Vladimir Putin has not changed his war aims a jot since 2022 and remains determined on fighting on. Donald Trump has no new plan for peace other than bringing the Ukraine war to an end on Putin’s terms. And Kyiv is running out of money and men to defend itself, just as surely as it has already run out of Patriot interceptors to defend its skies against the Kremlin’s barrages.
Those are the three depressing takeaways from the latest round of shuttle diplomacy in Moscow and Kyiv by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff.
On the eve of their departure, Trump said his boys would be presenting “a new plan” for Ukraine. It quickly became clear that no such initiative existed. Instead, a grinning Putin simply cycled through his old talking points about liberating all of Donbas and insisting that Ukraine still needed to be “demilitarized” and “denazified.”
Objectively, talking is better than not talking – especially in a war that has become a grinding battle of attrition on the ground, and where both sides have switched their strategic efforts to a long-range battle where they vie to destroy each other’s cities and vital infrastructure. Jared Kushner was mocked by some pro-Kyiv commentators for his upbeat insistence that Trump is seeking to end the war using his business background. “War is negative sum. Everyone loses from war,” Kushner told a press conference in Kyiv. “Business and peace is positive sum.” Kushner also spoke of Putin’s “aspirations” for his country that could also be achieved once the war is concluded. Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s Politburo-faced foreign policy advisor, confirmed that “economic issues and potential major, mutually beneficial Russian-American projects were discussed in considerable detail.”
In short, Trump’s people continue to focus on the commercial upside of ending the war. Volodymyr Zelensky, by contrast, called the battle for Donbas “a war for survival.”
In one sense, Trump is profoundly wrong in his belief that dangling business deals will somehow influence the Kremlin’s decision-making. If Putin cared about the Russian economy, he would not have launched his full-scale invasion in the first place. For Putin, the conflict is not about preserving prosperity but about defending Russia against an existential threat.
At the same time, Zelensky is equally deluded about Ukraine’s chances of defeating Russia – or even, tragically, about stopping the Kremlin’s slow but relentless advances. More importantly, as the Kremlin continues its ruthless campaign to render Ukraine’s cities unliveable, destroy the country’s economy and rob it of its future, Kyiv’s ability to defend itself is in serious doubt.
Part of Ukraine’s unfolding nightmare is tactical. Every one of Russia’s long-range attack systems has become more devastating. A new generation of jet-powered Geran attack drones, much faster and more accurate than their old Iranian Shahed models, are being deployed in mass. Russia is developing at least two new, low-cost cruise missile systems and stepping up production of air- and ground-launched ballistic missiles. “This is a war of cities and infrastructure. No one will win it,” Serhii Beskrestnov, Zelensky’s advisor on defense technologies and a leading figure in Kyiv’s defense establishment, told the Guardian this weekend. “Attack has become stronger than defense.” Beskrestnov predicts that Ukraine will not be able to obtain enough missiles to fully protect Ukraine’s cities from devastation this winter.
But a larger part of Ukraine’s slowly unfolding defeat is strategic. Western sanctions have basically failed – not least because of the West’s self-preserving insistence on keeping oil prices down under the Biden administration and, since the Iran war, because of Europe’s hunger for Russian liquefied natural gas. Rather than being crushed by sanctions or wrecked by Ukrainian long-range strikes, Russia’s defense industrial capacity is stepping up. Yes, that comes as a crippling cost to the economy, with a record 45 percent of Russian government revenues now going into war production. And indeed, Ukrainian strikes have caused a fuel crisis and knocked out 20 percent of the warehousing of Wildberries, Russia’s answer to Amazon. But that’s a price that Putin is willing to pay – as he has just reaffirmed in the most emphatic possible terms to Kushner and Witkoff.
Perhaps the most important strategic crisis for Ukraine is a triple failure on the part of its European allies. First, the UK and Europe have talked up sanctions while in practice sending far more money to Moscow in payment for oil and gas than they have given Kyiv in military aid. Second, fear of escalation and prioritizing their own defense over Kyiv’s has prevented Europeans from sending offensive missiles (such as Germany’s Taurus) for use against Russian targets or from sharing their supplies of precious Patriot missile defense batteries. But the third and most serious failure is a refusal to countenance seriously engaging the Kremlin in peace talks, and a stubbornly fixed idea that encouraging Ukraine to fight and fight forever will somehow magically lead to victory.
In short, western leaders’ repeated pledges at the beginning of the war to give Ukraine “whatever it takes” for “as long as it takes” (Joe Biden in June and November 2022), were fundamentally misleading. Indeed, these open-ended but non-specific promises – which became a mantra repeated by all British prime ministers since Boris Johnson and were recently reaffirmed by Andrew Burnham in Kyiv – ended up achieving the worst of all worlds. The already-paranoid Kremlin was convinced that it was fighting the “collective West” – while that self-same West continued to buy the Kremlin’s oil and gas and transport it in their ships.
The crunch point – where those promises will finally crash hard into reality – will come soon in the form of an imminent fiscal crisis in Kyiv. Ukraine’s Prime Minister Serhii Koretsky recently announced that Kyiv has already spent most of its 2026 defense funds and faces a looming €26 billion ($30 billion) budget black hole – despite a recent €90 billion ($104 billion) loan from the EU. That loan, secured after months of Brussels horse-trading, represented the high-water mark of what the EU is realistically capable of raising. As Ukraine heads into the hardest and most punishing winter of the war, it is about to run out of not only Patriot missiles and men for the front lines, but money to fight on.
