Unless they expected a surrender ( which seems to be the case - they had advanced paratroop drops and logistics and rations drastically unprepared for a longer term battle,potentially with the help of special ops murdering Zelensky), why even go there then? Nobody sane starts a war with the idea of long term destructive urban fighting. Especially live streamed urban fighting. There's nothing for Russia to win there, so if that was really their plan, it's even stupider.

Which systems exactly (models, etc)? And who exactly will field them?

> Ukraine will lose a bit more ground in Donbas before the Russian offensive culminates

Correct, that's one of their stated objectives

> The Russian military will run out of soldiers and equipment

They ran out of both two months ago, didn't you hear?

> Russian economy sputters

Any evidence that this is happening or will happen?

The point is that it seems completely hopeless without direct military help from the West. Looked at Russia, in what sense? I have lived there, so I know what life is like there, but I don't know the state of the military. Except that it's enormous, and only a fraction has been deployed so far.

Why won't they accept becoming a vassal state, if the alternative is complete destruction? Or are they betting that Putin will back off before it's levelled to the ground. Perhaps he will, but I wouldn't bet on it, look at Chechnya.

Clearly Putin thought the resistance would be weak and starting out they went to great lengths to spare civilians, but that has already started to give way. It's awful to think what will happen if this drags on.

It is not that large. I remember an estimate of some strategist that you need 5x more firepower to win a battle in urban environment (cannot find the link, sorry). Even if Russia sends 20-30% of its entire army and national guard to Ukraine, this would mean only a parity with highly motivated defenders. Russia certainly has better equipment and air support, but it may still take a lot of time and casualties will be high.

Spetsnaz airborne were routed day 1. Was it really just Ukrainians? Or did they have some proxy help?

>Despite its impressive resistance, the city faced the prospect of imminent encirclement.

General mobilization is a huge factor here. Russian troops are fighting against people who have nothing left to lose. encirclement doesnt matter, when they enter the city they will lead with spetsnaz because if they don't... they will take tremendous losses. Russia hasn't even started to see the real resistance yet.

This is not an option, due to the amount of lives and equipment lost I don't think Russia has the option to pull out. It's a bit hard to have 50k casualties and lose thousands of pieces armoured equipment, hundreds of planes and just be like 'actually that was for nothing'.

> Ukraine would still be a very dysfunctional country with the threat of Russian invasion always on the background

I think Russia has more of a problem the longer the war goes on Ukraine is already going to receive NASAMS and IRIS-T anti air equipment from the US and Germany, which would significantly change the balance in the ability for Ukraine to control the sky.

The weapons aren't going to stop until Ukraine wins, pulling out also means losing Crimea and all the other gains they had made from 2014 until prior to the full on invasion.

Ukraine is more than capable of hitting installations in Russia even in their current degraded state, I don't think anyones gonna let Russia go back over the line and wash their hands of it.

> What does Russia gain out of all this shit I have no idea but my point remains is that Russia can keep this up if it wants to

Can it though? Russia is quickly running out of pretty much everything, they aren't using T-62s (tanks that don't even have a autoloader, a staple of Russian and even USSR tanks) because they want to its because they have to. I think the systemic corruption in Russia means they cannot fight this war for that long, for more then now? sure, but for years? im not so sure.

> The average Russian citizen is either fine with what's happening (surprisingly many) or too afraid to do anything. It's very hard to predict but the chance of Russia making it like this cannot be ignored imo. If you want to this how a country can make it like this look at Iran.

The longer this goes on the more the average Russian will be affected, the more assets that will be seized, the more people that will be sanctioned and the more companies that will pull out.

How do you square that with the mass destruction of Ukrainian cities, including by aircraft bombing? It seems to be a ridiculous assumption long debunked.

> Air supremacy is already achieved (almost all Ukrainian war planes and strike drones have been shot down), so it does not make much sense to patrol the air space too much, since operating a plane is far from being cheap

Nope, Ukrainian drones continue to inflict heavy damage - either directly or indirectly with targeting, just this past day there were direct strikes on a railway bridge, command post deep in Russian held territory, and an indirect one with artillery on Russian troops in a forest. Check out Oryx the blog or twitter account, they verify posts and retract errors if any are detected. Furthermore, Ukraine still operated fighters as of what, 2-3 says ago at the latest? Russia does not have air supremacy, only local air superiority.

That's true on different fronts. Recently Ukraine lost territory in Donetsk & Lugansk while recovering territory at Kharkiv and Kherson.

Russia concentrated forces at Donetsk & Lugansk, it's their biggest offensive. Ukraine concentrated forces at Kherson, it's their offensive.

In other words both sides are trading territory with no clear winner while losing a ton of men and equipment where Russia is apparently losing a lot more. Giving this it's said that Russian campaign is unsustainable on the long term but Ukrainians are also under equiped and depend on donations & leases.

https://www.understandingwar.org/

This was a huge eye-opener for me, the fact that we are spending 20x more on the military industrial complex and yet it cannot supply enough shells and bullets for the war, to me, indicates that all of our posturing is a bad joke.

Either there is huge waste and abuse in the system, or we've literally set Ukraine up to lose.

