A year ago, basically nobody gave Ukraine a chance to hold out more than a couple of weeks maximum. And here we are.
This war is very much undecided and can go both ways. Russian collapse is far from certain, but also far from impossible.
Because for this platform the definition of "victory" is not "did Russia collapse ?" but rather "did Russia loose more than they gained ?". And as time goes by the cost (both economically and politically) of the war is increasing (steeply) and the gains are stalling (at best).
The goal of the western world is not to "beat" Russia, but rather to show that launching any kind of agression against it is not a clever move.
Fragmentation is possible but I don't believe it, at least for now.
Russia loses soldiers but they obtain much more soldiers with perfect battle training, they acquire priceless experience as to which weapons are effective and so on.
It's not that simple.
If anything, threat to eastern Europe is as huge as ever.
Sometimes I think that Putin slows this war on purpose. To train more soldiers, to weed out bad blood from commanders, to put their weapon to real test. Basically to build a real army.
Funny how those soldiers with perfect battle training still suffer from enormous incompetence, resulting in routs such as in Vuhledar. The units that fought there were reportedly Russian elite marine units. They died like flies in an unforgiving terrain, without air and even arty support.
"Perfect" soldiers would not even start an assault in such conditions.
Now I'm no expert in mechanized warfare but I think when you're caught by artillery fire on an open road with no cover you're not supposed to sit there and wait to get hit. Advance past the kill zone, retreat, or disperse but don't stop and wait for orders. Apparently this is the result of "perfect battle training" a year into the war.
Don't be daft!
Any new Russian leader, no matter how hawkish they currently talk, knows full well that Russian forces are depleted and will be incapable of waging a "major" war for many years to come.......
That is bullshit and you know it pretty well. Most Russian missiles are shot down by AA already and the terror waves have become smaller, indicating that Russians actually need to save the remaining missiles.
Russia can almost certainly outproduce the current West when it comes to arty ammo, but that factoid, while true, is irrelevant. Western artillery is much more precise and precision is what really matters. The Russians are great in turning random fields into a pocketed lunar landscape, WWI-style, but a single Excalibur round that obliterates a Russian headquarters or ammo dump has done orders of magnitude more damage.
Ukraine alone wouldn't be able to win this, no. But Ukraine with support of countries that, together, are about 30 times richer than Russia, is going to win this. The main problem is the human cost, but that is unavoidable when fighting a horde of orcs.
"When people agree that Ukraine loses multiple times as many people for every Russian that dies"
Russian propagandists agree on all sorts of bullshit, but it would be extraordinary if the ratio of losses on a static front favored an attacker. This only happens if the attacker is much stronger than the defender, like the US vs. Iraq, but in such a situation, the defender usually collapses rather fast.
We see the very opposite, the Russians have been trying to take Bakhmut for half a year, so far unusccessfully, and throwing more and more meat into the mix. Second army of the world, more like 140th.
Sure, if you listen to the Russian propagandists and ignore the common sense in the simplest of questions, Ukraine doesn't have any chance of victory. But we'll soon get to the anniversary of Kyiv fallen in 3 days.
> That's sacrificing your population.
Big if true, but if you haven't noticed the population doesn't want to be butchered by Russians instead, or recycled by Moscow in the future wars, like Russian speakers of the 2014-annexed territories were.
> What makes anyone on this platform believe that Ukraine has any chance of victory?
So it really depends on what constitutes a victory.
Quite interesting question with the timing of this great summary of Russian information operations [1]. An excerpt:
> Russia uses the narrative that Ukraine is incapable of defeating Russia because of inherent power disparities between the two states to mitigate major Russian setbacks or Russian failures to achieve rapid successes in major offensive operations.
[1] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offens...
People on HN are engineers, how can we not comprehend that you can't just take random objects stitch them together and somehow the whole thing will still work. It's as if I'd have a rails project fire 90% of my engineering team and then hire cobol, C++ and Rust developers and then hope that if each one of them builds their own respective feature in their favourite language I can somehow stitch it together. Such a thing hardly makes sense for a random tank supply chain. Doesn't seem to work for the railway system which uses Soviet gauges and makes even less sense for an integrated air defense system.