Is it worse than 'stalemate' in Ukraine right now?
Is it worse than 'stalemate' in Ukraine right now?
Experts say Russia has the upper hand at a time when US aid is not coming fast enough
It's just too bad there's no word in the English language for a situation that's worse than a stalemate.
Dumb question, but the word is "losing" right?
At this point I think their escape strategy is a full Russian annexation so that Russia has to deal with the Nazis themselves for eastern NATO countries for free.
By also for getting to claim "we warned you!!!" about Russia absolutely definitely wanting to annex the entirety of Ukraine from the start, historical development be damned.
It's been a while since I haven't checked the lib instances and Reddit, how are they dealing with the war now?
That is indeed the word I had in mind. Based on what Russians are saying, it sounds like they're not interested in western Ukraine in the slightest. My expectation is that the west will be stuck with a dysfunctional rump state in western Ukraine.
And from what I've seen libs in the mainstream are still convinced that Ukraine is winning.
Thing is, if Russian troops don't enter western Ukraine they can't really remove its government or get anything but a Korea divided armistice situation where there's no permanent legal cessation of hostilities, no international or even local recognition of new territorial realities and the prospect of continued terrorism against Russia by groups that they will claim to not control. They also wouldn't achieve de-nazification or de-militarization as that western side would be built up to be bristling with arms and NATO trained, Russia-hating Nazi-loving troops. Under that situation the west will declare victory including the media and liberals, they'll claim they didn't expel Putin but they did stop his march west and that if they hadn't stood with Ukraine he'd be in Paris by now or something.
When do you expect the next major Russian offensive? It has to be this Winter or the next right? Are they waiting full withdrawal of the west or will they attack before that?
I am still not sure there will be a "major Russian offensive" in the way that most people are imagining it. I think they will simply continue to incrementally dial up the pressure at all points along the line until the ability of the Kiev regime forces to mount a cohesive defense collapses. I think this is the smart play as Russia is only getting stronger while Ukraine and the collective West are getting weaker, so it's only a matter of time until a tipping point is reached.
Then again I might be completely wrong and the Russians could decide to go for a big flashy offensive just a month from now. Or a year. Who knows. The whole point in a war is keeping your enemy guessing and not telegraphing if, when or where you're going to attack. And that means that casual observers like us sitting on the sidelines are also incapable of predicting with any certainty what they will do.
My expectation would be that we'll see one within the next couple of months. It looks like Russia is already doing offensive operations all across the front, and one likely reason is that they're probing to see where the weak spots are. The front around Avdievka looks to be collapsing right now, so we might see a major push there. Another big factor is the deadlock in US over funding. If the money doesn't get passed in the next few days, then Ukraine likely won't see anything till the end of January at the earliest. This seems to be a good window of opportunity for Russia to exploit.
Just saw this on reddit, is this just a cope?
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/12/politics/russia-troop-losses-us-intelligence-assessment/index.html
I don't think there's any way that russia lost 300k troops but I could be wrong... Then again it's CNN so they are never going to follow up and do their own research, they are part of the propaganda arm of the US.
It's a cope, the funny part is that BBC set up a project to track Russian losses based on publicly available evidence, such as funerals, social media posts, etc. This is the only western count that has any methodology behind it, and it comes up with around 38k in losses. So, even if they're under counting, we could assume around 50k, that's still vastly below the wild numbers other western media keeps quoting.