Interesting, thanks. I'd assumed it would have to come out to the surface at some point, which...brings you back to it being a juicy, stationary target even more vulerable than moving fuel in disguised milk trucks and what not.
But - let's say he does have an actual plan and this isn't complete lip service over literally nothing. If he broke ground today, how many months would it before before said ground terminal is ready to operate. And how much longer after that would Ukraine destroy it? What state will the Russian air defense, fuel network, army and economy be in by then? Better or worse than today?
Isn't the seabed there super silty and unstable? There's been claims that the bridge is very vulnerable to an earthquake because of geologic activty + russian safety disregard.
Have a hard time believing he's got some magic air defense system that hasn't been deployed yet. Agree I don't think he's even trying to make that claim.
hink that if it was simply a question of military resources being applied to the problem, you’d be right. But this entire war is essentially the pet project of one man: Vladimir Putin. If he’s ever ousted from power, or dies (of natural causes or falling out of a window), the war will simply end, with Russia returning Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk back to Ukraine. Whoever takes on a leadership role afterwards will have one hell of a mess on their hands, and wrapping it all up neatly by placing the blame on Putin will be the best way forward. “You lost your brothers, sons, fathers, husbands? It was all Putin’s fault. We tanked our entire economy and global standing and gained absolutely nothing for it? Putin did it.”
I tend to agree with you. Just like with post Nicholas II, Stalin, Kruschev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin - every time there is a leadership change in this brittle clown show of a society Russia has created, there is chaos following the transition and the last guy gets blamed for everything. And I agree that the occupied territories will end up returning to Ukrainian control, but not all at once and not all in the same way. Ukraine has options - they don't have to roll their limited supply of hardware and men into Kherson, Zaporhizia, Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea. They just need to make the Russians leave, and offer a more secure option for those territories than remaining part of a collapsing Russian mafia state. Over time, the most damage Russia will do is to itself. Ukraine will have pushed the snowball down the mountainside that causes the avalanche but they probably will observe it from a distance while they focus on rebuilding their new, permanently altered and European aligned society. They'll probably have a similar experience to Czech, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria's post-Soviet one - relative prosperity, genrally stable democracy, institutional strengthening, but low birth rates adjusting to a new, but hopeful, baseline.
But i have next to zero faith that any organized opposition will emerge in Russia. It doesn't exist and isn't likely to form spontaneously. What seems more likely is a pure collapse - something more like 1991 than 1917. No more money, empty shelves, spiraling hyperinflation, serfs in bread lines standing around waiting for political change, but not doing anything in particular to make it happen. That means more of a warlord faction type power struggle post-Putin. Ethno-corporate warlords that offer any kind of local stability. Inevitably, they will fight each other, and that process will take years or decades, and god knows what sort of configuration the RF will go through before it's done. Frankly, I see the Russian Empire in a long term phases of collapse, but in terms of centuries, not years. Kind of like how the Ottoman empire collapsed over 300 years, after degrading quality of leadership, losses in war, losing it's best colonies on it's western borders, before ultimately collapsing into a secular rump state of ethnic nationalists like you have in Turkey today. Picture a Russian heartland from St. Petersburg to Rostov north to south, and from Belgorod to maybe Perm in the east. Everything else might fall away into new balkanized countries that will immediately go at each other's throats like Armenia & Azerbaijan over unreconciled territorial claims and feuding for resource control.
Sure, and that's okay. I don't expect russians to "act", let's be clear. But the heartless ghouls of 2026 filiming boo-hoo videos about drones and gas shortages are not the same category of WW2 obedient peasant willing to relocate all industry to the urals on a diet of cabbage and rotten potato soup to work 24 hour shifts in weapons factories with the political commissar's pistol in their backs. They can't even grasp or tolerate fuel shortages. A tank of gas lasts a week or so. What if Russia hasn't solved their fuel distribution crisis by the time today's gas in their cars runs out? If things get worse, or even if this the new normal, think about what that means. People can't get to work reliably. Wages will have to rise, leading to inflation and higher costs for everything. Industry doesn't have the capability to move goods around anyways. Farmers aren't able to harvest their crops. Maybe they will at gunpoint, but - even then - that presumes that the diesel to run the farm machinery exists where it needs to be.
