Russia and Ukraine

[The Grand Nudger]

Belaqua on Ukraine defeating Russia:

The Afghans (a few marauder tribes) managed to defeat the Soviet Union (The world’s – perhaps – N.1 military power at the time) after a 10 year war between 1979 and 1989.

I think it's more relevant to the current situation if we look at the US invasion of Afghanistan, and how the Taliban defeated the US. 

Though there was a long period of hostility, and the US spent tons of money, in the end the US army went home. Then within weeks the Taliban controlled the whole country. As I've written before on this thread, patience is a factor in winning wars. Staying power. 

Everybody knows that when the American Military Industrial Complex Blue Team leaves office, and the American Military Industrial Complex Red Team comes in (or vice versa) the new guy is under no obligation to continue the commitments of the previous guy. Poor Zelensky's entire strategy depended on depending on support that isn't dependable. So Russia could run a war of attrition and wait for the US to lose interest. And that's what happened. 

We also have to look at what Russia has said its goals are for the war. Putin and Lavrov have never claimed they want to occupy all of Ukraine. (This was claimed at the beginning by General Milley and a few other Americans, but no Russian has ever agreed with them.) 

There are no provinces in Afghanistan that border the US, that speak English as a native language and have US culture as their background. No part of Afghanistan was ever part of a greater US. No part of Afghanistan has a majority population which feels more American than Afghan. But significant parts of Ukraine are Russian in language, in culture, in affiliation. If these areas end up more closely allied with Russia there is no reason to think there will be an ongoing counterinsurgency. And if the other, Ukrainian-speaking parts of Ukraine are unoccupied, there will be no occupying army to do an insurgency against. Russia doesn't want to occupy the whole country, just to ensure that it doesn't have missiles aimed at Moscow. 

You're certainly right that there has been a huge human cost. Both sides have lost a lot of people. But the degradation of the Russian army is much exaggerated by people who take wishful thinking as fact. As proof of this, we can look at Kursk. (People seem to have stopped talking about Kursk recently, since the Ukrainian army never quite made it to Kamchatka after all.) At their peak the Ukrainians held about 1300 square km, but now they are down to less than a tenth of that, along the border. Syrskyi has ordered the troops remaining in Kursk to take up defensive positions along the border with Sumy, so as to prevent the Russian momentum from crossing into Ukraine. 

So if it's true that the Russian army is down to bottom-of-the-barrel troops, it means that these bottom-of-the-barrel troops are capable of pushing the Ukrainian army into retreat. 

After a huge expenditure of blood and treasure, Kursk is not the bargaining chip that Zelensky had hoped for. It is in fact a liability, because now he has another threat of invasion along another part of the border. Zelensky has the distinction of following in Hitler's footsteps, ordering an invasion of Kursk with (we are told) superior weaponry, only to get pushed out again after huge losses on both sides. This is not what winning looks like. 

As for free speech, both the US and the UK are cracking down hard on people who criticize Israel. This is a bipartisan effort. If any country works against the genocide, the US bombs them. Trump was bragging a few hours ago that he had bombed a group of unarmed people in Yemen, for example. The war in Ukraine gets a lot of attention, while the worst atrocities of our lifetime are being perpetrated with US weapons and US logistics and US money against Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon.

You're a lying piece of shit.  Putin and Lavrov have, multiple times, said they wanted all of ukraine, that ukranian people do not exist, and that they will kill every last fucking "nazi" in ukraine.