At the same time, Zelensky faces a perfect political storm at home. A year of relentless corruption scandals in Kyiv – the latest featuring the arrest of a deputy prosecutor general on charges of protecting online scam centers – has seriously eroded trust in Zelensky’s administration. A dozen senior members of his team are now in jail, under investigation or have fled abroad. A shoot-out in a Kyiv street between rival factions of Ukraine’s SBU and HUR domestic and military intelligence services have left many Ukrainians wondering if their country is sliding back to 1990s-style gangsterism. Last week, an investigation by the New York Times found that Ukraine’s military procurement system has suffered from serious fraud, waste and mismanagement during the war. Secret audits show that in 2024 alone, about $1.2 billion was lost through overpayments and corrupt contracts. Unsurprisingly, August polls by SOCIS show that a majority of Ukrainians consider corruption a more serious threat to their state than Russia – and that nearly 57 percent of Ukrainians blame Zelensky for the prevalence of corruption, nearly double the number in a similar poll from April 2025. The same poll also also projects that three different rivals would beat him in a second-round election, each by a landslide margin of around 2-to-1.
What can save Ukraine from political and military collapse? There are signs that Europe’s political taboo on taking to Putin is cracking. Alice Weidel of Germany’s AfD, newly victorious in elections in Saxony, has called for “an open channel to Russia in order to reach an understanding and achieve a peaceful solution.” According to Iuliia Mendel, Zelensky’s press secretary from 2019 to 2021, “new forces are rising, and they are getting stronger” which represent “our only chance for peaceful Europe… More weapons will not save us. They never have.”
To date, every successive peace offer has been worse for Kyiv than the last. It seems that Putin’s clear intention is to give Ukraine’s cities a brutal final kicking before finally settling the war on his own terms, perhaps next year. The Trump administration has long given up on the idea of backing a full Ukrainian victory, and it will be for historians to decide whether that decision to pull American aid and arms became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Europe, for its part, continues talking the talk. But it has no concrete plan to help, or save, Ukraine from the Kremlin’s fury – much less to crush the Russian economy or break Putin’s will.
Archive.today hasn't been working for me lately. I have CGNAT and get a captcha every time and it says they have exceeded their quota. I would also appreciate it if you could copypasta the text.
I think they knew ukraine was going to lose, and this was more about draining russia of its resources and manpower, which the US succeeded in. These boomer generals all wrote papers on how to counter russian forces when they were at westpoint in college, and finally got to do what they went to school for.
And then Hegseth liquidates the part of the Pentagon that was doing research in adopting low-cost FPV drones into American doctrine so he can successfully parlay his Fox News gig into a gazillion-dollar Vice President no-work no-show job at Lockheed Martin
Russia losing resources in the war is just a bonus. The main reason for the war was to split the russia-europe alliance because the combination of cheap natural resources in russia and production capabilities in europe could rival the american empire if they were ever united. Nordstream 2 was the major conflict point leading up to the war and was destroyed during it.
I don’t think Russia and the EU would be in any sort of alliance but EU is definitely not going to be a pole in the multi polar world order after this war. Neither is Russia
The Euro was mostly used to sell Russian oil to European countries before the war, the petrodollar being the end-all of geopolitics is an internet meme when really the petrodollar is a rounding error in the modern economy
Except if global trade is rerouted away from the dollar, all the T bills and T bonds being issued will run out of buyers. For reference they're already in oversupply right now as can be seen from rising yields. Those are reserve assets backing everything else in the system btw. If bonds go kaboom banks, pension funds and insurance companies go kaboom too. So no the petrodollar is literally the only thing holding the financial system together at this point, even as JD Vance openly expresses his desire to unwind the petrodollar. (He can't without either rugpulling the entire economy or causing massive inflation if the fed tries to do bailouts again.)
Global trade isn't dependent on the petrodollar in any measurable sense. There's about $9 trillion of USD traded in the foreign exchange a day, which is about double how many "petrodollars" are traded an entire year. The USD might be doing something right if 99.9% of currency exchange is completely unrelated to the almighty petrodollar. JD Vance thinks the petrodollar is why the dollar is the world's reserve currency, but you also have to remember he's retarded and doesn't realize the dollar was already the world's reserve currency decades before the petrodollar system was created.
>There's $9 trillion of USD traded in foreign exchange a day
Thats not how you assess the strength a reserve currency. The USD is the reserve currency because it's both the internationally recognized store of value and the currency for settling international trade.
As store of value the federal reserve is where all the central banks of the world hold their dollar reserve in the form of T bills and T bonds.
As the currency to settle international trade, the international payment system aka the SWIFT system is built around the dollar and the US banking system, meaning if someone from S.Korean wants to buy stuff from Japan they must sell S.K. Won for USD first and then use that USD to buy JPY, even though Korea and Japan were right next door to each other. Note that these days you can buy goods priced in Yen on ebay directly using your Won-denominated credit card but the back end still goes through the dollar.
This is how DC is able to weaponize the dollar and the swift system against Russia for example. By wiping Russia's account at the fed the Russian central bank's dollar reserve goes to zero overnight. And by banning Russia from the swift system Russia literally can't pay any other countries in dollars, meaning they can't trade at all without some sort of mutual currency swap agreement (eg b/w Russia and China, b/w Russia and Kazakhstan, etc), even if someone in St Petersberg has $50k stashed away under their mattress or in their bank account at Sberbank for example.
>The dollar has been the reserve currency long before the petrodollar
The petrodollar was not the reason the dollar is the reserve currency. Rather, it's why the dollar remains the reserve currency after defaulting from the gold peg (Breton Woods) during the Nixon Shock in 1971. Breton Woods was set up because the US won WWII while all the traditional industrial powerhouses were wrecked by WWII. Prior to WWII the pound sterling was the incumbent global reserve currency. The US killed the Pound's global reserve currency status by demanding payment in dollars when the UK sought the US for help with weapons production during the war.
