The war and the culturing of drug resistant bacteria can be ended sooner if Ukraine is provided with enough material to apply sufficient pressure to Russia to bring them to the table.
Unless the Russian economy collapses first. The ruble has lost 10% of it's value in just the past week. Inflation on many items is near 70% despite interest rates currently being set at 21%. It's spiralling a bit recently due to a renewed wave of sanctions enforcement and tanking petroleum revenues.
Now, that doesn't mean it will collapse, but it does mean they can't keep doing this forever. Number of soldiers available isn't the only factor that decides whether a nation can sustain a war.
Plus their other geopolitical projects are starting to crumble a bit. See: current events in Syria.
Rebel groups launched an offensive against the Russian-backed Syrian government over the past 48 hours and have retaken a large chunk of territory near Aleppo.
Russian military intervention is arguably the only reason the Syrian regime survived the civil war, but this time the Russian military has their own problems and can't intervene without stealing resources from their efforts in Ukraine.
Ukraine doesn't claim a 6:1 ratio overall. Only in certain parts of the front line during certain periods of fighting is it so lopsided, such as the recent Russian attempts to retake Kursk or the early assaults on Bakhmut and Vulhedar.
An optimistic estimate for the overall war would be more like 2.5 to 1, but realistically it's probably lower.
Here is a sober assessment of the strategy from Anders Puck Nielsen. He is an extremely well informed source on these matters. I highly recommend all of his videos.
Only checked the first few minutes ( if I even got there).
His opinion is really bad. Listen to his first minutes and compare it with my "couch" take vs his "well informed" opinion.
---
Russia doesn't have unlimited resources and they are not grinding the meat assault to let the west fear.
Russia needs to pay a lot to get it going, their resources are getting depleted, things that were already known ( eg. Demographics).
Why they are so willing to conquer Ukraine is simply because they went to add x million people to attack and fix that to prepare for a next meat grinding war.
Russia hasn't got unlimited resources. They need external help.
They are not going all in. They don't even enforce military conscription in the well known areas.
They are just down the rabbit hole now and we just need to support Ukraine more.
---
now listened to it completely
---
He's even wrong about why the west is funding Ukraine. Most of them want Ukraine to win, definitely neighbors of Ukraine that know Russia, or look at how the Netherlands is supporting Ukraine.
The rest, thinks at least there should be enough funds to Ukraine to deplete Russia from their capable men or their tanks ( which is actually happening) and helps NATO. I actually hope that now NATO has expanded to what was expected, that military aid increases.
The ones that want to stop funding Ukraine are the dumbest people in politics and believe in fairy tales that Russia claims or are literally Russian funded.
Russia is an underdeveloped country. 1/4 of the population doesn't have indoor plumbing. If you don't live in St. Petersburg or Moscow, your standard of living is just not very comparable to the rest of the developed world. It's like if NYC and Seattle were the only two major American cities and the rest of the country was basically Appalachia.
"The Russian military is large and modern, but the modern part isn't large and the large part isn't modern" is a basically true statement. They have a handful of modern platforms for prestige reasons but in very small quantity, and a large quantity of leftover Soviet trash. And even the "modern" stuff is several tiers below Western kit.
We are approaching the third year and you're unaware to the degree the Russian military industrial complex was revealed as a fraud?
The NATO concern with Russia in a conventional conflict isn't whether they would win, it's if they would win so convincingly that Russia would immediately escalate to nukes.
Their naval fleet => literally has tow boats following them on missions
Newest tank => T90 => barely build... 60?
Practically all their tanks are build a long time ago. The engine was a bad engine copy of the Germans.
Nuclear arsenal => they forgot maintenance like with everything else
Rocket missles => yes, it was still used a lot. Not reusable and was still based on a design from the 1960's.
Lada => taken over by Renault to make it profitable
------
Sure, during the cold war, Soviet Union was powerful, their facilities were all funded by the US during the world war, this is where they got the tech ( see reason of Holodomor). But it's only 2 modern cities and the rest is shitty to stay in.
Additionally, their invasion is just similar like the past. It ain't tech, it's literally meat grinder tactics.
There was a wild video of a Russian group mocking a tank and then discovering it was a Russian T-90 and its reactive armour was literally a construction brick.
They also had to chase their latest stealth prototype drone (S-70) over Ukraine with a pseudostealth fighter (Su-57 Felon, one of only about 30) to blow it up themselves. Almost certainly due to the drone being so faulty they tried to destroy it. They didn't even do that effectively, the large intact portions surviving and being collected for UA intelligence.
