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Ukraine is fighting an existential, defensive war. The country is being actively invaded and occupied. He gets more leeway than someone fighting an unpopular war halfway around the globe, and he refrained from attacking Russia directly for a long time.
Defensive yes, existential - they made it one. Russian demands while onerous - mostly veto over Ukraine security were not unbearable.
Zelensky didn't refrain from anything. He just lacked the capacity. And still lacks - the fabled Flamingos are underperforming for example. The moment they could strike russia - they did. Or invade. They pulled every long strike they could do. They started attacking the Crimean bridge years before Russia decided to start Kiev bridges (which also could be matter of capacity, russian munitions became precise last year). The two sides have been going all in since the beginning.
They are the same people. Only Ukrainian nationalists that think sincerely that there is even a shred of difference culturally or genetically between the Russians and Ukrainans. The two sides are equally smart, equally matched and equally indifferent towards the suffering of theirs or others' side populations.
Russian veto over Ukrainian security policy = Ukraine is a sitting duck when (not if - Putin has consistently said that Russia's long-term policy goal is the forcible incorporation of Ukraine into the Russian sphere of influence and the forcible Russification of the Ukrainian people) Russia restarts the conflict, hence existential. Even if you think I am wrong about Russian long-term goals and that Putin was grandstanding for a domestic audience, the Ukrainians don't, and have good reasons not to.
Assuming that the Ukrainians are correct in not wanting to be genocided and that the Russians want to genocide them, they are better off fighting against the odds now than making concessions that will force them to fight against even worse odds later.
The Russian idea that Ukrainian nationhood is fake and gay and that the Ukrainians are really Little Russians was submitted for adjudication to the God of Battles, who has already ruled against it. I agree that there is no genetic or cultural difference that would explain Ukrainian overperformance - it is some combination of better institutions and outside help.
Russia would be happy to have Ukraine as a client state, so the conflict would not restart. It would be pretty bad for Ukraine to be in that position but I don't think there would be any reason to pursue annexation or ethnic cleansing.
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I don't claim to be especially informed here but on the face of it, and from the beginning, it still seems to me like fighting the war is likely to result in vastly worse outcomes than simply accepting Russian rulership.
Seeing how the separatist republics DPR and LPR turned out probably gave the Ukrainian public sentiment on fighting a bit of a boost. I mean these were live experiments in modern day, Ukrainian Russian client states with every advantage: these were originally the nice resource-rich industrialized parts of Ukraine, they had pro-Russian, Russian-speaking populations (probably with a decently big contingent buying the line that Ukraine is a silly fake country and they are all temporarily embarrassed Russians and it's about time they rejoined the Fatherland), they had puppet governments totally dependent on Russia's largesse so Russia had plenty of leverage to run them however it wanted even if nominally independent. The Donetskians and Luhanskians would have had all sorts of reasons to feel optimistic about the whole thing, and Russia seemingly had every motivation to treat them good.
Instead as far as I can tell they got a pair of ridiculously miserable hellhole microstates run by tortuous adventurer warlords. Maybe, like, Congo manages to have it worse.
It's not obvious that client state Ukraine would turn out that bad, but IDK if it's obvious either that it would turn out any better. There was for sure no obvious reason for DPR and LPR to turn out that bad yet there they were. And if puppet Ukraina were to go about the same, that's a vastly worse outcome than whatever is going on in the war now.
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You go and find two people in a brawl who have already battered and bloodied each other, and tell the smaller one to just lie down and let the bigger one do as he sees fit it because it's rational.
Even literal dogs are rational enough to show their belly instead of fighting to the bitter end.
Dogs don't know what life as a Russian vassal state conquered after a gruelling war is like.
The Finns sued for peace two times between 1940 and 1944 in their conflict with the USSR. Did they make the wrong choice then?
I don't think the Finns back then and the Ukrainians right now are being offered similar deals.
I do. I suggest you and @Shrike can have a conversation about this.
Fair enough, I had thought the Finn's terms more generous than they were.
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Depends on who lives to negotiate peace. Could be pretty sweet to the point where Russian natives regularly make grumbling sounds in the general direction of "who's supposed to be the vassal state here".
It's not a society I would like to live in, but on the metrics of their traditions being unmolested by the imperial center and their coffers being filled from the Tsar's treasury, they rank quite high.
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dogs have 1 life, nation and state can reborn from ash, fighting to the bitter end tell other parties that fighting you is not profitable so future invaders need to calculate with that all out fight, instead of assuming you will be pushover in a snap
If Putin knows how crazy and hard the Russo-Ukrainian war becomes, he likely choose a different target instead
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"To every man upon this earth
death will come soon or late.
And how can a man die better
than facing fearful odds
for the ashes of his fathers
and the temples of his gods?"
