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I think Ukraine can win the same way Finland "won" the Winter War i.e. inflict disproportionate casualties against a numerically superior opponent for years on end, and after being beaten into exhaustion sign a peace treaty in which they give up 10% of their territory and accept forced neutrality. On paper this is a loss, but it kept them out of the communist bloc and they ended up a western-aligned NATO member without suffering economically or politically the way Poland or Czechoslovakia did in the interim.
At the end of the day, it's the Ukrainians at the front making the decision to fight or not, and as long as they're shooting at our geopolitical rivals I have no problem with arming them. So far, their revealed preference is to hold the line, and the moment that changes it will be clearly evident in the form of mass protests, mutinies, or defections, and their government will have no choice but to sue for peace. It's not my place to tell them how many of their lives are or aren't worth sacrificing for their cause, whatever they think that cause is.
The Ukrainians at the front were abducted off the street. It’s a conscript army. If I lived in Ukraine, I would have fled by now.
Ukraine may not win - not morally or practically, but because it’s too dangerous. Ukrainian troops approaching Russia or taking back Crimea will see nuclear weapons flying. Pushing Russia to the brink is a bad idea.
And yet the line holds. To put it another way, by my definition the line between "choosing to fight" and "choosing not to fight" lies between the German army of spring 1918 and the same army in the fall of that year, or the Imperial Russian army a year earlier. You may have another definition by which none of the conscript armies of WWI wanted to fight.
Ukraine has as much chance of taking back Crimea or threatening the Russian heartland as they do of conquering Mars, and no amount of western aid is going to change that. No one is getting nuked over Chasiv Yar.
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The videos I’ve seen of Ukrainian troops shooting their foreign blocking detachments so they can withdraw from the front, and the last few literal suicide bombings of Ukrainian draft offices by bereaved parents would seem to suggest that it is not, in fact, their decision whether to continue fighting.
If Ukrainian soldiers were that unwilling to fight they would have taken Kiev and negotiated their own peace with Russia.
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Do you actually speak Russian or Ukrainian? Can you actually show us ...Ukrainians suicide bombing offices?
The Ukrainian soldiers and the Scandinavian mercenaries in the blocking detachment didn’t speak the same native languages so they were talking to each other in English.
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Without a critical mass of internal support, an army melts away like the Iraqis at Mosul or the Afghans in the face of the Taliban. You can't just crank up the repression level arbitrarily like you're playing a Paradox game to make up for a lack of morale because you will run out of loyal enforcers. To me, it's essentially a tautology that an army that doesn't want to fight doesn't fight. The French army suffered mutinies and desertions in 1917 on a far larger scale than anything seen in Ukraine so far, and though they came very close they did not break in the end. Obviously in the case of conscription there will always be some individuals there against their will who want to go home and maybe frag their officers first, but if everyone really felt that way the war would be over already.
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