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This was an extremely common argument on this board just before and during the early stages of the Ukraine war.
It would have resulted in fewer overall deaths but has plainly been disproven by what actually happened.
The longer the war drags on the worse it gets for Ukraine, but with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight they made the right call to fight.
That remains to be seen, it depends on the peace deal they get and the real casualty figures, which we don't know.
'What actually happened' is still in a state of flux from the point of view of us observers who aren't privy to the secrets of the universe. It may be that the media is broadly accurate arguing that Ukraine enjoyed favourable casualty ratios due to high-tech western weapons and clever tactics. Or it may be that they were drafting men, shoving them into a trench and basically feeding them to Grad, Mista and Kalibr to buy time, that they suffer unfavourable exchange ratios. My suspicion is that the latter is more accurate, considering the preponderance of firepower on the Russian side and strong incentives for the media to lie in favour of Ukraine. If that is the case then Russia has a winning hand, they have suffered non-trivial losses and will be inclined to impose much harsher terms given the costs endured.
You're correct that we don't know, and I suspect the value of the war to Ukraine reached its apex earlier than today. Unfortunately I also agree with the rest of your post as well.
I suppose as a baseline though I still believe the value of Ukraine standing up for itself made it a net positive at some point in the past few years.
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How do you mean? I think they could have gotten out early giving up just the disputed Donbass areas plus land access to Crimea -- it's not great, but now they are in a situation where Russia has little reason to stop nibbling away so 'current lines of control' seems like the most they can get. That + a bunch of dead people and 2 years lost rebuilding time doesn't seem worth the squeeze to me.
I think giving up that early would have emboldened Russia or required enough compromises to make it effectively a vassal state. Not a foreign policy expert, just my impression.
I don't have an opinion either way on that -- seems to me to require advanced Kremlinology at best, literal mindreading at worst.
At this point on the other hand, I don't see any reason for Russia to want to stop what they are doing -- all the international capital has been burnt already, and direct war losses seem pretty sustainable for them. So they will need to either be offered something significant over and above what they've already taken (Zelensky seems reluctant) or threatened -- which Trump will probably try and might work, but there's a hard cap on how much they can be threatened for MAD reasons.
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Obviously whether or not they made the right call to fight is actually a values question and I am not going to second-guess Ukraine if they think it was worth it.
But just from an economic perspective I think Ukraine would probably have walked away in vastly better shape if they had made a peace deal.
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It appears that for all the blood and treasure spent since the early war peace deal was derailed, they're probably getting the terms of the early war peace deal.
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