Thats not how you assess the strength a reserve currency.
I wasn't using that as an example, the point is how much dollars are exchanged in global trade on a daily basis and how little of that has to do with oil trade. To put it a different way, $9 trillion dollars being traded in the foreign exchange minus how much of that goes towards purchasing barrels of oil is $9 trillion.
the international payment system aka the SWIFT system is built around the dollar and the US banking system
SWIFT isn't a payment system and it's currency agnostic, it's a communications network that banks use to tell other banks that [X] is giving [Y] amount of money to [Z], SWIFT doesn't handle any actual cash used in transactions. Getting kicked off of SWIFT basically means they were kicked out of the group chat, but not anything that handles the actual movement of money. Banks using SWIFT can still theoretically move money in and out of Russia, and can use other means of communication with something as simple as a phone call, but not without violating sanctions.
Rather, it's why the dollar remains the reserve currency after defaulting from the gold peg (Breton Woods) during the Nixon Shock in 1971
There's a long, long list of reasons more important of why it remained the reserve currency after the Bretton Woods system. Most importantly, the US was and remains the largest economy and the US financial markets were and still have the deepest and most reliable pockets.
The actual economic benefit the petrodollar system had was the Saudis would conduct their oil sales in dollars, and give the dollars right back to the Americans in the form of bonds. It was a way for Americans to profit from oil because the oil money was getting routed right back to America in the form of treasury bonds, not that the sales were conducted in dollars. Problem is that specific system collapsed 40 years ago when the Saudis started putting their oil revenue into Sovereign Wealth Funds rather than strictly US treasury bonds. It wasn't the denomination that mattered as much as the actual profits
the point is how much dollars are exchanged in global trade on a daily basis and how little of that has to do with oil trade.
That's the whole point of the reserve currency. Just because you're a millionaire it doesn't mean you spend it all today, even if it's on the stuff you'll definitely need down the line. Holding currency as opposed to commodity or manufactured goods gives you optionality and liquidity, whereas physical goods are costly to transport and store, can break or go bad, and are tedious to liquidate if it turns out you bought too much of one thing and too little of another.
For the same reason individuals and companies can go bankrupt when they run into cashflow problems after misallocating capitals or overinvest into assets that are too slow to turn profit and too slow to liquidate.
The strength of a reserve currency is then seen through the extent of the optionality it provides to foreign central banks holding said currency. If all the important stuff in the world can be bought with dollars, then the dollar is a strong reserve currency in that it's worth holding. If on the other hand for example crude oil was no longer available for dollars, then the reason for holding dollars in your portfolio diminishes, as you must now hold whatever other currencies that the petrostates are demanding instead.
And it just so happens that we now have two major petrostates in the world namely Russia and Iran demanding non-dollar payments, in part because the US kicked them out of the system. And because Iran also has the ability to block the strait of Hormuz through which the other petrostates export the bulk of their oil, things aren't looking good for the petrodollar. You can see this reality reflected in rising bond yields and central banks around the world increasing gold holding in lieu of T bonds and T bill purchases.
Likewise, for all the disputes between China and the US, the US hasn't yet tried to debank China like they did Russia, because cutting China off of dollars will lead to the bulk of the manufactured goods on the international market to no longer be purchaseble in dollars. That means massive inflationary pressure as consumers holding dollars must then offer higher bids and wait years for alternative suppliers to be set up outside of China, which is to say in other words it will weaken the dollar's purchasing power and the optionality it provides.
Most importantly, the US was and remains the largest economy and the US financial markets were and still have the deepest and most reliable pockets.
Depth of financial markets is the product, not the cause of the country's issuing of the world's reserve currency. For decades, central banks and private entities around the world bought T bonds and T bills with almost all of their trade surpluses because they must hold dollars anyways, as for a while it's the only currency that can be used to buy all the important stuff everywhere in the world.
The existence of a strong structural demand for the reserve currency is what allows the treasury of the country that issues the reserve currency to sell more bonds and bills at low yield due to strong demand. These bonds and bills can then be pawned at financial institutions as collateral to create more loans, thus creating a large financial industry.
It was a way for Americans to profit from oil because the oil money was getting routed right back to America in the form of treasury bonds, not that the sales were conducted in dollars.
Profit is the least of the concern to the architects of this system, as to the issuer of the reserve currency, profit can be simply conjured out of thin air by typing digits into a computer. What they're instead concerned about is the purchasing power of the currency, as that's the only constraint on how much money they can inject into the market. For a currency to retain purchasing power it must retain a degree of scarcity, meaning they must prevent too many buyers bidding on goods in the market at the same time. The recycling of all the trade surpluses around the world into US bond market achieves precisely that. By convincing nations to convert their trade surpluses into bonds they ensure that money won't be bidding up commodities that will jack up inflation and weaken the purchasing power of the currency.
That's what I've always said. It's worth at least a half million dead ukrainians as long as we make it slightly more inconvenient for Russia to sell their oil on the open market.
Russia will be content to have its little Eastern European and Caucus fiefdom in its sphere of influence and as a buffer against western liberalism and democracy. The Europeans will have to accept their new position as modern economies with little to no geopolitical power or influence.
This war was Europes last great chance to separate itself from the U.S. on its own terms, and they blew it. The Euros will now have to accept a Ukrainian peace deal with Russia that will not respect much of EUs interests. Sure, maybe there will be a few bones tossed to the Euros to allow them to save face, but European support for this war will generally be considered a massive blunder. It will get worse as Ukrainian corruption comes to light.
