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Let's talk about this for a second.
On the one hand, if Ukrainians want to fight to the last man, that is their right. I will not suggest they don't have that.
On the other hand, guess what? Unless your opponent is going to systematically kill you all (and there are examples of this sort of thing), defensive wars are rarely justified in terms of a cost-benefit analysis of human life. For instance, England could almost certainly have saved a great many British lives by surrendering to Hitler during World War Two.
What defensive wars do (if they succeed, which they can do even if they are technically a loss - witness the Finnish Winter War) is enable a unique culture and people group to preserve and maintain that culture and the state sovereignty that protects it. And, sadly, Ukrainian culture was already on shaky ground before the Russian invasion. But the war really accelerated that development, between out-migration to Europe and the absolute meatgrinder in the trenches. The Ukrainians understand this (which is why their conscription law blocks recruitment of young men - prime fighting age - to preserve their demographics). Continuing the war means that the already severe Ukrainian demographic problems will continue, and they might have to dip into their "seed corn" of young men. This would be a tragedy.
Ukraine will never recover from this war. It is never getting Crimea back, and it is almost certainly never getting back the areas of Western Ukraine currently occupied by Russia. Its population is shredded, its infrastructure increasingly weakening and its considerable Soviet-era inheritance largely spent. There is a possibility that they are already at the point where their best-case outcome postwar even if they did regain territory back to 2022 lines was that of a vassal or client state, clinging to the EU for dear life and trading away its vast natural resources to foreign investment firms in exchange for an influx of cash and workers to help rebuild their infrastructure...and the worst case scenario is one where they actually become a failed state, possibly losing their sovereignty again, perhaps to the Russians, but perhaps to blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers sent in to Kiev to keep the peace...or just keep the lights on.
Every single Ukrainian who dies in the trenches pushes the country as a whole a little closer to this dark outcome. At a certain point, if you wish to preserve the Ukrainian heritage, you have to ask yourself "how is this goal best served."
I agree that ultimately this is a decision the Ukrainians have to make. But it is worth considering.
Are people saying this, or are they irritated because the Ukrainians still seem hung up on getting Crimea back after a decade? (I understand the Ukrainians being hung up on Crimea, but it is probably a severe obstacle in negotiations if they really mean it.)
I agree with everything you said but I am somewhat skeptical of this:
I was not under the impression that Ukraine possessed valuable resources. The "mineral deal" thing was just a way for the US to provide some sort of security promise while maintaining strategic ambiguity. As another commenter said, rare Earths aren't actually rare, it's just that they are so diffuse they cannot be profitably extracted. Happy to be proven wrong though!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the issue with rare earths production isn't so much the diffusion, but the absolutely massive environmental damage extracting and refining them reaks- not like 'causes global warming' but like 'the drinking water is unsafe for hundreds of miles around'. It makes sense to set up extracting them in extremely poor countries(eg Ukraine, most of Africa) who might consider the toxic lakes the size of small US states worth it.
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Ukraine has a lot of very fertile land, which has traditionally been a large part of their geopolitical importance as I understand it. I suppose it is probably true that if Putin plowed them all under with a new superweapon the United States could simply build more farms in Kansas but that still seems fairly important to me.
(Based on occasionally reading stuff along the lines of "Russians after heated four week long gunfight finally conquer the first room in the Razelgrazelsky Salt Mine, a hardened nuclear-proof underground facility constructed in 1984 with 100,000,000 tons of concrete to house the Soviet Union's Winter Soldier program" I believe there's also a fair amount of conventional mineral extraction potential, but I'm not sure how significant that is comparatively.)
It’s also fertile arable land that the projection models suggest won’t be much affected by global climate change in the next 40 years. By 2060, it could be a significantly larger percentage of the world’s remaining agricultural output than it is now. I know not everyone here believes that GCC is a real phenomenon, but it is an indisputable fact that many high up military and government people in many countries do.
Climate change is real of course, but it's a non sequitur. Food production per capita is going up, not down. Climate change won't alter this state of affairs.
