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Notes -
A Tone-Shift in the Ukraine War
Lately, I've noticed that the tone of the discussion regarding Ukraine both on the Motte and on X has changed considerably. Notably, it seems that people are taking a much more pessimistic view of Ukraine's chances. The default assumption now is that Ukraine will lose the war.
I think a stalemate is still quite possible, but the more optimistic assumptions that Ukraine would regain lost territory (or comically, Crimea) are now a dead letter. So what, exactly, are our leaders thinking? Recently, Macron went off-narrative a bit, suggesting that France could send troops into Ukraine. More ominously, Secretary of State Blinken said that Ukraine will join NATO.
Perhaps Western leaders view this sabre-rattling as good for their electoral chances. And, until recently, the war was seen as a relatively cost-effective way to weaken Russia. (Sadly, this seems to have failed as Russia has freely exported oil to India and China and is making armaments in great numbers).
But what of Ukrainians themselves? Will they tire of being NATO's cat's paw? It's impossible to find good numbers on how many Ukrainian men have been killed so far in this war. It's likely in the hundreds of thousands. Towns and villages throughout the country are devoid of men, as the men (hunted by conscription) either flee, hide, or are sent to the fronts.
User @Sloot shared this nuclear-grade propoganda. While Ukrainian men fight and die in some trench, an increasing number of Ukrainian women are finding new homes (and Tinder dates) in Germany. Concern about female fidelity has always been a prominent feature of wartime propaganda. But, this takes it to a new level, since the women are in a different country, making new, better lives for themselves. How many will ever even return to Ukraine?
Ukrainian men are getting a raw deal in an effort to reconquer lost territory, whose residents probably want to be part of Russia anyway. Why should Ukrainians fight and die for some abstract geopolitical goal of NATO?
I've said it before, I'll say it again: bleeding Russia is on sale right at an amazing discount right now, so we're buying a bit.
"But [list of reasons why long term Ukraine is screwed, won't be able to get back lost territory, etc, etc]." Yeah, sure. Also Russia is exhausting itself at a very small cost to the American taxpayer.
If Russia spends years grinding away to a standstill in Ukraine, then they won't have the ability to attack any further anytime soon.
And very optimistically, it serves as a warning to other countries wanting to invade their neighbors. If they badly desire a drawn out conflict that drains their resources for no obvious gain, we'll give it to them.
It serves as a warning to other countries wanting to antagonise their much bigger stronger neighbours relying on western support. Your country will be decimated and in the end you will eventually be forgotten for some other geopolitical priority and lose anyway.
I don't think it's fair to say that Ukraine antagonized Russia. They insisted upon their sovereignty. They refused to be bullied. They refused to be conquered. That's not antagonizing, that's sticking up for oneself.
I do, more so the USA and their puppets in Ukraine antagonized Russia.
No such thing.
What is this, a playground? This is realpolitik.
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You can have your way. It serves as a warning to other countries wanting to “insist upon their sovereignty”. Does this make it any better?
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I'm as pro-Ukraine as they get, but this point never seemed correct to me. Russia will be able to reconstitute itself 5-10 years max after the war is over. Rebuilding doesn't take that long. And we're mostly just burning through Russia's legacy Soviet stockpile, which would have become more and more obsolete anyways as time passed by. Even the long-term damage Russia will experience from sanctions and the like won't matter much, since Russia isn't really a long-term threat like China is.
The brain drain impact becomes more severe with time. The longer the war, the harder it is to rebuild because emigrants start to settle down in their host countries and there's less reason for them to return. Anecdotally, 2 years ago my programmer friend and his wife planned to go back after the war ends and now they are looking to buy a house and start a family here in Canada.
Sure, I have a Russian chick in my work who came to the US long before the war. She had originally intended to perhaps return to Russia one day, but the increasing totalitarianism and lack of white collar opportunities are making that vanishingly unlikely in her eyes.
That said, the benefits that the US gains from this type of thing are really quite tiny. Russia didn't have much of a good future before the invasion, and it's only gotten worse afterwards, but Russia isn't really a threat in the long-term.