Totally agree that the russian citizens aren't going to Act. There is no opposition. The Kremlin has done an excellent job of preventing even the slightest chance of an organized political resistance. The generation that suffered was typically able to grow it's own food. Today's Russians have 80% living in urban areas in the western edge of country and have never planted a potato, nor do they have a garden to even try. It's not necessary or likely, as you point out, that the average russian is going to act. But that's not the only way a collapse happens. If anything, the modern russian urban dweller's lack of self sufficiency doesn't need them to act at all to be a major problem for the Russian government. No fuel, no food. No Food, no war.
Very good points. Lukashenko has been an obedient pup for Putin over the years, yet he has been meek and more conciliatory of late. Not out of benevolence, of course - he's had a knack for survival, must know he's bet on the wrong horse and has found himself isolated.
That's another chapter in the future Wikipedia page. But - the problem with having ships, as any boat owner knows, is that they're bloody expensive to build and operate, but kind of fragile. Surface gunboats were the ultimate expression of power projection in the 19th century, then once planes got invented, people figured out that it was way more cost effective to sink ships with massed planes than with other ships. Submarines were a stealthy superweapon under sonar and depth charges could be outfitted on just about any ocean going vessel.
Ships are so expensive and time consuming to build, that they're nearly obsolete between the time they're ordered to the time they launch. Ukraine has found several ways to destroy surface ships cost-effectively with missiles, air and sea drones. China, who have been on a ship building binge for years, might be re-thinking their entire doctrine. Taiwan has certainly been paying attention to Ukrainian Naval activities. And you think tank and air crews are expensive and time-intensive to train? Think about the operating & training costs of a friggin' ship with hundreds of specialist technicians, engineers, sailors, logistics etc.
Historically, 2nd tier navies who've tried to compete with big dogs, like the Italians, Germans, Austro-Hungarians spend all this time and money on fleets, then the have one big engagement, lose a few ships, and decide it's safer to stay in port. Or worse, like Taranto for the Italians, Bismarck for the Germans, Yamato for the Japanese, your uber weapon ships get destroyed by last generation bi-plane swarms dropping torpedos. Navies are a funny thing that way.
No kidding. You're right, Ukraine might well have accepted a ceasefire along the current frozen lines, including Crimea in early 2025. A year and 400,000 casualties later, they have been able to make ukraine retreat from Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad. But - the viability of Crimea is teetering, the country is in outright energy crisis and Moscow itself is capable of being droned regularly with air defence growing weaker every day, every where.
It's hard to view this conflict in historic terms - but you have to go back to the Persian Empire deciding to show Alexander who was boss before having their ass rolled back to Bactria for a comparison of a totally unnecssary imperial self-own of this scale.
There's no reward to the Belarussian people for dying for Putin's vanity. Do you thnk the average Belarussian gives a sparrow's fart about the prestige of hosting Russian tactical nukes? Any reward Putin gave for their service would of course be for the corrupt gangster class. It's a non-starter, AND Belarus' army is useless for the challenges Ukraine poses.
Without any kind of formula, Belarus has no way to actually actuate on entering the war in a way that won’t immediately become politically untenable domestically and internationally. The answer russia has pointed to for concentrated armored maneuver in the drone age are Turtle “Tanks” but the problem is they don’t work perfectly against drones and for that meager benefit the trade off is they are horrifyingly less effective at protecting against every other anti-tank weapon and doctrine NATO has spent decades perfecting the use of…
I would go as far a
To be fairer to them than they deserve - it wasn't supposed to go this way. Ukraine was supposed to roll over, Zelensky was supposed to flee. It's been said by people more clever to me that Putin wants to be seen as a 4D Chess player, but what he really is, is a Poker player with a fat stack who always bluffs.
But hubris is a prison and he can't only get what he holds now for all that they've spent. He's on tilt, to continue the poker analogy.
I think the total lack of a Purpose of this plan other than the glory of making gangsters a little bit richer leads to the extreme brutality we see. Indiscriminate terror bombing, beheading, executing POW's, Bucha, Irpin etc. When you don't have a bloody purpose for being there, then soldiers go to us-vs-them genocide pretty easily. Chaos is never more than a couple paycheques away they say - or something like that. In short - they don't know what the hell they're doing, therefore they don't how to stop or when they're "Done". The Idiot Tsar has set a ludicrous condition of triumphant tank columns rolling through Kyiv as the only condition for success. Since that is not going to happen - now what? Keep the industrial murder rolling until something changes.
