What is your logic or rationale for this view? I think the contrary view is easy to argue - Russia is one of the head states in BRICS which is the largest international union in the world both by population, and which has also economically surpassed the G7 as well. And militarily they're fighting a war against an endless stream of forcibly conscripted bodies being armed and funded by the entirety of NATO, Europe, and a few odd balls -- and they're winning, at a cost of < 10% GDP. What other countries could match that?
I think you mean they're obstinately continuing the invasion they thought would be over in three days. Sending an endless stream of regulars, conscripts, and prisoners against people defending their homeland with drones and secondhand cold war gear.
A million casualties for a territorial stalemate is certainly one kind of winning.
Ukraine had a standing army in the hundreds of thousands, numerous heavily fortified front cities, and a substantial chunk of highly motivated 'nationalists' within their armed forces. The rhetoric about Ukraine falling in 3-4 days was completely nonsensical and came from Western official sources, including the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. [1] The only time it surfaced in Russian propaganda was from television personalities who were obviously being boisterous and hyperbolic. That the West would publicly release such 'enticing' rhetoric prior to the war itself is interesting.
The war also isn't a stalemate by any interpretation. In the nominal sense Russian forces are making steady progress, most recently having entered into Pokrovosk [2]. But beyond that - war is rarely, if ever, a real stalemate when there are still large scale combat operations playing out. Rather it transforms into a war of attrition, where progress becomes non-linear. Ukraine is in the midst of a severe manpower shortage, but they still have enough forces to competently hold their defensive lines. But at the point that their manpower gets stretched just beyond that point, everything will collapse rapidly. In a way it's vaguely akin to a siege, except the resource under pressure tends to be manpower instead of e.g. food or water.
> The only time [the rhetoric about Ukraine falling in 3-4 days] surfaced in Russian propaganda was from television personalities who were obviously being boisterous and hyperbolic
The former commander-in-chief of Russian ground forces recently gave an interview in which he said that everyone expected Ukraine to fall within three days, due to severe intelligence mistakes regarding Ukraine that reinforced the belief that 70% of Ukrainians would welcome Russian invaders with open arms. Except: https://bsky.app/profile/wartranslated.bsky.social/post/3m7a...
It could be worth mentioning that this guy had been the commander-in-cheif from April 2012 until December 2013, did not hold any post since then and retired in 2018. Otherwise people might get an impression he had been in the military in 2022 and describes an actual state of the military instead of his opinion.
1. Manpower does not matter anymore. Drones and (soon) robots do.
2. I remember media sphere prior/at the time of invasion rather well. The general consensus was that Ukraine would fall in less than two weeks. The invasion itself started on the Fatherhood Defender's Day and I believe was supposed to be completed before the International Women's Day to make a good picture of Russian soldiers gifting flowers to Ukrainian women.
Drones have a problem. The reason they're so effective right now is because they're dirt cheap. A $10,000 drone can take out a $10,000,000 tank. And it gets into the issue of how money isn't stuff. Because that $10,000 drone isn't made of much and can be easily pumped out pretty quickly, whereas that tank involved a massive amount of supplies. Even if you have all the money in the world, this is a losing battle.
But as you try to make more sophisticated drones, to the point of aiming to fully replace men on the front, they start to become more and more expensive. You want them to be resistant to electronic warfare and you probably don't want to rely on fiber optics so you need some sort of fully autonomous processing unit on board, capable of generalized scenario processing. And you want them to be able to fly for a really long time, so you don't have to have deployment points front close to the front. And so on. You are gradually just reinventing the MQ-9 Reapers and their $30million+ price tag. And suddenly you've lost all the benefit of drones.
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Russia started peace negotiations with Ukraine 4 days after invading. If you genuinely expect complete capitulation within 2 weeks, you don't start negotiating for peace after 4 days when the enemy would be in a relative position of strength. For that matter, a lot of their early maneuvers were clearly more performative than military in style, like the endless convoys which looked imposing but served no purpose and imposed logistical issues that Russia clearly was not prepared to deal with.
In reality I think Russia did expect there was a high probability that Ukraine would rapidly agree to a settlement, and absent Western involvement that probably would have been correct. And similarly I think the US was probably expecting that Russian forces would just scatter and run at the first sight of Western arms. In reality the optimistic view of both sides ended up not panning and so everybody ended up with a much more real war than they probably expected.
Leaving the price formation nuances of some US peace-time military artifacts aside, my point is that manpower a.k.a. human soldiers become more and more obsolete and should not be treated as a main criteria perhaps already in the current Russian-Ukraine conflict.
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4 days is exactly the time frame to understand that initial calculations have gone wrong and it is time for damage control (try to pull out, initiate peace negotiations, etc).
War was, remains, and will probably always be a deadly game of logistics. Even relatively small divisions of soldiers will go through literally tons of supplies per day. And so getting the stuff to supply these soldiers is essentially what war is. It's why the Russian winter is so famous a weapon in war - it's not just literally freezing invading armies, but making logistics vastly more difficult while simultaneously imposing new requirements on those logistics. This is the reason things like cities are important in war. It's not just some abstract concept of strategic/defensive value, but because they are key points for organizing and advancing logistics. And throughout this entire process humans are the key driver of your logistics, both literally and figuratively.
Also even in terms of pure destruction and death, drones get like 99% of the media attention and analysis, yet good old fashioned artillery is still responsible for something like 80% of deaths. Drones are completely reshaping the modern battlefield, but they're working as a compliment to everything else rather than just overriding it. That might change in the distant future, but it's far from where we are today.
Well they were never aiming to occupy the entire country, the armistice negotiations were for once the decapitation attack on Kyiv succeeded they could negotiation territory annexation and a puppet government.