It's the difference between living a block away from a vicious criminal with one leg and living a block away from a vicious criminal with no legs. Every bit of extra disability is nice.
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Militarily? It certainly can. An officer corps of 20-years experience takes 20 years to build, and much of Russia's institutional experience was razed and the current crop have been resorting to much lower-level operational designs than previously done- the current generation of new direct leaders is going to have to unlearn trench infantry tactics to relearn actual Russian manevuer warfare doctrine. Similarly, building up a cold war's worth of artillery ammunition stockpiles took the Soviets literal decades, and the Russians don't have the Soviet industrial base to do so with.
Military hardware wise, also yes, in various categories. The Russian production rates of aircraft are, well, bad, and while the drone economy is a booming, it doesn't exactly enable the sort of deep-strike operations that Russia started the war off with. The naval losses will take a similarly long time to build. And while Russia can absolutely bring out raw numbers of reactivated obsolescent tanks to pad the numbers, this is the reminder that they weren't even able to get a meaningful production run of the Armata before it went back behind the lines to hide out the war. Any production run of modern tanks will be from a much deeper pit than they hadn't gotten out of before they started digging themselves into the war.
The bigger issue for the Russian military-industrial complex is the Russian arms export industry. It's been struggling for awhile, and appears to be cratering to a bare select few clients since, especially as the Russians have had clear trouble both honoring various contracts in favor of supplying their own forces. Given both the role that Russian arms exports plays in its foreign policy, and the long trail times for being displaced, one of the key Russian funding models for managing the costs of the industry is going out the window, with the longer it's out the worse it will be. Russia's ability to rebuild its arms market share is... probably dead, as people with needs will have gone elsewhere, and people with resources will have more promising partners to work with. Rather than the post-cold-war T-72 sales and such, expect Russia to be one of many drone providers, a much less lucrative and much more crowded market.
You seem like a Perun-watcher. I watch him too. He's great.
I should have specified a bit more clearly: Russia will be able to reconstitute the majority of its combat capacity in 5-10 years. There will be some lingering areas that take longer of course, but people are acting like Russia is going to be incapable of launching another invasion for 20+ years. The US army was severely battered after Vietnam, yet it reconstituted itself very effectively in 18 years to curbstomp Saddam in '91. It probably could have done so a lot earlier too.
This seems like it would be referencing NCOs, but Russia never had a robust and empowered NCO contingent. It's always been a very top-heavy organization relative to other militaries. This conflict practically erased the reforms trying to implement the Battalion Tactical Group as a coherent fighting unit, but in many ways this conflict has been a return to the basics for Russia. It's a big stupid artillery-centric army that tries to solve problems by blasting them with a truckload of artillery and frontal assaults using infiltration tactics in good scenarios and cannonfodder kamikazes in bad ones. In other words, there's not really a lot to relearn here.
Both the Russian aerospace forces and its navy would be irrelevant in any larger conflict with the West. It might be relevant if Trump causes NATO to collapse and Russia manages it's diplomacy to 1v1 a country like Finland, but otherwise it was never much of threat.
Yes, this is definitely happening. As of now this market share is mostly going to countries like France and South Korea, but in the long run it will likely go to China which will probably be a lot worse simply since they're more of a long term threat.
He is. Strongly endorsed for anyone interested in a non-American/non-European perspective from another hemisphere, and also anyone who for some strange reason has personal interest in how militaries are designed and planned for.
I concur with this recalibration, and your other points as well. I think a 5 year recovery is too short, and a 20 year too long, but 10 years is quite reasonable in general terms.
It's also one reason I don't expect the Europeans to cease support for Ukraine even if the US does, as the 10-year rebuilding point functionally starts when Ukraine ceases to cause more attrition of the important capabilities than Russia builds in a year, and the advent of drones to strike airbases / strategic infrastructure suggests that will be when the conflict more or less formally ends, or just before. Every additional year the Ukrainians hold out is a year the Europeans can continue their own military reconstitution (which itself may take the 5/10/15 year timeframe), and as the European further expand their capability, the more they can support Ukraine to prolong to further expand the European capability.
