Of course, I don't know anything about warfare, but I'm surprised by how quickly people went from "how soon before Ukraine invades Russia?" to "Ukraine is about to collapse". Sure, Russia is making real gains now, but isn't that because it's now pursuing much more modest goals?
I still expect that this war is going to last forever because I don't think either side is interested in serious negotiations and I also don't think that either has the capacity to change the military situation so much that it would force the other side to accept a compromise.
Like, even if Russia somehow manages to conquer the whole of Donbas, and keep in mind that currently they're only trying to get a small part of it, would Kiev accept to make the kind of territorial concessions Putin would need to stop the war? I don't believe that for a second 🤷♂️
Now, while I believe that sanctions are going to devastate Russia's economy in the long-run, I don't believe it will prevent it from prosecuting the war. And I don't see the West, especially not the US, stopping their aid to Ukraine, which means Kiev isn't going to stop either.
So I don't know how this fucking war is going to end because neither side wants to stop fighting and neither has the ability to change the situation on the ground so much that it would force the other to start negotiating in earnest. It will have to end eventually though.
Maybe eventually Ukraine won't be able to sustain this economically even with the West's support and will agree to make big concessions or it will become a semi-frozen conflict with regular flare-ups until both sides are tired and make a deal that ratifies the statu quo ante.
I guess one question about how long it will take is for how long the West is going to be willing to support Ukraine's war effort. It will be very expensive to keep it in the war and, with the economic situation deteriorating everywhere, it's going to become politically harder.
Right now France, Germany and Italy are only doing it because they get shamed into doing it by Poland, the Baltic countries, etc. and the media, but eventually people will get bored and it will become a political liability. I guess a lot will depend on what the US does.
I guess the only way for Ukraine to prevent that would be to somehow manage to inflict a decisive military defeat to Russia in the next few months, but I don't see how this could realistically happen.
Again, I don't know anything about warfare, so I'm just thinking about this like a dumb person. Doing that would require that Ukraine launch huge counter-offensives. To do that, it would need a lot of heavy weapons, most of which would have to be supplied by the West.
Here is a webpage that lists all the heavy weaponry that has been sent by the West so far. It's quite a lot but still nothing compared to what Russia had at the beginning and it still didn't get them very far. oryxspioenkop.com
Even if the amount of heavy weaponry that Western countries send Ukraine increased by one order of magnitude, I don't see why it would be more successful than Russia when it was attacking and they were defending, so it's hard to see how they could just kick the Russians out.
I'm just thinking out loud and not even pretending that I have a solution here. I just don't see how this war is going to end anytime soon. People have this debate about what we should do to end the war, but I don't see how what anyone is proposing would end it.
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