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| ▲ | onlypassingthru 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Russia is not only on the precipice of giving up territory in Ukraine, it's likely to give up so much more because its ability to function as a country is being systematically destroyed. The only barrier between Russians and anarchy is the last nine meals they’ve had. How's the summer harvest coming along? | |
| ▲ | afavour 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If you’re looking at win vs loss you also need to look at what you got in return for what you gave. A ton of casualties and further international isolation aren’t really worth the middling gains Russia could negotiate for peace today. Which is probably one of the reasons they still haven’t, sunk cost fallacy and all that. | | |
| ▲ | GJim 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | > If you’re looking at win vs loss you also need to look at what you got in return for what you gave. This. Russia is suffering over 400 casualties for every square km (1036 per square mile!) of territory captured in Donetsk, screwing their own economy and turning themselves into a pariah. Russia certainly isn't winning. https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian... | | |
| ▲ | fsuts 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Ukraine taking on rounds after rounds of multi billion euro loans also isn’t winning… They need a peace deal but external parties don’t want Ukraine to do this. The same ones lending the money | | |
| ▲ | illliillll 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Neither side needs a peace deal as of right now, that’s completely ridiculous. |
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| ▲ | t0mpr1c3 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It still hasn't got all of Donbas. Russia can't even keep what it previously took. Crimea is becoming indefensible. | |
| ▲ | solumunus 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Is that land worth the costs Russia has endured? Very obviously not, that’s why it’s not “winning”. If they could turn back the clocks they would. | | |
| ▲ | somenameforme 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | The benefit of war is almost never worth the cost. It just tends to scale up from repeated mutual miscalculations. For instance WW1 started from a Bosnian Serb assassinating the Austro-Hungarian heir and the next thing you know Brits are killing Germans over it. Everybody would have certainly turned back the clock there if they could, even moreso given that "The War to End All Wars" directly set the stage for WW2. But that doesn't mean that the Allied Powers didn't win WW1. | | |
| ▲ | solumunus 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's nowhere near the same thing. This was supposed to be an imperialist land grab by Russia. This war did not emerge organically. Russia had a goal, to seize Ukraine - easily and quickly. Russia have failed at that goal. Failing is not winning. Not only have they failed to secure their objective, the attempt to do so has cost several orders of magnitude more than intended. The land they do control is of low value. Again, spectacularly failing to carry out your goals is not "winning", in any sense of the word. | | |
| ▲ | somenameforme 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Would you say that Austria-Hungary choosing to outright invade Serbia because the assassin was a Bosnian Serb who might have had some backing from the government, was reasonable? Or was that a land grab? And when when Russia joins Serbia was it solely an action of obligation or because they thought they might be able to get a piece of Austria-Hungary? And similarly when Germany jumps in seeing they can now shift the balance back towards Austria-Hungary, and so on. And then this just kept iterating until suddenly everybody's fighting everybody, tens of millions are dying, and absolutely nothing was achieved. Then you get the Treaty of Versailles which desperately tried to justify it all by being excruciatingly punitive on Germany, but of course that ultimately did nothing but essentially guarantee WW2 where tens of millions more would die again, and again for basically nothing, with a good chunk of Europe left in rubble. In the modern war Russia claimed that their motivation for the war was to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO. Their early movements were largely performative or Hail Marys (like the decapitation strike) and within 48 hours they were engaged in negotiations with Ukraine that involved 0 land concessions, but primarily focused on Ukraine not joining NATO. Ukraine chose to fight, at the urging of the West, and so here we are. | | |
| ▲ | solumunus 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Ukraine were no where near joining NATO at the time, although as it turns out - if they were their motivation would have been entirely valid. Russia didn’t want Ukraine to join NATO because it would prevent them from annexing Ukraine, that’s simple logic. > within 48 hours they were engaged in negotiations with Ukraine that involved 0 land concessions So you think the plan was to invade Ukraine to scare them into a hand shake that they wouldn’t join NATO? I really don’t want to insult you but… | | |
| ▲ | somenameforme 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Not joining NATO would be an extremely small price to pay relative to what war could, and ultimately did, entail. There's a nice timeline here [1] of relations between Ukraine and NATO. It's an archived version from the day before the invasion began, so there's no hindsight posts. Things were accelerating rapidly on the Ukraine-NATO front. In January 2022 there was apparently even a bill that was to be introduced in the US declaring Ukraine a "NATO+ country" immediately. And NATO's responses towards Russia's expressed concerns began to be completely dismissive with not even a vague allusion to reconciliation. So I think the main goal was certainly to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, but I think a major secondary goal was for Russia to make it clear that their claims of red lines and such are not toothless. If a country makes repeated claims of things being a red-line but never acts on such claims, then their future claims will be casually dismissed. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ukraine%E2%80%93N... | | |
| ▲ | mopsi 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Things were accelerating rapidly on the Ukraine-NATO front.
They weren't. Ukraine is still nowhere near getting a membership action plan, which is the formal start of membership negotiations.We saw with Finland and Sweden how quickly entry into the organization can progress if there's a will in the alliance to accept new members. We have not seen such will regarding Ukraine. The whole "blame NATO" narrative is just a waste of everyone's time and completely ignores the internal developments in Russia and the ambitions of Putin and his clan. The main goal of the ex-Soviet security apparatus is to restore their lost empire and the special privileged position of the security services within it. To Europeans, the Cold War and the Iron Curtain were abnormalities that have been rectified; to the current generation of Russian decision-makers, the Cold War was a normalcy that they strive to return to. Russian dissidents have been warning for decades that the destruction of Russian democracy would sooner or later lead to resurgence of Soviet imperial thinking, and that's exactly what we're seeing. NATO itself bears little importance in this. Russia is against all forms of European cooperation and would prefer to see countries alone and isolated, because it would permit attacking them one by one, instead of facing a joint front that they can't beat. | | |
| ▲ | fakedang 13 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Doesn't matter now. Ukraine will never join NATO. Poland will be happy to veto their entry, and will be happy having Ukraine be the buffer state that can sacrifice its youth for the sake of Europe. What Zelensky did with honoring the UPA was irredeemable. Heck, were Belarus to overthrow Lukashenko, they have a better chance of joining NATO than Ukraine now. |
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| ▲ | benj111 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >russia is currently holding just about all the land it wants in Ukraine Based on? The fact it tried to take Kyiv in the first week? That it's still trying to advance? If Russia were to collapse tomorrow, they would lose everything, I don't see how that's winning. |
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