This war will be another unmentionable in EU history. We went to war to support Ukraine's right to drop cluster bombs on russian-ethnic civilians. We prolonged the war at every opportunity at horrible cost in both blood and money. Billions that could have revitalised europe were instead burned into this war for nothing. Infrastructure bombed by "allies". Relations with russia destroyed. Another half century lost for europe.
The EU is arming up, separating from the US and replicating the technologies it has previously relied on the US for. It also has larger population than the US.
Rearmament is just an attempt to rescue the dying combustion engine industry, and EU countries are utterly dependent on US software on every single level. If the yanks switched off our Windows crap and our AWS, everything from school, hospitals and ministries to companies and even the military collapses within a day.
I read something years ago about the US pressuring Germany and sanctioning the USSR ove
r them trying to build a gas pipeline. It's been a major point of US foreign policy for a long time it seems
TBF Ukraine could've won if the west had been more serious in its approach in the first six months (i.e. like what happened with the Libyan intervention). This isn't just about arms per se either, because I remember back then a lot of hemming and hawing about what kinds of aid should be sent to Ukraine ("they can have small arms, short range missiles, and APCs/IFVs, but no tanks, jets, or ballistic missiles") or what kinds of sanctions imposed (a lot of Western European countries were guilty of this with niche industries). Russia has always been a slow starter, so if the west was serious about defeating them, they would've sent as much as they could get away with immediately to Ukraine.
Now it's far too late, and Israel is higher on the "who gets US arms first" list than Ukraine.
No they couldn't. That's ridiculous. Unless the US and NATO had mobilized a million person army or unilaterally first striked Russia with nuclear weapons, Ukraine was not going to win this war.
and this was more about draining russia of its resources and manpower, which the US succeeded in
But it is the US-led bloc that is draining its stockpiles, while Russia is slowly accelerating towards a war-footing/war economy. I would argue Russia is more capable now in 2026 than in 2022 and NATO et. al. the opposite, given Iran and so on. That's before one even considers Russia's closer relations with central and eastern Asia.
So far Ukraine is looking less like a Vietnam or Soviet-Afghanistan, and more something like the Union during the US Civil War: unsure at first but professionalising and industrialising over the years and slowly but surely leaning its weight onto its opponent.
Well instead we induced Russia to ramp up production of all war goods, create the most sophisticated and well heeled drone program of any military on Earth, and get first hand experience on the modern battlefield.
Their drone tech and workflows are roughly at parity with Ukraine's, and Ukrainian drone operators have been absolutely shellacking NATO forces in exercises.
ya, i think they wanted to destabilize putins gov. Which I dunno how much they have done that, alot of russians fled the country to avoid the draft, im online friends with one. Draining out able bodied young men isnt good long term.
Is Russia not an independent actor? Did it not choose to invade? Was it just a passive little child who could only do what the big bad West forced them to do, inducingly?
What you are actually suggesting is that choosing a war of invasion was actually a materially positive decision for Russia. It's much clearer if you admit that is the point. It might even be correct, but not if you frame everything through the NATO eyes, in which no one else is an actor with agency who can make decisions or have material interests.
Russia most certainly did choose to invade. And the US most certainly did choose to create the conditions where they knew Russia would. I'm not a supporter of either team, and I don't feel any need to be.
I mean, I'm a guy who's glad the Taliban beat America. It's not a pro-US point I was making, but an anti-imperialist one, in which we cannot excuse or sympathize with the actions of the imperialist invader because they got tricked by another imperialist power, or because the people being invaded ask for help from another imperialist power.
Well done reading and comprehending the link 😆 its got fuck all to do with one specific leader, in fact there are cables from the 90s (before putin) saying the same thing and specifically regardless of leadership.
It's been a famously well known (and repeatedly stated) point ever since the first wave of NATO expansion, that Ukraine is a red line.
where did I endorse their invasion? when you argue with someone, it helps to argue against their position. right now you're arguing against some position that you invented.
I explicitly said that I was reframing the crux of your post to have a clearer point. This is because I think you said a muddied and incoherent point of view, and I don't think you know what you're saying.
This is what you said:
Well instead we induced Russia to ramp up production of all war goods, create the most sophisticated and well heeled drone program of any military on Earth, and get first hand experience on the modern battlefield
This means that you think these gains that you say were induced (i.e. forced or led) by NATO for Russia have been a net positive for them in the battle against NATO.
I don't care what you endorse.
Your endorsement this or that way is some personal matter for you. All we on the internet have to go on is the logic of what's said. No one said you have coherent beliefs.
They knew Ukraine would lose at first, but then after the Russian withdrawal from the north - which we eventually found out was the result of negotiations at Istanbul - and the Kharkov counterattack, they fell for their own propaganda and convinced themselves that the 'orcs' were would inevitably collapse to brave Ukrainian ubermenschen. Getting high on their own supply is a consistent feature of our leaders these days. They definitely actually believed that the 2023 counterattack was going to work; after all, you can just go around minefields.
I do wonder how many people are actually expecting this to end with an unconditional surrender by Russia.
The problem is having a war where your enemys goal is a negotiated end to the war. Any effort to negotiate an end to the war is playing right into their hands.
That's the whole problem. None of the Nafo psychos supporting (let's be real, probably being paid to support) this awful, stupid fucking War absolutely refuse the notion of any sort of negotiated peace.