As for Belarus - well, I can't see that they'd be a needle-mover. Their security forces are intentionally kept small to be affordable and be useful only for internal repression. They aren't even a 5th class assault force that could save the day where the entire Russian army has bashed it's brains in to the bristling hardened hedgehog that Ukraine has turned itself into. If Lukashenko sentences his citizens to death for Putin's glory, AND he pisses away his relatively tiny army in a month or two dying in the boggy lands of northern Ukraine, his head will be on a pike, either by Putin for failure or by his own citizens giving him the Ceaucescu treatment.
They don't have a plan, really. They never had a plan other than "Ukraine surrenders, we incinerate a million or so to make the rest docile and we all get slightly richer".
Airpower has hard limits, as the U.S. just recently found...again...in Iran. You need effective boots on the ground to move the needle. Even the massive, sustained, years-long Strategic Bombing campaign in WW2 required sending in massed ground forces right into the center of Berlin to end the European portion of the war. No air campaign has ever by itself achieved strategic political objectives in history.
And the air war that Russia is using for stand off terror attacks is INCREDIBLY resource intensive. It's costing Russia billions to kill a handful of innocent people every day. Those assets, including the crews, are expesnive and the aircraft are essentially irreplaceable, with finite lifespans before you consider losses.
Russia essentially has a three part strategy at this point:
Push small infiltration teams into soft areas. Hope they live long enough to encourage organized resistance to fall back to the next line of defense.
Stand off terror bombing.
Keep doing 1 & 2 until they give you something to make it stop.
The problem with #1 is that your policy is Infestation. But - like bugs, mice or rats, you can kill them now, soon or later. But eventually, you can get them all with enough Repellent & Traps. In this case, drone saturation.
The problem with #2 is like you said - it does not achieve a political objective
#3 only works if #1 does, and #1 only works if Ukraine agrees to stop killing your forward forces. Just ask the U.S. how vietnam went. They could engage enemy forces and eventually win battles - but then your occupying forces get sniped, bombed, shelled, droned, counter attacked. Eventually you realize that the cost of holding land is untenable - you can't pacify the ground, so you eventually choose to leave. What "works" for infiltration is not the same strategy that works for occupation. If the Ukrainians never stop bleeding the Russians, then the entire point of occypying and exploiting economic activity on the stolen ground never materializes. And they have to leave.
This is the recurring argument I have with people online who say "UKRAINE CAN'T RETAKE CRIMEA". They don't have to. They just have to make the Russians leave. If Crimea has no food, no fuel, no water, it is a barren rock outcrop that is bloody well uninhabitable. A tragedy, but - in the interim, it is also a buffer zone between Ukraine and Russia. When Russia either grows up or collapses, then maybe a peaceful existence becomes possible. Seems insane, but - time is a funny thing. The Germans and Japanese were certainly rehabilitated as global community members, but only after their malignant political class was deconstructed.
This war is existential for Ukraine, and no serious minded person expects the russians to honor any peace agreement long term. Russia gave Ukraine no choice - Death, Enslavement or Fight. If Russia stops fighting, there is still a Russia. Probably. If Ukraine stops fighting, there is no Ukraine. Not as a country, not as a culture, not as a people. Bleeding the Russian army until there is fundamental change in the political leadership or structure of the Russian Federation is probably the ONLY way for Ukraine to secure a lasting peace.
They are moving forward more slowly than any territorial invasion in the last 2,000 years. And put cruelty aside - they DO actually need to train these forces if they want them to make a difference.
Guys who were driving cabs, changing tires or working backoffice IT jobs 2 weeks ago are not effective infantry forces. They aren't coordinated, can't maneuver, aren't professional by any definition. They are, in a word, ineffective. Effective assault forces require ground and air support, vehicles, supporting fire, engineering, logistics, food, shelter - And Training. Just grabbing more bodies while ignoring everything else you need for a strategic offensive just means those unqualified cosplayers die faster than the last batch did.
They don't care about life - that's obvious. But that lack of emapthy doesn't translate into military effectiveness. If it did, the zerg rush of convicts and slack jawed cheque-chasers in years 2 & 3 of the war would have been more successful. And THOSE low functioning grunts at least had the rudiments of mechanized infantry, artillery & air support and mass. Anyone caught up in the next round of mobilization won't have those benefits AND their economic productivity is harder to replace.
Numbers matters less and less than effectiveness as this war goes on. Current attrition rates are 8:1 or more since russia pissed away their Soviet hardware inheritance and started relying on tiny infiltration teams and standoff terror bombing. Doesn't matter how cruel Russia is to their own - it won't make 'normal' people into effective assault forces in the face of the pure grinding hell on earth they're being mushed into.
