Very good points. Lukashenko has been an obedient pup for Putin over the years, yet he has been meek and more conciliatory of late. Not out of benevolence, of course - he’s had a knack for survival, must know he’s bet on the wrong horse and has found himself isolated.

That’s another chapter in the future Wikipedia page. But - the problem with having ships, as any boat owner knows, is that they’re bloody expensive to build and operate, but kind of fragile. Surface gunboats were the ultimate expression of power projection in the 19th century, then once planes got invented, people figured out that it was way more cost effective to sink ships with massed planes than with other ships. Submarines were a stealthy superweapon under sonar and depth charges could be outfitted on just about any ocean going vessel.

Ships are so expensive and time consuming to build, that they’re nearly obsolete between the time they’re ordered to the time they launch. Ukraine has found several ways to destroy surface ships cost-effectively with missiles, air and sea drones. China, who have been on a ship building binge for years, might be re-thinking their entire doctrine. Taiwan has certainly been paying attention to Ukrainian Naval activities. And you think tank and air crews are expensive and time-intensive to train? Think about the operating & training costs of a friggin’ ship with hundreds of specialist technicians, engineers, sailors, logistics etc.

Historically, 2nd tier navies who’ve tried to compete with big dogs, like the Italians, Germans, Austro-Hungarians spend all this time and money on fleets, then the have one big engagement, lose a few ships, and decide it’s safer to stay in port. Or worse, like Taranto for the Italians, Bismarck for the Germans, Yamato for the Japanese, your uber weapon ships get destroyed by last generation bi-plane swarms dropping torpedos. Navies are a funny thing that way.

No kidding. You’re right, Ukraine might well have accepted a ceasefire along the current frozen lines, including Crimea in early 2025. A year and 400,000 casualties later, they have been able to make ukraine retreat from Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad. But - the viability of Crimea is teetering, the country is in outright energy crisis and Moscow itself is capable of being droned regularly with air defence growing weaker every day, every where.

It’s hard to view this conflict in historic terms - but you have to go back to the Persian Empire deciding to show Alexander who was boss before having their ass rolled back to Bactria for a comparison of a totally unnecssary imperial self-own of this scale.

There’s no reward to the Belarussian people for dying for Putin’s vanity. Do you thnk the average Belarussian gives a sparrow’s fart about the prestige of hosting Russian tactical nukes? Any reward Putin gave for their service would of course be for the corrupt gangster class. It’s a non-starter, AND Belarus’ army is useless for the challenges Ukraine poses.

Without any kind of formula, Belarus has no way to actually actuate on entering the war in a way that won’t immediately become politically untenable domestically and internationally. The answer russia has pointed to for concentrated armored maneuver in the drone age are Turtle “Tanks” but the problem is they don’t work perfectly against drones and for that meager benefit the trade off is they are horrifyingly less effective at protecting against every other anti-tank weapon and doctrine NATO has spent decades perfecting the use of…

I would go as far a

To be fairer to them than they deserve - it wasn’t supposed to go this way. Ukraine was supposed to roll over, Zelensky was supposed to flee. It’s been said by people more clever to me that Putin wants to be seen as a 4D Chess player, but what he really is, is a Poker player with a fat stack who always bluffs.

But hubris is a prison and he can’t only get what he holds now for all that they’ve spent. He’s on tilt, to continue the poker analogy.

I think the total lack of a Purpose of this plan other than the glory of making gangsters a little bit richer leads to the extreme brutality we see. Indiscriminate terror bombing, beheading, executing POW’s, Bucha, Irpin etc. When you don’t have a bloody purpose for being there, then soldiers go to us-vs-them genocide pretty easily. Chaos is never more than a couple paycheques away they say - or something like that. In short - they don’t know what the hell they’re doing, therefore they don’t how to stop or when they’re “Done”. The Idiot Tsar has set a ludicrous condition of triumphant tank columns rolling through Kyiv as the only condition for success. Since that is not going to happen - now what? Keep the industrial murder rolling until something changes.