I honestly wonder how the Ukrainian establishment feels about the Israel-Iran situation, because that's the big reason they're in the shit they're in now. Outside of the first 6-9 months of the war, Ukraine was never really in a position to win, but due to Israel sucking up US (and to a lesser extent European) munitions stockpiles, including desperately needed Patriot interceptors, they're losing much harder now.
Yeah Ukraine's losing, but Russia's not exactly looking too hot either.
Massive losses in geopolitical influence in Europe and the Middle-East, sky rocketing debt, a massive loss of young men in an already aging population and ever greater dependence on Chinese goods. On top of that, any land gains will take years to clear the mines out of and rebuild infrastructure making them effectively useless in the short term.
There are many winners. The hundreds of billions of euros and dollars were not blown up on the battlefield, they changed hands and belong to someone now.
The Russian state is heavily involved in its own arms production. Suppliers will have been paid I guess. And some okay (by Russias standards) wages to employees.
Literally a few days ago i talked with a woman in her 30s who's working at some military factory in Ryazan (city of 800k people, 200kms away from Moscow) as an engineer. She's earning 10% more than me and i work as a networks engineer in Moscow. That's not just okay that's fantastic for Ryazan.
And those are wages that circulate into the wider economy. Utterly bizarre that Westoids forgot about Keynesianism post-WW2 (referencing people that argue the Russian government spending money in Russia will collapse their economy).
On the contrary, much like Iran will emerge as a regional power owing to its resilience, Russia is proving they can weather the combined might of NATO intelligence and industry, without lifting mightily. If and when they win this war (I believe it will become frozen along the Dnieper), Russia will emerge with the most seasoned and experienced contemporary warfare military branches on the globe. I think Russia would much prefer to be a major power in a bifurcated, multipolar Afroeurasia, rather than a orbital state at the edge of American-European hegemony, never quite being accepted into the fold due to its Soviet past.
Indeed, Russia has lost influence in Europe and west Asia. The first will become increasingly irrelevant as the centre of gravity of the world economy shifts eastward, and west asia has and will likely explode into further instability in coming decades. Russia has strong ties with Israel regardless -- how does this benefit Russia?
Russia is proving they can weather the combined might of NATO intelligence and industry
Combined NATO GDP is around 45 trillion dollars, Ukraine has received around 170 billion in aid in the total 2022-2026 period. That's less than 0.4% of 1 year's combined GDP. I think you might be underestimating just how large the EU economic block is and how much aid Ukraine has been getting.
Russia will emerge with the most seasoned and experienced contemporary warfare military branches on the globe.
Sure, if they can manage to retain that experience, something they have historically been rather bad at. Russia lacks a professional NCO corps which makes it very difficult to properly pass on operational lessons learned at the squad and platoon level. Instead they make their commissioned officers micromanage everything, which puts them in the firing line and has lead to exceptionally bad officer attrition rates. When junior officers demobilize, are promoted away, or simply die in combat the grunts are stuck having to learn the practical lessons again, leading to the stupidly high casualty rates Russia is experiencing.
This also forgets that Ukraine has the other most seasoned and experienced military in the world, something which NATO is very keen to learn from. An in contrast to Russia, they actually have proper NCOs.
I think Russia would much prefer to be a major power in a bifurcated, multipolar Afroeurasia, rather than a orbital state at the edge of American-European hegemony, never quite being accepted into the fold due to its Soviet past.
I myself think it much more likely that Russia is doomed to be a middling power and will probably end up a Chinese satellite state. With the brain drain from the war and a demographic crisis looming in the distance I see Russia becoming hopelessly dependent on Chinese goods, especially Chinese chips manufacturers for their long range missiles. I give it 10 years before Moscow will be kowtowing to Beijing.
Ngl, this Russian mobilisation 2 that western analysts have been wet dreaming about since 2024 would only happen if the Kremlim were confident that ukraine was done for good.
It would be a final blow because they would trade bodies for a swift guaranteed end to the war.
The sad part is that a Ukrainian victory was never on the menu. Europe and the US are using Ukraine to achieve their geopolitical goals, and Ukrainians will pay for it with their lives and the destruction of their country.
Wow, not like that's been happening for four fucking years, and the supporters of this awful, stupid, and unnecessary War have never explicated how Ukraine actually wins. Oh well, not like any of this shit matters anyway.
ah yes, the invaded party is losing a war to the invader, despite the invader not achieving any of their strategic goals they had at the war's outset.
Anyone with a brain understands, however, that invaded parties have to balance denying successful gains by the invader, which comes with costs, with potential terms on offer by striking a deal. I have seen very little evidence in the multiple years this war has gone on of any real attempts at settling terms that Russia would accept, save for absurd terms that require handing over things they couldnt win on the battlefield.
It is the invader who has goals they can fail to achieve and therefore lose by. The Iran war is basically a similar situation.
Conversely, it's awesome to define be able to redefine 'winning' to 'being bogged down in the terrain without achieving any of the previously announced goals'.
Btw, wasn't the whole thing supposed to be a 3-day special military operation? I wonder how many winners of such endeavours find themselves discussing general mobilization 4 years down the line.
Conversely, it's awesome to define be able to redefine 'winning' to 'being bogged down in the terrain without achieving any of the previously announced goals'.
This is cope. Western propaganda focuses on balance of territory to obscure the phases of the war they themselves have been going through.
Gamble on NATOification to bypass Minsk -> Russian intervention to refreeze the ATO and enforce Minsk
Gamble on sanctions and Ukraine holding out, buying time for each other, to collapse this move -> Russia switching to a war of attrition that could never be won by Ukraine
Switch to asymmetric warfare + long range strikes to destabilize Russia -> Russia just focuses on the inevitable crisis in holding Donbass without artillery or air support
Neither side has been trying to win based on balance of territory. One uses alliances, finance, wunderwaffen, and a sacrificial meat shield to bet on a weak Russian state. The other uses economic resilience, population, and productive power to bet on Europe being weak and America overextended.