Actually a reference to the officer corps.
One of the key moments in the first year of the war that underlined to me just how bad the conflict was going to be for the Russian military as an institution was the fate of the pre-war officer corps. It's been noted in the past that much of the pre-war NATO-trained first generation of Ukrainians who have been fighting from the start have since died, but the Russian officer corps not only was devastated in the course of the conflict- see the number of generals who died early on, or the Ukrainian precision campaign against identified officer locations- but their training institutions as well. One of the (many) short-sighted things Putin did in an effort to put off having to invoke conscription was cannabilize his training units to fill the front lines.
For those unaware, the Russians don't (didn't) operate under a training-base model like the US, where soldiers would go to an installation dedicated for training before moving to the installation with their home unit. Instead, every major Russian formation had its training units built-in, where the conscripts would directly report to the main unit and be a part of the detachment before going to a 'normal' position. The implication of this is that when Putin had these training units deployed to the front line, it killed not only many of the students, but the cadres teaching them as well. This was the root of some of those videos around the first mobilization of conscripts arriving at bases and receiving next to no training before deploying to the front line- the teachers who should have been there were either dead or already forward.
As a result of both of these dynamics- the culling campaign and the loss of the cadre generation- Russia's military has lost so much institutional knowledge, and what the replacements are learning instead isn't necessarily 'better', but rather a selection effect of what works in the current, extremely atypical context. You rightly note that the Battalion Tactical Group has died- and that was relevant as the Russian strategy relied on easy-to-mobilize BTGs as the modular deployable option for various conflict scenarios- but it also goes further than that. The Russian-NATO conflict strategy typically relied on a Russian war of maneuver to rapidly attack before the US could mobilize and intervene at scale; however, the current rising war generation is one trained and pruned for slow, attritional trench warfare. And while they will certainly do that far better than the Americans, that is also exactly the wrong strategy to take against a maritime/air power dependent power like the US who- by expeditionary necessity- will be coming in behind other people's front lines. The entire Russian rapid aggression strategy was to pre-empt the American ability to enter a theater, but for the next twenty years it's going to be in the hands of people whose formative/career defining experience is closer to WW1 with drones.
That's not nothing- and that could easily be very relevant in various types of conflicts and there will be countless posts in the future of how the Russian lived experience is worth more than the American inexperience- but WW1 with drones is a strategic model that heavily, heavily favors the American strategic model of not fighting WW1 yourself, but helping someone else fight it on your behalf.
There's also a point/argument that big dumb artillery armies are as much on their way out as the Airforce-models, and for the same reason- drones and long-range fires. One of the most surprising things about the HIMARs injection into the war wasn't how much damage it did to Russia artillery stocks directly, but how much it throttled the Russian throughput of ammo-to-guns despite how few launchers were actually in the Ukrainian possession. The volume and scale of ammunition required to keep the guns firing with an overmatch to make very slow gains over relatively basic trench systems created a tension of how much is needed versus how vulnerable you are moving that much ammo forward. As drones continue to proliferate, the viability of such major ammunition reserves needed to brute force advances is likely to be a liability as drones get better and better at targeting up and down the value chain from the massed munitions to the massed artillery.
What makes you think that the current conflict is atypical and giving the Russian army the wrong lessons? How would a typical conflict with the correct lessons look like?
Among other things-
-Basically no one in the world has as artillery-centric an army as the Russians, and the implications of drones and precision munitions to throttle artillery at scale mean no one else is going to want to due to the logistical throttling they enable. Russia is using artillery in its current fashion to brute-force the offense because that's what it has on hand and can procure the ammo for, not because the artillery is doing more than alternative investments would have. Even Russia post-war is far more likely to focus on drone power expansion and precision munitions than restocking dumb rounds by the billions.
