Ukraine still has a parliament, has halted most Russian advances, etc. That is by definition, survival.

The US killed approximately a million North Vietnamese military. The US lost less than 60K. Wouldn't you agree that the North Vietnamese won the Vietnam War?

The Nazis killed MILLIONS of Soviets and the Nazis lost FAR less. Yet, it's indisputable that the Soviets won the European theater.

No one is arguing that this isn't incredibly painful and bloody for Ukraine. They've lost TENS of thousands and their country looks worse than Iraq ever did. But it's A LOT easier to win a defensive war than an offensive one. Until the government is overthrown and/or they give up, they "win" because the Russian objective was to take over the entire country and install a puppet state.

By the metric that a lot of armor+men spent with minimal gain. Like I said I'm not 100% sure if Kherson was just a way to pull Russians to re-enforce Kherson at the expense of possibly being spread thin somewhere else. By these soldiers accounts their losses were 5 to 1 and Russians seemed relatively prepared for this offensive.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/07/ukraine-kherson-offensive-casualties-ammunition/

Wrong it's def you

Historic shift in Russian energy flows, becomes China's 4th largest LNG supplier | Latest | WION



Also wait for winter and perhaps a little longer for the effects of food shortages worldwide. Really sad it has to come to this though

The offensive is still in progress....this isn't like the wars that you're used to watching on CNN where America comes in and kicks the shit out of everyone. This is going to take MONTHS. There are going to be some Ukrainian battalions where every single soldier is killed. That's the brutal nature of war which is why you need to look at the big picture.

the bolded. afghanistan does not border on russia, its a completely different scenario. for russia, putin sees this as a do or die war, he cant, he wont tuck is tail and retreat. you are also attributing the ebb and flow of battle, withdrawals and advances, as having more meaning then they do.

but fur sure ukraine wins by merely surviving, but i really dont see it happening. Russia is literally going to carve up eastern ukraine, in my opinion.

This post was edited by ferdia on Sep 8 2022 03:22pm

Afghanistan bordered the Soviet Union. I don't considered removing multiple major axes of your offensive as part of the ebb and flow of battle. The Russians shut down an entire theater!

I'm not convinced that Putin sees this as "do or die." The Russians have a lot of options to escalate (with substantial cost of course) and they haven't even considered those options yet.

This post was edited by thundercock on Sep 8 2022 03:26pm

Definitely you.

The vast majority needs pipeline infrastructure to export, and those don't get built overnight. It would take years to establish the pipeline infrastructure to sell the same volume to China as they sell to Europe today. What China resells amounts to a hill of beans.

Only sad because Russia didn't have to invade anyone.

Indeed. Russia would have been much better off by not invading and they are significantly weaker post-invasion.

By many accounts Ukraine has eased on their large scale offensive mobilizations in Kherson. Maybe you have some inside scoop and know Ukrainian strategy for months ahead before most of us but I'm not going to try to predict what they will do in the coming months. You could be right that they are just taking a breather before the next wave but who knows.

I mean look at the two main fronts in the news in last week or so. There's the Kherson one and then there's the Kharkiv one. The latter there's objective and verifiable success. They pushed the Russians back significantly. Kherson on the other hand they took some towns and ran into Russian artillery and basically stopped while Russia deployed more troops/armor there and are putting in pontoons in place.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Sep 8 2022 03:45pm

Fair points about numbers, but there the similarities stop.

First, despite all the naysaying from the pro-Ukraine side, Russian occupation of advancement through the South and East of Ukraine has been if not welcomed then tolerated. There is almost no partisan activity, the Russians probably won't even need to fake the eventual plebiscite results about joining the Russian Federation. That's markedly different that Vietnam or WW2 Eastern Europe, where the occupiers had to carry out genocidal reprisals and faced constant partisan attacks.

Second, you're doing mindreading on the Russian objectives and it's at odds with things we know. Russia for 8 years supported the Minsk 1 and 2 agreements, trying to get Ukraine to implement them. That would have resolved this issue with no need for this war to happen. We know that back in May Russia and Ukraine were close to an agreement that would have ended the war, but the West (Boris, certainly acting on orders from across the Pacific) scuttled them. So while I can agree that the Russian goal now is to take over the Russian-majority areas from the Donbass to Moldova, it definitely wasn't always the case. Russia preferred diplomacy, and was met with intransigence.

Third, and this is a constant problem, is that people don't look at the downsides (from the Western perspective) to this war dragging on. I know you probably disagree, but this war is a disaster for the West, as I said in an earlier post today. Material support is already waning, the media is ever so slowly starting to turn on Zelensky, and who knows what the next 6 months will bring for European political stability. Russia doesn't have those problems. The war is popular, there's no problems with inflation, their budgets seem in order if not somewhat strengthened by their energy sales.

Fourth, this 'status quo' is unsustainable. Ukraine can't take attrition like this forever. They're already conscripting older men and women, they've lost an unknown but certainly large portion of their experience officer corps which take years to train. They've lost much of their Soviet-era armor and aircraft, and the people trained to operate it (when a tank gets hit the people in it do, too). Fact is, the organizational and logistical capacity of the army will degrade much faster than the boundaries of the conflict suggest.