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Notes -
Zelensky and Trump's arm twisting competition
Ukraine is bombing Russian refineries. Good for them but maybe not so good for the price of diesel and thus for Trump. Trump has been very vocal about how Zelensky needs to stop using the targeting data that the US supplies them. Recently he's stepped up his threats, proclaiming a diesel deal with Russia just a couple months after the Lindsey Graham Memorial Sanctions Bill, and announcing an energy ceasefire that Russia doesn't seem to know about.
Republican congressfolk have been fairly supportive of the Iran conflict but Russia is much more polarizing. Zelensky seems confident we won't see a repeat of the early administration snafu - no need for groveling and thank yous - due to this pressure. On the other hand, another winter without sufficient air defense will prove extremely painful, though we said that last year too.
I don't get why Zelensky doesn't just go easy on the refineries for a few weeks to get some Trump brownie points. It can also get some moral high ground of like "we held the ceasefire but Russia kept attacking" for a renewed massive strike in November or December. I just don't see holding back on energy for a couple weeks making much of a difference for the war effort, the economic shocks will have a delayed effect on putin and the front line, and he has plenty of non-energy targets to hit like datacenters and warehouses.
On another note, I do like how Ukraine is gloves off - many of their attacks on bridges and powerplants and other economic targets would be screeched of as WAR CRIMES if Trump did it. (by the same people who simp for Zelensky of course) I'm sure if Trump really went scorched earth and maximally targeted these types of targets, Iran would actually be brought to its knees, but instead all we get is a bunch of cope strikes on insignificant targets.
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.
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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.
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.
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?"
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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.
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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.
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