This war was supposed to last 3 days. It is now day 101. Russia was supposed to take kyiv. It was entirely pushed back. It then tried to take Kharkiv, and was entirely pushed back. It’s now trying to settle for severodonestk in the east and it’s not clear that they will take it despite a very large manpower advantage in that area. Meanwhile their control of southern areas like Kherson is beginning to falter.

Already struggling to halt progress in the east seems like a wildly misleading claim. Significant advances have been completely repelled.

The war was over before it began. The Ukrainian government telling people to take up arms is completely suicidal. War in the 21st century begins and ends with air superiority. Nothing else matters at all. Once air superiority is established, the war is over. And Russia is flying with absolute impunity over all of Ukraine now. The smartest decision is total capitulation at this point. Because Putin will stop at nothing and will not respect any form of ROE. The alternative is Kyiv being reduced to rubble and tens of thousands dead.

And you believe that is a failure?

Considering that Russia's top objective is to take the Donbas, that seems like a success. Ukraine is not Iraq 2.0; they are/were the largest military in Europe outside of Russia. And that is without considering all the western weapons and training support.

Where does that assumption come from? No Russian source has ever said that. The only sources I’ve seen were the US propaganda arm. Putin said that they were now in a defensive war with the west (his words, not mine). I don’t think they expected that to be over any time soon.

But just for fun let’s assume you’re correct. Their objective is to conquer Ukraine..?

It still doesn’t change the fact Ukraine isn’t winning. They’ve lost territory, most of the military assets, and the territory they’ve lost thus far is their most productive (industry and agriculture is based around the coast). By no measure is that trending toward victory.

Now my position on this — Recall, Ukraine had one of the largest standing armies prior to this war. Order of magnitude more prepared than Iraq in the 90s or 2000s. With better equipment, heavily entrenched and much larger by land mass.

I don’t think there’s any way that Russia expected to conquer Ukraine with 50k troops (1/8 the size of Ukraine’s standing army) in 90 days. But I also don’t think Ukraine is the only theater of battle. The real war is the war of logistics and in that, Russia is far better prepared and capable.

You are somewhat misinformed about the Ukrainian war. Ukraine has 3-4 times less population than Russia, but it started full mobilization early in the war. Meanwhile Russia started partial mobilization just recently. So it was common for the Ukranian army to have a numerical advantage on the ground. Most of the recent Russian retreats can be attributed to the lack of personnel to properly mount defensive positions.

As for technological advantage... It depends. Ukraine effectively has the whole NATO and a number of additional countries as its rear and supply base, while Russia depends only on itself and a bit on Iran. In terms of communication systems, intelligence, and likely anti-tank and anti-ship systems, the Ukrainian army is miles ahead of Russia. Russia has advantage in air, artillery, anti-air, and ground-to-ground rocket systems.

Every Ukrainian defender kills 10 Russian occupiers?

Obviously some will be less fortunate, and a select few will go down in history as extremely effective removers of Russian conscripts.

What do we define as winning here?, Ukraines tactic is to fall back to defensive positions when they are about to lose something so not to lose men. The gains Russia has made are very small and the amount of equipment and men it has taken to make them is huge.

Most of those games where made before long range heavy western weapons started being delivered too, I suspect their gains will slow down even further because of this.

Not fast enough. My understanding is the current Western military analyses still predict the Russians will eventually win, it'll just cost them more.

IMHO, if we want to Ukrainians to win, it'll require either some kind of direct military intervention, or giving them control of much more advanced equipment (e.g. cruise missiles, anti-ship missiles, etc.)

>The opening comment makes its seem like this is now all in the past. I think its a bit early to comment on how much Russia achieves here - this is very much WIP with a lot dependent on the solidarity in the West and the reaction of the populations to the cost of the war and the war effort as it drags on.

Essentially, the manner in which Russia will have to prosecute to the military side of the war to 'win' their military objectives, will make the political objectives that were the reason for the war in the first place, unachievable.

In the first few days of the war it was possible to imagine Russia achieving those political objectives. Ukraine might have given up the capital immediately. Huge parts of the country might have decided they preferred to join Russia. But it soon became apparent that those assumptions were wildly off. Any victory now will, at best, include absolutely massive quantities of troops perpetually kept in Ukraine at an incredible cost of resources and lives over future years.

Those aren't incompatible situations in this kind of war. Russia is advancing fairly quickly (though not without significant reverses) since focusing on taking a strip of southern territory rather than decapitating and forcing the surrender of the Ukrainian regime.

There are also still taking insanely high casualties and material losses that cannot be replenished on any reasonable timescale (Ukraine is taking high casualties, proportionately more than Russia, but also defending their homes; this matters in terms of casualties that can be taken without collapsing the populations will to fight; and Ukraine is getting a flood of material from outside supporters.)

While there's wide variance in estimates, Russia's casualties in its four month war look to be at least in the neighborhood of those the Soviet Union took in its decade long war in Afghanistan, which was widely seen as the USSRs Vietnam and a major contributor to the fall of the country, and the USSR was much bigger than Russia. And it's ever worse when you look at the casualties among senior officers and combat pilots.