Assuming no direct western intervention, I think the crucial next steps for a Ukraine victory will center around whether NATO can transition from providing soviet surplus to modern western arms, and get Ukrainians the training required in time. F-16s or even 35s and modern air defenses could play a huge role in making russian territory gains largely impossible, but the operational training would be measured in multiple weeks at a minimum.

Russia has 3x times as many people as Ukraine, not 10x times. It has a lot more land, but I doubt it is 10x times more.

Russia has a ton of land (with most of it being unproductive land in Siberia), but that won't help them to win the war.

It is actually more of a problem than an asset, because they must guard very long shores and borders against unfriendly neighbors. And if they decide to redeploy a unit from Khabarovsk to Ukraine, it takes at least a week to move it by rail. Probably longer than that. Not exactly a recipe for flexibility.

> It is actually more of a problem than an asset, because they must guard very long shores and borders against unfriendly neighbors.

On the flip side they can afford to give up a lot of terrain while they get their act together. And now the other side has super long supply chains that they have to deal with.

See World War 2.

Yes, for defense, it is great (on the other side of this scale would be Israel that lacks any strategic depth and thus must defend the border regions at almost any cost).

The Napoleonic wars were yet another great example of a strategic retreat and bleeding the enemy dry in the endless frozen steppe.

But for attacking someone else, the situation reverses and now it is Russia that faces serious logistical problems correlated to its sheer size.

> Russia has 3x times as many people as Ukraine, not 10x times. It has a lot more land, but I doubt it is 10x times more.

It's actually almost 30× the land area (6.6M mi² vs 233k mi²)

Ukraine is approximately 603,550 sq km, while Russia is approximately 17,098,242 sq km, making Russia 2,733% larger than Ukraine.

The best effect of Russian admirers and propaganda alike is that people think it is bigger then it is and that everything Russian is better then it is. It is also country where huge amount of population does not have flushable toilet, have huge inequality and massive amount of internal issues.

Russian main advantage is that it does not value human life and is OK with massive looses. And that it has zero ethical limits with regards to civilians. That is amount of greatness.

This comment is really weird. It's written as though it's correcting an incorrect assumption in the parent. But it's literally confirming what the parent said.

Parent: russia is almost 30x the size of ukraine

This comment: what?! you're confused by russian propaganda! it's only 2733% larger than ukraine

And then, even if you adjust to claim that you were trying to reinforce parent's point, that's not plausible either since parent was actually pointing out that people's belief that russia was 10x bigger was actually a large underestimate of its size.

I didn't introduce the 10x figure. But if you look at GDP, 10x seems about right. GDP is often used to compare countries, and that the size, and quality of the army you can field is based on GDP of the country, seems somewhat reasonable.

The GDP doesn't really matter in this conflict, since the Ukraine is essentially getting all its weapons, intelligence and training for free.

That and, a lot of the Russian military (the reserves) and their equipment (ships, subs, intercontinental bombers, nukes, etc) are not really going to help the Russians win the conflict, since they're either not useful, or politically impossible to use.

I think if Putin can sell to the Russian people that this is a war, not a special military operation, and as such, they should call up the reserves, break the law about how those reserves are allowed to be used, etc, then they could probably win. Without that, I don't think it's that realistic: they're fighting against a totally mobilized country that's being flooded with high-tech weapons. Imagine afghanistan, if the taleban were armed for free by the western military-industrial complex. The US wouldn't be able to do it. Russia almost certainly won't be able either.

It is more like 30x.

You should look at it from Putin's point of view. Escalating with the west is even less of an option. Militarily, I don't think he has any doubt about US, French and UK nuclear deterrence. Even if you take nukes off the table, if you look how poorly his troops are doing in Ukraine, imagine that against NATO, even without the US.

He might "escalate to de-escalate", i.e. make a lot of noise about escalation to intimidate Biden (so far it worked), but it can only be bluff. Whichever metric you use, the ratio of power between Russia and Europe is much greater than Ukraine to Russia.

