When talking about this with my lib friends, I suggested that maybe if Ukrainans went back in time to 2022, they might have decided that suing for peace in exchange for land would have been a better outcome than all the death and destruction that was about to come. He immediately retorted that, if we went back in time, that we should have spent a trillion dollars on weapons and marched on Moscow. I expected strong pushback during that conversation but I honestly didn't expect "we should have had an even more horrific war and given even more money to the military industrial complex"

I think we must laugh, what else is there to do for them now? Apart from explaining this was mostly people who didn't want to fight who fought, pressed into it by neonazis and NATO mercenaries, and all the war's supporters have been hiding out in the West plugging their ears. Once everyone understands the premises, I think we can laugh.

The only decision for these guys is to march on Kyiv or surrender to the Russians. If they don’t, that’s their choice to sit and die while some Ahkmat soldier screams for gods blessing while their trench gets assaulted.

The horrifying part is that they are already doing that. They didn't just adopt their draconian mobilization law for no reason.

Liberals are dreamers who believe in the power of positive thinking. They live in a fantasy land where they can wish for things to happen without any regard for practicality or reality. Their idealist views lead them to ignore pesky details such as production capabilities and supply chains, leaving them with fanciful expectations that never come to fruition.

Ukraine showed that NATO ground weapons are nothing special. Iran's strike showed that all of the West's best air defense can be neutralized reliably. Bad day for NATO stans.

nazis putting all their hopes in wunderwaffe? huh. that's new.

We just need to fit the ghost of Kyiv with British lasers….

That's sort of the elephant in the room, the west was in the best position they were ever going to be in last summer. The balance of power shifted significantly in Russia's favor since then as even western media openly admits now. If Ukraine couldn't make any progress back then it's obvious that there's no path to victory now.

yeah but you can't print something so honest in western media

Tankie sends Zelensky a mean tweet and he doesn't give any orders or whatever for a week

Patriots will be delivered to the government in exile in metaverse 🤣

for free (joining the Ukrainian military) your name can also be stitched onto the uniform of a soldier (you)

I think there's a lot of spin in western media regarding what happened at the start of the war. Russian main goal was to get Ukraine to negotiate, and they almost achieved that before Bojo intervened. The secondary goal was to pin the troops in western Ukraine which allowed taking a lot of key territory in the south that ensured there was a land bridge to Crimea.

When the negotiations broke down, Russia started doing ordered withdrawal instead of trying to hold on to territory they knew they couldn't hold with the size of the army they had. They also started erecting layered defences in the south that broke Ukraine's summer offensive.

People in the west have been very focused on the territorial gains, but Russia has been fighting this as a war of attrition from the start. The main objective has been to degrade Ukrainian military while increasing the strength of Russian army. So, even though there were obviously a lot of teething problems at the start, looking back it seems that the overall strategy was fairly sound all along.

What they're doing now is pushing all across the front which is forcing Ukraine to use up whatever reserves they have to simply hold the line. This is not a sustainable situation for Ukraine. It's also worth noting that over time Ukraine loses more and more experienced soldiers who are replaced by conscripts. Eventually there's going to be an inflection point where there simply aren't enough professional soldiers to hold the core of the army together.

I very much expect that we'll be seeing more breakthroughs like Avdeevka, but we're unlikely to see any big arrow offensives because those are very costly. It's just going to be steady pressure until there's a collapse on the Ukrainian side. Once the collapse starts, then things will likely accelerate quickly from there.

Russian officials are saying the next two months will have large advances.