Totally. That's why I don't think he actually intends to go through with it - even if wanted to, enough of the high functioning members of his team understand it's suicide. Poland and Finland would no doubt see war as an inevitability at that point, and would likely conculde that teaching them a lesson now is the only option while Russia is relatively weak/distracted and they are relatively strong.
And the air war that Russia is using for stand off terror attacks is INCREDIBLY resource intensive. It’s costing Russia billions to kill a handful of innocent people every day. Those assets, including the crews, are expesnive and the aircraft are essentially irreplaceable, with finite lifespans before you consider losses.
Russia essentially has a three part strategy at this point:
Push small infiltration teams into soft areas. Hope they live long enough to encourage organized resistance to fall back to the next line of defense.
Stand off terror bombing.
Keep doing 1 & 2 until they give you something to make it stop.
The problem with #1 is that your policy is Infestation. But - like bugs, mice or rats, you can kill t
I thought about this a lot too. Mobilization seems the most likely, and even the idea of it accomplishes other internal goals of maybe flushing out and exposing anyone planning organized resistance. If you encourage resistors to leave....well...often they leave. Then you have a chance to catch them in transit, or make them advance their plans ahead of schedule which would greatly reduce the chances of a successful uprising later.
Understood it is important - it all is for many reasons. Kramatorsk will be a bloodbath maybe past the scale of Bakhmut, Pokrovsk etc, and there's no guarantee the current version of the Russian army will be successful there. That will take a least a year maybe 2-3 at current pace. Ukraine might find it worthwhile for it to be a Stalingrad of sorts. In that time, all of Russia will have endured years of drone attacks, fuel shortages, surging inflation, mini mobilizations & press gangs in remaining cities that have men suitable for military service. But those troops won't have the materials and mechanized support that the lower-functioning useless mouths before them had. They're likely to die faster and be harder to replace in successive rounds of meat waves.
The other thing - Ukraine gets a very big vote in what happens next. It's not just up to Russia. Crimea in particular will be under tremendous stress over the timeframe to capture the rest of the Donbas if UAF are able to continue stopping fuel & supplies coming into the peninsula. Russian civilian sentiment is just barely starting to grumble a bit. Per the point of the article - if in their minds Crimea is "lost", it seems unlikely that they'll be consoled by the trade off prize of Kostyantynivka.
Almost certainly the same source then. Telegraph's Ukraine podcast is a bit of an aggregator - if you see a story with a specific number elsewhere, it often ends up reporting there too.
I found this clumsy to even type, so no doubt it retained it's capacity to confuse. I think the actual quote was that holiday bookings were down by 80%. I shouldn't have bothered trying to explain it as rising cancellations. That was the point I was trying to make, that...there are STILL Russians who are gonna holiday in Crimea, dammit, now get in the car. Which we won't be able to bring back, because there's no gas. Quit crying and get in the Lada.
It's really kind of crazy to see Russian civilians filming exasperated clips, seemingly unable to understand that any of this is real, and (finally) affecting them.
Here's a funny stat from The Telegraph yesterday - Crimean holiday cancellations from Russia are up 80% in June. Which sounds like a lot - but that made me think....**only 80%??? Who are the 20% of smooth brain vacationers who are STILL keeping their reservations? **Who is THAT stubborn about losing their deposit that they're walking into beseiged territory without food, gas or water. And why are the Russian administrators allowing ANYONE else to come there? To be a liability and take their story on how awful things are back to russia with them?
6 months is assuming you gonna give them any decent training. Their main propaganda theme for many years was ww2 and to be like their grandfathers in it.
So yeah, they’ve progressed in their ww2 cosplay but we can go deeper. They still have personal rifles, after all, and not just several per 30 men.
As for the bit about taking people who are actually needed - well “victory, we wouldn’t stand behind the price”, same ww2 narrative.
Now, there is a risk full scale mobilisation would trigger some uncontrollable processes. And they were evading it for quite some time.
But the thing is, I don’t think russian leadership is purely rational. Their leader sees himself as a messiah on a holy mission to reunite the Rus and be the Gatherer of Russian Lands.
I don’t think he will bail and I’m fine with it. We need to end russia now, not to leave this problem to our children.