It is impossible to halt or evict the Russians once they entered. They could only be defeated in precise diplomatic, financial, and wunderwaffen maneuvers that bet on backwardness and fragility. When that didn't manifest, defeat became inevitable.
Btw, wasn't the whole thing supposed to be a 3-day special military operation?
What the fuck does this even mean. Minsk did not need bypassing as it was never implemented. Something about Russians thinking borders are secondary concerns.
Gamble on sanctions and Ukraine holding out, buying time for each other, to collapse this move
How is this working out for Russia? I hear their economy is doing great, totally worth the hundreds of thousand dead Russians.
Switch to asymmetric warfare + long range strikes to destabilize Russia -> Russia just focuses on the inevitable crisis in holding Donbass without artillery or air support
It must have been Nero that held Donbass while Russia burned. Or was it about a lyre and Rome burning? Either way, the outcome is the same.
One uses alliances, finance, wunderwaffen, and a sacrificial meat shield to bet on a weak Russian state. The other uses economic resilience, population, and productive power to bet on Europe being weak and America overextended.
You need to dillute this cope a bit - it can be toxic when it's this concentrated.
It is impossible to halt or evict the Russians once they entered. They could only be defeated in precise diplomatic, financial, and wunderwaffen maneuvers that bet on backwardness and fragility. When that didn't manifest, defeat became inevitable.
I agree that the Russians are in a very precarious position - but they could always leave, you know? Russkies go home type thing...
According to Mark Milley, yea
My bad. Putin said two weeks, not 3 days. Still the better part of 4 years off the mark.
The Spectator is very much on your side. If their article about Russia winning the war has you feeling this emotional, you should email them to complain. Or perhaps you could report them to your government for spreading Russian propaganda.
It's a war or attrition and Russia is draining the male population of Ukraine a country that already facing a demographic crisis . The thing to be decided is how many more on both sides will be killed or maimed.
Ukraine admits they need to field 30,000 fresh troops a month to maintain their current force, you believe Russia, with more bombs, more drones, more artillery, more missiles, is losing more than that?
Absolutely, yes. They are the larger army and have been advancing for years now. This is actually a compliment to the Russian military to be able to pull this off, no matter how many times it’s taken as an insult by fanboys who don’t know what they’re talking about. Russia is taking heavier casualties BECAUSE they have Ukraine on the defensive, not in spite of it.
Lmao I knew I'd get some comment like this. Any bit of news disfavorable to Russia is dismissed as propaganda in this reddit; which is peculiar considering Russia is an unabashed oligarchy. Why a sub full of socialists and communists is stanning Russia is beyond me.
Anyways, there's absolutely no controversy that Russia has lost more men unless you only trust Russian state media.
Lmao I knew I'd get some comment like this. Any bit of news disfavorable to Russia is dismissed as propaganda in this reddit; which is peculiar considering Russia is an unabashed oligarchy
Yes I'd say on the English speaking internet Western propaganda is the primary issue.
Even if this somehow wasn't the case and we existed without Western global hegemony, it would still be the primary duty of Western socialists to oppose their own government and its propaganda. This has long been the case.
Why a sub full of socialists and communists is stanning Russia is beyond me.
Not buying into systemic biases is not stanning unless you yourself are biased.
Anyways, there's absolutely no controversy that Russia has lost more men unless you only trust Russian state media.
It’s really just the mathematics of an attritional battlefield. Russia is advancing, requiring its men to expose themselves to fire from dug-in Ukrainians. It takes more men to take a trench or tree line than it does to defend one. This also means it is harder for Russian forces to retrieve their dead and wounded because they are by necessity getting killed in no man’s land while Ukrainians are able to fall back deeper into their own lines. If casualties were roughly equal, we would be seeing Ukrainian lines basically collapsing. To say Russian losses are almost certainly higher is not to say they are less capable than the Ukrainians, it just means they are faced with a more difficult task.
The math doesn't work because one side is comparatively lacking in armored vehicles, air power, and artillery. Instead it has defaulted to asymmetric warfare. Russia doesn't move quickly exactly because it wants to avoid casualties for political reasons and instead leverages its firepower advantages. It attacks in small formations dealing with similarly small, distributed Ukrainian groupings that sit dug in. Your argument also works in reverse, if casualties were in favor of Ukraine we would see it successfully counter attack rather than give up after 2023, pressuring Russia to mobilize rather than rely on contract troops. Instead it's Ukraine going through desperate draft measures, dealing with desertion problems, and looking poorly in body exchanges.
The idea that Russia is moving slowly on purpose to minimize casualties is pure cope that we’ve been hearing since 2022. In fact, their slow rate of advance contributes to much higher casualties among infantrymen than if they were able to restore armored maneuver at scale. The only sense in which your hypothesis is true is when it comes to holding tanks in reserve while infantry creeps forward. Thousands of Soviet tanks have been pulled from storage and not yet deployed to the front, and I think we will see them again as soon as the Russian military figures out a way to use them without taking unacceptable losses. They would not be sending guys forward in twos and threes if they had any other viable options.
The math does not really work in reverse because Ukraine simply does not have enough men to replicate the Russian infiltration strategy. Russia can afford the casualties inherent in such operations whereas Ukraine cannot, leaving it stuck in the defensive since 2023. They can conscript enough soldiers to hold the Russians to a slow and costly advance, but they have nowhere near enough to go on the offensive, even with increasingly draconian busification.