-Drone and aerial siege warfare is atypical because Russia has benefited from a political, not practical, barrier that wouldn't apply in NATO conflicts. The Russians have, for example, benefited greatly from having air-standoff superiority and both in terms of air-delivered munitions and for being able and willing to use drones to target civil infrastructure while their enemies wouldn't. The Russians would not have the former in a NATO conflict, and the later one-sided nature is due to the restrictions NATO countries impose on the Ukrainians, not restrictions NATO countries impose on themselves. A great deal of Russia's economic-destruction warfare siege alternatively would not work (heavy glide bombs) or would not be unilateral advantages in the economic struggle (infrastructure targetting), but it's the 'what worked' of the current generation.
-The current war has underscored the importance of small short wars rather than long large wars to advance the national interest. Russia is continuing the war primarily because Putin made a series of strategic mistakes most countries do not make, and then doubled down on personal reasons. However, even Putin had aimed and intended a small short war, and the contrast to the long, expensive war that has lost Russia a multitude of strategic assets (military and otherwise) will drive home a lesson to planners in Russia and abroad to limit the scope of future conflicts of choice. However, the operational experience of the Russians in Ukraine will be precisely the opposite, as the small-nimble BTGs were destroyed and grinding attritional slog is what was inefficient but effective.
-The nuclear deterrence modeling and level of economic depence between relevant parties is atypical in general. Most conflicts, and most of Russia's more likely conflicts, are not cases where a nuclear-umbrella power is backing a non-nuclear state being invaded by a nuclear power. Most countries also don't have the backers of one party be economically dependent on imports from the opposing belligerent. Both of these factors significantly shaped the Western support for Ukraine, but either of these factors could easily change in both general conflicts and for Russian conflicts in particular (not least because Europe chose a strategic break from the Russian economic dependence).
A more typical conflict with correct lessons would include... probably not doing this at all, but at the very least a more precision-munition dependent strategy, smaller scope and scale, an emphasis on rapid movement rather than trench warfare, and not relying on nuclear/economic deterence against external backers of the opponent.
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Valuable comment and perspective, thanks for responding.
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I think this statement also vindicates decades and billions of dollars of American research and deployment of precision guided weapons: the logistical tail is greatly reduced when you can just, not fire the huge fraction of dumb rounds that would miss anyway.
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I think this is the rationale.
It doesn't seem to be working. The sanctions have failed. Utterly. It turns out that China, not the West, is the key trade partner of any commodity producer. Russian oil and commodities freely trade on the world market, and the West is actually afraid to sanction Russia more strongly because it hurts them more than Russia. Sanction Russian metals? Great, welcome to higher prices and China will scoop up all Russian production for cheap.
The bigger issue is that the Russian army is 15% larger than before the war and apparently Russia is outproducing the West in key armaments by large margins.
But even if this strategy was effective, killing 1 million people to "weaken" an adversary is just incredibly evil.
I think this rationale is mostly in defending military aid to Ukraine. In two years, the US spent a total of $75 billion on Ukraine aid. This is like 5% of its military budget over the same time frame. I think it is hard to overstate how much of a bargain that is. If they could keep China occupied for another 10% of their military spending a Machiavellian strategist would of course do this.
And the Ukrainian cause is quite photogenic. They are somewhat democratic and western and fighting against annexation by a much larger warmonger. Much better than previous allies the US supported against the USSR, like the Mujaheddin.
If the US was smuggling a nuke into St Petersburg and detonated it there to weaken Russia, that would be incredibly evil, yes. But this is not what is happening.
Forget about the small scale conflict of 2014. Putin has no moral claim to occupy Kiev. He is the aggressor in this conflict. NATO is not mind-controlling the Ukrainians. They want to continue to fight, foolishly dreaming of reclaiming every square meter of their country from 2014 back. I think that they might be better served by pursuing a negotiated peace where they cede the occupied parts and then join NATO so Putin can not come back for another slice.
You might be a radical pacifist who thinks that violence is always wrong, and the decent people of the world should just roll over and give the bullies what they want.
