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Trump will get stonewalled by Putin on his demands, resort to threats of reducing or cutting off aid to Ukraine as a way to force them to make whatever concessions to end the war, and hang the failure on the Biden admin and lack of support by the European satropies. Ukraine will end up a rump, disarmed state, with something like a constitutional requirement of neutrality as well as disarmament (with inspections). Russia will have more territory than it's already currently inducted into the Russian Federation.
Russia gains nothing from stopping the conflict. Everything is in their favor. They are winning all along the front. Every single week their military gets larger, stronger, and better equipped. Ukraine gets weaker, smaller, and less equipped.
I predict the war will end in 2025 with a significant chance of a cascade-failure of the Ukrainian army, likely as a result of a big arrow move by the Russians. I also expect serious political instability or coup against Zelensky & Co., likely by the nationalist faction who implement a universal conscription program in an attempt to stabilize the line and I think this will fail. I think there is a small chance in the event of a cascade failure, Europeans and/or NATO will attempt to put "peacekeepers" into parts of Ukraine in order to stabilize the conflict, perhaps first a trickle in places like Lvov and more if it's not punished enough.
The war will end as a huge embarrassment for the West with permanent degradation in the perception of the West's financial and military strength. It'll be yet another feather in the cap of failure by the US state department over the last 25 years.
Do you not think it likely/plausible that Trump would force Russia to accept a freezing of the conflict along current lines with no additional conditions by way of threats? Between the circumstance that any Republican administration is likely to contain more hawks/military optimists, a general preference his team seems to have for bold moves and a certain "Nixon going to China" effect now that in the public perception the Democrats are the party owning the "help Ukraine" brand, I think he could make the threat of escalation credible - say, to start, by providing Ukraine with significantly more and better deep strike equipment, letting them base combat aviation in adjacent European countries, greenlighting an incursion into Transnistria, or even going through with garrisoning some Western troops in the rear to free up Ukrainian troops for the front. It's not clear what responses would even be available to Russia to any of those that I can see Putin risking, apart from maybe shooting down some US surveillance drones over the Black Sea.
(Ukraine, I imagine, could be strongarmed to accept freezing with no additional conditions; their current public refusal is just for morale reasons.)
I don't think at this point Trump can "force" Russia to do anything because he doesn't have many believable escalatory threats. They will have to be given a lot and I think the bare minimum Putin will accept is Russia keeps the entirety of all oblasts it has already inducted into the federation except maybe certain parts of Kherson and at the cost of the US and Europe removing all sanctions on Russia and Russians and some sort of guarantee going forward, with Ukraine disarming and having their constitution reflect both disarmament and neutrality, as well as "de-nazification," and enshrining protection for russian-speakers.
Russia is winning and will win more the longer the war continues. They have advantage everywhere, they've already sunk a ton of resources into this capability, they've already spent a lot of blood, and they've already spent a lot of legitimacy and political capital on it. To get them to stop, you are going to need to give them something very valuable.
Ukraine is in no position to negotiate. They have repeatedly violated agreements, e.g., don't attack energy infrastructure. Ukraine will accept whatever the US wants because the US is a but-for supporter of their continued ability to fight.
I don't think the Russians will be moved by these escalatory threats. Russia has escalation dominance in region and it's not close. Russians will bomb any airfield irrelevant of where it is if the planes taking off from it are used in military operations in the SMO let alone Russian territory. I doubt the AFU is capable of serious escalation against Transnistria. Any NATO troops which step foot on Ukrainian soil will be immediately bombed. Russians have already framed this discussion because these threats have already been made over the last two years. I doubt they will retreat from any of these threats.
Additionally, I sincerely doubt many in the world would belief radical escalatory threats by the US military. The US military which invaded Iraq was built up during the cold-war; that force, its men, and its equipment have been spent and reformed. The current US is not the country which built that military, filled it's ranks, or built the equipment for it. I doubt the US military could currently accomplish something like the Iraq invasion now. It's been spending multiple years embarrassing itself in missions like protecting international shipping in the Red Sea against the Yemenis. By the time they declared victory, they struggled to convince US flagged ships to make the run through the straight with guarantees of protection. I doubt the US could even fight in place of either side in the war for longer than a few months without conscription and major industrial mobilization.
Donald Trump will not risk escalation to war over a Biden administration debacle when he can just hang the idiotic failure on the Biden administration and even use it as an excuse to clean out the state department and other connected agencies. I agree he has "bold move" guys in his orbit, but I think the "bold move" here would be to blame the neocons, the Biden admin and state department, and walk away from a dumb foreign entanglement.
IMO, Donald Trump escalating something like this to war would end his political legacy and he would lose large portions of his supporter base.
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It isn't a victory, but isn't the fact that Ukraine is still fighting this far still an impressive feat?
At some point, you can't expect the West to be able to defeat Russia in every proxy war context.
This isn't even a symmetrical proxy war. The West is fighting only as a proxy against full Russian involvement. Feels a lot like Russia's Vietnam, even if in the long run Russia might eke out a points victory - a major power thwarted by a minor nation backed by opposing major powers, except even less flattering for Russia because at least Vietnam was half a world away and not bordering America.
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Ukraine losing half their population and their most valuable oblasts as well as 600,000+ dead (I haven't seriously looked into casualties for the last 6 mo or so) in order to successfully stall a much larger and more powerful country is impressive. The coordinated western and Ukrainian propaganda blitz and ability to control how the war is perceived in the West is very impressive. Unfortunately, manipulating perceptions eventually has to sync with reality. The West manipulating or buying of Ukrainian elites to feed their people and nation into the shredder is impressive.
However, it's going to result in a catastrophic loss and at enormous cost, too. Western weapons have been exposed, and even if we're being overly kind, western industry and capability to make these weapons in sufficient numbers to affect the battlefield has been exposed, and Russia (and their allies) now have countermeasures to all of them and they're quite effective, the multipolar alliance strengthens, Russia's willingness to supply weapons and tech to American enemies is in overdrive, the deindustrialization of Europe, amongst others.
The West has engaged in dozens of actions which could legitimately be characterized as acts of war and the only reason it's not is because of escalatory danger. There's a difference between supplying some 3rd world guerilla group to combat an enemy and focusing nearly your entirely military output to support a country up to and including on-the-ground military personnel who interface intelligence with that military and even even weapons.
I do think it's reasonable to expect a competent West to pick these sorts of wars only when they can win them and the cost is worth it. I don't consider the Western foreign policy establishment to be competent or reasonable because they have a now 40+ year history of incompetent idiocy which has burned the benefits of winning the cold war.
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