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No matter how much Russia underperforms, screws up, or fails against seeming ridiculously favorable odds...
They can mass mobilize a million+men any time it gets heated, while Ukraine is already maxed out (in terms of new troops per week)
they have the old soviet stockpiles that means even as the average equipment regresses decades, they can feed the war machine, whereas the European and even American stockpiles are getting hazardously low.
The Russian economy is actively profiting from the war and global increased scarcity, whereas the Germans are preparing warming centers because they won't be able to keep the lights or heat on.
The collapse of international supply chains if this continues are going to start Arab spring style regime change and civil war throughout the world, which draws the American empire away from Europe and towards Middle eastern deployments, whereas Russia has already secured Assad and its few major allies.
Ukraine's GDP was 3k per capita before the war, Russia's was 10k. As the Eurozone economy collapses and shortages hit the world, the Average Ukrainian's standard of living is going to collapse even if their government has properly managed their food stores so they won't starve (which who knows?)
Russia has already conquered all the territories it geostrategically needed. It has Donetsk and Luhansk, it has Crimea, it has its land border, it controls Kherson and the mouth of the Dnipro river... Those are its victory territories. Those are its bare minimum victory territories... but that's it. If the borders never move Russia has secured everything it strategically needed from this war.
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Winter is not going to favour the Ukrainians... Russia is already in place and has its supply lines. Russia does not have to pull off big maneuvers to win. And the economies Russia is intimately tied to aren't going to collapse and fall to riot and rebellion this winter.
Ukraine just made a big deal of taking 1000 square kms... Russia has taken hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, and the lines have barely moved in 5 months. Unless the Russians mutiny and break, which is very very unlikely...the lines are likely to stay there til next spring at the earliest... all drawing out the war is doing is killing 10s of thousands of Ukrainians a month, and ensuring that the inevitable global humanitarian crisis is all the worse.
there should have been a negotiated end to this war months ago, and the European countries should be pushing Ukraine to cede and accept their loss... not egg them so their constituents can freeze (probably to death in the case of the elderly), global famines can wrack the world, and more Ukrainians can die under Russian artillery... and all to prop up America's hegemony, not even their own empires.
This seems weakly false to me.
Here's an interesting article about how "soviet stockpile" is a myth because equipment, including dumb ammunition, can expire and needs regular servicing, something that Russia hasn't been doing much of until recently: https://archive.ph/4FYzG Also, a CredibleDefense thread that adds some details, including counterpoints, to these claims: https://old.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/x2uhp1/a_farewell_to_arms_by_year_end_russia_will_be/.
I would also be careful about putting much faith in outdated equipment. The way I think of it is that equipment is configured to fighting certain specific kinds of conflicts. So in aggregate, it gives the tactician certain features like speed, time in field, etc. and it would seem to me that old equipment geared toward a 1970's style all-out war w/ NATO would not do well in what's happening in Ukraine right now. More concretely, I would imagine 70's-era tanks to fair quite poorly against modern man-portable anti-armor weapons and tactics. Even more so when we're talking about modern comms equipment.
There's a small counterpoint to be made here using the example of the Millennium Challenge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
In a gist, it was a US military exercise that basically pitted a high-tech player against a low-tech player and the low-tech player won on such a staggering scale that they had to reset the exercise. That said, I'm not sure if Russia is capable of deploy an effective low-tech strategy: to my armchair general knowledge, I can't think of an instance when Russia didn't fight using massive force.
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So that Russia will repeat the same year or decade later? Even German politicians noticed flaw in this idea.
Yeah, because Russia is famous for its great logistics.
[citation needed]
Yeah, because tanks kept 20 years in Siberian mud are so useful. To be clear, some stockpiles are useful but this 12 000 tank count is a deranged fantasy.
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How long do you think it would take to draft, organize, train, equip and deploy those million men? It strikes me the lead time on successful mobilization across Russia is probably something like the length of the war up to this time. What moves do Russia's enemies make during that time?
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Russia will never outproduce the West.
China, or at least some Chinese analysts see Russia as defending their western border. Seeing as it's the most industrial country in the world, with some serious long-term planning, it's quite possible they have large conventional weapons in reserve and some production capacity.
Were Russia to fall and be decolonised, the sparsely populated Siberian Republics would end up just being bought by the West. What would prevent US army in Germany from being relocated to northern China border ? That's where the security threat is now, it'd make perfect sense.
So they don't want to let that happen.
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The West has not even started to massively expand its production capacity, and our peace time production capacity is order of magnitude too low to keep up. By the time we get on that, it might be all over.
The West is no longer the place where things are built, where factories pop up, where you can find tens of millions of people who know how to operate a bridgeport, lathe, or a rivet gun. It’s no longer in our DNA. We outsource that shit to China.
I think many westerners look at the achievements of their grandparents and great grandparents, and believe that we could do the same. We can’t. We would need to change our entire culture, and we won’t do that in a matter of months. My hope is that the current predicament at least causes our society to get on that path and start to grow serious. Might be the only way to recover from current degeneracy.