I think that fighting wars which can be won or at least fought to a stalemate is sometimes worth it. I am not even firmly opposed to fighting losing wars. Sometimes extracting the maximum cost from an enemy can be a sound strategy. It does not help you in your timeline, apart from satisfying petty feelings of revenge, but it might help you in all the other timelines. If every military operation where the attacker was twice as strong as the defender resulted in the defender surrendering without conditions and the aggressor reaping the full productivity of their new possession, a lot more aggression would happen. Instead, the mere threat of a long war followed by decades of asymmetric conflict eating up the productivity of the region is a lot of the reason why wars of conquest are rare.
I do not expect the Ukrainians to be especially grateful for NATO for the military support. They know that we treat them as pawns, with them doing all the dying. I am strictly against sending NATO troops into Ukraine, Russia and NATO shooting directly at each other is how nuclear wars start. If Ukraine was in NATO, then it would be worth risking World War III in its defense because the alternative would be to defect from the obligations of Article 5 and destroy any deterrence NATO offers, which would enable Russia to pick off European countries one by one.
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It's not, as there is no single rational.
There are a multitude of competing interests and desires, and trying to consolidate them into a single position is going to
They really haven't, unless you misunderstood various purposes of the various differing sanctions.
These, for example, were not the goals.
In order- the Chinese have not substituted for the Europeans in Russian energy export volumes, the sanctions on Russian energy exports were about profit margins rather than keeping them out of the world market, the Western sanctions have been about driving the economic separation of the European economic system from the Russian system despite Russian attempts at triggering economic devastation via abrupt cutoffs, and keeping Russian metals off the global market was never the goal as much as to break the European supply line dependencies.
Saying 'you're failing because you're paying more to not be addicted' rather misses the point of an economic policy to break addiction to cheap commodities that were kept cheap via policies to encourage dependence that could- and was attempted to be used as- geopolitical blackmail. China's gain to Europe's pain is not a counter-argument to this, as China paying more at the cost of Europe staying dependent is not a success of a policy to economically disentangle Europe from Russia. This is simply trying to smuggle a bilateral zero-sum argument in a three-party arrangement to claim that Russia and China both have to lose simultaneously for the other parties to win. (Rather than, say, noting that China exploiting Russia and taking over European market share and more at the expense of Russian autonomy from Chinese interests is not a Russian strategic victory.)
The Russian army is 15% larger by size, not capability- which is to say, they have conscripted a lot of infantry after losing most of their professional officer corps, and their armament level devolved from late cold war technology hardware to mid- and early-cold war vehicles pulled out of storage with minimal modernization. The key armaments Russia is outproducing the West in are artillery ammunition and middle-Cold War vehicle reactivations, which- while relevant- are neither indefinite nor enduring production advantages.
Surprise surprise, it turns out that if you start war economy mobilization first, first-mover advantage allows you to have more industry mobilized than people who spent more of the first year hoping they wouldn't have to mobilize.
There are separate other assets that the Russians are utilizing to good effect- like Drones and airpower- but saying that Russia is outproducing the West in airpower assets or drones would both be quite bad takes.
That is indeed why the Russian government is incredibly evil, since they are indeed killing to the adversary they have identified in a way that war crimes have become practically a point unto themselves as proof of their power via untouchability or recourse.
Fortunately, the people assisting the Ukrainians are not killing the Ukrainians, but instead helping them resist the evil people who have been quite open on their desire to erase the Ukrainian nation in the third continuation war in a decade.
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I suppose this is rational, as long as your assumptions are accurate.
Is Russia exhausting itself? I’ve seen reports that their standing army right now is far large than pre war even accounting for casualties.
It seems that the Russian army was pretty rusty during the first year of the war. Logistics issues. Command issues. Not enough bodies. Etc. that seems to have been remedied. They in fact now have a great deal of experience fighting against NATO kit. And it seems like they’re doing well adapting to drones, electronic warfare, etc. I wonder how that compares to the US and NATO. We have a great deal of experience fighting the GWOT and insurgents.
All of that is to say, I wonder how Russia today compares to Russia 2021 in terms of how much of a threat they are to NATO.
And all of that says nothing about the ethics of egging on and prolonging a doomed conflict on the chance that it might weaken a geopolitical rival.
