America doesn't and shouldn't fight China or Russia alone, so I don't know why we're talking about that.
Russia is basically on its way out as a military power. It can't even conquer Ukraine.
As for China, you don't fight China alone. What do you think military bases in Japan are for? Anyway, for the world's sake, China shouldn't start a war, but sometime you just can't stop stupid.
I think very few, if any, countries in the world would be stronger than what we turned Ukraine into. You have a massive army being replenished by a constant slew of bodies, to the point of forcefully dragging people in off the streets, and then being armed with hundreds of billions of dollars in Western arms. But what gives Ukraine a particular superpower is their logistics.
Most people don't realize is that war is essentially a giant deadly game of logistics, and so the typical plan for Russia would be to simply destroy the logistics pipelines arming Ukraine. But thanks to the people 100% responsible for maintaining Ukraine's military managing to maintain a strategically accepted neutrality, it's impossible to fundamentally disrupt their logistics pipeline outside of small scale black ops stuff.
So that has turned this war into a war of attrition where Russia is advancing slowly, but mostly setting the goal as essentially having Ukraine simply run out of Ukrainians. And they seem to be succeeding. Once the real death tolls for this war are revealed, people are going to be shocked. You don't need to drag in people off the streets, close your borders, and continually lower the enlistment age (in a country with a severe demographic crisis) if you're not suffering catastrophic losses, especially since as the amount of territory you have to defend decreases, you need fewer soldiers to maintain the same defensive density.
> You don't need to drag in people off the streets, close your borders, and continually lower the enlistment age
As you said Ukraine’s demographic situation was quite horrible before the war. Very few people in their 20s. Hence the conscription age being 27 earlier in the war. They lowered it to 25 later (which is kind of the inverse of what happened historically in other wars).
Russia had way more manpower, then the cannon fodder from North Korea and the foreign mercenaries. Russia can afford even 1:1.5 or 1:2 casualty rates (of course they have other concerns and seemed to be very politically unwilling to send actual conscripts there and the pool of willing volunteers is not infinite).
Once the war ends and both sides can start clarifying their troop classifications. There's always going to be uncertainty because an MIA could be dead, or it could be some guy who successfully deserted and started a new life for himself somewhere. But as both sides return captured troops, exchange bodies, and so on - everything will be made much more clear. And there will also be less political motivation to lie.
I think this is impossible to answer for now. All you can do is look at known data and draw probable conclusions with an extremely high degree of uncertainty. So what do we know for certain about each side and the current state of the war?
Russia: Invaded with less than 200k soldiers. They later on mobilized approximately 300k soldiers. This mobilization was extremely unpopular and resulted in mass resistance within Russia, Russians emigrating and so on. Since then they swapped entirely to a 'voluntary' system of deployment, with some reported incidents of coercion. Benefits for soldiers are extremely high which is likely driving a significant rate of enlistment. Soldiers are demobilized after their contract ends, which is a very important issue for a war entering into its 4th year.
Ukraine: Had approximately 300k soldiers before the invasion. After the invasion they closed their borders, prevented men of 'fighting age' from leaving, and declared a general mobilization so that anybody between the ages of 27-60 could be forcibly conscripted and deployed to fight. They have carried out this mobilization very aggressively as well as constantly lowered the minimum age, and standard, of mobilization in a country that already had a severe demographic crisis before the war. Demobilization is somewhere between inconsistent and nonexistent.
Current: Both sides seem to agree that Russia has a significant manpower advantage with an army of approximately 700k soldiers remaining in Ukraine.
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To even begin to create comparative casualty measures you need to create estimates for how many soldiers Russia was able to 'voluntarily' enlist and estimates for their contract length to account for demobilization. And then you need to contrast this against how many people Ukraine was able to conscript and mobilize. You can find numbers for these online, but nobody's even pretending to try to be remotely objective and there's highly organized propaganda abounds, so the numbers are completely meaningless.
And then on top of that you also need to somehow figure out how many are actual casualties and how many are desertions. For instance Ukraine has apparently filed more than 300,000 criminal cases over desertion. Of course they also have numerous major motivations to avoid KIA classifications. So basically yeah - you're not going to be able to realistically estimate casualties on either side, with anything even resembling a reasonable degree of confidence, until the war is over.
Probably not but it’s unlikely to be that massively different, Ukraine wasn’t that much less willing to engage in “meat grinder” style tactics earlier in the war. Even 1:1.5 rate would be pretty horrible given the demographic disparity.
