Some say Putin is desperate, that Russia is on the brink of failure. We will see.
That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? Unless Trump starts sending shiploads of eggs, things are going to get dire for ordinary Russians.
People have been saying that since the first weeks of the war. Don’t count on it. People expected Ukraine to flop over, and it didn’t. But now it seems they’ve greatly overestimated Ukraine. It is in a state of real disaster due to attrition. It was never equipped to fight a war of this scale - Russia has been, going back to the Soviet days.
What Russia lacked in intel, planning, competence or willpower at the start of the war, it has made up for with learning, superior manpower and ammunition and a rather ingenious domestic balance.
Yes, it’s a large economic distortion and the bill will come due, but the weight of evidence points away from the idea that Russia is nearing a 1917 collapse moment.
It’s still a basketcase nation (remember Prigozhin, lol) but so are most nations in the world.
Tiny-ass Ukraine has taken out over 700k Russians for about 100k of their own. We’re talking an actual David vs Goliath fight and David is kicking ass. The instant Russia touches a NATO country, Russia doesn’t exist anymore. Whether that’s due to nuclear hellfire or an invasion and regime change, we’ll see, but either way it will not end well for putin.
Ukraine is by no means tiny. And the numbers you state are unrealistic to the point of absurdity. Things may in fact end well for Putin. He will be despised forever in the West, he’s old and cannot hold power much longer and Russia will spend at least the next decade distracted with a wide front. But there is a possibility he will consolidate territories taken, keep Ukraine out of NATO through pokiticking and pass on his power to a successor that would convince Western leaders to partially restore relations with Russia out of convenience.
Putin says a lot of things. I don’t know why we bother listening to most of them. He isn’t talking to us.
It’s incredibly fucked up Biden is prioritizing aid to Israel rather than Ukraine in his final days till he shuffles off into the sunset
Israel wanted trump to win, but Ukraine is fucked with trump.
And Biden is just leaving them and all their other allies with the bill.
If we really want to fuck Russia and prevent trump from allying with them, Biden would give Ukraine some nukes arguing that it was because Ukraine voluntarily disarmed after an agreement with Russia not to invade.
That would actually prevent WW3, because a long range nuke that can reach Putin is the only consequence he’d really feel. He obviously has no problem throwing bodies and rockets into Ukraine.