If the war ends with Ukraine ceding some land but staying independent and anti-Putin, then that might be a loss for Ukraine but it would also be a loss for Russia as the strategic outcome would be worse than the pre-war global status quo, as we're seeing a more unified and militarized Europe (Germany just anounced literally doubling its military budget), Finland+Sweden likely joining NATO. I.e. Russia winning a battle in this way doesn't seem to lead to Russia winning the strategic war.
WP says "Most sources conclude that the Soviet Union had intended to conquer all of Finland", acknowledging that some don't. And also offers the following tasty tidbit:
"Commander Meretskov announced publicly that the Finnish campaign would take two weeks at the most. Soviet soldiers had even been warned not to cross the border into Sweden by mistake."
If you know of an analysis that (cogently) suggests otherwise, feel free to share it with us.
Unless Putin has decided that 2022 would be the last year of record of the Gregorian calendar at least for a while he isn’t going to bring on the apocalypse.
As horrible as this conflict is it’s pretty much the death knell of Russia as a superpower and probably for good.
It almost lost in Georgia in 08 which brought it a lot of army reforms and its performance in Syria has emboldened them to think that they can play in the big leagues again but it seems that they aren’t able to perform on the modern battlefield at all.
I have a feeling that a lot of people in the pentagon that have been concerned about Russia becoming a near peer to the US are now sighing in relief.
I almost want that once this conflict is over for the pentagon to release a statement in jest that it officially downgrades Russia from near peer to junk like the credit agencies did.
I doubt anyone in the pentagon was woried about Russia becoming an near peer in conventional arms. The US economy is 14 times the size of the Russian economy. The US spends about $800 billion on its military each year, the Russians spend about $60 billion.
The fear of near peer came from their reforms following 2008 where they decided to modernize their army especially their infantry adopt modern combined arms and maneuver warfare and basically mimic the US individual squad battlefield doctrine.
They shifted on paper form a conscripted army to a professional one and have revamp their NCO core.
And their relative success in Syria did make it seem like they were making a lot of progress now it’s clear that what ever progress they have made was either all a smoke screen or limited to such a small number of units that it doesn’t make an impact on the battlefield.
This war has shown that even what the west feared the most the so called elite airborne troops which were always a key part of Russias military doctrine aren’t effective at all at taking and holding military objectives.
Russian armor seems to also be extremely vulnerable to western ATGMs so the fear of Russian APS systems has also now proven to be completely unfounded and Arena/Afganit seems to either be non existent in the field or utterly and completely useless especially when compared to western battle proven APS systems like Trophy/Windbreaker which have seen great success against Russian modern ATGMs.
Basically they aren’t even a paper tiger at this point they are a wet tissue.
We have now hard indisputable proof that they aren’t capable of anything more than leveling cities from 100 miles away which they won’t be able to do due to NATOs total air superiority or bringing a nuclear annihilation which hopefully they aren’t mad enough to do.
Did anyone publish, prior to the invasion, a timeline of how they expected it to go that had Russia far ahead of where they are on day three? If so, can you link it? If not, how do we know they are behind schedule?
They are behind schedule they couldn’t maintain objectives they captured and are still fighting over the same cities.
They have given up on many objectives in south Ukraine and failed to secure a land bridge to Crimea.
They have already given up on taking many primary objectives and are now bypassing them and pretty much concentrating nearly everything on Kyiv.
The Pentagon, UK MoD and plenty of other entities have been publishing daily analysis.
The fact that they lost so many assets and haven’t been able to establish air superiority (despite Ukraine having pretty much no Airforce and very limited AA) is a also clear indication of their current capabilities also.
And I find it laughable to claim that they are limiting offenses on civilian targets when they are using MLRS and cluster munitions on cities and have been since the war began.
What assets have they lost and what are reasonable expectations for losses? The kind of stuff I'm seeing here seems like half an analysis. "Russia has done X" okay, but what should we be expecting? How do we know if X is good or bad? I just haven't seen it. How much was this expected to cost Russia?
Not in the Pentagon, but I'm still very worried about their capabilities on the cyber front.
Honest question because I don't know: Does Putin listen at all to public opinion, or to the sentiment of his military.
Stalin was probably the most powerful man on Earth during his lifetime, but even he didn't always get his way in the Politburo. Sometimes Stalin was on the losing side of a debate. But win or lose, the Soviet leadership emphasized speaking with a unified voice regardless of whether one had supported or opposed the outcome.
Is there a Politburo for Putin? Is there a group of people around him who can influence him and, sometimes, change his mind?
If he is completely deranged and wants to start a nuclear war he could’ve done so without sacrificing so many Russian troops.
He can sit in his bunker and order a nuclear strike and even if most forces would disregard that order it only takes one launch to bring on the end of the world as we know it.
He knows he is running out of time and he wanted a new Russian empire to be his legacy but I don’t think turning Europe and North America into glass is on his todo list.
At least I hope not.
Quite a lot of people said he seemed like he was going to, for quite a few weeks in advance, though they were trying to dissuade him, just counting people in the US government, NATO, etc.
> The president of Ukraine said like two days before hand that it was unlikely.
He said that the West needed to move forward the sanctions threatened for after an invasion to before, and that Russian behavior depended on immediate, united Western action.
The US media played up the part you refer to and downplayed the I assume our friends will heed my clearly-correct and urgent advice context, because they had a narrative they were selling of “Biden Admin sees imminent invasion, but the Admin is paranoid and everyone else, even the people who would be attacked, disagrees”.
[0] https://fakty.com.ua/ua/ukraine/20220220-reznikov-meta-kreml...
I'd been concerned about the buildup for a year, but was practically certain once the abrupt demands to NATO and Alperovitch's analysis came out 3 whole months ago:
Some had very strong hunches. But that's not the same as "knowing".
It's not so much that he "wants to" start a nuclear war.
The concern is whether he may end up doing that anyway -- if the moment arrives when he is sufficiently cornered and feels he has nothing more to lose.
Also various reforms happened after the Winter War that readied the Red Army for the soon coming invasion of the USSR.
There were military, and possibly political, blunders by the Soviet Union in the beginning of the Winter War, but the result was a successful one for them.
If we look at history, it's closer to Iran-Iraq wars.
Saddam pulled a historical grudge out of the ass, wrapped it in bizarre, artificial semi-religious ideology, and tried to draw an image of "people's war" with propaganda.
Then he started the war with people who 1) actually have a real historical grudge, 2) are real religious warriors, and crack good at that, 3) were much better at "people warring" than him, forcing him to retreat in complete ignomy after poking the beehive, which later causes an existential crisis within his regime.
Heck, I would say Putinism is the closest thing to Baathism. Random nonsense from communism, religion, and fascism glued together, and called an "ideology," which then not even its own members can understand, or explain.
Russia has a 'tradition' of stating what seems a 'small victorious war', aiming to boost popularity and support for the government, and then blundering badly - Russian-Japanese war (1905), Russian-Finland war (1940), Afghanistan invasion (1980), two Chechnya wars (1994, 1999). So far, Ukraine 'special operation' seems to be a one more addition to this ignominious list.