For Ukraine, war deaths would likely be a footnote compared to emigration when a new census is eventually completed (I don't mean to sound cavalier, but am trying to put things into perspective). An estimated 20% of their population has left since the start of the full scale invasion - ~10 million people - by now they've settled into new lives abroad (my 8 year old daughter's class here in Canada has 3 kids from Ukraine alone).
Ukraine is going to have some painful demographic issues to deal with when the dust settles (and I am cheering for them!).
> Ukraine is going to have some painful demographic issues
The scariest thing is that even in the best-case scenario, this may no longer be possible. Even before the war, Ukraine's demographics were dire, then young people left, and no matter how the war ends, there's no objective reason for them to return.
It depends on what happens. If Europe/US just shrugs and moves onto the next thing after the war, which is probably the most likely outcome, then yeah. But there is a real chance that they try to go full Marshall Plan with the goal of weaponizing Ukraine. If so, then there's going to be a lot of money flowing about there with some big opportunities.
With what surplus resources? Europe seems to be suffering from some pretty catastrophic looking political blowback with groups like Reform, AfD and a host of similar-looking parties gaining popularity because people don't think their interests are being prioritised. The US has a Trumpism phenomenon that might be matched by a left-wing revolt (crazy policies waiting in the wings Mamdani prioritising New York over Israel. The gall of the man).
On paper the US is broke. I'm not sure about the Europe situation but I doubt they're doing well either the growth statistics I saw last were a joke. They're all struggling to even arm Ukraine for this war.
If I were a Ukrainian strategist I too would not count on some sort of vast infusion of resources appearing after the war. These are not the conditions of the Marshall Plan where Europe had massive economic potential and the US was the world's leading industrial superpower with wealth to spare.
Literally yes, because they haven't started an actual war. If the US manages the same in Venezuela then they'll be doing a good job there too.
The difference between China and the US is China (humorously, probably because of US pressure) keeps re-investing their economic surplus and the US keeps blowing big chunks of it on meaningless wars. That seems to be the big factor of why China had this huge industrial economy appear out of nowhere and the US has been sort of lurching along for the last 20 years.
Hard to believe it, but trillions in investment is better for people's wallets than trillion dollars in making life horrible for goat herders in the middle east.
This is a false equivalence. The United States was not trying to “conquer” those countries in the territorial sense that Russia attempted with Ukraine. Those conflicts were limited political or counterinsurgency objectives fought under strict constraints, often without public support, and with no intention of annexation. Comparing that to a conventional invasion aimed at seizing and absorbing a neighbor’s territory is analytically inaccurate.
US did defeat Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. And indirectly Syria by supporting the insurgency (and we had bases in that Country). It is also worth noting that the US and South Vietnam had effectively contained the North by 1973. The Paris Peace Accords ended direct US involvement and the North violated those terms two years later when it launched a full-scale conventional invasion. South Vietnam collapsed only after the US withdrew military support. Same with Afghanistan. Iraq is flourishing without Saddam and without war. It toppled Saddam’s regime in weeks, and the country now has an elected government, functioning institutions, and no US occupation. Whatever its internal challenges, Iraq is not a case where the US attempted and failed to annex territory. It demonstrates that these were limited political interventions, not conquest wars.
(I'm not sure how many Vietnamese actually love USA, vs how many don't... I just want to remind that different people in the same society might hold different opinions, and the sentiment is certainly not monolithic)
Vietnam had such massive population growth that there are very few people who even remember the war. On the other hand China was pretty much always ingrained into their “national consciousness” as a permanent massive threat.
I never really looked into it, but it looks like the vast majority of Vietnamese were born after the war so US culture and trade are way more important contributors to opinion. Vietnamese are some of the most pro-US people in the world.
In March 2022 Russia occupied 27% of Ukraine. They have now lost much of their artillery tanks and then army and now control 19% of Ukraine while their oil refineries blow up, and recently tankers. I'm not sure the conquest is going quite to plan.
Not trying to be the world's policeman would allow tremendous downsizing of the military and its associated expense.
Decoupling and isolation is a very rational response if nuclear proliferation is going to accelerate, in order to avoid having entangling alliances pull the country into a nuclear equivalent of the first World War.
"World's policeman", that's what you tell little kids America was doing. America didn't invade Iraq or Afghanistan for world peace. There were strong economic and strategic motives behind those invasions.
