that the "two weeks to
flatten the curvecrash the Russian economy" arguments also have a really bad track record). Not sure where you are even getting the P-man himself (I don't particularly count a pro-Ukrainian source cherrypicking his quotes as being him as a source, any more than Russian telegram channels quoting Zelensky become pro-Ukrainian).More options
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It also assumes Ukraine can keep up its share of losses.
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