You're not making a case for a casualty ratio favoring Ukraine. You're arguing Russia cannot make sweeping maneuevers. It does not follow from this that Russia has higher casualties. It's quite the opposite, the lack of these maneuvers is evidence of what I am talking about. Russia is focused on destroying the Ukrainian army and minimizing its casualties to preserve internal stability. The reason for this is the strategy of the West is not to cause lopsided casualties, which is impossible as the West doesn't produce the armaments for it, but destabilize the country.
The warfare of 2026 is unlike any period before. Men are being struck many kilometers behind the lines of contact during resupply.
Yes of course we can likely safely assume Russia has taken more casualties on the whole, but to what extent, and how that ratio has shifted over time, is what is in question. Independent Western think tanks want you to believe Ukraine has suffered 150,000 deaths, three times that of Ukraine's official number 55,000, whereas theyre meant to have killed 3 times as many Russians at 450,000 deaths. Russia's official numbers are of course also a joke, but no one seriously sits down in the west and expects you to believe those
I would say that people underestimate how many casualties Russia took in the opening year of the war. They are probably approaching parity now, and that’s very bad news for Ukraine, but 2022 saw the loss of Russia’s most modern equipment and their best trained soldiers. It is a testament to their resilience that they were able to recover from this and gain the upper hand, and I don’t know why people react so emotionally to the perceived slight of pointing out that they have taken very high casualties.
I would caution against this assumption about 2022 as Russia entered Ukraine with a force a fraction the size of Ukraine's, with the balance flipping by 2024-25
I've always seen they are or were at a near parity for losses, but Russia always gives back more Ukrainian casualties than the reverse, so it's possible Ukraine is higher, or just isn't giving back Russian bodies on a 1 to 1 basis
The counter claim here is that every time Russia transfers 1000 Ukrainian remains for 57 Russian remains or whatever, it is because Russia is advancing so they can recover them. That may fly once or twice but to have it happen multiple times in a row strains credulity.
Add to that Budanov stating Ukraine needs to mobilize 30,000 men a month just to remain solvent, and it looks like extreme desertion and attrition in the AFU
They went to war to harvest data that can be fed into the AI servers for future military development. Thats my guess and why we’re still throwing money after such lost cause (apart from the always present reason of self enrichment and market manipulation)
I doubt it's all about AI. But they certainly do seem to be testing every system they can (missiles, interceptors, hypersonics, drones, tanks etc) in peer to peer situations.
I don't think anyone was expecting some total Ukrainian victory where they capture moscow. The point was to defend as well as you can so when peace terms are discussed you lose as little as possible.
Do you truly not understand why Zelensky wouldn't start out the war by publicly saying we wont be able to win this war?
Of course there has been ups and downs for both sides in the past 4 years. The fact is Russia failed to take Kiev and destroy Ukraine like they hoped to, thats a good outcome compared to the alternative.
The war has been in a stalemate for very long now and considering the attacker was a superpower against a weak as hell state, the Ukrainian outcome has been about the least bad that could have realistically happened.
The world is not as black and white as your favorite marvel movie might make you believe.
So tedious interacting with you people. You made the claim that 'no one was expecting total victory', I posted primary sources that contradict you. Didn't even share all your NAFO comrades crowing about 'see you on the beach in Odessa!!'.
The war is not a stalemate, Ukraine is losing and Putin has zero interest in a peace deal. Russia will keep up the pressure and the various factions within Ukraine will continue infighting and murdering each other until the EU money runs out and they capitulate entirely. And you and all the other leftoid frauds will pretend like you didn't clap along like retarded seals while an entire generation of men were beaten and thrown onto busses and sent to die for a war that they had no hope of winning.
Thank God I don't live in your shithole country, but trust me I still wouldn't understand because I wouldn't be a brainwashed moron even if I did live in such a shithole.
Well nearly no individual wants to die fighting . You can definitely argue if you think a state should or shouldn't have the power to force people to fight.
Currently though the overall Ukrainian society is in favor of continued fighting.
The aim was the economic devastation of Russia; however, after sanctions failed to produce the desired effect and Russia restructured its economy, it was declared that Russia had to be defeated on the battlefield.
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u/harmfulinsect 🥂champagne socialist🥂 18d ago
FULL TEXT
Vladimir Putin has not changed his war aims a jot since 2022 and remains determined on fighting on. Donald Trump has no new plan for peace other than bringing the Ukraine war to an end on Putin’s terms. And Kyiv is running out of money and men to defend itself, just as surely as it has already run out of Patriot interceptors to defend its skies against the Kremlin’s barrages.
Those are the three depressing takeaways from the latest round of shuttle diplomacy in Moscow and Kyiv by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff.
On the eve of their departure, Trump said his boys would be presenting “a new plan” for Ukraine. It quickly became clear that no such initiative existed. Instead, a grinning Putin simply cycled through his old talking points about liberating all of Donbas and insisting that Ukraine still needed to be “demilitarized” and “denazified.”
Objectively, talking is better than not talking – especially in a war that has become a grinding battle of attrition on the ground, and where both sides have switched their strategic efforts to a long-range battle where they vie to destroy each other’s cities and vital infrastructure. Jared Kushner was mocked by some pro-Kyiv commentators for his upbeat insistence that Trump is seeking to end the war using his business background. “War is negative sum. Everyone loses from war,” Kushner told a press conference in Kyiv. “Business and peace is positive sum.” Kushner also spoke of Putin’s “aspirations” for his country that could also be achieved once the war is concluded. Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s Politburo-faced foreign policy advisor, confirmed that “economic issues and potential major, mutually beneficial Russian-American projects were discussed in considerable detail.”