Strategic motivation? If one assumes the US is going to be globally involved, yes, but that's begging the question.
Economic motivation? Not so much now, with the US being a dominant oil producer, and with petroleum itself losing importance. Even then, it's questionable if this could justify the full cost of the US military.
I think the original motivation was two fold: it was a combination of some sort of moral obligation to defend the "free world" from authoritarians, and (after WW2) a desire to keep small countries (and recent WW2 enemies) from deciding their only option for defense was their own nuclear deterrent.
Another thing the US did in the post-war world was apply economic leverage to dismantle European empires. This can also be viewed as defending nations against external coercion.
I think it had something to do with 9/11 being an act of war from Afghanistan against the US. Nations are responsible for the actions of groups inside their borders against other nations.
It was not an act of war since Afghanistan didn't have an official government - in practice the Taliban ran things - but the attacks were carried out by the Al Qaeda which was spread over the Middle East. The Taliban might have been sympathetic to it but they were not actively supporting them or had any official collaboration with them.
I hope you see where the problem with this is - the US had an enemy in a supranational organization, the Al Qaeda, which resided in many countries including Afghanistan.
The government of said country was unfriendly but not actively hostile to the US and on good terms with AQ, but not outright allies. This could've been said to apply between many Middle Eastern governments and radical groups at the time.
The US decided to invade, and antagonized the formerly unfriendly Taliban to become actively hostile.
The US managed to temporarily win over the Taliban but failed to permanently displace them.
AQ leadership, including Bin Laden moved out of the country almost immediately.
The 'war on terror' went on almost without end, then Bin Laden was killed a decade later, in a different country the US didn't declare war on, thanks to US special force action.
While AQ got weaker, ISIS got stronger (honestly I don't follow ME insurgent groups that closely, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a rebrand/reorganization in part).
So the US-initiated invasion totally failed to reach its stated result while leaving a huge collateral in its wake.
> Russia will conquer Ukraine, any other prediction at this point is absurd.
Are you sure? They are advancing, sure, put look what they paid for to achieve this: 300k dead, 700k wounded, depletion of their souvereign wealth fund, 20%+ inflation, lower oil production and so on.
Unfortunately, yes. USA is doing everything but openly support Russia at this point too. It could have been different if Ukraine got proper support, but instead it is being undermined.
Europe could do more, but at least most states dont play for Russia (Hungary and Slovakia excepted).
I think we may be at peak Trump though which will limit his power to bail out Putin. The midterms won't go well, the Epstein stuff is embarrassing, the Republicans are starting to get unruly.
> They are advancing, sure, put look what they paid for to achieve this: 300k dead, 700k wounded, depletion of their souvereign wealth fund, 20%+ inflation, lower oil production and so on.
Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship led by the communist Putin. As if communist dictators care. Look at North Korea, it's just the results of an unremarkable year.
I think literally nobody knows the price either side is paying right now. And I do mean literally, including Trump, Putin, and Zelensky. The fog of war applies to participants, let alone outsiders who are basing our views on figures and claims that obviously going to be driven heavily by propaganda.
But beyond this, I don't think this war is about Ukraine anymore than a war in Taiwan will be about Taiwan. It's little more than a proxy for hegemony in both cases. Russia did not want NATO parked in their Achille's heel of the Ukrainian flatlands. NATO did, and we pushed forward against endless threats of it being a redline, essentially as a means of indirectly imposing our will on Russia and establishing a hierarchy of dominance.
And similarly, for those that don't the Taiwan-China history - the Mao led Chinese revolution was a success. The existing government of mainland China fled to Taiwan where they brutally oppressed the locals, in an era known as the 'white terror' [1], and established power through 40 years of martial law. And of course we backed them, solely to use them as a weapon against China, because geopolitics.
This is why these wars are so important for the participants. The US couldn't care less about Ukraine, but withdrawing without ruining our ability to militarily threaten other peer or near peer countries is difficult. And similarly the last thing Russia needs is more land, but if they never act on claims of red lines, then they can never expect their interests to be considered in the case of a conflict in interests between them and the West.
I don't agree on the Russia Ukraine motivations. Ukraine is not part of NATO and was not going to become part of NATO. There were already two NATO countries bordering Russia near Moscow and St P if NATO had wanted to invade which they had no thoughts of doing. Russia lies constantly on this stuff. I think they basically regarded Ukraine their land as part of the Russian empire they were restoring.
