Russia is starting to lose ground in Ukraine(economist.com) |
Russia is starting to lose ground in Ukraine(economist.com) |
Now to be clear I'm completely opposed to the war in Ukraine, and I'm quite happy to see Russia getting pushed back. My hope would be that Ukraine takes back all of its remaining territory. But, I think there are at least some justifications that could have made sense for someone who thought the war would be easy, and who did not care about the human cost either side would bear.
A counterexample comes from post-2022 Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland: every single one of them is digging anti-tank trenches along the border with Russia, installing everything from surveillance systems to reinforced bunkers and pillboxes, preparing minefields to be laid and bridges to be blown up. Things have gone so far that some of them are discussing dismantling railway lines connecting with Russia to prevent them from being used by invading forces.
No such preparations can be seen on the Russian side of the border, because in the post-Cold War world, everyone recognizes that an attack from Europe is a delusional fantasy. There's no will and no means for that.
Putin couldn't let Ukrainians join the EU, start getting all the EU fund money and actually started living like Europeans. Russian population would see that at a large scale and start asking questions. He couldn't get back the influence over the country diplomatically so he resorted to terror.
Edit: I also wanted to add that this was the reason Putin and other Russian propagandists have been calling Ukrainians the brotherly nation (to show them how they care about them), the nazis (to show that their government is harmful) and that Ukraine doesn't even exist as a country (to show that they should all be the same people under the same borders).
The “NATO expansion” so often mentioned by Russian apologists, are free nations correctly observing they are more safe against their past oppressor by joining NATO. Russia is a bully, and smaller nations are strong together.
For Russian leadership, an independent Ukraine was fine as long as Ukrainian leadership was controlled by Kremlin.
As soon as Ukraine started moving towards the west, Russia invaded.
most of the russian land is frozen tundra, and even if global warming improves that slightly it'll still be mostly to largely useless.
crimea, meanwhile, is a highly desirable warm water port that has been the subject of many conflicts throughout the ages.
ukraine is a breadbasket and produces 40%-50% of the food of all of russia but with 3.5% of the land. a considerable number of soviet era heavy industry was there, such as the azon steel plant, and it is the gateway to europe, the black sea, and anatolia.
Without Ukraine, and probably soon without Transnistria, and maybe even Belarus, Russia can be quarantined and contained. Eventually the Russians will decide they want to be more European than they want to be North Korea.
Personal survival. He needed a war to justify the dismantling of the remaining democratic institutions. That the war lasts plays in his personal interests also.
P.S. Don't forget that he is 73 years old.
Putin been killing civilians back from 2001. This diagram cleary shows that together with propaganda machine you can drastically shift population opinion https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/28383.jpeg.
Simply, they underestimate how much Ukraine is able to resist.
Like so many other situations, we have to wait for him to die.
moscow always called the shots in kyev and they prefer to keep that going.
also don't underestimate the black sea access and the pan-slavic, pan-orthodox "3rd rome" thing -- those also shape perception.
Now I’m just convinced it is all propaganda and I blocked those YouTubers from my feed.
First Biden's timidity and dithering over arms, which looks ridiculous today and led to so much needless difficulty and suffering for Ukraine. And then Trump, quite clearly favouring Putin and (obscenely) shaking down Ukraine at its most vulnerable point with the 'mineral deal'.
It's hard to imagine any earlier US administration not backing Ukraine to the hilt - pouring in advanced arms, strangling Russia with much harder sanctions, maybe even patrolling the skies of western Ukraine. The chance to take down the worst sort of nationalist tyrant, and one of the world's nastiest troublemakers? And one of the USA's longest standing enemy countries to boot? What President before these last two wouldn't have jumped at it?
War started in 2014. Obama did nothing.
This ignores/forgets the fact that Biden had the Ukraine crisis directly after Covid ending so he basically couldn't actually go all in on the conflict.
>It's hard to imagine any earlier US administration not backing Ukraine to the hilt
Earlier administrations were operating in a much better economic environment and had a much higher international standing. Don't forget that outside of Europe US standing was dropping already before Trump 2.
There's a strong case that they didn't even defeat the nazis, that was done by the Soviets.
The Soviet Union defeated the Nazis with US materiel. Without that, they probably don't get it done.
And even if what you said were true, the US still should have supported Ukraine more than it did, and should do so now.
With Lend-Lease equipment. No matter what way you cut it, multiple nations defeated the Nazis together.
Ukraine has long decided that they will not be deterred by the threat of nuclear bombs. They seem to be determined to win back the territory that they have lost or at least put themselves into a better bargaining position.
It's wildly unclear whether that calculus is too risky, too cautious, or completely unmoored from reality. About all that we do know is that Russia hasn't nuked anybody... yet.
Which means there's an intermediate step: carrying out an above ground nuclear test. This obviously violates the Test Ban Treaty, but is a lower step than just blowing away Kyiv.
And territorial expansion and conquest of neighboring countries is Russia's MO, not Ukraine's.
Oreshnik alone could decapitate the EU in under 30 minutes.
Spoiler: it's absolutely useless. Russia does have great weapons that CAN hurt a lot, but Oreshnik is not one of them.
Why is he even a thing? A guy wrote a couple of books with some failed predictions? Only thing I can think of is that he mostly tells people what they want to hear, with some minor bit of contrarianism to have the semblance of telling truth to power. Add in self-promotion, and I guess that is the recipe for success (or at least being internet quotable)?
A fact: Zelenski as well as his predecessor Poroshenko came into the office not by coup, but were elected by Ukrainian people.
Panslavism has died in 19th century when other slavic states figured out that it is just different name for Russian empire. Then panslavism was revived after 1945 as Eastern Block. It has been an economical disaster.
EU membership isn't the golden ticket it used to be. Russia basically had an inside man in there for years with the Orban administration in Hungary. Member nations like Greece, Malta and Bulgaria also seem to have experienced more brain drain to the higher income countries in the bloc than they have in economic and industrial development.
As for the golden ticket metaphor, I agree, but when the country is so economically and institutionally behind than the rest of the EU, this would still benefit them a lot. All Eastern countries experienced big emigration but a lot of the citizens previously having emigrated are now returning.
The US can't subdue Iran, leave alone Russia. Or China.
But the original question was whether the US should be supporting Ukraine. You keep wanting to make this about the US going head-to-head against Russia or China, but that's not actually the subject under discussion here.
https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/us-loses-51st-mq9-...
and putin owns trump, so that's not a nuke thing
By the time the western allies reached Berlin the Soviets had already wrecked the Germans.
No one is arguing the US fought on the eastern front, the argument is over who suffered the most.
Don't take my word for it, read "When Titans Clashed" by Glantz and House.
http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-best-version-of....
Russia's definition or the western concept of land grab.
Putin laid it out very clearly in his speeches. They are not interested in a land grab, they want to denazify The Ukraine and liberate the Russian speaking regions.
Denazification means more banderaites and by extension no more NATO.
Target has been conquering Kyiv and installing pro-russian vassal government like in Belarus. He tried to, as we have seen first 3 months, but spectacularly failed.
Everything after first 3 months is grinding war to save face without a clearly defined target.
What you're saying is what Western media has made up since day one. Per usual.
The second target is denazification. Which means getting rid of the Nuland installed regime.
