Posted on 02/05/2024 4:29:19 AM PST by FarCenter
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Nothing will happen if the Russians stay with the plodding, slow grind-up of Ukraine’s army. But, as noted above, the Ukraine war is reaching an inflection point for both military and political reasons.
Shifting the Ukraine government to Lviv and gaining support from Poland and the UK (no others are likely to contribute anything) would buy time for Biden, although the end result either will be a war in part of Europe (Poland, the Baltic states) or a stalemate that Russia and NATO accept.
Biden gets off the hook for the time being if this scenario plays out but even in the medium term it is a strategic disaster. Biden, of course, is mindful he does not need and cannot survive another Afghanistan-like disaster.
British enthusiasm for war owes to pressure from Washington. It is well to remember that the British military is an unholy, underfunded and undermanned mess. The British forces lack materials, lift and cover to do much of anything, and it is foolish to think the Russians won’t retaliate.
That leaves the impression that British enthusiasm for war is simply fake news, intended to scare the Russians somehow. Most of Washington’s Ukraine policy has been based on the exaggeration of the value of American weapons and coordination capabilities, and on wishful thinking that Russia would back out of the conflict.
Any look at Russian history, dating back to Napoleon, should have suggested that Russia wasn’t going to back down. Moreover, taking into account British bombast, one is reminded of the outcome of the charge of the Light Brigade. Will we see another Balaclava in Ukraine?
Nuland has created a disaster with the full backing of the Biden-Obama team. As, so far, there is no counterweight in the United States or among the NATO states, the disaster will roll on. Washington will continue to risk a war in Europe, even a nuclear war, to try and salvage the disaster of its own making.
Washington and Nuland are effectively trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
At the border with Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson?
At the Dnipr River?
At the Western boder of Vinnytsia and Zhytomyr?
The latter is close to the old Russian border with the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1914.
Wherever Moscow decides.
To the victor...
The border will be drawn north to south at Moscow. Russians will retreat to east of Urals where they belong and the land in between will be declared a neutral zone. It will be salted and any Russian seen there will be killed in honor of neutrality.
This being a proper peace treaty means that everyone is a bit disappointed.
Biden’s Ukraine policy? It’s not Biden’s and Ukraine isn’t the objective. His handlers want a world war.
The US and Ukraine just need to be softened up a little first.
“Wherever Moscow decides.”
CLEARLY the end-game now, and I suspect the partition will be mostly well west of the Dnieper, pretty much down the middle of what was Ukraine.
On Russia’s side (the east side) will be Odessa (Putin’s now made that clear) and Kharkiv, and they will link-up with Transnistria (and, of course, the 5 regions that are already part of Russia), with a big DMZ in the middle.
On the West side, which Russia doesn’t even want, it will be Poland, Hungary, Romania fighting it out with NATO for their piece of the country.
With Adviika about to liberated, we’ll soon be seeing something like the Race to Berlin at the end of WW2, and the Russians will be moving west much faster (regardless of what that Trudeau junkie claims), so as to achieve their objective before they have to directly fight western troops.
Anyway, that’s my take on the end-game, but who knows...everyone has been wrong on just about everything, although people like MacGregor, Berletic, and Ritter have been right, so far, regarding more recent events, including the Ukrainian collapse.
Then the next war will start.
Moscow would have to win first. You've been declaring victory since February 2022, tankie.
Please keep up, foreigner.
Wanna make a small wager? The Russians have shown absolutely no capacity to break out. They do not have the manpower nor the logistics to break out - and this has been proven repeatedly in the past after other victories - Mariupol, Bakhmut, etc that the same commenters wrongly thought would lead to a quick Russian victory. Instead they have extremely weak supply lines, their own shortages of munitions, they lack trucks and tankers and spare tires and their command and control woes are as bad now as they were in the first phase of the war. There’s a big difference between amassing a huge amount of firepower to win a battle of attrition in a siege at enormous cost (just miles outside their so-called capital of Donetsk), but successfully engaging in maneuver warfare is an entirely different problem one they have shown zero capacity in.
It gets easier to make fast progress when the other side has spent pretty much all the weapons they could get their hands on, which is why Adviika is collapsing FAR FASTER than the other examples you used.
Feel free to think what you want, I’ll just keep watching the reporting and commenting on.
Russia could just cut to the chase and renounce Stalin’s seizure of Eastern Poland in 1945.
The people of Lemberg obviously want what the EU has on offer. Surprisingly (to me anyway) the people of Poland recently elected an “open and affirming” government.
Give Galicia back! The rest would collapse overnight.
Avdiivka is a suburb of Donetsk, the Russians have been attacking it since 2014. Sure the Ukrainians have obvious supply challenges (it turns out that when the US cuts off Ukraine's supply of artillery shells, that hurts Ukraine's ability to win artillery duels - who could have predicted that!) But there's a massive difference between advancing a couple of kilometers to capture a fortified location where the war started and waging mobile warfare across hundreds of miles - Bakhmut didn't lead to a Russian breakout and neither will Avdiivka for many reasons but principally the simple fact that the Russians don't have even remotely the logistical capacity to support such an operation.
The Russians certainly want territory which they are now fighting to get.
The Russians had “the logistical capacity” to take Berlin in 1945.
I’m not a stalker like some Ukraine Cheerleaders here, so I don’t keep a record of your prior postings. So I’ll just state that just about EVERY ‘expert’ on Russia has been DEAD WRONG on this war, starting with the effect of the ‘sanctions’, which wound up collapsing Europe’s economy, while Russia sailed right through it. Then you have the Western-juiced ‘Counteroffensive’, which achieved about 5% of what the ‘experts’ were predicting all over the Western media.
So don’t take it personally, even the ‘experts’ seem to be CLUELESS as to Russia’s capabilities, so I wouldn’t expect people here to do any better.
For the record, The EU recently approved enough funding to carry Ukraine for the next year.
Further, the US has supplied new rocket propelled smart bombs good for 180 km range that can hit an tank at a tremendous distance. The need for conventional artillery has been diminished by American technology not even presently deployed to our military.
It is now a new game where the Russians are severely outclassed
“they lack trucks and tankers and spare tires”
Russian supermarkets and gas stations get stocked daily.
“successfully engaging in maneuver warfare is an entirely different problem one they have shown zero capacity in”
That is the main Russian problem.
“new rocket propelled smart bombs good for 180 km range”
The Russians have sheet metal. Is it a $200 metal dummy or a tank?
Three attackers to every one defender is the needed math to win and Russia doesn’t have the forces to win.
No matter what the details at the end of the Ukraine-Russia war, two still non-NATO countries, the article's statement speaks volumes.
From the Biden-Pelosi-Kerry-Romeny fleecing of Urkaine before Maidan, through to the "color revolution" and into the invasion, things cannot go back to zero. Nor does it look as if the NATO nations can actually ramp up production of useful war munitions to keep up, by reason of their own policy failures.
As the supposed "unipolar" and "rules based" order splinters into a multipolar world, those who think they can rule all the continually moving parts are lost in their own delusions.
When an emerging faux-Western West becomes confused over such as "what is a woman" sorts of questions, it is assured that faux-West has adopted idiots rather than wise men for leadership. Zero emissions? Nonsense. Carbon neutral? Idiocy. Transsexualism? Narcissistic folly. Merit as proof of racism? Lunacy.
The Titanic's deck chairs are soon to get wet.
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