It's not about immediate intentions, but about strategic options. Imagine Russia decided to form a military alliance with Mexico with the expected intention of deploying weapons on the Mexican border. If Mexico agreed to this, it would take approximately 0 seconds before the US invaded them under some whimsical pretext (drug gangs probably) and overthrew their government to prevent this. In fact this is, more or less, what the Cuban Missile Crisis was where we were willing to bring the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation over it, and that was an even lighter weight version of this event since there isn't even a land route from Cuba to the US obviously!
But in this scenario would you think Russia deploying weapons in Mexico is a precursor to them invading? Or that the US would be worried about that? Obviously not. Neither was Cuba. But it gives an adversarial power a tremendous strategic edge, while you get less than nothing out of it since it reduces your 'power' in the relative strategic balance of countries.
> Imagine Russia decided to form a military alliance with Mexico with the expected intention of deploying weapons on the Mexican border.
It would be a very foolish idea, because it's no longer the Napoleonic era. Concentrating your forces close to adversary's border makes them easy targets for destruction by long-range artillery and airstrikes. The Finnish chief of defence forces recently made the same remark when the Russians moved their weapons closer to Finland for intimidation: "It only makes them easier for us to destroy."
> In fact this is, more or less, what the Cuban Missile Crisis was
Not at all. The Cuban missile crisis was only about nuclear missiles. The USSR continued to provide a large number of conventional weapons to Cuba, including submarines and fighter jets, until it collapsed in 1991, without any of your invasion fantasies coming true.
It is a Soviet-built MIG-23 fighter jet carrying Cuban insignia. MIG-23 first flew 5 years after the missile crisis and the first batch was delivered to Cuba in 1978.
> It's not about immediate intentions, but about strategic options. Imagine Russia decided to form a military alliance with Mexico with the expected intention of deploying weapons on the Mexican border.
The problem with pretending this analogy is relevant as a justification (or at least an "other people would have one the same thing" argument, which isn't really a justification to start with) of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (besides the fact that it relies on dubious assumptions about a counterfactual) is that the only reason Ukraine resumed its long-abandoned pursuit of relations with NATO was a direct result of the invasion by Russia in 2014.
Ukraine had been striving repeatedly to join NATO until 2010. That's when Yanukovych, who generally leaned more East than West, took power. Ukraine dropped its NATO ambitions under his leadership and re-affirmed themselves as a neutral state. Then he was overthrown, in an action directly backed by the US with John McCain, Victoria Nuland, and others literally on the ground in Ukraine giving speeches and riling up protesters come rioters, almost certainly with further black ops organizing going on behind the scenes.
Following Yanukovych's successful overthrow figures favorable to the US/UN/EU, including those hand picked by Victoria Nuland in her leaked conversation, ended up in power. In fact the person Nuland hand picked for Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, was one of the authors of Ukraine's initial formal request for a membership action plan from NATO.
Can you tell me that you genuinely think that if Russia hadn't annexed Crimea (which happened after all of the above) that Ukraine would have chosen to stay "neutral" in this context? And I put neutral in quotes because what does that even mean when one bloc is driving the successful overthrow of democratically elected leaders and hand picking new ones? Imagine Lavrov et al were on the ground encouraging pro Russian protesters to topple the Ukrainian government (alongside comparably likely black ops organizing behind the scenes), they ended up successful, and then leaders hand-picked by him end up in power. Is that somehow still just Ukraine deciding their own fate?
There's a huge problem with this narrative. The Russian government's public tender database shows that they ordered the production of campaign medals for the invasion of Crimea months before any of this happened. Oops.
I still think Ukraine wasn't primarily about Russia's military security though. I mean the US/Nato could stick missiles in Estonia if they wanted.
It may have been about political security. If Ukraine which is basically at least part Russian had become a prosperous democracy on Russia's doorstep it would make it harder for Putin to justify his autocracy. In fact that one may come to pass.
It's not about missiles in this case. That's a strategic battle that Russia has largely already lost, though the advent of highly capable ICBMs/MIRV/etc with hypersonic maneuvering also makes vicinity less relevant in modern times. In this case it's about a land route for invasion and subsequent logistics. There are already NATO countries bordering Russia, but the land between them is extremely unfavorable - swamps, forests, and so on. It's simply not fit for what would be a large scale conflict.
