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Ukraine is not Liechtenstein! It is not Monaco! They have an army of 1.2 million men and women. When you figure in the aid they have something like a two trillion dollar military budget. They have a territorial area that’s equivalent to France and Germany combined, giving them significant ability to use defense in depth. They have been fighting Russia since 2014, which has given them a significant amount of combat experience that most NATO countries do not have. And those years allowed them to build up a fearsome network of fortifications and bunker systems all along the DPR/LPR border. There’s a reason they got picked to be the buffer state over Poland, and it’s not because they’re an easy nut to crack. To assume that Ukraine is the “easy mode” before having to take on the NATO final boss is foolishness.
Is it? Russia is almost five times the population of Ukraine and militarily supposedly one of the mightiest nations on earth. Russia is noticeably richer and more advanced than Ukraine, and incredibly it’s less corrupt which is absolutely wild.
Lots of smart people thought the Russians would crush Ukraine in a matter of weeks, it’s incredibly impressive on Ukraine’s part that they didn’t. And equally embarrassing for Russia.
Ukraine is largely flat and featureless. Afghanistan it is not. Yes it’s a buffer state but historically buffer states come in many flavors; Ukraine’s particular brew is the easily traversed crossroads type.
A lot has happened between now and then of course, but this whole excercise is, on my end, indicative of the relative weakness of Russia.
Poland, even without NATO protection, is obviously a huge problem for Russia. This whole thread stated with me basically saying that the idea of Russia throwing its weight against Poland is absurd, so I’ll spell it out.
Poland is roughly the same population as Ukraine, with tougher and more diverse terrain, and has had greatly heightened peace-time military spending for years. It’s much richer, more advanced, less riddled by corruption, more homogeneous, and has a much higher state capacity.
And there’s no reason to believe that the ramp up that Poland could achieve would be any less spectacular than Ukraine’s. In fact there seems to be sufficient evidence for the opposite conclusion.
While Russia is clearly not on the ropes and it appears to me that they’re winning, it also appears clear that their regime is pretty brittle and couldn’t sustain the heightened war state to even look seriously at directly messing with Poland or the Baltic countries, or even Finland.
Even in its current fake and gay state, NATO would absolutely eat Russia alive. I can’t believe this is even remotely controversial to stay.
I feel like this is a case where you just have to keep an open mind and be willing to update your views. The smart people who thought that were wrong, on both counts. Russia badly botched it's attempt at a fast, combined arms inivasion, yes. But Ukraine also hung on with much more tenacity and organization than anyone expected, and that counts for a lot. And now they've had 2 years worth of western aid and training, in a fairly large country that is all-out mobilized for war. At this point, like @ABigGuy4U said, Ukraine is not a soft target, and yet Russia continues to advance.
Now, if there were some hypothetical future war between all of NATO and Russia then, sure, Nato wins easy. Except that would never happen, because of nuclear weapons. I also don't see any particular reason why Russia would want to start such a war- there's no area of Poland that's like the Donbass, which has lots of ethnic Russians and a direct land connection to Crimea.
Only the ones in Europe. They're closer than ever now to China, North Korea, and Iran. Not sure about the former Soviet states in central Asia but I don't think there's any real tension there, either.
That said, I agree with your initial point that Russia isn't particularly a threat to Poland, even on its own. So I guess I'm cautiously arguing in favor of a peace deal where Russia gets to keep the Donbass, the other European countries stay vigilent and increase defense, and hopefully there's no more war after that.
Im not cuddles but i think i have. Have you? What if my "updated" view is that the russian military is substantially less capable than initially estemated.
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I basically agree with all of this.
My initial comment was mostly in response to the idea of Russia considering Poland / Baltic Countries / Finland part of their “sphere of influence”. To which I simply don’t find the idea of those countries coming under credible military threat from Russia to be a realistic prospect at all.
In regards to Ukraine, the motivation & justification for the Putin regime is more transparently obvious, even if you ultimately disagree with or oppose that regime. Which I sort of do, largely depending on my mood.
Ukraine has really outdone itself but I simply don’t see a way around them getting ground to dust eventually by the Russian war machine outside of a deus ex machina type situation where Putin chokes on a chicken bone and Russia descends into chaos. Hopefully they can settle before they run out of young men to fight.
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