Surrender is not an option. Unfortunately, everyone (men and women included) must do their duty to stop a genocide.
Surrender is an option, none of those things is worse than death. I would not make that trade. If the Ukrainian men want to stop it they can still volunteer, so can anyone else. And it looks like they will lose the war anyway, so they’ll have to surrender anyway except now after a huge amount of death and destruction. Ukraine is heavily indebted and the belief that some Marshal plan reconstruction would enable them to pay that off is unrealistic.
Being tortured, raped and beaten until you die is not worse than death? Beg to disagree.
> And it looks like they will lose the war anyway
Highly unlikely. Russia is bleeding men they can afford to lose for now, but don't in the long term. Russia has absolutely no way of achieving victory, so by definition Ukraine can't lose. It can't really win either, because Russia as it is today cannot accept defeat.
We disagree on the framing and likely outcomes. I doubt I could your mind so I won’t even try.
They have shown no serious improvement in military tactics or armaments.
Meanwhile Ukraine is being armed by half the world, and has shown crazy advancements in unmanned tech (like hitting Russian ships with underwater unmanned vehicles hundreds of km from Ukrainian ports).
Russia cannot win. Even if they somehow manage to conquer the whole of Ukraine which will not happen easily or soon, it will still be at best a Pyrrhic conquest at the expense of guerilla warfare.
Ignoring the details of your statement I will instead focus on the inherent contradiction of using the slow pace of advancement as evidence of lack of prowess at the same time as confidently stating that gorilla warfare would render such actions a Pyrrhic victory.
I would suggest that maybe Russia knows that, they dealt with a serious insurgency in Chechnya. I would also suggest that the slow progress is in part intentional in order to maintain defined battlefield lines and avoid such insurgencies. They know it costs more in Russian lives but that is price they are willing to pay. People who want to fight them can go out and meet them on the battlefield.
Oh, you're either very naive, very stupid, or Russian. You mean to tell me that when Putin announced a 3 day special military operation, it was on purpose that it's taking 2 years of a meatgrinder with hundreds of thousands of Russian casualties to take barely any land? Cool, makes sense if you're braindead.
Russia has been planning for this war since before 2008 it is ridiculous to think that they thought it would only take 3 days, if they did they would have started the war much sooner. They knew there were in for the long haul and had already made steps to prepare their economy for long term sanctions. There were not completely prepared but prepared enough.
Additionally, this conflict sits within a broader US/China conflict and a long drawn out conflict with Russia benefits China to which Russia is largely a vassal state, now more so than ever. China is prepping for a great powers war and understandably would like to undermine the west substantially before that happens. Bogging the west down in a series of regional conflicts is an effective way to do that. China would much rather their adversaries economically implode than to fight a massively destructive WWIII.
I know you're probably Russsian or identify strongly with Russia, so it doesn't matter what I say, but think about it...
Why would Russia get themselves involved into a protracted multi-year war meatgrinder? They know what happened in Afghanistan.
Also, if they were planning a long war, why would they throw paratroopers at Hostomel airport right outside of Kyiv? Why would they throw multiple brigades attacking Kyiv and getting stuck in a traffic jam? Look at a map, Kyiv is not far from the Belarus border, and the capital, but any such attack would be extremely isolated and risk being cut off. Also, the Ukrainian government could just run away to Lviv and coordinate the fight from there, so Kyiv would be little more than a symbolic victory if they managed to capture it.
It's obvious they were hoping to capture Kyiv quickly and have Ukraine fall apart. They weren't ready for a prolonged fight.
> They also said they would not invade and then they did
> That's the problem with trusting Western media
The same western media that called it that Russia will invade?
Russia is worried they will be Balkanized by the west and that is clearly against the interest of the Russian leadership. To not understand that Russian are willing to pay an enormous cost to do so is to not understand Russian history, beyond Afghanistan where they really didn’t want to be there in the first place.