It appears the US has about 400,000 civilian machinists; 1.8 million assemblers and fabricators; 428,000 welders, cutters, solderers, or brazers, and 1 million metal and plastic machine workers. This isn't "tens of millions" but it's not nothing either.
Do you really think the US would be as nimble organisation-wise as back in the 1940s, and be able to transition to arms manufacturing in a couple of years ?
The US is already making tons of weapons. The US is the world's largest arms exporter, responsible for 37% of the world arms trade and delivering weapons to 96 different countries since 2016. The civilian sector makes almost 10 million firearms per year. Military production is also quite high, since equipment does wear out, and the military is constantly replacing old equipment with upgraded versions. Sending 20 MLRS systems to Ukraine was seen as a big deal, but the US makes 9,000 rockets for those launchers every year, and those rockets are soon to be obsoleted by the ER GMLRS.
Counterpoint.
Even Russia is probably getting low on ammunition and they were making far, far more per year and stockpiling in anticipation of a conflict.
US never planned for something like this:
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It doesn't have to be as nimble as the 1940s, it just has to be better at doing so than Russia, with vastly more resources than Russia.
You are forgetting who is the pre-eminent industrial power in the world.
Hint: it's not the US.
China produces more, measured in terms of manufacturing output in dollar terms, but there's not a huge gap:
https://www.brookings.edu/research/global-manufacturing-scorecard-how-the-us-compares-to-18-other-nations/
Russia is similar to countries like Turkey and Spain.
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When you look around at everything with a weld on it, 428,000 seems like such a tiny number, doesn't it?
Was just thinking that about the 200k HVAC techs who would collapse civilization if they all went on summer holiday at once.
It's probably not enough to churn out millions of AR-15s, sure, but it's enough to build something. Perhaps at least build tools to make other things with.
The US civilian sector produced over 2.4 million AR-15s and AKs in 2020.
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Production is irrelevant when the time to produce the stocks is measured in years, and the rate of consumption is measured in months.
The US cannot keep the supply of Javelins or any other matteriel flowing to Ukraine at anywhere near the rate this war is consuming them. Russia's crappy soviet stockpiles are decades behind the times and half have been plundered... but 50ish% of them are there.
To take just Javellins, the US had given 1/3rd of its total stock of Javelins to Ukraine by April and most of that's been consumed or been sold off to the highest bidder by now.
The US has almost certainly crossed the 50% mark by this point.... that's it. The supply is not going to reach that peak again during this war and the US is almost certainly hoarding most of the remain stock for themselves given they just witnessed how fast that supply is consumed in any real conflict.
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Can they? I think they can't actually mobilize all those men. And if they could, they'd just be turning them into cannon fodder.
Ancient equipment which hasn't been maintained and quite possibly exists only on paper (long since sold for scrap to feather someone's nest) isn't going to help them
The Germans are of course idiots, but it's hard to see how Russia is benefiting.
International supply chains will not collapse over Russia and Ukraine. Aside from Europe's natural gas. If they'd execute a few Greens for treason they could probably solve that problem, but they won't.
Yes, war does that. But what else can they do, surrender? That's not better.
Russia holds important territory now, but they can't just declare victory and stop as long as the Ukranians can fight.
The trick is finding one which doesn't mean "We take Eastern Ukraine now, and the rest later". At this point I think it's off the table until Russia is exhausted or Ukraine is thoroughly beaten.
Fairly certain I’ve seen data that Russia no longer has a trade surplus since their not selling gas anymore and oil prices fell.
And that’s besides long term issues that Europe won’t trust Russia as an energy supplier or that Russia isn’t getting the imports they need to run their economy.
Also not sure how useful 1940’s tanks are today. Not many cars work from then. And they would be going up against HiMars and Javelins. Could be just canon fodder which I’m not sure how many Russians are willing to be.
Is that kind of analysis super relevant in a world where we're talking about mass mobilization of infantry? Russia feeds itself, if it can do that and produce weapons, the current account and living standards are kind of irrelevant if the government retains control.
That's like saying that the flammability of material is kind of irrelevant if it does not ignite.
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More than you'd think.
The reports I read on sustained warfare recently penned by French generals were surprisingly glowing of that old tech actually, if you can bring in the numbers and the industry to make the parts.
The basic scenario they have for a WW3 would be everyone blowing up all their fancy modern equipment in the first year or so (or not using them out of fear of destruction like the dreadnoughts of WW1 which is functionally the same) and then reverting back to primitive but reliable equipment that's about 40s levels of tech once the satellite communications and fancy gizmoes all run out.
Now this isn't WW3 so the parameters are not exactly the same, but Ukraine is in a situation that still makes large amounts of shit armor useful: for logistical reasons the West mostly gave them light equipment and they are running out of the complex weapon systems and vehicles by their own account.
Another thing to consider is how vulnerable armor has become on the modern battlefield. The people now clamoring that the tank is dead and we should ditch it for light vehicles and artillery may be going too far, but modern ATGMs (which is just what the Ukies have been given) do make the difference between modern and not so modern tanks less relevant. If your modern tank blows up all the same, you'd rather have two not so modern tanks.