I'm not sure how useful comparisons to WW2 are, though they are clearly used to appeal to mythical nonsense for propaganda purposes. Suggesting that WW2 still has lessons to learn 80 years after the fact is like being in WW2 and saying that you should heed the lessons of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The battles and military capabilities are in absolutely different universes.
As for the "mission". Yeah, maybe. That might also be guilding the lily a bit. These are (quite often literally) gangsters ingratiated with the malign power of the Russian intelligence and security services. Platitudes about glory and restoring the entitled imperial greatness of russia is perhaps again propaganda draped over the more pragmatic goal of slimy gangsters getting a little bit richer, while feeding lies to the masses to keep them compliant. Are Putin and his immediate enablers rational? Well - sort of yes, but as you say sort of no, or they would have stopped by now and been content with having shown the world they are serious about their near-abroad security. I absolutely agree with you that he won't bail now - the time has passed for an orderly, principled conclusion. He's chosen the more violent personal exit route of mussolini, Gaddhafi and Caeucescu. How and when we get there is all that's left to be decided.
You're right, of course. It's 3 words, and says more about my immaturity than it does any damage to the context of the article. But you're still right.
Interesting, thanks. I'd assumed it would have to come out to the surface at some point, which...brings you back to it being a juicy, stationary target even more vulerable than moving fuel in disguised milk trucks and what not.
But - let's say he does have an actual plan and this isn't complete lip service over literally nothing. If he broke ground today, how many months would it before before said ground terminal is ready to operate. And how much longer after that would Ukraine destroy it? What state will the Russian air defense, fuel network, army and economy be in by then? Better or worse than today?
Isn't the seabed there super silty and unstable? There's been claims that the bridge is very vulnerable to an earthquake because of geologic activty + russian safety disregard.
Have a hard time believing he's got some magic air defense system that hasn't been deployed yet. Agree I don't think he's even trying to make that claim.
I think he's talking shit to buy time.
All the way to every gas station in Crimea. That would certainly be quite a project.
I tend to agree with you. Just like with post Nicholas II, Stalin, Kruschev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin - every time there is a leadership change in this brittle clown show of a society Russia has created, there is chaos following the transition and the last guy gets blamed for everything. And I agree that the occupied territories will end up returning to Ukrainian control, but not all at once and not all in the same way. Ukraine has options - they don't have to roll their limited supply of hardware and men into Kherson, Zaporhizia, Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea. They just need to make the Russians leave, and offer a more secure option for those territories than remaining part of a collapsing Russian mafia state. Over time, the most damage Russia will do is to itself. Ukraine will have pushed the snowball down the mountainside that causes the avalanche but they probably will observe it from a distance while they focus on rebuilding their new, permanently altered and European aligned society. They'll probably have a similar experience to Czech, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria's post-Soviet one - relative prosperity, genrally stable democracy, institutional strengthening, but low birth rates adjusting to a new, but hopeful, baseline.
But i have next to zero faith that any organized opposition will emerge in Russia. It doesn't exist and isn't likely to form spontaneously. What seems more likely is a pure collapse - something more like 1991 than 1917. No more money, empty shelves, spiraling hyperinflation, serfs in bread lines standing around waiting for political change, but not doing anything in particular to make it happen. That means more of a warlord faction type power struggle post-Putin. Ethno-corporate warlords that offer any kind of local stability. Inevitably, they will fight each other, and that process will take years or decades, and god knows what sort of configuration the RF will go through before it's done. Frankly, I see the Russian Empire in a long term phases of collapse, but in terms of centuries, not years. Kind of like how the Ottoman empire collapsed over 300 years, after degrading quality of leadership, losses in war, losing it's best colonies on it's western borders, before ultimately collapsing into a secular rump state of ethnic nationalists like you have in Turkey today. Picture a Russian heartland from St. Petersburg to Rostov north to south, and from Belgorod to maybe Perm in the east. Everything else might fall away into new balkanized countries that will immediately go at each other's throats like Armenia & Azerbaijan over unreconciled territorial claims and feuding for resource control.
Sure, and that's okay. I don't expect russians to "act", let's be clear. But the heartless ghouls of 2026 filiming boo-hoo videos about drones and gas shortages are not the same category of WW2 obedient peasant willing to relocate all industry to the urals on a diet of cabbage and rotten potato soup to work 24 hour shifts in weapons factories with the political commissar's pistol in their backs. They can't even grasp or tolerate fuel shortages. A tank of gas lasts a week or so. What if Russia hasn't solved their fuel distribution crisis by the time today's gas in their cars runs out? If things get worse, or even if this the new normal, think about what that means. People can't get to work reliably. Wages will have to rise, leading to inflation and higher costs for everything. Industry doesn't have the capability to move goods around anyways. Farmers aren't able to harvest their crops. Maybe they will at gunpoint, but - even then - that presumes that the diesel to run the farm machinery exists where it needs to be.