> The rhetoric about Ukraine falling in 3-4 days was completely nonsensical
I am basing this on the blitz attack on Kyiv, not anyone's rhetoric. I guess in your mind those paratroopers at Hostomel and armor column from Belarus were going to Amazon Prime their food, ammunition, fuel.
There's also the post-invasion rounds of conscription, recruitment from prisons, and the infamous Prigozhin videos where he tells the MoD to stop sending so much ammunition because Wagner was too well-supplied on account of a multiyear war being totally the thing that the Kremlin planned for.
> including the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Who, in this conflict, have a much better reputation for calling Russia's strategy than Russia or you. And they'd probably show you the receipts if you engaged them directly.
> it transforms into a war of attrition
Okay I stopped caring, everything from here on out seems like you giving a lecture at a military academy but I have no reason to believe you know the first thing about the subject. Based on your another commentary it seems more like you are trying to make the Russian invasion seem to be proceeding normally by changing what normal is.
Pokrovsk? Great example of Russia's strategic incompetence. It was eliminated as a military asset a year ago, and they simply could have moved on. But because of fixation on toponym political victories they have continued to throw resources at it pointlessly. Pokrovsk has probably been a net win for Ukraine.
I haven't been following events too closely lately and didn't realize we were already at the [x isn't even strategically relevant] point with Pokrovsk. I'd assumed that city would hold longer. You might want to edit the Wiki - they're still accidentally calling it a strategic city.
Propaganda ate your brain if you really believe BRICS is a real alliance or that it matches, or surpasses (sic!), G7.
> And militarily they're fighting a war against an endless stream of forcibly conscripted bodies
By… employing endless stream of their own meat and paying them obscene (locally) money.
Difference is that Ukraine fights for survival.
Reading your comment, I’m a bit confused about your moral compass. Would you also call Polish Armed Forces during WW2 “endless stream of forcibly conscripted bodies” when they resisted numerically superior opponent?
BRICS overcame the G7 economically in 2018 with the difference growing sharply since then. [1] Currently BRICS has about 36% of the world GDP vs about 30% for G7. The world is changing far faster than most realize. Back in 2000 it was 43% for G7 vs 21% for BRICS. The world's changing a lot faster than most people realize.
As for people voluntarily fighting for a country - I think that's certainly a noble cause. Not only the cause itself, but because it exemplifies that the leaders of that country have shaped a system that people are willing to die, and kill, over. It's a validation of a society. Of course it can also be a proxy for desperation - as you mention Russian enlistment offerings are rather extremely generous, but at least it remains a system that people opt into knowing full well what it entails.
But on the other hand I find forced conscription barbaric. You are taking people who do not believe something is worth dying over, and forcing them to die, and kill, over it. I think it will be something looked upon in the future like we look upon slavery today. Is it a necessary evil? Maybe, but people argued the exact same of slavery in the past as well.
only relevant for local buyers, world economic power is still denominated in GDP, a flawed metric yet one that can’t be gamed. And G7 > BRICS by far in this
A dollar by itself is meaningless because prices people pay are not meaningfully impacted by a global market. For instance you pay 800% more for a bottle of water in the US than you do in the literal desert of Saudi Arabia. [1] So comparing dollar for dollar is meaningless.
This is likely also why G7 economies are relatively shrinking. There's less of a focus on "things" and more of a focus on gaming stuff to increase paper wealth, generally to the benefit of a very small percent of society.
BRICS isn't real. There's literally no BRICS union. These countries talk like there is, but in practice they don't do anything collaboratively. BRICS is just their propaganda tool. Empty words.
The peace treaty will clarify that, but I think the more important thing is the establishment of a multipolar world order. That, in and of itself, can lead to conflict, but I also have some optimism that it might bring in a paradoxical peace in the same way that nuclear weapons did. The reason nukes have been good is because it makes it clear that war is unwinnable which effectively ended direct conflict between world powers. Yet of course proxy wars are alive and well with Ukraine being the king of them all. And the US may be unable to defeat Russia in this war, but it's also equally unlikely that Russia could defeat the US in a similar scenario. So, "The only winning move is not to play."
Of course this says nothing at all about relatively small regional conflicts, but in the grand scheme of things I'm far more concerned about WW3 than I am about these. That's not to understate the impact of what can (and is) happening in these sort of conflicts, but at the end of the day I don't think humanity will ever 'evolve' beyond war, and so in the mean time I think the goal should be to not end our species over something that will inevitably look like a pointless waste of life in a few decades. Keep in mind that WW1 was unironically called 'The War to End All Wars' before we started attaching an ordinal to it.
> The reason nukes have been good is because it makes it clear that war is unwinnable which effectively ended direct conflict between world powers. Yet of course proxy wars are alive and well with Ukraine being the king of them all.
Not looking forward to being your proxywar or small regional conflict. It’s amazingly frustrating to be dragged into this without any provocation or possibility to actually affect the situation. Just unfortunate geography I guess.
I don’t think nukes stopped the direct conflict between world powers. They made it possible for the first time. There is no reach to US without them.
War in Europe or parts of Asia is easy the old fashioned way and seems to happen on a regular basis.
The peace treaty? What peace treaty? Multipolar world order is a buzzword that failed states like Russia certainly like to spout on their media channels to try and prove that they are not complete failures, and that in fact losing a million people to barely advance a frontline over 3 years is just and necessary. At this point they should be really worried about China just waltzing in on Siberia and taking whatever they need.
They are only doing ok because of Trump’s support for Russia. Europe badly needs to get its shit together but if the US actually engaged, it could end the war promptly.
