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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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I will free-form list my thoughts:

The current Ukrainian retreats do look more like a rout than an orderly retreat, and there is talk of quite a lot of operational chaos in Ukrainian command at the moment. Pro-Russian opinion sources are definitely very gleeful in a way I haven't seen since the well advertised Ukrainian offensive imploded with massive casualties. In a couple days we will get a better view into how much of this is true.

Ultimately it is very difficult to predict anything about the future of this war (without clowning yourself) without a good insight into the casualty rates of both sides and Russia's military production/import ramp-ups.

I suspect that Ukraine is actually facing a low ceiling in its overall conscription capacity. I base my suspicion on increasingly brutal videos coming out for months where conscription officers are beating up men unconscious to drag them to the barracks or having to fight a large community resistance. We simply don't know how many eligible Ukrainian men are even left in the country at this point.

I suspect that Russia is having some problems ramping up and adapting its military production. I base my suspicion on its constant reliance on North Korean/Iranian weapons imports and inability to scale up precision bombing campaigns to truly devastating sizes and the fact that they appointed basically a logistics czar as the Minister of Defense after spending years failing to adapt their hardware to the battlefield conditions.

I still expect that a Ukrainian front collapse is very much possible although I am impressed by how long they held out. They have relied heavily on "ideologically motivated" brigades (other words might apply), a general manpower advantage over the lean professional pre-war Russian army, and Russia's slow adaptation to the drone/precision-guided dominated war. Those troops are dead, Russian military recruitment seems to have equalized things, and Russians more or less adapted to these technologies and even gained an upper hand. All these observations support the theory that Kursk offensive has been a failed Hail Mary attempt to trigger some black swan event through forcing a massive error from the Russian command.

I think anyone who still word-cells "this is how Ukraine is actually winning" theories are basically delusional or worse. The war perhaps developed as a win for the NATO command (debatable imo), but Ukraine is a dead country busy with auto-cannibalization in the hands of a desperate leadership.

This is culture war stuff, you basically just said " The nazi's in ukrane are losing". This isn't an analysis, it is a hit piece.

So? What’s your point?

but Ukraine is a dead country busy with auto-cannibalization in the hands of a desperate leadership.

This is the final truth. Win or lose, Ukraine is facing a historic collapse. Its population has already declined by 30% since its peak in 1990. The median age is 42. The women who fled to Germany and other western countries are not coming back. And the men are being fed into the meat grinder. What will be left is a country with lots of old people, few children, and a conspicuous lack of productive adults starting families.

It would have been far kinder if Kyiv had fallen in the first days of the war.