robirdus wrote:
I think it is a history of technology AND logistics.
Then we have Afghanistan which evaporates all that. 20 years of war against an enemy stripped of both logistics and technology.. An enemy who puts all it’s pride in living in the medieval ages. Today Taliban is back and rules again with an iron fist.
War is 100% a human activity. In that sense Ukraine will eventually win, with 100% certainty. I think the only lesson is to never start a war unless you know with 99.99 percent confidence you will win. Putin doesn’t even recognize this as a war. He can’t win a war that doesn’t exist (for him), and he can’t lose either. Ukraine see it differently.
(although I am against delivering weaponry to a conflict zone, but I do not wish to sidetrack this conversation)
Then propose effective way of stopping Russians to deliver weaponry to their army.
30 years ago Croatia and Bosnia were faced with same hypocrisy like yours and paid huge price (Bosnia still paying being pretty non-functional county) in more than 100.000 dead and more than 2.000.000 displaced persons. So please spare us from relativism and quasi-neutrality.
LeSving wrote:
Then we have Afghanistan which evaporates all that.
I am not convinced.
Following your logic, the best chance Ukranian have is to grab their Mosin-Nagant and charge the tanks?
Running an effective war requries both manpower, motivation, training, skill, and logistics.
Therefore this should be one of the main efforts.
Emir wrote:
Then propose effective way of stopping Russians to deliver weaponry to their army.30 years ago Croatia and Bosnia were faced with same hypocrisy like yours and paid huge price (Bosnia still paying being pretty non-functional county) in more than 100.000 dead and more than 2.000.000 displaced persons. So please spare us from relativism and quasi-neutrality.
As I said I don’t want to sidetrack this conversation to that way.
By the way as I remember Hungary were among the first to send AK’s to support Croatia in 1990… (this is an interesting story especially how and why the international scandal was created after it has surfaced, despite the fact that in reality 10 thousand smallarms weren’t significantly influencing what has happened afterwards)
Supporting with lethal weapons a country has its place.
What I am saying and I am missing is that there was not a single voice in the whole Western word talking about peace, ceasefire, agreement. ( as per my understanding, even before the war)
Yes sure, maybe I am wrong and the story is so simple that there is a crazy dictator and he will go until Ukraine is fully occupied.
In this case there is no other way just to fight this war until there is no Ukraine left, or totally ruined and will look like Budapest after 1945 February 13, after the soldiers of SS “protected” it against the 2nd Ukranian Front.
Russia in this war MUST be stopped. What we see now is the best way? I am not skilled enough to say.
What I observe, though, that there were moments of this war where a negotiated agreement could have been possible, but no-one tried. For example when the Russian Blitzkrieg failed. Maybe that was the moment when a compromise would have been possible. But whether you like it or not, you have to offer something to the other party to reach an agreement. Why do we think that after that Blitzkrieg failed and nothing has been achieved by Russians they will stop and withdraw their forces? Of course they continue. But now we set a goal to weaken Russia so they will never try such things again. But is it a realistic goal? I have serious doubts. I see numbers and these numbers are against the odds. And as I have stated earlier, I do not believe that technology alone will change the outcome of this war. I don’t believe in Wunderwaffe.
And I don’t agree that it is only death or victory, black and white. I am not saying at all, that the only way is to lay down weapons, do not resist and surrender. You have to make sure that the continuation of the war for the enemy will bring more harm for them than benefit.
Our (West) current position is that Ukraine and Ukranian people must fight until total victory over the Russians or total destruction of their country.
Instead of trying to reach a situation where “continuation of the war for the enemy will bring more harm for them than benefit” and negotiate.
robirdus wrote:
What I am saying and I am missing is that there was not a single voice in the whole Western word talking about peace, ceasefire, agreement. ( as per my understanding, even before the war)
There are lots of voices talking about that, but it’s difficult to achieve when one of the belligerents 1) has already repeatedly broken agreed ceasefires intended to make evacuation of civilians possible 2) is almost obsessively lying even in the face of obvious facts and 3) expressly doesn’t accept Ukraine as a legitimate state.
As some of you might know, the Swedish Great Power era definitely ended when the Swedish army was finally defeated by the Russians at Poltava (in Ukraine!) in 1709 after an extended campaign where the Swedes won every battle but were eventually overcome by attrition. Judging from Russian rhetoric, it seems they believe Swedes still have revanchist feelings about that, which absolutely no one does — not even the extreme right-wing nationalists. That, I think, says a lot about the state of mind of the Russian leadership.