While I tend to agree, reading through the various nuclear close calls as far as I can tell, there were far more on the Russian side than the American one, and while American nuclear incidents tended to be headed off with everyone following orders and working within established systems, Russian ones usually involve one guy literally refusing an order. It's hard to know how accurate all of this is, but it does imply deterrent through incompetence. The concern is not limited to intentional nuclear strikes, every time Russian forces get put on alert the threat of an accident grows. Putin likely knows this, and NATO is also very wary of it.

> if you look how poorly his troops are doing in Ukraine

s/are doing/have done/

History is replete with completely incompetent offenses that were highly useful and motivating learning experiences.

I'm not sure that Russia is culturally in a position to be their own schoolmaster here, but they could be. And they have virtually infinite domestic capacity to churn out, man, and power last-gen war materiel, even with sanctions.

Only time will tell. Nobody knows anything yet.

Their war equipment is not "last-gen", they basically keep upgrading whatever was left of the USSR and they do sit on the huge stocks of non-modernized Soviet equipment, but eventually they will be left with a useless old and vulnerable hardware. Yes, they made some next-gen tanks and planes which are not combat ready yet but modern Russian industrial capability would be able to churn out only token numbers of those anyway, under sanctions and brain drain.

Russian equipment loss in this war won't be replaced for decades if not longer.

What will the US, UK and France do if Russia uses a tactical nuke in Ukraine? Nuking Russia because they nuked Ukraine is… very unlikely.

A ton of countries would join NATO ASAP (if allowed in, and several would be) or rush to form new collective defense coalitions that include at least one other nuclear power, which in many cases would likely come with significant concessions to that nuclear power (i.e. China gains a de facto, if smallish, empire overnight).

Everyone refuses to trade with Russia until they're reduced to one of the most miserable countries on the planet. If their nuke program falls apart, several countries take some territory from them and no-one minds. Possibly they're reduced to selling parts of the country (maybe on a lease-like arrangement, which isn't unprecedented) in exchange for re-opening limited trade with countries that are willing, but see that they really have them over a barrel (China, again, is a likely beneficiary)

Several countries start or re-prioritize nuclear programs. Turkey, Iran, South Korea, and maybe even Japan, all likely candidates. Maybe more.

That's roughly what I'd expect the world to do about it, if the result isn't a spiral into outright nuclear war, or a swift and decisive coup in Russia. No, it's not good, but it's especially not good for Russia.

That’s not what nuclear deterrence protects against. If he does that there will be other forms of escalation. A Iran/North Korean style set of economic sanctions possibly (I don’t think India and China would support Putin anymore at that point). Possibly a direct confrontation over Ukraine (no fly zone or a no fly zone by proxy, giving the Ukrainians the missile defence sufficient to clear the sky). Etc.

> You should look at it from Putin's point of view. Escalating with the west is even less of an option.

I see this differently.

My understanding of the Russian "heartland" narratives suggest Russia is dead if they cannot control Ukraine in the medium term. Their "multi polar" view suggests that they MUST be at the centre of an anti-US alliance extending across Asia, Europe and Africa.

From these perspectives they HAVE to fight this war now. Even if they lose now, they feel they have to keep trying.

You assume same value system on Putin side as you have and that is unlikely.

>It's really hard to see that Ukraine by itself could defeat Russia

There are many paths but they are all long term "replace the Taliban with the Taliban" type ones that people don't wanna talk about.

Fair enough, I was thinking more of a classic win by defeating the Russian army on the battlefield. But the kind of loss the USSR had in Afghanistan might be possible without much if any help from abroad.

The kind of victory Afghanistant had also means ending up with deeply authoritarian and violent society. It implies complete destruction of democratic civil society, unfortunately.

>The kind of victory Afghanistant had also means ending up with deeply authoritarian and violent society.

The current Taliban are way, way more liberal than the 90s Taliban. They've embraced modern communication, dropped most of their Pashtun ethnic supremacy stuff and are a little less violent across the board. That's really a big change all things considered.

Unless you're a woman.

Or a christian. Or your Jewish. Or an American. Or your gay. Or you want to educate your daughters. Or you …

> It's really hard to see how Ukraine will successfully fend off a country 10x its size

Every Ukrainian defender kills 10 Russian occupiers?

Obviously some will be less fortunate, and a select few will go down in history as extremely effective removers of Russian conscripts.