The thing is, it NEVER mattered what MacGregor, Ritter, Tucker, or Trump said, the Russians simply WERE NOT going to lose a war on their doorstep and they were going to get as much help as needed (which isn’t much at this point) from China and North Korea, whether Biden’s supporters liked it or not.
That’s my take on it.
“the Russians simply WERE NOT going to lose a war on their doorstep”
They did in Afghanistan, when the Soviet Military was four times the size of today’s Russia, the Warsaw Pact was on their side, and the Afghans received only a small fraction of the support that Ukraine does today.
The Afghans could not touch anything in Russia, but Ukraine has struck Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kazan - and has three million drones in the pipeline for this year.
Russian casualties have already been several times higher than the total of their ten years in Afghanistan. Their equipment and financial losses have also been several times higher than in Afghanistan. Soviet inventories of Artillery and Armor grew over the ten years in Afghanistan, but Russia is overwhelmingly losing more equipment from their storage than they can produce. That supply is on track to be exhausted next year, at the burn rates we have seen so far.
The land area and population of Afghanistan and Ukraine are fairly similar, but the Ukrainian population and Military are dramatically more technically capable, better organized and led.
The Soviet Union was able to quickly occupy all of Afghanistan and install their own Government, but Russia has achieved much less in a much longer timeframe in Ukraine.
It actually seems unlikely that Russia can sustain current rates of combat operations in Ukraine for more than another year or two, if support for Ukraine remains at current rates.