Totally agree that the russian citizens aren't going to Act. There is no opposition. The Kremlin has done an excellent job of preventing even the slightest chance of an organized political resistance. The generation that suffered was typically able to grow it's own food. Today's Russians have 80% living in urban areas in the western edge of country and have never planted a potato, nor do they have a garden to even try. It's not necessary or likely, as you point out, that the average russian is going to act. But that's not the only way a collapse happens. If anything, the modern russian urban dweller's lack of self sufficiency doesn't need them to act at all to be a major problem for the Russian government. No fuel, no food. No Food, no war.
Very good points. Lukashenko has been an obedient pup for Putin over the years, yet he has been meek and more conciliatory of late. Not out of benevolence, of course - he's had a knack for survival, must know he's bet on the wrong horse and has found himself isolated.
That's another chapter in the future Wikipedia page. But - the problem with having ships, as any boat owner knows, is that they're bloody expensive to build and operate, but kind of fragile. Surface gunboats were the ultimate expression of power projection in the 19th century, then once planes got invented, people figured out that it was way more cost effective to sink ships with massed planes than with other ships. Submarines were a stealthy superweapon under sonar and depth charges could be outfitted on just about any ocean going vessel.
Ships are so expensive and time consuming to build, that they're nearly obsolete between the time they're ordered to the time they launch. Ukraine has found several ways to destroy surface ships cost-effectively with missiles, air and sea drones. China, who have been on a ship building binge for years, might be re-thinking their entire doctrine. Taiwan has certainly been paying attention to Ukrainian Naval activities. And you think tank and air crews are expensive and time-intensive to train? Think about the operating & training costs of a friggin' ship with hundreds of specialist technicians, engineers, sailors, logistics etc.
Historically, 2nd tier navies who've tried to compete with big dogs, like the Italians, Germans, Austro-Hungarians spend all this time and money on fleets, then the have one big engagement, lose a few ships, and decide it's safer to stay in port. Or worse, like Taranto for the Italians, Bismarck for the Germans, Yamato for the Japanese, your uber weapon ships get destroyed by last generation bi-plane swarms dropping torpedos. Navies are a funny thing that way.
No kidding. You're right, Ukraine might well have accepted a ceasefire along the current frozen lines, including Crimea in early 2025. A year and 400,000 casualties later, they have been able to make ukraine retreat from Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad. But - the viability of Crimea is teetering, the country is in outright energy crisis and Moscow itself is capable of being droned regularly with air defence growing weaker every day, every where.
It's hard to view this conflict in historic terms - but you have to go back to the Persian Empire deciding to show Alexander who was boss before having their ass rolled back to Bactria for a comparison of a totally unnecssary imperial self-own of this scale.
There's no reward to the Belarussian people for dying for Putin's vanity. Do you thnk the average Belarussian gives a sparrow's fart about the prestige of hosting Russian tactical nukes? Any reward Putin gave for their service would of course be for the corrupt gangster class. It's a non-starter, AND Belarus' army is useless for the challenges Ukraine poses.
To be fairer to them than they deserve - it wasn't supposed to go this way. Ukraine was supposed to roll over, Zelensky was supposed to flee. It's been said by people more clever to me that Putin wants to be seen as a 4D Chess player, but what he really is, is a Poker player with a fat stack who always bluffs.
But hubris is a prison and he can't only get what he holds now for all that they've spent. He's on tilt, to continue the poker analogy.
I think the total lack of a Purpose of this plan other than the glory of making gangsters a little bit richer leads to the extreme brutality we see. Indiscriminate terror bombing, beheading, executing POW's, Bucha, Irpin etc. When you don't have a bloody purpose for being there, then soldiers go to us-vs-them genocide pretty easily. Chaos is never more than a couple paycheques away they say - or something like that. In short - they don't know what the hell they're doing, therefore they don't how to stop or when they're "Done". The Idiot Tsar has set a ludicrous condition of triumphant tank columns rolling through Kyiv as the only condition for success. Since that is not going to happen - now what? Keep the industrial murder rolling until something changes.