It is utterly insane to me that this is still a conversation.
Ukrainians have been sacrificing their lives to defend us all from Russian imperialism, and all they ask for is weapons. It's almost three years on now, and yet here we are.
POV: EU/US dual citizen, in EU for the last 8 years.
Ukraine is fighting a war that prevents direct NATO Russia conflict on the polish border.
Russia has publicly stated their geopolitical goal is to reestablish control of the Suwalto gap.
That is in Poland I believe.
An invasion of Poland prompts all NATO members to declare war and attack Russia.
With the state of Russia's armed forces, NATO would devastate Russian armed forces within a week to the point, the Russian regime would not be able to defend itself from internal threats.
I absolutely sympathise with Ukraine and want them to win, but for now all the talk about Russia attacking Nato is just talk. Nato is a defensive alliance, nothing more. To preemptively attack Russia because we think they might attack us, is not what the alliance was set up to do.
There are no guarantees in war but giving Ukraine sufficient advanced weapons to kill a few million more Russians would likely bring peace. Russian manpower reserves are deep but not unlimited. And even if that doesn't work it will at least weaken Russia enough to significantly reduce the threat to our NATO allies in Eastern Europe. Don't think that Russia will stop with conquering Ukraine. They'll keep advancing as long as they have the means.
Russia cannot issue a general conscription, their regime would collapse. You can see this because they are choosing mercenaries and ethnic conscription, and north Korean soldiers.
Russia was already suffering a demographic cliff, this was effectively the last generation of men that could be thrown at a war.
Russia is a racial hegemony of the Caucasian Rus ruling over central Asian ethnic 'stans. Think chechnya and Georgia at a minimum.
So if too many Russians are conscripted and die, they cannot be used to keep the other provinces in line. The entire Russian state collapsed.
Consider that each conscription round entails as much or more population flight from the country, do you raise 100,000 soldiers, 250,000 more flee the country.
Jeffrey Sachs is an economist and he's been criticizing the war for the entire time , repeating points that I'm pretty clearly are direct Russian propaganda parroting, but fine one mans propaganda is another mans opinion.
Putin has shown the usual authoritarian contempt for peace, treaty, and diplomacy. Negotiating a cease fire at this point is appeasement, "peace in our time" foolishness.
Putin thinks Europe is weak and cowardly, and now he thinks the US is working in his interests and will not honor article 5 of NATO.
If a couple squadrons of modern NATO aircraft were employed, It would mean total air superiority, All Russian tanks Artillery antiaircraft and apcs destroyed within a week, absolutely no supplies going to the troops on the ground.
I'm a strong supporter of giving more material to Ukraine, but unfortunately a couple squadrons wouldn't make much of a dent. For air supremacy where you can do whatever you want in the air, you need to destroy enemy air defenses; even if you don't have complete air supremacy you need to create localized air supremacy to do missions. SEAD and DEAD (suppression and destruction of enemy air defenses, respectively) is extremely difficult and there's really one one country that has the means and requirement to do so, the US. Currently most aircraft in Ukraine on both sides are engaging in standoff attacks because getting anywhere near the front exposes you to massive amounts of air defenses. If the US could donate several squadrons, including specialized electronic warfare craft, and could train Ukrainian pilots on SEAD/DEAD then there'd be a chance to roll back Russian air defenses, but that's unlikely to happen even in the best case scenario. It's important to keep sending planes to Ukraine to prevent them from losing the air war, but I doubt there's anything that can be done for Ukraine to win the air war
The economy is on the brink of disaster, it's almost all war fueled now. Russian military capacity is evading day by day ( tanks, men, ... ). It won't be a threat to NATO anymore in 2-3 years, if it's funded by domestic means ofc.
Putin won't attack with nucleair missles. The problems would increase a lot ( eg. Because of the nuclear assured destruction, china would stop immediately helping Russia).
Probably Russia would collapse further like in 1991.
"bringing peace" is a framing that benefits the aggressor; whenever you say that, ruzzian apologists come out of the woods with a peace "solution" which is that Ukraine just surrenders. Peace is easy, you just get the victim to surrender.
This isn't a little misunderstanding that you can settle by negotiating. Instead, one side doesn't want the other one to exist.
The real solution is to remove from the aggressor the power to impose itself by force. How I don't know.