It depends on if you consider leadership or equipment attrition relevant to exhaustion, or just manpower numbers. Really, both are true simultaneously.
The Russian army is larger than it was before the war started both because (a) it mobilized- which the pre-war military on eve of invasion hadn't, and (b) it has been drawing cold war stocks for reactivation. If you define exhaustion as an inability to form big armies of vehicles that move, the Russian army isn't exhausted.
However, many of the assets that provided capabilities beyond raw numbers- say precision weapons to take out operationally relevant objectives at range rapidly to enable a manevuer offense, tanks with modernized sensors needed to survive well against ATGMs, strategic aircraft capable of maintaining airborn AWACs coverage to identify drone intrusions, highly trained officer corps to manage complex operations- are gone, and have been replaced by inferior, not superior, quality. Other assets for maintaining strategic endurance have also shown fraying- the Russian prison system for convict conscription is not, in fact, limitless, just as Russian economic interventions are not, in fact, costless and do not disprove impacts of sanctions, and the Soviet Union stockpiles are also not infinite.
Russia is dependent on iranian-style drone swarm attacks because it ran out of its much more capable cruise missiles stockpiles, and was using them at a relatively minuscule production rate afterwards- meaning that considerably less advanced air defense capabilities are required to shoot down considerably more attempts. Russia cannibalized its officer training corps in the first year of the war, using them in the front lines even before the first mobilization, leading to far less capable officers leading far more blunt attacks that were far more prone to artillery disruption and internal report falsification. Russia's prestige units started the war with near state-of-the-art armor which included about-as-modernized-as-possible end of the cold war tank models, and many of them have begun to adopt 1950s-eras tanks simply because those were the first that could be pushed through modernization because they didn't have need for the various 60s/70s/80s and beyond capability enhancing technologies. Russia started with the largest artillery army in the war and massive artillery advantages... and now is importing ammunition from North Korea which is substandard even compared to the aging soviet ammo that the Russians were using before, which is to say it's considerably more likely to explode on the wrong side of the barrel, or not explode on target, than what Russia started with. There are more examples to, from aircraft quantities to arms exports to it's energy export portfolio- a lot of things, while still continuing, are just worse than a few years ago.
Before the war, there was a joke that Russia had a large army, and a modern army, but not a large modern army. Now the modern part is dropped: Russia has a large army, and a devolved army, and it has a large devolved army. But it's still a large devolved army.
Does the inability to maintain quality of arms mean exhaustion? You'll be forgiven for thinking not, but it does imply things about Russia's ability to maintain effective offensive operations, hence the second and third order effects of relying on high-casualty tactics for relatively marginal territorial gains... which, as far larger and more aggressive armies than the Russians have demonstrated in the past, is a path to military exhaustion.
More in the short term, less in the long term.
In the short term, while quality has devolved, quantity has increased, and quantity has a quality all of its own when it's not matched by anything on the other side. While having late-WW2 tanks with cope cages is a national disgrace as far as military prestige goes, WW2 tanks still resist small arms fire, and while the loss of anti-tank capability by Ukraine/NATO is far overstated, volume does matter. If NATO were unwilling to fight for a long time, more immediate threat is worse than less but more capable immediate threat.
On the other hand, volume can be matched and overcome with time, and while the Russians were the first to mobilize to a war economy, the Europeans both can- and more recently have begun to- recognize themselves as in a military-industrial race which they need to compensate for being late too, and as they begin to catch up in volume, quality starts to matter more again. Comparisons to the Gulf War of the 90s aren't accurate, but aren't entirely wrong either: if the only way for Russian military units to survive is under air defense bubbles, they aren't advancing and the economic differences will start to add with yet more time.
As such, the European-NATO nightmare is that they have to face the Russian mobilized force in the near term, before they have the time to re-arm. As such, the Ukrainians are both a time and a scale buffer: if the Ukrainians give up, the Europeans risk facing the threat sooner before they mobilize, but if the Ukrainians keep fighting the Europeans both increase their time to re-arm and decrease the capabilities they have to arm against (because Ukraine will continue to attrit the Russian capabilities / wear down that Soviet stockpile / eat tens of thousands of more rounds of artillery with their trench lines).