Surrounded by healthy children and grandchildren, I'd say. And the dudes being rounded up and forced into the meatgrinder at gunpoint don't seem to share your sentiment. The young women, fleeing, never to return. Whom exactly does this war serve, on the Ukrainian side? Because it sure doesn't seem to serve the people.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
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Maybe, maybe not. But people are not so dispassionate about their homes as that. At some point, yes, the damage from war gets to be so bad that people will accept foreign occupation rather than continue the war (otherwise wars would never end other than annihilation), but it takes time for the losses to get to be painful enough that people will accept losing their home to the foreign invaders.
How foreign? Ukraine is barely a country, and the people don't seem very enthusiastic about the fight. AFAICT this war is perpetuated by the government for the government at the expense of the people.
The ukrainian people want to fight, though.
Now, I broadly agree with the idea that the ukrainian government should avoid further loss of life to preserve Galicia, because that's the only 'ukrainian' part of ukraine(I make no illusions about my ethnoreligious prejudices). But the Ukrainian public wants to fight to the bitter end, and I respect them for it. It's not the government making them.
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A healthy majority of Ukrainians support the war from every polling I've seen. And foreign enough this war is really creating a national identity for Ukraine. When people start shooting missiles into your apartment blocks you stop viewing them as compatriots fairly quickly. ANd there is also an aspirational element look at Poland a democracy in the EU that's practically surpassing Western Europe at this point and look at Russian despotism under Putin.
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I’d take the deal the Ukrainians are being offered. The young get to 10x their income and a chunk of the boomers die off fighting it.
Ukraines war fighting ability seems to prove that being in the Russian sphere has greatly retarted economic development plus Polish are Slovaks and have already achieved close to prime Euorpe incomes.
If the war ended today then the fight would have been worth it. But who knows how it ends.
You'd die for being replaced by Indians and line go up? I can understand opting for it in times if peace, because you'll probably enjoy the benefits before the negatives kick in. But what's the point of walking into the meat grinder for it?
Indians don't want to go to Ukraine. They want to go to richer countries which aren't currently on fire and covered in snow at the same time(the US obviously the ideal, but Canada, Australia, the UK, even Russia all rank far above Ukraine). Indians don't want to live in an impoverished shithole which has been wrecked by war and in which the average citizen is incredibly racist.
They might prefer other countries, but they're not going to stay home if Ukraine is the only one on offer, and if Indians are too picky, there's always Africa.
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Listen I don’t support immigration at all. I don’t think Indians should leave India. I want them deported from America. I even want denaturalization in the west.
But you can find benefits for Ukraine in the war and hope they are smart enough to not become Ikrinia.
I believe in Ukraine for Ukrainians and maybe some Russian Slavs who want out of Russia since they are similar.
If it was just about them being smart enough, one could have hope, but it's about pressure, propaganda, bribes and incentives. The idea is/was the they'll align themselves with western Europe, if they do that they'll be flooded with (even more) NGOs, they'll have EU money dangled in front of them for implementing the progressive social agenda, and their politicians will be offered cozy positions in Brussels to pull strings back home. This isn't something you can resist, because it sets up a "you have to get lucky every time, they have to get lucky once" dynamic.
This gets down to you can never do anything in the west pessimism but at the end of the day there isn’t anything else to bet on but the west. And for your concerns Poland doesn’t seem to have done infinite immigration.
Trump has gutted a significant part of the NGO complex with getting rid of USAID. Europe is getting center right pressure now (I can’t use their labeling far-right).
You still need to work to make a better world. You can’t just do endless pessimism.
How? It's not about if "you can ever do anything", it's about whether you're setting yourself up for a series of structural disadvantages, that will negate whether or not a particular nation is "smart enough" to not implement a suicidal policy.
And I can't help but notice you never bothered denying said disadvantages.
Sure, their number of migrants is finite... for now. They're actually a perfect example of what I'm talking about, as they already do have a number of people that came over from Pakistan and Africa which literally no one asked for. Their amount might cause an eyeroll from a German, Frenchman or Brit, but all this means is that they started the process later, not that they'll put a stop to it.
The only reason they're even doing as well as they are is because they've been under a "far right" government for years, which was subject to the exact pressures I described above, and even they got caught selling visas to third-worlders. On top of that more pressures are added daily on thr EU level (like the recently passed migration pact).
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I think Ukraine is a dead state regardless of whether the war ends today. The demographic damage is apocalyptic.
Eh, Galicia had replacement fertility before the war, and they're the properly 'Ukrainian' part of Ukraine. Nowhere near out of the question that they'd recover- after all, the children born immediately before the war are now turning four, and Ukraine might use some child soldiers in their late teens but it's not recruiting younger than that.
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Not much has changed on that from the war. Same issue all of western society is dealing with.
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