In my experience, even Russians that are avoiding Russia have the mindset that the US/West pissed Putin off and this is the explanation for anything that befalls Ukraine, with of course the idea that Ukraine and the US can end it by giving Putin the taken territory as if its a troll toll
pervasive victim blaming that never acknowledges the choice that the aggressor made, its his “special military operation”
It doesn't matter what they think. It only matters if they can't afford to eat. Shell them until they can't and they will stop; it's really irrelevant how they justify it to themselves.
Failing to make this choice was the singular point that could have prevented World War II. Destroying Russia's ability to make war is the only way to prevent World War III.
The war and the culturing of drug resistant bacteria can be ended sooner if Ukraine is provided with enough material to apply sufficient pressure to Russia to bring them to the table.
Look at the population of Russia and Ukraine. Even with endless material Ukraine is going to run out of a meat puppets long before Russia.
Unless the Russian economy collapses first. The ruble has lost 10% of it's value in just the past week. Inflation on many items is near 70% despite interest rates currently being set at 21%. It's spiralling a bit recently due to a renewed wave of sanctions enforcement and tanking petroleum revenues.
Now, that doesn't mean it will collapse, but it does mean they can't keep doing this forever. Number of soldiers available isn't the only factor that decides whether a nation can sustain a war.
Plus their other geopolitical projects are starting to crumble a bit. See: current events in Syria.
I’m out the loop a bit… what’s going on in Syria that would affect the war in Ukraine?
Rebel groups launched an offensive against the Russian-backed Syrian government over the past 48 hours and have retaken a large chunk of territory near Aleppo.
Russian military intervention is arguably the only reason the Syrian regime survived the civil war, but this time the Russian military has their own problems and can't intervene without stealing resources from their efforts in Ukraine.
So it builts robots. Ratio is already 5/1. Never give in Giving in got us here!
It's Russia that requires Africans for it's jobs and North Koreaans/Syrians for the war ( with very high pay)
Invading leads to more casualties than defending.
Not if they have enough materiel to kill at a 4:1 ratio or better.
Exactly. Ukraine has claimed a recent 6:1 ratio, and Moscow has found it necessary to bring in reinforcements from North Korea.
Ukraine doesn't claim a 6:1 ratio overall. Only in certain parts of the front line during certain periods of fighting is it so lopsided, such as the recent Russian attempts to retake Kursk or the early assaults on Bakhmut and Vulhedar.
An optimistic estimate for the overall war would be more like 2.5 to 1, but realistically it's probably lower.
Equipment kills are another story.
Russia is losing 1000+ a day. I get thee is propaganda, but it would be news is Ukraine was losing 400/day.
The rate of Russian advance (that is, extremely slow) would imply the kill rations are very high in Ukraine's favor
You can't really imply kill ratios by the speed of the advance, it doesn't work like that.
Bizarre propaganda.
It's not like Russia is some undeveloped country - they have as advanced materiel as any major power.
How would Ukraine ever achieve that kind of kill ratio?
By Russia using "meat wave tactics."
Here is a sober assessment of the strategy from Anders Puck Nielsen. He is an extremely well informed source on these matters. I highly recommend all of his videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8ZPbnVqHrY
Only checked the first few minutes ( if I even got there).
His opinion is really bad. Listen to his first minutes and compare it with my "couch" take vs his "well informed" opinion.
---
Russia doesn't have unlimited resources and they are not grinding the meat assault to let the west fear.
Russia needs to pay a lot to get it going, their resources are getting depleted, things that were already known ( eg. Demographics).
Why they are so willing to conquer Ukraine is simply because they went to add x million people to attack and fix that to prepare for a next meat grinding war.
Russia hasn't got unlimited resources. They need external help.
They are not going all in. They don't even enforce military conscription in the well known areas.
They are just down the rabbit hole now and we just need to support Ukraine more.
---
now listened to it completely
---
He's even wrong about why the west is funding Ukraine. Most of them want Ukraine to win, definitely neighbors of Ukraine that know Russia, or look at how the Netherlands is supporting Ukraine.
The rest, thinks at least there should be enough funds to Ukraine to deplete Russia from their capable men or their tanks ( which is actually happening) and helps NATO. I actually hope that now NATO has expanded to what was expected, that military aid increases.
The ones that want to stop funding Ukraine are the dumbest people in politics and believe in fairy tales that Russia claims or are literally Russian funded.
