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Yancey Ward's avatar

The war in Ukraine was completely avoidable- all it really required was for Ukraine to agree to allow the Russian majority east separate, and for NATO to agree to never admit Ukraine to the treaty alliance. However, for the last 30 years NATO had expanded right up to the Russian border, and spent part of the last year and a half trying to induce color revolutions in other former Soviet Republics that are still aligned politically with Russia, like Belurus and Kazakhstan.

Now we are stuck with a situation where the likely path seems to be escalation. Putin bit off more than he could chew with the limited operation, and will now likely commit more forces to the conflict, which runs the risk that the US gets even more deeply involved in supporting Ukraine with air support and possibly actual troops if it looks like Ukraine's effort is about to collapse. The clowns in charge of the west and Russia are going to blunder us into a nuclear exchange if they don't start looking for an off-ramp soon.

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forumposter123@protonmail.com's avatar

I'm hardly a booster for Ukraine. I think the war was entirely avoidable and that the "good side" shares a lot of blame for it starting. I think many of the problems Ukraine had will still be there after the war even if they win, though I hope the experience of fighting the war might generate enough social bonding to break out of some old equilibirums. If the best case scenario outcome comes to pass, I still don't think supporting Ukraine was worth the risks.

However, I think the Vietnam reference is flawed.

1) Vietnam was a guerrilla conflict, this is a conventional conflict.

2) Ukraine has clear war aims that are measurable and achievable (we can debate how achievable they are, but "push army to the following borders" is certainly clear and at least possible).

3) America was the aggressor in Vietnam, Russia is the aggressor here.

4) The Vietcong could call on essentially unlimited reserves of fighters and the war itself generated new Vietcong fighters. Russia has the men it went into the conflict with and it has clearly shown it can't or won't replace them.

For the first six months of the conflict it seemed as if we were in a First World War trench warfare type situation. One in which nobody was going to move the front lines much and a lot of people would die in artillery duels. In such a situation, continuing the war in a futile attempt to wrest control of the Donbass seemed really dumb and immoral.

Now it appears that Ukraine is capable of large scale offensive action that can break Russian lines. Given all I've outlined above, they will eventually win the war.

Maybe in some alternate timeline of more reasonable people, we could skip all of the fighting and dying to get to that point and negotiate some deal, but I don't really see it happening. Probably the most likely outcome for a negotiated settlement is if both sides were pessimistic and thought there was something to gain from peace. Other than saving a few lives, its not clear to me that the Ukrainian side would gain much from peace at this point. Putin also isn't going to give up all that territory without a fight.

I don't think Putin will mobilize or use nukes. I think he will do what he's done the whole war, putz around and always wait till its too late to matter.

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