As for Belarus - well, I can’t see that they’d be a needle-mover. Their security forces are intentionally kept small to be affordable and be useful only for internal repression. They aren’t even a 5th class assault force that could save the day where the entire Russian army has bashed it’s brains in to the bristling hardened hedgehog that Ukraine has turned itself into. If Lukashenko sentences his citizens to death for Putin’s glory, AND he pisses away his relatively tiny army in a month or two dying in the boggy lands of northern Ukraine, his head will be on a pike, either by Putin for failure or by his own citizens giving him the Ceaucescu treatment.

They don’t have a plan, really. They never had a plan other than “Ukraine surrenders, we incinerate a million or so to make the rest docile and we all get slightly richer”.

EX-FUCKING-ZACTLY. Thank you.

Airpower has hard limits, as the U.S. just recently found…again…in Iran. You need effective boots on the ground to move the needle. Even the massive, sustained, years-long Strategic Bombing campaign in WW2 required sending in massed ground forces right into the center of Berlin to end the European portion of the war. No air campaign has ever by itself achieved strategic political objectives in history.

And the air war that Russia is using for stand off terror attacks is INCREDIBLY resource intensive. It’s costing Russia billions to kill a handful of innocent people every day. Those assets, including the crews, are expesnive and the aircraft are essentially irreplaceable, with finite lifespans before you consider losses.

Russia essentially has a three part strategy at this point:

1. Push small infiltration teams into soft areas. Hope they live long enough to encourage organized resistance to fall back to the next line of defense.

2. Stand off terror bombing.

3. Keep doing 1 & 2 until they give you something to make it stop.

The problem with #1 is that your policy is Infestation. But - like bugs, mice or rats, you can kill them now, soon or later. But eventually, you can get them all with enough Repellent & Traps. In this case, drone saturation.

The problem with #2 is like you said - it does not achieve a political objective

#3 only works if #1 does, and #1 only works if Ukraine agrees to stop killing your forward forces. Just ask the U.S. how vietnam went. They could engage enemy forces and eventually win battles - but then your occupying forces get sniped, bombed, shelled, droned, counter attacked. Eventually you realize that the cost of holding land is untenable - you can’t pacify the ground, so you eventually choose to leave. What “works” for infiltration is not the same strategy that works for occupation. If the Ukrainians never stop bleeding the Russians, then the entire point of occypying and exploiting economic activity on the stolen ground never materializes. And they have to leave.

This is the recurring argument I have with people online who say “UKRAINE CAN’T RETAKE CRIMEA”. They don’t have to. They just have to make the Russians leave. If Crimea has no food, no fuel, no water, it is a barren rock outcrop that is bloody well uninhabitable. A tragedy, but - in the interim, it is also a buffer zone between Ukraine and Russia. When Russia either grows up or collapses, then maybe a peaceful existence becomes possible. Seems insane, but - time is a funny thing. The Germans and Japanese were certainly rehabilitated as global community members, but only after their malignant political class was deconstructed.

This war is existential for Ukraine, and no serious minded person expects the russians to honor any peace agreement long term. Russia gave Ukraine no choice - Death, Enslavement or Fight. If Russia stops fighting, there is still a Russia. Probably. If Ukraine stops fighting, there is no Ukraine. Not as a country, not as a culture, not as a people. Bleeding the Russian army until there is fundamental change in the political leadership or structure of the Russian Federation is probably the ONLY way for Ukraine to secure a lasting peace.

They are moving forward more slowly than any territorial invasion in the last 2,000 years. And put cruelty aside - they DO actually need to train these forces if they want them to make a difference.

Guys who were driving cabs, changing tires or working backoffice IT jobs 2 weeks ago are not effective infantry forces. They aren’t coordinated, can’t maneuver, aren’t professional by any definition. They are, in a word, ineffective. Effective assault forces require ground and air support, vehicles, supporting fire, engineering, logistics, food, shelter - And Training. Just grabbing more bodies while ignoring everything else you need for a strategic offensive just means those unqualified cosplayers die faster than the last batch did.

They don’t care about life - that’s obvious. But that lack of emapthy doesn’t translate into military effectiveness. If it did, the zerg rush of convicts and slack jawed cheque-chasers in years 2 & 3 of the war would have been more successful. And THOSE low functioning grunts at least had the rudiments of mechanized infantry, artillery & air support and mass. Anyone caught up in the next round of mobilization won’t have those benefits AND their economic productivity is harder to replace.