Russia is an underdeveloped country. 1/4 of the population doesn't have indoor plumbing. If you don't live in St. Petersburg or Moscow, your standard of living is just not very comparable to the rest of the developed world. It's like if NYC and Seattle were the only two major American cities and the rest of the country was basically Appalachia.
"The Russian military is large and modern, but the modern part isn't large and the large part isn't modern" is a basically true statement. They have a handful of modern platforms for prestige reasons but in very small quantity, and a large quantity of leftover Soviet trash. And even the "modern" stuff is several tiers below Western kit.
We are approaching the third year and you're unaware to the degree the Russian military industrial complex was revealed as a fraud?
The NATO concern with Russia in a conventional conflict isn't whether they would win, it's if they would win so convincingly that Russia would immediately escalate to nukes.
Russia has ego projects funded with oil revenue.
Their 5th stealth fighter => isn't stealth
Their naval fleet => literally has tow boats following them on missions
Newest tank => T90 => barely build... 60?
Practically all their tanks are build a long time ago. The engine was a bad engine copy of the Germans.
Nuclear arsenal => they forgot maintenance like with everything else
Rocket missles => yes, it was still used a lot. Not reusable and was still based on a design from the 1960's.
Lada => taken over by Renault to make it profitable
------
Sure, during the cold war, Soviet Union was powerful, their facilities were all funded by the US during the world war, this is where they got the tech ( see reason of Holodomor). But it's only 2 modern cities and the rest is shitty to stay in.
Additionally, their invasion is just similar like the past. It ain't tech, it's literally meat grinder tactics.
There was a wild video of a Russian group mocking a tank and then discovering it was a Russian T-90 and its reactive armour was literally a construction brick.
https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1gt1...
They also had to chase their latest stealth prototype drone (S-70) over Ukraine with a pseudostealth fighter (Su-57 Felon, one of only about 30) to blow it up themselves. Almost certainly due to the drone being so faulty they tried to destroy it. They didn't even do that effectively, the large intact portions surviving and being collected for UA intelligence.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/why-russia-shot-down-s-70-...
Russia couldn't manage to get naval superiority against Ukraine, a country with effectively no functional navy vessels.
They're still producing more artillery shells than Europe and US are able to provide Ukraine.
That seems to be the determining factor in this war.
Yeah but look at that border with NATO that Putin keeps manned. He cant just dump his entire military into ukraine like a lot of pundits predicted.
Or what, NATO will invade?
? Russia barely has soldiers and defense at those borders
[flagged]
They should not. It’s not their war. Instead, just give Ukraine what they need to defend themselves.
It is utterly insane to me that this is still a conversation.
Ukrainians have been sacrificing their lives to defend us all from Russian imperialism, and all they ask for is weapons. It's almost three years on now, and yet here we are.
POV: EU/US dual citizen, in EU for the last 8 years.
Ha yeah and hitler would have just stayed in Germany. The pure ignorance of foreign affairs you are publicly showing is astounding.
If they step into Nato territory it's obviously a different discussion. If you want to call me ignorant for stating obvious facts, you do you.
Ukraine is fighting a war that prevents direct NATO Russia conflict on the polish border.
Russia has publicly stated their geopolitical goal is to reestablish control of the Suwalto gap.
That is in Poland I believe.
An invasion of Poland prompts all NATO members to declare war and attack Russia.
With the state of Russia's armed forces, NATO would devastate Russian armed forces within a week to the point, the Russian regime would not be able to defend itself from internal threats.
That would imply nukes
I absolutely sympathise with Ukraine and want them to win, but for now all the talk about Russia attacking Nato is just talk. Nato is a defensive alliance, nothing more. To preemptively attack Russia because we think they might attack us, is not what the alliance was set up to do.
Poland should send troops, to man the border against Belarus. Not too escalatory, and frees up more Ukrainian resources.
I don't like dabbling in politics, but can anyone confidently say "give them x and y and this war is over"
Because I would have no idea how to determine what would be needed to bring peace
There are no guarantees in war but giving Ukraine sufficient advanced weapons to kill a few million more Russians would likely bring peace. Russian manpower reserves are deep but not unlimited. And even if that doesn't work it will at least weaken Russia enough to significantly reduce the threat to our NATO allies in Eastern Europe. Don't think that Russia will stop with conquering Ukraine. They'll keep advancing as long as they have the means.
From what source do you base your certainty?
For example, Jeffrey Sachs has a very different opinion than you. From whom can I hear the steel man case for your statements?
