It's sometimes called "The Second Thirty Years' War", although I feel that labelling is misleading, as is, potentially, the core thesis. Careful reading of the diplomatic history illustrates that WW2, despite our popular notions, was not entirely inevitable, but, at least so far as Poland was concerned, was one more in a very long list of NSDAP f#ckups. 30 Year War Part II is a workable paradigm when considering the large scale causes of the 20th century conflicts. It's deeply, bitterly ironic that Europe was done in by the same intellectual framework that allowed them to dominate the rest of the world. Turns out, once you start throwing subhuman labels around, it's just a matter of time before the label lands on your neighbors.
People consisted other nations and ethnicities subhuman as long as they existed. Europe was, AFAIK, the first place on Earth that (1) considered subjugated people equal before the law (if they converted), (2) banned slavery and (3) imposed slavery ban on other nations.
The Mongols and the ancient Persians didn't even make anyone convert.
> banned slavery
If you don't count all the colonies...
> imposed slavery ban on other nations
It is a very admirable thing to do, but who else could do it? They had the most powerful militaries in that era.
Colonies are exactly what I'm talking about.
> It is a very admirable thing to do, but who else could do it? They had the most powerful militaries in that era.
Nobody else even wanted to.
Tell me more about how slavery was outlawed in Haiti - especially during the French Revolution with its "liberté, égalité, fraternité". Tell me about Belgian Congo. Tell me about the close relative of slavery, indentured servitude, in the British Empire.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-produce-million...
https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/europe/100000008299178/u...
Freedom is paid for in blood. People forget that after a few generations of peace, and then we have to pay again because we grew complacent.
>You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.
We see movies where artillery is always just raining down from the sky. It seemed so random.
It blows my mind we had complex patterns and essenstially formations and defensive walls and boxes to protect a position and just wow.
That must have been hell on the receiving end.
Ukraine’s increasing ability to hit deep targets suggests to me this strategy of Russia’s will not work. The offensive pace is too slow for the immense economic costs.
Putin (following Dugin) has expressed the goal of building a Russian empire stretching from Vladivostok to Lisbon. I suppose that's just sabre-rattling; but Leningrad is very exposed, at the end of a long land corridor bordered on either side by NATO members. I'm convinced he hopes to dominate all the land between Russia and the Baltic.
As is the Eastern front during WW2, same thing, the sheer numbers are mind boggling.
The artillery production mentioned here reminds me of how scales changed from the beginning to the end of the war. At the outbreak, IIRC Russia produced ~35K artillery shells per month and was using ~25K per day. By 1917, there was a battle where a combined total of ONE MILLION artillery shells were fired (between the two sides) in a period of roughly 4 hours.
Every war seems to have a defining technology that's new and makes it unlike previous wars. This is rarely clear to military leadership before the war starts so tends to mean the calculations are off. For example, the US Civil War was the first war fought with mass-produced, long-range, fast-loading and accurate rifles, which led to >600K deaths. By comparison, the US lost 400k servicemen in WW2.
In WWI, that defining technology was really artillery. To a lesser extent it was machine guns too. Air power became a factor late in the war but the concepts of aerial bombardment, strategic bombardment and air superiority wouldn't really come into their own until WW2. The real solution to artillery and fixed positions ultimately became the tank But WWi ended before this really took off. Like air power, it would become a huge factor in WW2.
Why this is important is because the war in Ukraine is in many ways similar to WWI. Air power isn't really a factor but the most defining factors are artillery, trenches, fortifications and terrain, most notably the Dnipro River.
Russia has built 3 lines of impressive fortifications that mirror German positions in WWI. Russia's strategy is essentially to dig in, use the river as a barrier and wait for the West to get bored or lose patience with supplying Ukraine such that Ukraine sues for peace and Russia gains territory east of the river, creating a land bridge to Crimea.
But in a WWI style war, artillery is incredibly important. It can be used to cover an advance into a fortified position (eg a creeping barrage [2]). These were tactics that were developed and learned through WWI.
Oh and if you want to see how devastating this can be look no further than Verdun, the so-called "Red Zone" (Zone Rouge) [3].
[1]: https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-55-blu...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_(artillery)#Creeping_b...
[3]: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-i/zone-rouge.html