OK, I’m on the record from the start saying Ukraine would lose the war militarily. The counteroffensive has failed. NATO equipped and trained an entire army for Ukraine and it didn’t even get to the main defensive lines.
The Americans told the Ukrainians to charge entrenched, mined positions without air superiority and in the face of an enemy with more artillery than them.
That went about as you’d expect.
The Ukrainians are not taking back the territory they have lost, let alone Crimea, which was always a ludicrous fantasy.
Ukrainians are dying like flies and I am firmly on the side that says that their casualty numbers have to be higher than the Russians, because the Russians are launching a ton more artillery shells and have air superiority. Meanwhile six million refugees have moved to the EU, and I’ll bet most of them will never return to Ukraine, which was a depressed and extremely corrupt nation even before the war.
Russia has not been squeezed out by sanctions and is not going to be. China will not let it happen and most of Africa and Latin America are on their side, while India wants more trade with them. The nation hurt most by sanctions is probably Germany, which is losing much of its energy price sensitive industries (very important industries that have been world leaders for over 100 years in many cases.) Since Germany is the industrial heartland of the EU (and cemented that by using the EURO and enforced austerity to devastate other EU countries industrial base), this will hit the EU hard.
Russia, meanwhile, is churning out ammunition and weapons and buying them from North Korea and Iran, who don’t care at all about US sanctions, for obvious reasons. In the West, weapons warehouses are bare and we don’t have the capacity to restore them, nor are we ramping up production quickly.
So Russia has a larger population and army, and more weapons and equipment than the Ukrainians. They have air and artillery superiority.
The only road forward for anyone who isn’t a horrific bastard is a negotiated peace. Russia (sorry) is going to get the Russian parts of Ukraine, and Ukraine is just going to have to suck it up. If the war continues, Russia may attempt to grab the entire coastline and that would make Ukraine a land-locked country.
The longer the war goes on, the worse for Ukrainians. The war is lost and a negotiated peace will save tens of thousands of lives and make it so that Ukraine is less of a complete basket-case after the war.
There will be a guerilla war after any peace. It could be won by the Ukrainians, but I doubt it. Eastern Ukraine is flat and occupied mostly by Russian speaking sympathizers who want to be in Russia.
Sometimes you lose the war on the ground. Russia will not get everything it wanted, but they will get some of what they wanted and so will Ukraine, in the sense that they may get real security guarantees or NATO membership after the war is over.
But Ukraine has lost. Pretending it hasn’t is ridiculous and monstrous. Throwing more hastily conscripted soldiers into the meat grinder is stupid and evil.
The best possible end at this point is a negotiated peace.
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