As for Belarus - well, I can't see that they'd be a needle-mover. Their security forces are intentionally kept small to be affordable and be useful only for internal repression. They aren't even a 5th class assault force that could save the day where the entire Russian army has bashed it's brains in to the bristling hardened hedgehog that Ukraine has turned itself into. If Lukashenko sentences his citizens to death for Putin's glory, AND he pisses away his relatively tiny army in a month or two dying in the boggy lands of northern Ukraine, his head will be on a pike, either by Putin for failure or by his own citizens giving him the Ceaucescu treatment.
They don't have a plan, really. They never had a plan other than "Ukraine surrenders, we incinerate a million or so to make the rest docile and we all get slightly richer".
EX-FUCKING-ZACTLY. Thank you.
Airpower has hard limits, as the U.S. just recently found...again...in Iran. You need effective boots on the ground to move the needle. Even the massive, sustained, years-long Strategic Bombing campaign in WW2 required sending in massed ground forces right into the center of Berlin to end the European portion of the war. No air campaign has ever by itself achieved strategic political objectives in history.
And the air war that Russia is using for stand off terror attacks is INCREDIBLY resource intensive. It's costing Russia billions to kill a handful of innocent people every day. Those assets, including the crews, are expesnive and the aircraft are essentially irreplaceable, with finite lifespans before you consider losses.
Russia essentially has a three part strategy at this point:
Push small infiltration teams into soft areas. Hope they live long enough to encourage organized resistance to fall back to the next line of defense.
Stand off terror bombing.
Keep doing 1 & 2 until they give you something to make it stop.
The problem with #1 is that your policy is Infestation. But - like bugs, mice or rats, you can kill them now, soon or later. But eventually, you can get them all with enough Repellent & Traps. In this case, drone saturation.
The problem with #2 is like you said - it does not achieve a political objective
#3 only works if #1 does, and #1 only works if Ukraine agrees to stop killing your forward forces. Just ask the U.S. how vietnam went. They could engage enemy forces and eventually win battles - but then your occupying forces get sniped, bombed, shelled, droned, counter attacked. Eventually you realize that the cost of holding land is untenable - you can't pacify the ground, so you eventually choose to leave. What "works" for infiltration is not the same strategy that works for occupation. If the Ukrainians never stop bleeding the Russians, then the entire point of occypying and exploiting economic activity on the stolen ground never materializes. And they have to leave.
This is the recurring argument I have with people online who say "UKRAINE CAN'T RETAKE CRIMEA". They don't have to. They just have to make the Russians leave. If Crimea has no food, no fuel, no water, it is a barren rock outcrop that is bloody well uninhabitable. A tragedy, but - in the interim, it is also a buffer zone between Ukraine and Russia. When Russia either grows up or collapses, then maybe a peaceful existence becomes possible. Seems insane, but - time is a funny thing. The Germans and Japanese were certainly rehabilitated as global community members, but only after their malignant political class was deconstructed.
This war is existential for Ukraine, and no serious minded person expects the russians to honor any peace agreement long term. Russia gave Ukraine no choice - Death, Enslavement or Fight. If Russia stops fighting, there is still a Russia. Probably. If Ukraine stops fighting, there is no Ukraine. Not as a country, not as a culture, not as a people. Bleeding the Russian army until there is fundamental change in the political leadership or structure of the Russian Federation is probably the ONLY way for Ukraine to secure a lasting peace.
They are moving forward more slowly than any territorial invasion in the last 2,000 years. And put cruelty aside - they DO actually need to train these forces if they want them to make a difference.
Guys who were driving cabs, changing tires or working backoffice IT jobs 2 weeks ago are not effective infantry forces. They aren't coordinated, can't maneuver, aren't professional by any definition. They are, in a word, ineffective. Effective assault forces require ground and air support, vehicles, supporting fire, engineering, logistics, food, shelter - And Training. Just grabbing more bodies while ignoring everything else you need for a strategic offensive just means those unqualified cosplayers die faster than the last batch did.
They don't care about life - that's obvious. But that lack of emapthy doesn't translate into military effectiveness. If it did, the zerg rush of convicts and slack jawed cheque-chasers in years 2 & 3 of the war would have been more successful. And THOSE low functioning grunts at least had the rudiments of mechanized infantry, artillery & air support and mass. Anyone caught up in the next round of mobilization won't have those benefits AND their economic productivity is harder to replace.
