Russian officials publicly assure the world that their invasion will only last 1 week due to their overwhelming military superiority.
109 weeks later without a victory, losing twice as many soldiers and equipment, Russian officials swear that the US, not an active combatant, is going to be so embarrassed.
I was watching an analysis on the 2023 progress of the war. The author said that while he acknowledges that Russia seems to have the favour making the war a stalemate and took more strategic, albeit small, locations than Ukraine did; this leads to Catch-22 for Kremlin that the more Ukraine struggles, the more money Ukraine will receive which is not on Russia’s favour.
There’s also the fact that Russia never really seemed to account for most of its monetary and material taps getting turned off. When you’re (ALLEGEDLY) throwing conscripts out there without even a single full magazine of ammo, you’re burning through old post-WWII ammo stocks, and constantly having to beg old SSR states “hey can we buy/borrow some of your tanks and APCs please,” it doesn’t look great.
The trouble is, the material taps haven’t turned off they’ve been rerouted. Apparently enforcing sanctions is hard and more importantly also pisses off your donor base consisting of amoral business types. You can find any number of articles of Ukrainian complaining (even years into the war) that they find western electronics in downed Russian missiles.
The Kremlin warned that American support for Ukraine could turn into a decade-long folly, urging the U.S. to not oppose its invasion of the country as Congress appears set to pass a $60 billion aid package.
Buried lede: Russia thinks its “three-day special military operation to de-nazify remove US biolabs de-NATO Ukraine resurrect the Soviet Union” could take a decade. 😂
Also, they think they might need a decade to defeat a power that has a fifth of its military size, and which has, so far, roundly managed to make a laughingstock out of much of the Russian military.
Let’s assume Ukraine and all the funding it receives does delay it a decade and Russia eventually wins.
Isn’t that still a resounding success delaying Russia by 10 years and crippling them from the extended war?
It might suck for Ukraine, but from a foreign policy perspective that’s a success
Uhh no it isn’t? What the fuck? The very fact of a war is a foreign policy disaster if you care about the well being of Europe at all. God I hate America sometimes
Really?
Last I checked, we haven’t had almost 500k casualties and lost billions in military craft to old mothballed weapons we since moved on from.
It’s actually kinda incredible for Russia to have not realized that the US is literally just letting Ukraine integrate itself into NATO standards by training on and building up NATO standard equipment as it runs out of the shitty Soviet era alternatives
Meanwhile Moscow is instead developing a dependency on Iranian and Chinese made military hardware, stuff that neither is especially willing to part with given their own war plans.
The US could 1000% just barely provide enough aid to tactically let Russia chew its teeth out trying to break Ukraine, but it’s sending what Ukraine needs to win whenever it can because the US sees Ukraine winning as more important than Russia losing at this point.
US is literally just letting Ukraine integrate itself into NATO standards by training on and building up NATO standard equipment as it runs out of the shitty Soviet era alternatives
Not just Ukraine, either! All the NATO Eastern Bloc countries donated their Soviet equipment (and much more) and are actively rearming and retraining their own militaries on NATO standard equipment.
Unfortunately “barely enough” is closer to the mark. Ukraine should’ve had this funding last year and we should’ve been close to the next round at this point. If this is actually all America can muster when it is committed to “winning” then then thats a bit sad and scary considering the incompetent broke ass country we are trying to beat while having homecourt advantage.
The only thing that gives me solace is the thought that this is carefully architected to bleed out Russia and not actually a show of real force.
If only they had oil, they’d be a free country neo-colony of Biden a long time ago
US is literally just letting Ukraine integrate itself into NATO standards by training on and building up NATO standard equipment
Excellent point. Due to the equipment Ukraine now has the west is at a point where they will stand to lose a lot of valuable technology if Russia wins making it necessary for western intervention if things go bad for Ukraine.
At the risk of being jingoistic, this type of opponent is exactly what our military is designed to utterly destroy. If the US was an active participant it would have very quickly wiped the floor with the Russian army and would be dealng with Russian backed insurgents in the east.
Ukraine has been beating them with the stuff we routinely throw away (when the Republicans don’t get in the way), I am convinced they have no non nuclear answer to our actual military.
40 years ago maybe, but afaik after 20 years of Iraq and Afghanistan the us army has shifted quite far into focusing on counterinsurgency and away from fighting vs mass armor and artillery
Seems a little high. Russian casualties are probably closer to 350k according to Western estimates.
I wonder how many died though (edit: Ukraine claims 180k but their casualty estimates are reportedly high, so probably less than 180k dead)
funny that the Russkis mention Afghanistan 😅
And as always, as long as the cunts in Russia are complaining and riding their propaganda train at full speed, we are doing something right.
These brainiacs had concerts singing Gruppa Krovi from Kino to recruits early in the war. A literal Afghanistan-era Soviet anti-war anthem. They have no sense of irony.
Hey Putin, remind me again how many days into your 3-day special military operation you are?
