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I get it. Putin is the bad guy. Russia is the bad guy.
But in the real world: Zelensky has no path to realistically expelling Russia from the land they want, short of dragging the rest of the world into WW3.
If you really want to game it out: Zelensky has every reason to try and escalate this conflict. His best option is to drag my children into a war so that he can take some land back from Russia. The problem is: I’m not willing to send my children to their death so that Zelensky can have a little bit more land in the northeast of Ukraine. I’m also not willing to risk an all out nuclear conflict so that Zelensky can have more land in northeastern Ukraine.
Lock Zelensky and Putin (the bad guy Russia is bad Russia invaded Ukraine Russia bad) in a room together and demand that they hammer out a peace deal. That IS going to result in Russia keeping some of the land they’ve taken. In exchange Ukraine gets to keep a couple of hundred thousand young men alive.
As far as what is a nation: The United States is a nation too. It is not in our vital national security interests to escalate a regional conflict to the point where we are sending our children to their death. If Zelensky wants to continue his national suicide then go for it, but I’m not funding it anymore, and if he succeeds in escalating it to WW3, no promises he doesn’t end up on the other side when the US has gamed out her interests.
Making it a financial drain is all you need. Russia only has so many tanks, planes, etc. in storage that can be re-activated. While there are efforts to step up defense production, it's not easy and Russia is a thoroughly corrupt nation whose government hemorrhages money into the pockets of whoever holds it at every step.
Zelensky, meanwhile, gets the financial, material, and ideological support not only of many different powerful nations to keep the war going, but their populations as well.
It is 100% in the US' interests to ensure the world order isn't realigned to favor Russian tactics. Every country planning on doing something similar is going to realize that going to war against the combined power of the Western order must be done with far more care.
If you only care as that your own nation isn't invaded, so be it, but much of the prosperity America enjoys stems from America's export of security to the numerous smaller players. Take that away and you've got a poorer America. Those players each contribute to that defense in their own ways as well, even if they don't spend enough directly on their own militaries.
Yes but as few tanks and guns and ammo as Russia has, Ukraine has even fewer, it's why they are entirely depending on Zelensky flying around the world in his green outfit and begging/shaming other countries into funding his war.
Look it's horseshit that Putin invaded. That sucks for the Ukrainian people that are suffering, but Zelensky is only prolonging the suffering. This is not a marvel movie where the good guys win. The guys with more artillery, more land, more calories for their troops, more money, and more ability to threaten the rest of the world win. In this case, that is Putin.
Putin is going to win, the only question at this point is how long it's going to take, and how many young Ukrainian men are going to die.
The only way that doesn't happen is if Zelensky succeeds in starting WW3. I hope that nobody is deranged enough to think that is a reasonable sacrifice for the rest of the world so that he doesn't have to go to the negotiating table.
Am I supposed to think it's a mark against him that he tries his best to get nations to support his people in a war that might very well decide the fate of Ukraine?
Absolutely not. Putin's Russia suffers from dire competence, corruption, and cowardice issues that plagued the Soviet Union just as much. People were making shallow analyses like this at the beginning of the war without any consideration for just how effective Russia's armed services actually are. You can't look at raw counts, you have to look at equipment quality, training quality, leadership quality, etc. Russia is lacking in a great many areas when it comes to what makes a good military.
Despite the numbers advantage, Russia's armies should not be presumed to be even "good enough" to make the invasion a success. It won't be easy, but the idea that Putin's effort is unstoppable is entirely counter to everything we've seen since the invasion started.
Russia is on the defensive in this war at this moment against a smaller nation that it chose to invade. More Western aid is only going to help.
My interpretation of this was that if you are going on a publicity tour begging for people to help your nation, you are probably not drowning in materiel! Does Joe Biden have to travel the world begging for other nations to give the US weapons so they can help bomb Yemen or whatever? The key point is that this behaviour indicates that Ukraine doesn't actually have what they need to win, because otherwise they wouldn't be doing it.
Except the person I was responding to literally used the word "shaming" as well. We don't typically speak of "shaming" in a positive light, especially not here. That's what I'm pushing back on.
Regardless, that person also said that Russia was just destined to win in the end due to material advantages. I reject that idea entirely, and it can be rendered false even further by Zelensky doing what he's doing.
There are quite a few people on this site who seem to have heard "amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics" or some variant of that and concluded that since Russia has BIG NUMBERS that it's going to win. A lot more goes into winning a war than one's military hardware count.
Who cares?
It doesn't matter if we speak of shaming in a positive light or not on here. What matters is if he was actually trying to shame countries into supporting him, and my reading of his actions and words (especially if you include the comments he's been making before this current tour) absolutely support that claim. You can say that it isn't a problem that he's trying to shame people into supporting him, and given his circumstances I'm not even going to say that it makes him a bad person - hell, if I was in his position, I would be busting out as much shaming as I possibly could if I thought it'd get me more tanks.
What ultimately matters here is that he is out begging for materiel and openly stating that they will lose the war if the flow of treasure (and presumably blood, albeit surreptitiously) doesn't get ramped up. That's not something you go out and say if you're winning!
I agree! That said, I believe we're on opposite sides in this particular disagreement, because I do believe that Russia will ultimately emerge "victorious" (I use the quotation marks here because I think Russia's best outcome would have been for no war to take place at all) - just not for the sophomoric reasons that you've outlined. If you're interested in learning more about my perspective and getting a more elaborate understanding of the thinking of the people you disagree with, I highly recommend this article https://www.ecosophia.net/notes-on-stormtrooper-syndrome/
Okay, fine. Material limits would prevent Ukraine from winning with what it already has.
That may have been more reasonable in Feb 22, it's much less so now. Russia's military performance has greatly lacked in comparison to what it was thought to be and the Ukrainians have demonstrated they can fight and even reverse the gains Russia has been making. Russia's efforts at building more stuff are not going to drastically take off in the near future, they're relying on reactivating older stuff for the time being.
Linked article is completely irrelevant due to the previous point.
Edit: Ignoring the cultural and political analysis in that article, it just doesn't fit what we know about Russia's military production and the difficulty of Ukraine's counter-offensive. These things take time and Russia doesn't have my confidence in its ability to get things going at the rate it needs.
Did you check the date on when that article was written? That post didn't come from Feb 22.
I'm sorry, but a totally evidence free assertion like this isn't going to actually convince me. That article laid out a fairly clear and well explained argument as to what's going on in Ukraine, one that deserves more than "it is irrelevant because I think it is wrong". I've seen multiple news stories talking about ammunition and military supply-chain issues on the west, and the same claim you're making (Russia is going to run out of ammo/have serious supply difficulties) has been made repeatedly over the course of the entire conflict and has been wrong every single time a definitive date was given.
I'm entirely amenable to changing my mind - if you can summon up some good statistics showing that Western supply chains are capable of providing ammunition and materiel to Ukraine at a rate that can exceed what Russia and their allies are putting out I will absolutely change my mind (though with the obvious proviso that the statistics are good and the argument sound). From where I'm standing now, it really does seem like Russia has a better manufacturing supply chain for the kind of munitions that are being used in this conflict.
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