Russia has already been humiliated. The allegedly second strongest army in the world could not defeat a much smaller neighboring country quickly and had to retreat from the proximity of Kyiv and Kharkiv.

They do still have their artillery, though, and they are trying to take Donbass. In a very piecemeal fashion, very slowly. They have learnt something from their spring failures.

The result of this war depends on how fast can the Ukrainians re-arm completely to Western weapons, including artillery. It does not make sense to send tons of heavy Western guns there, if there aren't enough trained soldiers to operate them and enough trained technicians to fix them.

This is the bottleneck, not the raw number of weapons; people tend to treat weapons as magic, but they only work in combination with skilled soldiers and a functioning supply chain.

The Ukrainians are learning fast - people generally learn fast when their country is on fire - but the process will likely take months.

> Russia has already been humiliated.

According to whom and compared to what? Russia has employed maybe 20% of their military personnel and gear and are weeks, maybe days, from consolidating and absorbing the Donboss.

Keep in mind that Ukraine is the second largest military in Europe (after Russia) with their own military industrial complex, huge cache of Soviet weapons and the training and intelligence assets of NATO.

Can you name a single successful significant counter offensive (other than the Moskva) by Ukraine?

Under deploy your army, spread them too thin and attack at all fronts, send generals to die at the front line, retreat and focus everything on taking over a pile of rubble.

It is hilarious, if only it wasn’t so sad.

Russia has incompaciated the second largest military (a true near-peer) in just a handful of months. Like it or not, their tactics have worked. Read up on military feints and Maskarovka, nobody is better than this than the Russians: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_military_deception

Russia has incapacitated the second largest military indeed: their own. Trying to invade a country which a couple of years ago didn't have any real army to speak of, and failing terribly. They lost Kyiv, they lost Kharkiv, hopefully after Russian economy crashes they will also loose their territorial integrity.

"Russia has employed maybe 20% of their military personnel"

That is a shallow measure. Most modern armies have "tooth to tail" [0] ratio less than 1:5. Combat-ready units constitute a minority of the entire military personnel everywhere, and Russia has deployed most of those in Ukraine. It cannot afford to deploy all of them, as it has long borders and shores that need patrolling.

Russia no doubt has a huge cache of Soviet-era weapons, but it has already burnt through much of that cache, much like Ukraine did. Given that they are transferring T-62 to the theater, deploying ancient Kh-22 missiles and that the dud rate for both missiles and artillery shells seems to be between 10-30 per cent, it seems that they are already down to using older, less reliable stock. That does not mean that they ran out of modern stuff completely, but rather that the newer stock is depleted enough that they need to be careful about that.

For me, the humiliation consists of the current stalemate. I don't require any massive counteroffensives from the Ukrainians to see the Russian advance as a failure. They didn't manage to take freaking Kharkiv that lies just 40 km from the border and they fought three months over Mariupol, besieged from all sides.

This is just incompatible with the image of an unstoppable bear that Russia cultivated before the war.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth-to-tail_ratio

Can you provide any evidence that they actually went after Kharkiv in earnest other than blowing up some military targets? They'll probably eventually take that city as it is historically and majority Russian.

As for the (retrofitted) T-62s, those are mostly given to the Donboss militias and a perfect tank to use in the already conquered rear. They are still armor and they still function. US also runs some old gear if you didn't know.

As for the dud rates, I'd expect that for older missiles. Their new stuff (which is more advanced than anything the US has) is less than 10%. And it's clear they're not running out any time soon despite western media claims two months ago that their weapons stocks were days from depletion.

On the other hand, the dud rate for western supplied Javalins and NLAWs is around 80% as reported by Ukrainian military personnel. And it's actually now illegal for Ukrainian troops to publicly criticize the effectiveness of western supplied weapons.

Let's stop projecting and be honest about what's actually going on.

Russia's advanced new stuff is mostly vaporware. Like the Armata tank, which was accepted into service a couple of years ago, but can't be manufactured. Or MiG-35, which isn't particularly modern, but can't be manufactured either.

If you plan a quick win and instead manage to claim 2 provinces after you flattened them, that is humiliating.

Everything has its costs. I'm speculating here, as Russian officials never claimed quick victory. But my theory is that they indeed had a plan to quickly capture big Ukrainian cities (not necessarily Kiev) with help of some traitors. This plan did not work well, probably Ukrainian special services managed to prevent that plan. So they regrouped at east border and slowly demolishing Ukrainian army. It's not humiliating. It's smart. Many wars were lost because warmasters were too stubborn and tried to continue already lost cause. That's not the case here. Right now I don't see any change for Ukraine to survive this war. Their army will be destroyed, Russia apparently is too strong and did not collapse under sanctions and probably can continue its military pressure for months if not years, while Ukrainian front is breaking apart and more soldiers are giving up every day.

There's Russian adage: don't say gop until you jump over. This war is far from ending and early Russian mistakes did not turned into significant issues.

Claiming only 20% of the country is humiliating?

I suppose they can fortify that and come back in 10 years and take the rest.

Remember when Hannibal destroyed the Roman armies? That sure was humiliating.

What happened next?

It is yes. Because their initial goal here was instead to go in and overthrow the government in a couple days, while not expecting any significant international response.

There is a huge difference between their initial expectations, and what actually happened. And now they are in too deep to undo their mistakes.

I'll send you a $1,000 over Venmo or in Bitcoin if you can share where even a single top level Russian official said that amoung their goals was to take the capital.

They landed airborne troops at the capital, and had a very long convoy headed for the capital.

Regardless of what they said, they tried to attack the capital. That says more about whether they tried to take the capital than public statements.

> their goals was to take the capital.

You think those large amount of troops and resources, that were in the process of attempting to surround and take the capital were just sacrificed for no reason?

They spent a lot of resources on those attacks, and they didn't gain much from them.

Surely you should consider that it was a mistake, and don't think it was intentional for them to have taken such losses with little to show for it.

You're thinking like a westerner as are so many other armchair generals. Russia military doctrine has more tolerance for loosing people and equipment if that helps achieve their end goal.

But you understand that there isn't some end goal that doing this failed offensive helps right?

As in, they could have just not done a failed attack on the capital, and instead focused their troops on other regions to achieve some other goal.

However many resources they sacrificed on that attack could have been sacrificed elsewhere more effectively, which shows pretty clearly that this specific failed offensive wasn't some success and instead was a failed offensive that they had to back off on.