We're also much less reliant on fertile land and specific weather patterns than we used to be. See my comment below.
More importantly, Ukraine is currently only about 2% of global wheat production. That's its most important crop. Figure that Ukraine is responsible for less than 0.1% of global food calories. Even if that share doubles, it doesn't make a dent. And then consider that food is less scarce than it has ever been, and this trend only gets bigger every year.
Ukrainian wheat fields were very important in the days of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Their importance is small now, and will be even less in the future.
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Ukraine pre war was something like 0.5% of world's agricultural output. Every single major European country produces more food (by value) than Ukraine. Even if their yields fall due to climate change (highly unlikely: agriculture can adapt to climate change very easily), it's extremely unlikely that Ukraine's fields would make a significant difference. I certainly hope that high up military and government people are not so innumerate to take this seriously. As it happens, the silly climate change deniers would be more correct on this than you.
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Yeah, IIRC, Ukraine has one of the highest percentages of arable land in the world, up there with Bangladesh.
Since I like tangents... I believe that fertile land is worth less now that at any time in since the neolithic revolution. The amount of food produced per capita has never been higher, and it just goes up and up every year.
In the US alone, maize yields are up 40% since the year 2000. Milk production per cow is up 60%. Yields in other countries have increased even faster as they catch up to US standards. We still haven't fully unlocked the amazing gains that the Haber Process made possible over 100 years ago.
Empires used to be built on fertile land. Egypt was once the most valuable piece of real estate in the world since the flooding of the Nile river guaranteed food production every year. It produced enough surplus to feed the urban poor in Rome, and later, Constantinople. When Egypt was lost in the 7th century, Constantinople emptied out.
The most densely populated places in the world today are still often river valleys: The Ganges, the Nile, the Niger, etc...
But we've cracked the code. We can make our own fertilizer. We can irrigate the desert. Indio, California is the driest city in the US. And it is an agricultural powerhouse. Population may grow geometrically, as Malthus stated, but food production has grown geometrically at a faster rate.
The wheat and rapeseed fields of Ukraine matter less than ever.
On top of everything else, 40% of American corn gets turned into ethanol and added to gasoline despite this plausibly being worse for the environment than just burning gasoline and corn ethanol having an EROI much worse than gasoline.
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A great tangent!
Yes, I think you're right. (It's also potentially interesting given the speculation that global warming will make northern climes much more arable, IIRC Russia in particular could benefit). And the more right you are, unfortunately, the more likely it is that Ukraine will suffer a worse outcome.
Ukraine also has, or had, a lot of Soviet-era technical and industrial capacity. I'm not optimistic much of this will survive the war intact and in Ukrainian hands, however.
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IIRC US bulk crop production has expanded even though the amount of farmed acreage has declined substantially in the last few decades. It's a huge change and not one that gets talked about often.
What surprised me is how big the increase has been just since 2000.
I would have assumed that progress had leveled off, but no, it just keeps getting better.
Unfortunately it’s extremely dependent on the Haber-Bosch process. Modern crops aren’t grown in soil as much as they are grown in a six foot deep layer of fertilizer. Much of the phosphates for that fertilizer comes from Russia which is part of why food prices have been going up so much over the last few years.
No, they don't. Russia produces 5.6% of global phosphate output which is about 60% of US production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphate
Could be wrong but I doubt it. Phosphate prices started going up in Feb 2020 and were quite high, but have now reduced to the merely elevated levels of 2012 since the end of 2024.
https://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=rock-phosphate&months=240
That said, this graph is a little weird looking, so maybe it's not totally trustworthy.
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No one told my $NTR stock about higher prices. Potash shortages are always 30 years away.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NTR/
Russia has been very good about defeating the oil sanctions (with some huge percentage of the world oil fleet turning off their transponders). It's likely they are shipping nearly as many phosphates as they were before too.
Nutrien is losing value because they are having to spend more and more money on potash since the war started, which is cutting into their bottom line.
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