This is a significant reason as to why the Europeans will likely keep supporting Ukraine even if the US fully ceases to (say, under Trump). Ukraine capitulating increases the risk of a threat the Europeans are less likely to conventionally match (the larger-but-devolved RUS conventional forces), while Ukraine resisting increases the European posture vis-a-vis the Russians.
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I thought the Russian economy lacked the ability to replace expended or destroyed high tech equipment. Or recently destroyed oil infrastructure for that matter. They could be throwing large amounts of effectively unreplacabe materiel at Ukraine. And then none will be left for other uses. Bleeding them.
I have little doubt in their ability to field many men for a long time and gradually grind at the Ukrainians. I don't take more men under arms as a sign of economic strength for them. But it doesn't matter since our ""allies"" in Europe will fund them more and more through oil purchases so their GDP will grow merely by being a petrostate.
Ukrainians have agency and I am not at all sympathetic to arguments we are egging them on when we give them the arms they ask for. Or that hastening their brutalization by Russia is somehow a moral good.
If Ukrainians didn't want to fight, they won't. People have their own agency, and no amount of cajoling and money got the Pashtuns to fight for 'Afghanistan' or Cubans to fight against Castro. Remember that Azov started as a wholly domestic Mariupol militia because they really really hated Russians, and Slovyansk had a shitload of people leave because they did not want to stay under Russian - sorry 'Novorossiya' rule. I maintain that if the west pulled all support entirely to Ukraine we would see many more one way suicide drone strikes against refineries, and that the west is maintaining support to Ukraine to avoid further collapse of energy market infrastructure
Most arguments about Russia busting sanctions and their army being regenerated are cope. Muscovy resents being looked down on; their pretensions of continued luxury with their cheap chinese knockoffs and inability to be seen buying the real deal in Paris or Milan smarts far more than just not wearing it, not to mention the endless bitching from Muscovites about their life now being more difficult. Similarly, the Russian army going from BMPT (or more realistically BMP3) to MTLB and BMP1 is hardly an upmuscling of the RuAF (a different argument about whether upgrading from MTLB to BMP3 makes any difference can be made but thats separate to this thread.)
Ultimately, the Russians are likely to grind through the Ukrainians regardless, but the sanctions will leave them an embittered and lesser (in their own eyes) people, deservedly disrespected for their incompetence at defeating their weak and corrupt cousins at the outset and resorting to WW2 era cope.
I'm mostly agree but it seems that most of the Ukrainians want to fight in abstract, as country, but not themselves, as the existence and unpopularity of mobilization show. You don't close the borders for fighting-age males if you aren't suspecting that they will choose to run from the country instead of risking their lives for it.
Yes, most want some other countryman to fight. Conscription always has this tension of 'are we getting the right bodies in the fight' and right now, especially since mid 2023 we can posit that war enthusiasm has died down with the calculus shifting on where Ukraines maximal capability is following Ukrainian failures even with the much vaunted European armour. Mobilization in any country has never been popular, with responses ranging 'bitching about it' to 'fragging the Lt'. On this front I will give Russians a measure of credit, the sheer number of buryats and tajiks enthusiastically clambering into shitboxes to catch a mine is quite amazing.
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Idk inflation is pretty high, young Americans can't afford buying houses, nobody wants to join the US military to die for Israel or for Hunter Biden's business deals, 'Democrats' apparently feel the need to prosecute their political opponents, bridges are collapsing and planes barely going up in the sky, cops and judges don't feel like prosecuting (non-political) crimes...
According to the theory that every single bad thing that happens in the US is due to Russian agents, this war is not exactly cheap.
Yes: using a silly and false theory we can purposefully contrive false conclusions.
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NIMBYism is hardly caused by giving away some military equipment
the same
how the fuck it is caused by aid give to Ukraine? (the same for other things you mention)
this theory is blatantly idiotic
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