That’s true, Russians don’t care that the Azov battalion guys hate Roma and Jews, they care they hate Russians. But that doesn’t change the fact that the Azov battalion guys are anti-semitic fascists!
It’s a lot more than isolated good news fwiw.
It’s way to soon to say how this turns out. Russia has lots of guys in reserve.
Realistically speaking Ukraine will fall once the cities get encircled and cut off.
Don’t forget about this guy
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Seems like that is going to take a long time to accomplish and it doesn’t seem like Russia is prepared for that long of a conflict. It doesn’t really seem like their economy collapsing will help but time either. /hopium
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It is hopium and I have been breathing it in all week. Putin is still selling the west oil and gas every single day, so he will funnel all that to his military effort and let his people suffer.
If you look at the battle maps day by day, they will be encircled within a week or 2.
Poker wise I think Ukraine needs to hit a 4 outer on the turn or the river, if anyone thinks the odds are higher feel free to explain.
I can see Russia just destroying a bunch of stuff and then withdrawing with an “Enjoy your democracy” farewell. I agree that an occupation is not likely over the long term, and trying to govern an entirely insurgent population probably won’t work. The original plan of installing a puppet government and Ukraine becoming a willing Russian satellite state seems to be gone.
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this seems like the only real off-ramp for putin. He’d rather be seen as a bully and a war criminal than an incompetent dipshit who got mired in a boondoggle trying to actually govern.
link?
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I think Russia is going to keep big chunks of Ukraine though. Donbas, and maybe most of the coast. Or all of the coast. Russians and Russian speakers are concentrated on the coast and in southeast Ukraine. So maybe annex all that, or make that a puppet, or several puppets. Then who knows what happens to the rest of Ukraine.
I agree with this.
Thing is eventually they will leave because Ukraine will never accept them there. Might take decades but they will.
Right now, the narrative seems to be that he’s an incompetent dipshit who can’t run an invasion that should be a cakewalk and you want to pile being seen as a coward who retreats while Ukrainians thumb their noses at him on top of that? Is he going to negotiate being treated like a badass in exchange for withdrawing?
The rest of Ukraine becomes a base for launching terrorist attacks against Russia.
Maybe. Unless they like build a fence or something.
I think this is the right take. But if anyone is tired of hopium and wants some synthetic optimoids instead, consider:
- Metaculus has the odds for the fall of Kyiv down to 58%. That means a 42% chance of either a negotiated peace in the short term or an outright Russian defeat.
- The convoy of doom seems to be not going anywhere:
https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1499278184407314437?s=20&t=AMjwPL1aqKG44pGmhzk5eA - The wheels, or at least the tires, seem to be quite literally coming off of Russia’s mechanized support vehicles.
Moreover, it’s really unclear to me what a Russian victory actually entails at this point. In particular, if they decide to stop their advance at some point and retreat to some line of control in the east, that doesn’t stop the war. Based on everything we’ve seen so far, it seems very likely that Ukraine would just continue the war with drones and irregular units attacking behind the front lines. The Vietnam War seems like a better model than Iraq or Afghanistan. You’ll have an occupier puppet regime with minimal popular support that’s trying to defend against infiltration from adjacent hostile territory along a huge border. And they have like 150,000 guys to try to do it. (US forces in Vietnam peaked at half a million.) How is that gonna work? It’s hopeless. The plan has to be to convince Ukraine to accept peace terms, but then how is that gonna work, especially if they kill 100,000 civilians taking Kyiv?
Perhaps if the Russian forces are doing some kind of heavy reorganization work behind the scenes and launch some huge offensive that traps a big chunk of the Ukrainian Army in the east, maybe that builds enough momentum for them to get a favorable peace treaty, but I’m skeptical. Or perhaps they just kill enough of the Ukrainian leadership that there’s no one around to organize a resistance, but that seems implausible at this point. Democracies are harder to decapitate than autocracies, and surely Ukraine has had time by now to come up with a contingency plan for running the country out of Lviv.
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Nah, my moment comes with the fall of American democracy.
They don’t have to launch a huge offensive for this encirclement to happen! They’re going to encircle huge chunks of the Ukrainian army with their current lines of advance. The whole front line in Donbas and the units in the north could all be encircled.
Right, but to encircle the units in the east, they need to cut them off before they can withdraw.
Popped over to Alexey Navalny‘s Twitter:
https://mobile.twitter.com/navalny
Clicking the translate button on his last few tweets, it looks like he is being charged with fraud because he raised money for his Presidential campaign even though he should have known that he wouldn’t be allowed to run?
So weird the way they do their authoritarianism over there…. Beyond putting up a front, I think the idea of doing it this way is to allow some freedom to see what catches on so that Putin can get a sense of the mood of the population while still crushing anyone the moment they became a real threat to him?