You are not the only one. Any sane military analysis showed it was a.bad idea. Where you (and everyone without access to classified information) messed up was assuming Putin was sane.
The war is still going on, Ukraine is still bleeding, the Ukrainian military is losing some of the more qualified personnel they had prepared before the start of the war, and the Russian military is gaining experience and becoming a bit less shit.
Which means Ukraine’s qualitative advantage is becoming smaller. Even the casualty rates have changed accordingly.
And Russian economy is not crumbling and doesn’t seem to even be on that track.
Putin and others are afraid of competing civilized polities in the ex-USSR. They very clearly don’t intend any “imperial restoration”, because their actions are inconsistent with that. They are more of a mafia group gotten very high.
They hurt Georgia so that it doesn’t become a prosperous country, they also were strangling Armenia in various forms, even with it being an “ally”, and since 2010 started supporting Azerbaijan. With Ukraine their actions were not unlike those with Armenia before government change, and then various gradations of war.
See, even if Ukraine sort of “wins”, it’s inevitably going to be more authoritarian than in an alternative reality where this war didn’t happen. If it “loses”, then, well, there won’t be such a civilized polity, just another Belarus, bigger and poorer.
You are not the only one. Any sane military analysis showed it was a.bad idea. Where you (and everyone without access to classified information) messed up was assuming Putin was sane.
Ah, let’s slow down a bit.
The war is still going on, Ukraine is still bleeding, the Ukrainian military is losing some of the more qualified personnel they had prepared before the start of the war, and the Russian military is gaining experience and becoming a bit less shit.
Which means Ukraine’s qualitative advantage is becoming smaller. Even the casualty rates have changed accordingly.
And Russian economy is not crumbling and doesn’t seem to even be on that track.
Putin and others are afraid of competing civilized polities in the ex-USSR. They very clearly don’t intend any “imperial restoration”, because their actions are inconsistent with that. They are more of a mafia group gotten very high.
They hurt Georgia so that it doesn’t become a prosperous country, they also were strangling Armenia in various forms, even with it being an “ally”, and since 2010 started supporting Azerbaijan. With Ukraine their actions were not unlike those with Armenia before government change, and then various gradations of war.
See, even if Ukraine sort of “wins”, it’s inevitably going to be more authoritarian than in an alternative reality where this war didn’t happen. If it “loses”, then, well, there won’t be such a civilized polity, just another Belarus, bigger and poorer.
Almost a win-win situation.
It’s not a sport.
I hoped he wouldn’t, but at the point where he was massing troops at the border it was surely a sign of what was coming.
“We’re not planning on invading, just putting all our troops here for shits and giggles!”
It wasn’t the massing of troops. It was the massing of blood and other perishables. You don’t do that for drills.
When the analysts found that there were massive stores of blood bags on the border, that was when it really dawned on me it was going to happen.