Numbers matters less and less than effectiveness as this war goes on. Current attrition rates are 8:1 or more since russia pissed away their Soviet hardware inheritance and started relying on tiny infiltration teams and standoff terror bombing. Doesn’t matter how cruel Russia is to their own - it won’t make ‘normal’ people into effective assault forces in the face of the pure grinding hell on earth they’re being mushed into.

I agree, there’s nothing to suggest Ukraine is at a breaking point.

Totally. That’s why I don’t think he actually intends to go through with it - even if wanted to, enough of the high functioning members of his team understand it’s suicide. Poland and Finland would no doubt see war as an inevitability at that point, and would likely conculde that teaching them a lesson now is the only option while Russia is relatively weak/distracted and they are relatively strong.

And the air war that Russia is using for stand off terror attacks is INCREDIBLY resource intensive. It’s costing Russia billions to kill a handful of innocent people every day. Those assets, including the crews, are expesnive and the aircraft are essentially irreplaceable, with finite lifespans before you consider losses.

Russia essentially has a three part strategy at this point:

Push small infiltration teams into soft areas. Hope they live long enough to encourage organized resistance to fall back to the next line of defense.

Stand off terror bombing.

Keep doing 1 & 2 until they give you something to make it stop.

The problem with #1 is that your policy is Infestation. But - like bugs, mice or rats, you can kill t

I thought about this a lot too. Mobilization seems the most likely, and even the idea of it accomplishes other internal goals of maybe flushing out and exposing anyone planning organized resistance. If you encourage resistors to leave…well…often they leave. Then you have a chance to catch them in transit, or make them advance their plans ahead of schedule which would greatly reduce the chances of a successful uprising later.

Understood it is important - it all is for many reasons. Kramatorsk will be a bloodbath maybe past the scale of Bakhmut, Pokrovsk etc, and there’s no guarantee the current version of the Russian army will be successful there. That will take a least a year maybe 2-3 at current pace. Ukraine might find it worthwhile for it to be a Stalingrad of sorts. In that time, all of Russia will have endured years of drone attacks, fuel shortages, surging inflation, mini mobilizations & press gangs in remaining cities that have men suitable for military service. But those troops won’t have the materials and mechanized support that the lower-functioning useless mouths before them had. They’re likely to die faster and be harder to replace in successive rounds of meat waves.

The other thing - Ukraine gets a very big vote in what happens next. It’s not just up to Russia. Crimea in particular will be under tremendous stress over the timeframe to capture the rest of the Donbas if UAF are able to continue stopping fuel & supplies coming into the peninsula. Russian civilian sentiment is just barely starting to grumble a bit. Per the point of the article - if in their minds Crimea is “lost”, it seems unlikely that they’ll be consoled by the trade off prize of Kostyantynivka.

Almost certainly the same source then. Telegraph’s Ukraine podcast is a bit of an aggregator - if you see a story with a specific number elsewhere, it often ends up reporting there too.

I found this clumsy to even type, so no doubt it retained it’s capacity to confuse. I think the actual quote was that holiday bookings were down by 80%. I shouldn’t have bothered trying to explain it as rising cancellations. That was the point I was trying to make, that…there are STILL Russians who are gonna holiday in Crimea, dammit, now get in the car. Which we won’t be able to bring back, because there’s no gas. Quit crying and get in the Lada.

It’s really kind of crazy to see Russian civilians filming exasperated clips, seemingly unable to understand that any of this is real, and (finally) affecting them.

Here’s a funny stat from The Telegraph yesterday - Crimean holiday cancellations from Russia are up 80% in June. Which sounds like a lot - but that made me think…**only 80%??? Who are the 20% of smooth brain vacationers who are STILL keeping their reservations? **Who is THAT stubborn about losing their deposit that they’re walking into beseiged territory without food, gas or water. And why are the Russian administrators allowing ANYONE else to come there? To be a liability and take their story on how awful things are back to russia with them?

6 months is assuming you gonna give them any decent training. Their main propaganda theme for many years was ww2 and to be like their grandfathers in it.

So yeah, they’ve progressed in their ww2 cosplay but we can go deeper. They still have personal rifles, after all, and not just several per 30 men.

As for the bit about taking people who are actually needed - well “victory, we wouldn’t stand behind the price”, same ww2 narrative.

