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What will be left of Ukraine after Russia and the West are done with their proxy war?
It's hard to get good numbers as both Russia and Ukraine lie about everything. But it feels that Ukraine is exhausted and will soon lose this war. My heuristic for this is reading between the lines of the news. Every optimistic story about Ukraine's war effort in the last year has failed to bear fruit. And nuggets of facts go unchallenged, such as the average age of Ukraine's soldiers now being 42.
The U.S. estimate as of August (according to Wikipedia) is that 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed with another 120,000 wounded. I would treat this as a floor, personally. The Ukrainian forces at the start of the war were 200,000 regular soldiers and 100,000 paramilitary. I think it's safe to say these troops have been utterly gutted. The size of the Ukrainian army is reportedly 800,000 today but at this point it must be nearly entirely conscripts. Conscripts with an average age of 42. To channel George Carlin, think of the average 42 year old. How would they fare in a trench? Now realize half of Ukrainian soldiers are older than that.
Millions of people have fled Ukraine. The population (as of 2022) had already declined from 51 million to 36 million within the 1991 borders. It is likely much lower today. We will soon see the first instance in more than 150 years of a country losing half its population. (Either the Potato Famine or the Paraguayan War seem like the last potential candidates for this happening).
What people don't realize is how incredibly RARE this is. The population of other war-torn regions such as Afghanistan and Iraq has skyrocketed. You can't even see the conflicts on a population chart. Syria had a brief decline but has rebounded and is now higher than ever before. The population of Russia dipped during WWII by about 10% but by 1955 had rebounded again to an all-time high.
The combination of low fertility, huge emigration, and war deaths will depopulate Ukraine to a degree that hasn't been seen in modern times.
I have to ask, at this point, why does the West still support Ukraine? Yes, it's very convenient that Ukraine is willing to destroy itself to hurt Russia. But, as a utilitarian, I am very skeptical of the benefits of "grand strategy" type decisions like this. The world is complicated. If we let Putin have the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine will he then demand the Polish-speaking parts of Poland? No. It's not like this war has been a resounding success. Furthermore, he could die tomorrow.
But the deaths suffered by Ukrainian conscripts (and yes Russian conscripts too) are very real. We are trading the deaths of real people for theoretical future benefits. And we are destroying an entire country in the process. Why not go to the bargaining table and end this cruel and pointless war?
What do you think would happen if the West didn't support Ukraine?
Putin would have taken the Russian speaking parts of Ukraine and incorporated them into Russia. Then he would sabre-rattle in the Balkans but do exactly nothing because the Balkans are part of NATO.
Then he would die of old age unlike the hundred thousands of young men who died horrible deaths in this war.
If there's one thing that this war has shown, it's that (a huge amount of) Russian-speaking Ukrainians do genuinely see themselves as Ukrainians, not Russians, and would prefer to live under Ukraine. After all, it's that constituency that, for the most part, is forming the refugee wave to the rest of Europe - the Facebook groups for Ukrainians in Finland have been full of "I just arrived from Donetsk... I came from Mariupol... Is it safe to return to Kharkiv?" and so on. As such, Ukraine would still be depopulated (anyone in the new border with Russia would have a good reason to leave on the assumption that Russia might want to grab more at any time), it would of course still be considerably weakened, and Western support or no Western support, the indications are that Ukrainians would have fought until loss and occupation, so you might still have hundreds of thousands of young men dying horrible deaths.
Of course, if Russians had managed to take huge regions with comparative ease in this war, it would have made it inevitable they would have then gone for other non-NATO areas of the former Soviet Union - formally incorporating Belarus, new wars with Moldova and Georgia, a bout with Kazakhstan - and would have then settled for waiting for NATO to disintegrate, probably aided by internal anger by countries like Poland over the "betrayal of Ukraine", to try to expand into Baltics (I assume this is what you mean by Balkans). Considerable destabilization in Eastern Europe in any case, huge loss of unity for the West as Russians demonstrate they can just roll over a Westernizing nation, a new legitimation of annexation as a political concept causing even more destabilization worldwide.
That's a pipe dream no matter how well the war went for Russia. Russia is weak. NATO is strong.
Nevertheless, I do think initial resistance to Russian invasion was good. There is simply a limit to how many lives I think should be wasted. That limit is far less than the > 200,000 that have already been wasted.
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Putin attempted a decapitation strike against the Ukrainian government and plainly stated it is not a legitimate nation and is merely part of Russia.
Putin grows hungrier by the eating. I don't buy "if we just gave him a little and stop resisting so much Putin would stop".
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