I claimed no certainty. As I stated above, nothing in war is certain.
Jeffrey Sachs is just some guy. He has no more expertise in this area than I do so you can take whatever opinion you like.
Russia cannot issue a general conscription, their regime would collapse. You can see this because they are choosing mercenaries and ethnic conscription, and north Korean soldiers.
Russia was already suffering a demographic cliff, this was effectively the last generation of men that could be thrown at a war.
Russia is a racial hegemony of the Caucasian Rus ruling over central Asian ethnic 'stans. Think chechnya and Georgia at a minimum.
So if too many Russians are conscripted and die, they cannot be used to keep the other provinces in line. The entire Russian state collapsed.
Consider that each conscription round entails as much or more population flight from the country, do you raise 100,000 soldiers, 250,000 more flee the country.
Jeffrey Sachs is an economist and he's been criticizing the war for the entire time , repeating points that I'm pretty clearly are direct Russian propaganda parroting, but fine one mans propaganda is another mans opinion.
Putin has shown the usual authoritarian contempt for peace, treaty, and diplomacy. Negotiating a cease fire at this point is appeasement, "peace in our time" foolishness.
Putin thinks Europe is weak and cowardly, and now he thinks the US is working in his interests and will not honor article 5 of NATO.
If a couple squadrons of modern NATO aircraft were employed, It would mean total air superiority, All Russian tanks Artillery antiaircraft and apcs destroyed within a week, absolutely no supplies going to the troops on the ground.
I'm a strong supporter of giving more material to Ukraine, but unfortunately a couple squadrons wouldn't make much of a dent. For air supremacy where you can do whatever you want in the air, you need to destroy enemy air defenses; even if you don't have complete air supremacy you need to create localized air supremacy to do missions. SEAD and DEAD (suppression and destruction of enemy air defenses, respectively) is extremely difficult and there's really one one country that has the means and requirement to do so, the US. Currently most aircraft in Ukraine on both sides are engaging in standoff attacks because getting anywhere near the front exposes you to massive amounts of air defenses. If the US could donate several squadrons, including specialized electronic warfare craft, and could train Ukrainian pilots on SEAD/DEAD then there'd be a chance to roll back Russian air defenses, but that's unlikely to happen even in the best case scenario. It's important to keep sending planes to Ukraine to prevent them from losing the air war, but I doubt there's anything that can be done for Ukraine to win the air war
Give Ukraine rockets to attack all of Russian oil revenue. Then they can't fund it anymore.
Russia also sells oil below profitable internally and to friendly countries to keep them happy.
So you don't need to destroy them all of the time. Their oil companies are already non profitable.
The main problem here is that the US doesn't want oil prices to rise and that's why it's barely done by Ukraine.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/09/27/gazprom-drops-from...
The economy is on the brink of disaster, it's almost all war fueled now. Russian military capacity is evading day by day ( tanks, men, ... ). It won't be a threat to NATO anymore in 2-3 years, if it's funded by domestic means ofc.
Putin won't attack with nucleair missles. The problems would increase a lot ( eg. Because of the nuclear assured destruction, china would stop immediately helping Russia).
Probably Russia would collapse further like in 1991.
"bringing peace" is a framing that benefits the aggressor; whenever you say that, ruzzian apologists come out of the woods with a peace "solution" which is that Ukraine just surrenders. Peace is easy, you just get the victim to surrender.
This isn't a little misunderstanding that you can settle by negotiating. Instead, one side doesn't want the other one to exist.
The real solution is to remove from the aggressor the power to impose itself by force. How I don't know.
In my experience, even Russians that are avoiding Russia have the mindset that the US/West pissed Putin off and this is the explanation for anything that befalls Ukraine, with of course the idea that Ukraine and the US can end it by giving Putin the taken territory as if its a troll toll
pervasive victim blaming that never acknowledges the choice that the aggressor made, its his “special military operation”
It doesn't matter what they think. It only matters if they can't afford to eat. Shell them until they can't and they will stop; it's really irrelevant how they justify it to themselves.
Failing to make this choice was the singular point that could have prevented World War II. Destroying Russia's ability to make war is the only way to prevent World War III.
See also:
>Gaza bombardment worsens superbug outbreaks
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2024-11-19/gaz...
>Wars are breeding superbugs that will spread 'everywhere'
https://www.politico.eu/article/war-ukraine-gaza-superbugs-s...
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