Now, there is a risk full scale mobilisation would trigger some uncontrollable processes. And they were evading it for quite some time.

But the thing is, I don’t think russian leadership is purely rational. Their leader sees himself as a messiah on a holy mission to reunite the Rus and be the Gatherer of Russian Lands.

I don’t think he will bail and I’m fine with it. We need to end russia now, not to leave this problem to our children.

I’m not sure how useful comparisons to WW2 are, though they are clearly used to appeal to mythical nonsense for propaganda purposes. Suggesting that WW2 still has lessons to learn 80 years after the fact is like being in WW2 and saying that you should heed the lessons of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The battles and military capabilities are in absolutely different universes.

As for the “mission”. Yeah, maybe. That might also be guilding the lily a bit. These are (quite often literally) gangsters ingratiated with the malign power of the Russian intelligence and security services. Platitudes about glory and restoring the entitled imperial greatness of russia is perhaps again propaganda draped over the more pragmatic goal of slimy gangsters getting a little bit richer, while feeding lies to the masses to keep them compliant. Are Putin and his immediate enablers rational? Well - sort of yes, but as you say sort of no, or they would have stopped by now and been content with having shown the world they are serious about their near-abroad security. I absolutely agree with you that he won’t bail now - the time has passed for an orderly, principled conclusion. He’s chosen the more violent personal exit route of mussolini, Gaddhafi and Caeucescu. How and when we get there is all that’s left to be decided.

Thank you for your input!

You’re right, of course. It’s 3 words, and says more about my immaturity than it does any damage to the context of the article. But you’re still right.

They had lots of chances where the smart thing would have been to stop over the past few years. At this point, they’re spent - on many levels - and any serous minded person can see it. Hubris is a prison

I don’t think they can do a big mobilization, and here’s why. First - politically and economically. They have already used up the most worthless mouths they could exchange for good ukrainian land. Mobilization now will cut deeper into the socioeconomic classes that they actually NEED going forward. Which will come with increased blowback internally. The other reason I don’t think they can is timing. If you needed reinforcements today, then you needed to get them into the pipeline 6m ago. They didn’t do it, and they’ve let their 2026 campaign sputter and Ukraine regain the initiative, which itself makes future mobilization more difficult if the brighter, more informed meat you’re dressing up this time is less convinced of the certainy of success. Or survival.

What would full-scale produce? 300k more bodies, in about 6-12 months, at great internal cost? That would be about half a year’s worth of casualties marching into seasoned Ukraininan drone swarm kill zones. They don’t have the mechanized armor or air support for an effective zerg rush anymore. Just replacing raw numbers isn’t the same as maintaining or improving the quality of your Average Figthing Man. Russian capabilities are declining, and it’s not a slow incremental slide - it’s a friggin’ matterhorn drop in effective capability once you’ve lost your professional army AND your soviet hardware inheritance.

Thanks for the chin wag.

Thanks for the input. RE: Needing the war…yeah, I get it, but I’m not sure that there is a certainty that as soon as it stops, he will be liquidated. You need a faction to take over a country - organized, reasonably committed to a concept, different skills at different levels in a hierarchy. Maybe some thing they have a core of people they can trust - but this is Russia, and despite their butcherous incompetence and malignant greed - what they HAVE been good at is smashing any tiny ember of organized opposition.

I think they DO have qualms about sacrificing every Russian, as they are really just gangsters who want to lead tacky lives skimming off money from economic activity. You can’t steal what no longer exists. But - I think they also are in a trap of having weak institutions outside of the intelligence services and nobody really knows WHAT to do, never mind if they have the organizational effectiveness to do it.

The “losing to a worthy adversary” thing - yeah, that hubris is definitely part of their self image, but when you consider yourself a Great Super Power (even though you’re not, and on some level, the bright ones there probably understnad it), then the only one you’re allowed to lose to is the U.S. But it’s broadly accepted that Trump is their puppet, so…how can you surrender to your subordinate who, in NO WAY, could you reasonably construct a story that you are activey fighting.

