this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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I think many people are forgetting that the larger army, vastly outnumbering Ukrainian resources in numbers, has not won a victory since the beginning of the invasion. And only presents a problem because the 2 countries cannot reliably use air power to overcome 1st WW trench warfare. Russia has defenses, but no ability to move forward. They are just trying to hold on to what they took in those first few months and are very slowly failing at that. If Ukraine can keep going, supported by the West, Russia will lose. I do not think Russia will use nukes -- any use of a nuke is basically on Russia's own land -- according to them -- and will affect them as much as Ukraine. But the question of ending the war is an interesting one. Do we see Russia continuing the war if they lose most of their ill-gotten territorial gains? What happens to those insecure areas? Are people going to rebuild, i.e. invest scarce resources in unstable areas? Or will they just become dead zones, DMZ borders?
Gotta have a highly specific definition of "victory" to say something like this
Well, let's use the Russian definitions... Did they take Kiev within 3 days? No. Did they hold Kherson? No. Are they able to stop the Ukrainians? No. There has not been any significant ground taken by the Russians in the last few months. Were they able to defend against Ukrainian attacks on the Black Sea? No. After losing their Moskva flagship, they still are suffering attacks on infrastructure, warchips, and bridges. So I am happy to use the limited in context term of victory, while not being so pendantic that it loses meaning.
Did they take back all the Russian speaking territories actually in question? Yes
The city of Dnipro would disagree.
That's outside the separatist regions.
It is Russian-speaking like OP specified, though, as well as Ukraine's 4th largest city.
If they only cared about Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk they had them and could have done nothing new, but they tried to take the whole country and so now here we are.
They never tried to take the whole country. That's just fantasy and doesn't make sense for a dozen reasons.
About two thirds of Dnipro speaks Russian at home, but ethnic Russians are only 25-30% of the population (see "Demographics"). I would imagine this is why the city is predominantly not separatists.
I mean, it used to be more pro Russian, but then Russia changed a lot of minds by actually showing up in 2014.
Riiight.
So you acknowledge it's not part of the separatist regions. Why would Russia want to occupy hostile territory?
And don't take my word (and common sense) for Russia not trying to conquer the whole of Ukraine; that's what U.S. military analysts think. Or are they Russian propagandists?
I wouldn't trust those US Military Analysts!
I don't know, ask the Chechens, or any number of similar ethnic minorities that are part of the last intact European empire. Also, hexbears stop linking me to the same weird compilation of illegible and irrelevant crap.
That link is perfectly legible and incredibly relevant. You just want to pull the "if you don't have sources I demand them and if you do they don't matter" bullshit.
I never demanded sources, because you're right, it's incredibly easy to produce a shitty source. They're mostly useful for uncontroversial things where there's a lot of subject matter experts with no real stake in the exact answers.
If you actually wanted to convince me Russia wasn't trying to conquer Ukraine, I guess you'd have to convince me I don't remember the winter of '22 right. I saw the shit happen, and I can read behind the lines well enough to know that when someone launches a full-scale invasion of a smaller neighbor starting with their capital, they mean to put it under their control, one way or another.
I didn't say you demanded sources; I said you're doing the reddit debatelord bit of "if you don't have sources I demand them and if you do they don't matter." I had already provided a source, so of course it didn't matter.
I see you're still refusing to read that source, which talks in detail about the various parts of the initial months of the war, including the northern attack towards Kiev.
I'll admit I've done that before, but... yeah, it's useless and I found that out. Same story if I gave a source for my thing unprompted. You'd tell me it's just CIA propaganda or something.
I literally can't read it very well. Does it expand on hexbear or something? I guess I could download it and zoom in, but why? You know as well as I do that one magazine photo won't change either of our minds. If Biden himself came out and said it I'd say Biden was wrong. There are no special authorities on Putin's motives.
Now, if you want to avoid being a debatelord, we could just stop now. Debate is useless, I just didn't want to agree by silence.
And you know this because...? It is actually possible to dismiss some unreliable/contradicted sources, accept others, and view more iffy sources with skepticism but not write them off entirely.
It's extremely easy to read on your phone if you zoom in. You also mentioned that you could download it, like a PDF. You just don't want to read it for some reason.
Yeah, I don't buy it. Even if I thought you were a big thinker and not just an internet person, what somebody meant by something is a judgement call, inherently.
They definitely did try to take the whole country, but had to change goals when that failec spectacularly. Then Putin concocted a new narrative and desperately wanted everyone to forget about the original one. Based on the copy paste comments from the hexbear brigade, it seems like you guys did in fact uncritically swallow all of Putns koolaid and forget very recent history in favour of the new fictional reality.
Russias referendum of annexation disagrees with your arbitrarily defined "separatist regions".