I don't share your doubts that throwing a ton of troops with mediocre equipment as target practice to the western wunderwaffen would be acceptable to the Russians. This is what Russia does and has always done, after all. And it worked out for them so many times that it might actually be the right call.
All in all, I think people are overselling the materiel angle here. Manpower is a much more constraining factor in my opinion.
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They can force conscript, if Putin's willing to pay the costs he's gone to significant expense to avoid to date, but a major issue is that the Russians already cannibalized their mobilization and training infrastructure. The units whose job it is/would be to train new arrivals have already had their cadres raided to fill in at places like Kherson, and some reports of mobilized reservist training are of 1 week refresher before going to the front.
So, yes, probably cannon fodder, especially as the systems they would be meant to give mass to- and which in turn force-multiply them- have been extremely degraded, and the Russian supply system hasn't fixed its fundamental dependence on rail.
The crux of mobilization is that it would have been far more effective far earlier, when Russia still had its higher-tech precision strike capabilities and hadn't lost modernized tanks number in the multiple european nations. Even if mothball reserves still exist /work / get refurbished, they're at this point to replace superior equipment that already failed, even as Ukrainian capabilities have grown.
The argument generally rests on Russia's record oil import dollars from the energy price jump, while ignoring different metrics like the GDP slump or impacts to various non-oil industries like the airline sector (uh, not good) or vehicle manufacturing (97% car production decline in May 22 compared to May 21), on top of the implications of hundreds of thousands range of emmigration.
The general argument is that thanks to the fuck-off money the other impacts don't matter, and that the Europeans will cave and go back to buying Russian gas long-term instead of completing the gas import terminal projects, thus giving Russia a bumper crop of energy sales instead of functionally increasing the room temperature by burning down the house.
Supply chains no, food chains maybe, but the assumption to be challenged is why Assad would be stable in a food-insecure region, and how insecurity in the middle east actually benefits Russia beyond 'oil price stronk' arguments that resolve economic health to oil prices and assumptions that the US response to a Middle Eastern humanitarian crisis won't be to just sell the oil-rich countries more food at higher prices.
There isn't enough exports worldwide.
EU imports from RU were the size of the LNG spot market.
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Every war in history has ended in a negotiated settlement in which the winner keeps the territory and prizes they took. The exceptions are things like Troy, Carthage, and Berlin... and the Ukrainians aren't making it to Moscow.
The most likely scenario if Ukraine doesn't negotiate is this continues until America stops funding them, and Europes economic aid stops working... at which point they collapse, Russsia takes vastly more, and they become a warlord run failed state for the next several decades.
Wars are either won in the maneuver or the economics and logistics... the maneuvering has stopped and Ukraine's economic position is only going to get worse. America isn't going to give them another hundred billion dollars, perhaps even a majority of that disappeared into bribes, and what's left of their economy is going to collapse in the next 6 months.
Russia taking its land corridor and the republics, and crimmea now, and then Ukraine getting a few years to actually have an economy, rearm, and ideally set u psome trade ties so they aren't on constant edge with russia is a massively better idea than them fighting til they collapse on some lie Europe told them about an EU membership they were never going to give a country with nothing to offer and a GDP below 5k per capita (ask the Turks about that one)
Meta: I hope we can maintain norms that downvotes aren't for mere disagreement. This thread has some heavily downvoted comments that as far as I can tell aren't arguing in bad faith, breaking rules, or violating other norms. This is one such comment, there are many others.
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The UCDP Conflict Termination dataset (link, paper) has this data:
Most wars fizzle into low-level unresolved stalemates without formal concessions or recognitions. Only half or so of interstate conflicts end in a ceasefire or peace agreements (typically the former).
In suggesting a negotiated solution, one should also be aware of the statistics and factors regardings the durability of peace agreements, and particularly the tensions over incompatible interpretations of Minsk II that failed to be resolved in the Normandy format talks that initiated this conflict.
So a negotiated settlement or a defacto settlement which saves face by not signing a paper. the point remains: there is no way you magically get lost territory back by wishing, and unless you keep escalating til you lose everything you have to accept your enemy controls what they control.
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Certainly not. Troy, Carthage, and Berlin are not the only wars where one side was vanquished. There have been many successful wars of conquest.
America can fund them at these levels (tens of billions, not hundreds) indefinitely. There's no point in them negotiating until they can be assured it means more than "we'll take what we have now and the rest later". And there is another option -- the Russian invasion and occupation force collapses and Ukraine drives them out of the country. It is not a foregone conclusion that Russia wins.
Russia has made it clear that Ukraine is not a legitimate entity to them. If the war were somehow to stop now, it would be Russia which would take a few years to re-arm and re-group and then take the rest of Ukraine.
That seems highly unlikely given how poorly the war has gone so far, and could be prevented simply by inviting Ukraine into NATO.
What does that have to do with anything?
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