Russia and Ukraine

[Anomalocaris]

PS any Russian occupation outside of the small slivers of failed state territories in the Donbass it's vassal breakaway states already hold will cause problems that will eclipse Vietnam, every single day of said occupation.

The notion that Russian occupation of Ukraine will be mired in a popular guerrilla war is very likely a pleasant mirage.

It should be noted the american perception of US-Ukraine-Russia relationship is steeped in the self-deception that the US created to pursued ourselves that we were morally right to try to pry Ukraine away from Russia in the first place by pretending that is what Ukrainian people overwhelmingly Wanted.    In fact, anti-Russian sentiment is mostly restricted to relative young urban people.   Outside that there is considerable nostalgia for the former Soviet Union in Ukraine.   That should be totally unsurprising considering Ukrainian economy today,  after 30 years of independence, is roughly half of what it had been under the Soviet Union, and Ukrainian standard of living since independent have declined from those of the relatively developed world under USSR to being on par with that of third world, civil war torn Libya or Sri Lanka.

Our perception of the world since the end of the Cold War have become so conceited, blinkeredly self-serving and ideological, that We delude ourselves with the preposterous reasoning that because in our opinion it is morally reprehensible to pine for the Soviet Union, therefore the effect of poor performance after the fall of Soviet Union does not signify, and the resultant existence of Soviet nostalgia can be ignored and do not need to be accounted for in our perception of ground reality.  No wonder we can produce a trump. 

As to how much young people who hate Russia really love Ukraine and are truly willing to die to defend it, that can be judged by the fact 30% of the young educated Ukrainians have permanently emigrated to Europe and America, and permanent emigration seems to be the aspiration of most of those remaining.