People really downplay the risk of the war simply collapsing. We've been numbed by 3 years of stalemate and attrition and lines barely changing. But its blatantly obvious that Ukraine has long since run out of troops and reserves and is reduced to kidnapping people to fight. Russia doesn't need to make a big dramatic breakthrough, Ukraine simply needs to reach a tipping point. From where we stand right now people think Ukraine could hold out indefinitely, but how secure did the western-backed government in Afghanistan look a week before it poofed?
If hardline Ukrainian nationalists won't agree to peace, if America pulls heavy weapons support, if Europe continues to deliver empty cloudcuckooland promises, we could easily be looking at a Ukraine that implodes domestically and is then occupied and managed by Russia just like I said from the start. And then we get the worst of all worlds, we lose the war, we lose our credibility, we fought for nothing and Russia doesn't need to negotiate with us.
1. The tacitly or explicitly pro-Russian side of these debates has been predicting an imminent implosion of Ukraine for those 3 years, and it still hasn't happened. Of course it could happen any moment, but can you really fault people for dismissing this notion after it had proven premature time and time and time again?
2. The Afghan government never looked stable if we're being honest. Afghanistan never had a sense of national unity, no tradition (nor an appetite) for democracy. It was a country in which nobody had any loyalty to the government or the state and its institutions. And its military and police force were sorely lacking any kind of track record or tradition. Ukraine checks all these boxes while Afghanistan checked none.
3. I disagree with your framing in the final paragraph. You make it sound as if the major - if not the
only - obstacle standing in the way of peace was Ukraine. In reality, Russia has no interest in a peace deal involving meaningful compromise right now. And why would they? They have the upper hand on the battlefield and the larger reserves of manpower. As long as Western support for Ukraine remains muted, they are in a comfortable position. Hence, they are clearly stalling and delaying Trump's push for a peace deal. That being said, the belligerence and boneheadedness of Ukraine's hardline faction surprises me. They would have been well-advised to play the same game as Russia and placate Trump.
One or two weeks ago I said that Trump's initial approach to the Ukraine war was naive and unsuitable because he was preemptively giving up all leverage he had over Russia while trying to put the screws on Ukraine. Trump's strategy is fundamentally flawed because it operates from wrong premises, namely that Russia is a misunderstood victim of Western aggression and acting out of a sense of justified defensiveness.
Under this premise, coddling up Russia might help alleviate their fears and anxiety and thus pave the way for them being willing to stop the war. Then use the dependency of the Ukrainian side on US support to get them to agree to a peace deal,
et voilà, problem solved. As predicted, this premise is wrong and his peace proposals are going nowhere. I still hope him and his advisers figure out something else, instead of what they're signalling right now, which is basically the US saying "screw you, guys, I'm going home".
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Apr 24 2025 12:54am