Numbers matters less and less than effectiveness as this war goes on. Current attrition rates are 8:1 or more since russia pissed away their Soviet hardware inheritance and started relying on tiny infiltration teams and standoff terror bombing. Doesn't matter how cruel Russia is to their own - it won't make 'normal' people into effective assault forces in the face of the pure grinding hell on earth they're being mushed into.
I agree, there's nothing to suggest Ukraine is at a breaking point.
Totally. That's why I don't think he actually intends to go through with it - even if wanted to, enough of the high functioning members of his team understand it's suicide. Poland and Finland would no doubt see war as an inevitability at that point, and would likely conculde that teaching them a lesson now is the only option while Russia is relatively weak/distracted and they are relatively strong.
I thought about this a lot too. Mobilization seems the most likely, and even the idea of it accomplishes other internal goals of maybe flushing out and exposing anyone planning organized resistance. If you encourage resistors to leave....well...often they leave. Then you have a chance to catch them in transit, or make them advance their plans ahead of schedule which would greatly reduce the chances of a successful uprising later.
Understood it is important - it all is for many reasons. Kramatorsk will be a bloodbath maybe past the scale of Bakhmut, Pokrovsk etc, and there's no guarantee the current version of the Russian army will be successful there. That will take a least a year maybe 2-3 at current pace. Ukraine might find it worthwhile for it to be a Stalingrad of sorts. In that time, all of Russia will have endured years of drone attacks, fuel shortages, surging inflation, mini mobilizations & press gangs in remaining cities that have men suitable for military service. But those troops won't have the materials and mechanized support that the lower-functioning useless mouths before them had. They're likely to die faster and be harder to replace in successive rounds of meat waves.
The other thing - Ukraine gets a very big vote in what happens next. It's not just up to Russia. Crimea in particular will be under tremendous stress over the timeframe to capture the rest of the Donbas if UAF are able to continue stopping fuel & supplies coming into the peninsula. Russian civilian sentiment is just barely starting to grumble a bit. Per the point of the article - if in their minds Crimea is "lost", it seems unlikely that they'll be consoled by the trade off prize of Kostyantynivka.
Almost certainly the same source then. Telegraph's Ukraine podcast is a bit of an aggregator - if you see a story with a specific number elsewhere, it often ends up reporting there too.
I found this clumsy to even type, so no doubt it retained it's capacity to confuse. I think the actual quote was that holiday bookings were down by 80%. I shouldn't have bothered trying to explain it as rising cancellations. That was the point I was trying to make, that...there are STILL Russians who are gonna holiday in Crimea, dammit, now get in the car. Which we won't be able to bring back, because there's no gas. Quit crying and get in the Lada.
It's really kind of crazy to see Russian civilians filming exasperated clips, seemingly unable to understand that any of this is real, and (finally) affecting them.
Here's a funny stat from The Telegraph yesterday - Crimean holiday cancellations from Russia are up 80% in June. Which sounds like a lot - but that made me think....**only 80%??? Who are the 20% of smooth brain vacationers who are STILL keeping their reservations? **Who is THAT stubborn about losing their deposit that they're walking into beseiged territory without food, gas or water. And why are the Russian administrators allowing ANYONE else to come there? To be a liability and take their story on how awful things are back to russia with them?
I'm not sure how useful comparisons to WW2 are, though they are clearly used to appeal to mythical nonsense for propaganda purposes. Suggesting that WW2 still has lessons to learn 80 years after the fact is like being in WW2 and saying that you should heed the lessons of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The battles and military capabilities are in absolutely different universes.
As for the "mission". Yeah, maybe. That might also be guilding the lily a bit. These are (quite often literally) gangsters ingratiated with the malign power of the Russian intelligence and security services. Platitudes about glory and restoring the entitled imperial greatness of russia is perhaps again propaganda draped over the more pragmatic goal of slimy gangsters getting a little bit richer, while feeding lies to the masses to keep them compliant. Are Putin and his immediate enablers rational? Well - sort of yes, but as you say sort of no, or they would have stopped by now and been content with having shown the world they are serious about their near-abroad security. I absolutely agree with you that he won't bail now - the time has passed for an orderly, principled conclusion. He's chosen the more violent personal exit route of mussolini, Gaddhafi and Caeucescu. How and when we get there is all that's left to be decided.
Thank you for your input!
You're right, of course. It's 3 words, and says more about my immaturity than it does any damage to the context of the article. But you're still right.