Ukrainian War Developments

Overbom said:

What a senseless foolish war. If Ukraine only had some sane leaders with a 50+ IQ all this mess would have been avoided.

Have they really not read a single history book to realise what is the expected behaviour of a country supposed to be, when your neighbour is a great power?

Ukraine should look at Vietnam and basically copy Vietnam's diplomatic conduct/behaviour/framework with China

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FriedButter said:

You missed the best one

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Mirabo said:

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That thread just keeps on giving.

Who really expects a jet to attack them? You can't be prepared every god damn day for jets to attack at 6am.

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Lethe said:

The more I think about the prospects for conflict resolution, the bleaker it looks.

At first glance there is reason to be optimistic. Russia now has a clearer sense of the costs of pursuing their strategic aims, in both military, economic, strategic and political terms, while Ukraine now knows how serious Russia is about enforcing its "red lines", and the limits of western support that it can expect.

On closer examination, however, it is the raft of western sanctions that have been applied, and the rhetoric behind them, that threatens the prospects for peace. These sanctions do not apparently serve a coercive purpose, but rather a punitive one. That is to say, the sanctions are not intended to encourage Russia to change its behaviour, but are rather intended to punish Russia for actions already taken, and weaken it going forward. The distinction is important. Even if certain key figures such as Biden were minded to offer Russia an "off-ramp" (i.e. do X and Y sanction will be removed), the number of actors/institutions and sanctions/mechanisms involved, many of which are now subject to the vagaries of domestic opinion, severely undermine the credibility of any such proposal. Would Putin (or his successor) really believe that, for example, by withdrawing from Ukraine the EU will abandon its strategic drive for freedom from Russian coal/oil/gas/etc.?

The consequence is that Russia will likely treat the sanctions that have been imposed, and the new strategic/geopolitical reality they promise to create, as a cost already incurred, with the prospect of any revision playing little role in the Russian strategic calculus. Accordingly, Russia will see little reason to deviate from its goals in Ukraine, and indeed is likely to seek a more complete Ukrainian capitulation than would've been accepted before the war began. "This has already cost us so much, we must ensure it was worth it." While it is tempting to imagine that higher than expected combat losses and greater than expected Ukrainian resistance may encourage a softening of Russia's position, it must be remembered that Russia can escalate so much further. Russia can move to a true war economy and put millions of men under arms, they can bring nuclear weapons to bear. With a vital strategic interest at stake, and plausibly the very survival of the present regime, and no more bridges left to burn, it is likely that Putin will double, triple, quadruple down on this invasion and seek the total capitulation of Ukraine.

The final point to note is that many in western decision-making circles know all of this. They know that the present path, whereby Russia is having great difficulty achieving its objectives but no plausible alternative, will see Ukraine reduced increasingly to ashes, with a horrific toll in human lives and culture, and they do. not. care. I'm not sure where the phrase first came from: that NATO is willing to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian, but it captures an ugly truth. Russia will likely emerge from all this a shadow of its former self, and that is precisely what many decision-makers in the west intend. Ukraine may not emerge at all, and nobody is very concerned about that.

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