Invasion into Russia would ideally go through Belarus, which is part of the reason that Belarus is such a critical ally for Russia, and now even hosts their nuclear weapons. Since that's not possible, the second best route (and third and forth and...) is through Ukraine, likely towards Kursk or Belgorod.
There's even something of an equal but opposite here on NATO's side - the Suwalki corridor [1]. It's a narrow stretch of land between Belarus and Kaliningrad (a Russian exclave) that, if controlled, would cut off the Baltic states from NATO. So if war ever breaks out between NATO and Russia, it would be a key strategic point and unsurprisingly, it's been heavily fortified by NATO - there are even hundreds of American troops there.
The idea of an invasion of Russia from Europe is utter nonsense and completely detached from reality. Tell it to Russian military experts and you will get sighs and eyerolls in response. Not even Russian military exercises like Zapad simulate such a scenario. On the ground, the border remains completely open - you can walk straight into Russia (and lost mushroomers often do so by accident) because there isn't even a chainlink fence or a cleared sand strip marking the border.
Contrast that with the European countries that actually fear an invasion: they are preparing bridges for demolition, scouting suitable areas for minefields, digging anti-tank ditches, installing reinforced pillboxes and bunkers. Last week, Latvian media reported that the government is even considering tearing up railways near the Russian border to slow the invading force.
The scenarios the Russians are preparing for include, for example, mass unrest in Belarus that would lead to Russia invading the country to keep its dictator in place, like they did in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and in Hungary in 1956. In 2020, this almost happened in Belarus over fraudulent elections and mass protests that were ultimately suppressed without requiring a "brotherly military intervention" by Russia.
> it would take approximately 0 seconds before the US invaded
Very unlikely.
Also Mexico wasn’t never exactly that aligned diplomatically and politically with the US to begin with.
Russia on the other hand views that it has some inherent right to subjugate and dominate all of their neighbors and turn them into puppet states if not outright annex them.
> In fact this is, more or less, what the Cuban Missile Crisis
In fact this is outright drivel. The US hardly viewed Russia as their actual opponent before 2014-22. Remember Romney- Obama debate (and Obama generally bending over backwards to appease Putin most of the time).
> Russia did not want NATO parked in their Achille's heel of the Ukrainian flatlands
Russia (i.e. Putin but also Russians in general) wanted to rebuild their empire from the beginning. Anything else is just an excuse.
> interests between them and the West
Of course this conflict has been mostly one sides till the 2014, with Obama and Merkel bending over backwards to appease Putin.
Also the implication that Russia has some God given right over dominion of half of Eastern Europe is a bit appealing..
> our will on Russia and establishing a hierarchy of dominance.
That is a very Ruso-Imperialist mindset. A society pretty permanently stuck in the 1800s politically and psychologically… e.g. Germany, France, Britain were somehow able to step over their ambitions and are doing relatively fine (even without having millions of foreigners subjugate)
Thank you for repeating Russian propaganda. But the truth is that Ukraine is sovereign nation and has every right to decide their future and give a fuck about Russia feelings. Russia is the aggressor and blaming anything on NATO is laughable propaganda.
> In all honesty, would you hold that argument if Mexico decides to host Russian or Chinese troops?
Ukraine wasn't hosting foreign troops (except Russian troops, some of whom were were the spearhead of the invasion) when the Russo-Ukrainian war started with the Russian invasion in 2014.
(They did start hosting some that were involved in training and advisory assignments after the war started and before the major escalation in 2022, but those can hardly justify the war which started with the 2014 invasion.)
In all “honest” how is that relevant when Ukraine never did that nor was US willing to deploy their troops there to begin with. To what end? Not a single US administration between 1990 and 2022 was particularly antagonistic or expansionist towards Russia..
Perhaps the objective isn't to conquer the whole of the Ukraine, but only most of it, leaving the western parts independent.
This seems to be pushed as the right approach wrt the Ukraine in Alexander Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics, which apparently is used as the source for Russia's current "Eurasianist" geopolitical doctrine:
Are you expecting Ukraine to ultimately buckle and collapse if the war of logistics continues for long enough?
It doesn't seem like Russia has the will, or potentially the capability, to actually conquer Ukraine rather than squat on some of their land and hope to move their border.
Russia is basically on its way out as a military power. It can't even conquer Ukraine.
As for China, you don't fight China alone. What do you think military bases in Japan are for? Anyway, for the world's sake, China shouldn't start a war, but sometime you just can't stop stupid.