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.
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.