This is kind of the weird paradox of having an idiot like Trump for an asset. He always pretends he has more leverage than he actually does. First year, FIRST big thing he did was cut direct U.S. support and tried to strong arm Ukraine into taking a bad deal. Europe stepped into the funding breach, and the 2025 version of the Ukrainian army turns out to be fully capable of resisting the 2025 version of the Russian army, even without direct U.S. military aid. In short - the fear of what WOULD happen if the U.S. pulled aid was more useful than the reality. Turns out, the U.S. aid isn’t that important to the current state of the war. And thus Ukraine doesn’t have to fear what the U.S. MIGHT do, because they’ve already done all they can, short of joining the war on the side of the Russians.

So - the SECOND big thing Trump did was start threatending allies like Denmark and Canada with invasion, and shooting ridiculous tarriffs in every direction. Degrade NATO, and erode economics. In a sense - if you can’t MAKE Europe stop supporting Ukraine, then cause a global recession to try and force them to be more selfish about their economies indirectly, forcing them to cut Ukrainian aid. That didn’t work, because it turns out crashing the global economy isn’t good for the U.S. economy either. And his mouthbreathing MAGAt horde doesn’t have investor-class levels of cash reserves to ride out a multi year recession. Probably behind closed doors, the EU told Trump’s team that if they so much as landed a pleasure craft in Greenland with a soldier on it, they would dump all U.S. Treasury reserves instantly and destroy the american economy, along with their own.

Then the THIRD big thing he did was starting to get invade-y by punching down on Venezuela, and he thought he could do the same to Iran. Again, he pissed away any military credibility they earned in Venezuela by being Netanyahu’s water-carrier in the ridiculous attack on Iran. The U.S. military’s limits are now clear - they are not interested in a boots-on-the-ground quagmire bloodbath. Well - Iran is not Venezuela and the limits of air strikes have been broadcast loud and clear. It’s hard to see Trump getting broad approval for another military boogaloo even in, say Cuba, much less literally attacking your allies.

Getting off on a tangent here, but - the point is - No serious minded thinkers in Russia think they’re fighting the U.S. right now. They’re not even talking about it in their most spittle-froth spewing propaganda channels. So - who are you ALLOWED to lose to? Britain? France? Germany? The Poles? That puts them in a pretty tight spot where they are only allowed to lose to a country whose leader is an obedident slave of your own.

So what CAN they do to trigger a russia-friendly outcome I mean? I don’t think they CAN do much anymore. They had options a couple of years ago and they had momentum. They were idiotic and greedy and doubled-down…because…reasons…and now Crimea is on the verge of being under seige. No water, no fuel, and soon no food or air defense. If Crimea collapses, then things will get very, very, very, very, very, very bad for them. As it is - their capitol is being bombed, their effective air defense is collapsing, they haven’t gained any meaningful ground in nearly two years, the economy is teetering on implosion, people are feeling the effects of the war in the few big cities that actually matter. Ukraine is getting stronger and Russia is getting into unthinkable, untenable situations. I dunno - all that to say, I think the game is later than people realize, and that there’s going to be some major major changes, soon.

Thanks for the chin wag.

, yeah, i think they WOULD in fact nuke europe. Possibly even chuck 'em at every NATO nation because they keep beating the dead horse of claiming that ukraine is being puppeted by NATO.

It would be nice if it turned out that whoever is sitting in the missile silo command centers has better morals than the scum fleshwastes who are in charge, evading armageddon via conscientious objection AGAIN just like that one time a radar malfunction over the northern arctic almost caused russia to preemptive strike the united states back during the cold war but for ONE DUDE who decided he wouldn’t make the call that could end the world.

it’s lowkey akin to a narcissist’s ‘extinction burst’. they’re losing everything so they blow up and burn it all, shrieking incoherently from their quivering ball of white hot impotent rage “YoU mAdE mE dO tHiS!1!!!11one!1!1!1”

He’s rational enough to be researching organ transplants and seeking eternal life. That’s insane and abomination, but it at least implies he’s enjoying this life well enough to want to preserve it. And the people who would have to execute an order from a dying Putin to nuke the world have to live in it after he’s dead, and they’ve got loved ones and lives that they would probably like to continue. China, and others inside the gangster family that runs the FSB are unlikely to trigger themselves into being incinerated because Putin doesn’t accept mortality. The FSB rather likes what they have in Russia, and are even trying to expand it.

it’s 3 words, because I’m still immature even at advanced age, and no attempt to mislead anyone on the context of the article. But rules are rules.