I am sure Russia is beyond any redemption, beyond being worth discussing any reasonable settlement with, short of a total withdrawal from Ukraine. They
) which was pretty smart and e.g. knew perfectly well that the West had absolutely no intention of invading the USSR (the “NATO around our borders is a threat” was purely for PR and not seriously believed)It is true that the West can be accused of turning Ukraine into a pile of rubble in order to beat up Russia, but Ukraine would have been a pile of rubble anyway, only much bigger by now without the supplied weapons – because they have a relatively modern and – as of last 8 years or so – well trained army which would have fought down to the last man and the last woman (having lots of women fighting is very good for morale). Then, where else Russia would have continued to, is anybody’s guess. The “we will nuke you while selling you oil and gas” approach would have worked wonderfully, all the way to NATO borders.
How will the total withdrawal from Ukraine be achieved? There is a long way to go, but Russia’s military is not that big. Around 250k soldiers and that includes their logistics. Lousy logistics too because their SOP is a hit and run job on a weak enemy, where you load up the tanks with all the bog rolls etc you need to do the job done, and steal what you can along the way. Ukraine has already killed 20-30k, so probably 50k are not able to fight. Their army is likely down to 50% of fighting capacity now, but actually much less because the soldiers know (this is evident from ample phone and comms intercepts, readily found online for anyone to verify, assisted by the thickoes stealing phones and SIMs from the locals 
) that they are being converted into “pizza” (their description, not mine) at a great rate, with many attacks resulting in “90% pizza” coming back, so they don’t want to fight anyway. The whole show is on its last legs already, with sand being put in fuel tanks and Russians setting fire to recruitment offices back home. This isn’t WW2 where the leadership was happy to lose 27M soldiers. They are also running out of missiles, so are using up old junk which is good only for apartment blocks. Russia will pack up when it is exhausted.
In the long run, Russia will end up an African country. Much of it always was, but they had hopes. Now those hopes are gone. Even the most naive Western politicians will not easily revert to old ways. Well, they might personally, with a bit of “entertainment”, but without domestic support. Look at Finland and Sweden. That was really Putin’s biggest achievement. Even China is distancing itself (they need to export freely, and don’t like losers )
And Ukraine is only just getting going, with the new stuff, mainly from the US. In the north they are driving Russians back, with the front lines almost at the border. Map. In the south, Russia is blocked. In the middle, Ukraine has plenty of territory to trade while stretching Russian supply lines and picking off the tanks and producing lots of great videos
The US is going great stuff, pulling Europe’s hot chestnuts out of the fire yet again, while the EU is struggling to agree. Lend-Lease? Amazing. Never thought I would see this in my lifetime.
Lots could happen in the meantime. Putin doesn’t look good…
This was on Russia’s big day – 9th May
LeSving wrote:
Putin doesn’t even recognize this as a war. He can’t win a war that doesn’t exist (for him), and he can’t lose either.
The other problem is his hubris. He started believing his own propaganda, that Ukranians would welcome him with open arms, and he would be in Kyiv in three days.
robirdus wrote:
Our (West) current position is that Ukraine and Ukranian people must fight until total victory over the Russians or total destruction of their country.
I certainly hope not. The West should be supporting the Ukrainians in their fight to remain independent, which means that if they wish to use that independence to negotiate with Russia, it’s up to them. Thankfully they’re too sensible to take up any of the risible offers that Russia has come up with so far.
Peter wrote:
mass-deport civilians to far away places in Russia (that one I find especially hard to understand; it’s really weird as to purpose)
This is exactly what Stalin did. Round up and deport an entire population, then scatter it throughout the almost uninhabited Russian Far East thousands of miles away (what we would call Siberia). Replace the population with ethnic Russians. Language, culture, identity and social cohesion break down.
The most well-known are the deportations of the Crimean Tatars, and that of the Chechens and Ingush. Wikipedia has an article somewhat euphemistically named Population transfer in the Soviet Union. An example:
Names of repressed nations were totally erased from all books and encyclopedias. By the next summer, a number of Chechen and Ingush placenames were replaced with Russian ones; mosques were destroyed, and a massive campaign of burning numerous historical Nakh language books and manuscripts was near complete. Their villages were razed to the ground and their graveyards bulldozed.
A modern theory on the Tatars is that they were a Turkic people and therefore an impediment to a Soviet takeover of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits in Turkey, which control marine access to the Black Sea.
Sure, but they would have to ship off 30+ million people “somewhere” (making a guess at what % of Ukraine is actually hardcore pro-Putin-policy; they do have a big 5th Column problem and maybe it is 5%). And today you can’t do that without it getting you a “really bad name” because these people will have internet access, plus they are much better educated than the populations in the places which they would get shipped to.
I guess Russia planned to do much larger numbers. But how were they planning to get away with it in the face of world opinion? There is an amazing amount of cynicism involved in believing that if you sell oil and gas to everybody who matters (nearby) then nobody will say anything.
The problem now for Russia is that the war cannot be “settled” without them being returned, obviously.
Just watched a video from a captured Russian trench, and guess what was found in it?
I wonder if they realised it needs the water hoses connected?