As a policy I would rather see Russian tanks turned around and go into China. The West courted China in order to undermine Russia but underestimated China and overestimated Russia. Russia was successfully turned against Germany in WWII and if the west was smarter we would swallow our pride and do that again for WWIII. Having your enemies engaged in destructive conflicts is a big part of realpolitik and an essential part of remaining a dominant hegemon.
I’m repeatedly bemused by those who emphatically declare that Russia will fail because it is corrupt as if they have discovered something that the Russians themselves are not aware of. Russia has taken a learn-by-doing approach which is the only way of improving war-fighting capability in such an endemically corrupt country. This externalizes the negative signal for bad ideas, those failed excursions having died are no longer able to make future decisions. The average intelligence of those who remain has gone up. To paraphrase Napoleon; we mustn’t teach our enemies to fight by fighting them too often.
The media is telling the truth when it’s in their interest to do so. I’m not sure how you are trying to generalize this to them always being right when clearly they contradict themselves on so many matters. In the weeks before the invasion I was telling right wingers that they are about to look like fools when Russia really does invade. US intel provided proof by noting the movement of blood supplies to Western Russia which would only be done in preparation for a war as opposed to the exercises that was claimed.
And there are many things worse than death. Do you know how Russian combat medics are trained? Instructors pick a prisoner, cut off their palm, then instruct the medic on how to stop the bleeding. Then they cut the arm off up to elbow, teach how to stop the bleeding, and repeat it until the prisoner has no limbs left. Stories like these are a common occurrence. The number of documented war crimes has exceeded 100 000, and investigators don't even have access to most of occupied land.
It is natural that no-one wants to take the risk of ending up in the situation I described, but at the same time, someone has to take the risk, otherwise Russians will simply exterminate Ukraine and Ukrainians as they exist today. Like at Uvalde, more people will die as a result.
Unless there’s plentiful evidence for the above (it’s possible one-off, I suppose), I think you’ve gone full fruit-loop territory.
I humbly suggest you look in the mirror and ask what’s actually going on in your head, and why. This sort of distorted extreme thinking is what creates monsters.
And people here are taught since childhood that this not about being an useful little soldier for the government, but an essential duty to your friends and family, because when the situation gets tough, there won't be anyone else to protect them. A huge professional military that can come to your rescue - like the US Army - is a luxury that most people in the world don't have.
I don’t agree with the framing again, but again I don’t think I’ll be changing anyone’s mind here.
Vaccines are a good example of this. Everyone is better off when they take a personal risk to eradicate polio from the entire group. In the process, some people will suffer side-effects ranging from allergic reaction to even death in the worst case, but that is the sacrifice that needs to be made. Unfortunately, modern imbalance towards individualism has produced a generation of parents who cannot tolerate any risk, choose the selfish option and leave their children unvaccinated, leading to re-emergence of old infectious diseases that kill and maim more children than the universal vaccination would.
Individual and collective interests need to be fairly balanced, and Ukraine has done that by preferring older conscripts over younger ones, but you will never find enough volunteers for any truly shitty situation that requires more people than the tiny fraction of natural-born risk-takers who fill the ranks of firefighters and other dangerous professions.
Slavery is always evil, including military slavery ("conscription").
Also, the guerilla scenario is not that realistic. Russians are experts at fighting guerillas and insurections, they have accumulated centuries of experience in it. That's because they've been a multi-ethic empire consisting of a lot of conquered unhappy minorities for a long time now, so they had to learn how to keep them in check. They have world-class spy network and surveilance state, so that any dissidents will be quickly found (torture enough people and someone will give up the location of their guerilla relative etc.). Moreover, they begin the occupation of a given region with mass-murdering people who have leadership capabilities ( see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre ), so that there's literally no one left who could organize the guerillas into anything meaningful.
For context - in the part of Poland occupied by Germans during WW2, there was a vast Polish underground state (there were 200k guerillas soldiers alone, but there were also underground schools, universities giving diplomas, underground theaters etc.). That was all operating under Gestapo's nose, and in spite of heavy military commitment to occupy Poland. Meanwhile, in the Soviet-occupied part of Poland, there was practically nothng. Russians were that much better than Germans at squashing dissidents.