Russia and Ukraine

[The Grand Nudger]

Re 1914/18 kia/wia to total army size.....russia is approaching a full turn on it's forces. 650k/900k (and that 900k was just on paper.....). Each successive turn of forces...locally or globally, means the next set is of lesser quality. Who is left to train them? The remains of the red army are buried in ukranian fields - men and equipment included. It is ukraines poverty, and not russias might, that has prolonged this conflict. It was ukraines poverty that started this fight. Russia was looking for someone they could bully and figured a nation picked clean by grift and corruption was the appropriate theater for their military...and even that turned out to be an aspirational goal on a practical level.

As it turns out, they should have goaded us to attack ukraine, rather than doing it themselves. There was probably some fever dream scenario in one of putins intel yesmens heads that played out exactly like that. Where the donalds smallness could be counted on to get us forces to clear out the "terrorists" for russian occupation. Nobody stopped them when they anexed crimea, and they assumed no one would come to ukraines aid. This is one of the key intel failures on the russian side that's lead to their disastrous performance in the war. They misread the collective wests disbelief that russia would do something so clearly stupid and disastrous for russia as the collective wests apathy towards ukraine. They misread ukrainians dissatisfaction for their own government as a desire for russian rule. They misread ukraines inability to fight the initial occupation a decade ago as an unwillingness to fight.

I'm still on the fence about whether they misread their own forces. I'll die before anyone sees those records, if ever. I think there's a version of this where russia realizing how shitty their situation actually was became the catalyst for a desperate invasion.