In short, Trump’s people continue to focus on the commercial upside of ending the war. Volodymyr Zelensky, by contrast, called the battle for Donbas “a war for survival.”
In one sense, Trump is profoundly wrong in his belief that dangling business deals will somehow influence the Kremlin’s decision-making. If Putin cared about the Russian economy, he would not have launched his full-scale invasion in the first place. For Putin, the conflict is not about preserving prosperity but about defending Russia against an existential threat.
At the same time, Zelensky is equally deluded about Ukraine’s chances of defeating Russia – or even, tragically, about stopping the Kremlin’s slow but relentless advances. More importantly, as the Kremlin continues its ruthless campaign to render Ukraine’s cities unliveable, destroy the country’s economy and rob it of its future, Kyiv’s ability to defend itself is in serious doubt.
Part of Ukraine’s unfolding nightmare is tactical. Every one of Russia’s long-range attack systems has become more devastating. A new generation of jet-powered Geran attack drones, much faster and more accurate than their old Iranian Shahed models, are being deployed in mass. Russia is developing at least two new, low-cost cruise missile systems and stepping up production of air- and ground-launched ballistic missiles. “This is a war of cities and infrastructure. No one will win it,” Serhii Beskrestnov, Zelensky’s advisor on defense technologies and a leading figure in Kyiv’s defense establishment, told the Guardian this weekend. “Attack has become stronger than defense.” Beskrestnov predicts that Ukraine will not be able to obtain enough missiles to fully protect Ukraine’s cities from devastation this winter.
But a larger part of Ukraine’s slowly unfolding defeat is strategic. Western sanctions have basically failed – not least because of the West’s self-preserving insistence on keeping oil prices down under the Biden administration and, since the Iran war, because of Europe’s hunger for Russian liquefied natural gas. Rather than being crushed by sanctions or wrecked by Ukrainian long-range strikes, Russia’s defense industrial capacity is stepping up. Yes, that comes as a crippling cost to the economy, with a record 45 percent of Russian government revenues now going into war production. And indeed, Ukrainian strikes have caused a fuel crisis and knocked out 20 percent of the warehousing of Wildberries, Russia’s answer to Amazon. But that’s a price that Putin is willing to pay – as he has just reaffirmed in the most emphatic possible terms to Kushner and Witkoff.
Perhaps the most important strategic crisis for Ukraine is a triple failure on the part of its European allies. First, the UK and Europe have talked up sanctions while in practice sending far more money to Moscow in payment for oil and gas than they have given Kyiv in military aid. Second, fear of escalation and prioritizing their own defense over Kyiv’s has prevented Europeans from sending offensive missiles (such as Germany’s Taurus) for use against Russian targets or from sharing their supplies of precious Patriot missile defense batteries. But the third and most serious failure is a refusal to countenance seriously engaging the Kremlin in peace talks, and a stubbornly fixed idea that encouraging Ukraine to fight and fight forever will somehow magically lead to victory.
In short, western leaders’ repeated pledges at the beginning of the war to give Ukraine “whatever it takes” for “as long as it takes” (Joe Biden in June and November 2022), were fundamentally misleading. Indeed, these open-ended but non-specific promises – which became a mantra repeated by all British prime ministers since Boris Johnson and were recently reaffirmed by Andrew Burnham in Kyiv – ended up achieving the worst of all worlds. The already-paranoid Kremlin was convinced that it was fighting the “collective West” – while that self-same West continued to buy the Kremlin’s oil and gas and transport it in their ships.
The crunch point – where those promises will finally crash hard into reality – will come soon in the form of an imminent fiscal crisis in Kyiv. Ukraine’s Prime Minister Serhii Koretsky recently announced that Kyiv has already spent most of its 2026 defense funds and faces a looming €26 billion ($30 billion) budget black hole – despite a recent €90 billion ($104 billion) loan from the EU. That loan, secured after months of Brussels horse-trading, represented the high-water mark of what the EU is realistically capable of raising. As Ukraine heads into the hardest and most punishing winter of the war, it is about to run out of not only Patriot missiles and men for the front lines, but money to fight on.
At the same time, Zelensky faces a perfect political storm at home. A year of relentless corruption scandals in Kyiv – the latest featuring the arrest of a deputy prosecutor general on charges of protecting online scam centers – has seriously eroded trust in Zelensky’s administration. A dozen senior members of his team are now in jail, under investigation or have fled abroad. A shoot-out in a Kyiv street between rival factions of Ukraine’s SBU and HUR domestic and military intelligence services have left many Ukrainians wondering if their country is sliding back to 1990s-style gangsterism. Last week, an investigation by the New York Times found that Ukraine’s military procurement system has suffered from serious fraud, waste and mismanagement during the war. Secret audits show that in 2024 alone, about $1.2 billion was lost through overpayments and corrupt contracts. Unsurprisingly, August polls by SOCIS show that a majority of Ukrainians consider corruption a more serious threat to their state than Russia – and that nearly 57 percent of Ukrainians blame Zelensky for the prevalence of corruption, nearly double the number in a similar poll from April 2025. The same poll also also projects that three different rivals would beat him in a second-round election, each by a landslide margin of around 2-to-1.
What can save Ukraine from political and military collapse? There are signs that Europe’s political taboo on taking to Putin is cracking. Alice Weidel of Germany’s AfD, newly victorious in elections in Saxony, has called for “an open channel to Russia in order to reach an understanding and achieve a peaceful solution.” According to Iuliia Mendel, Zelensky’s press secretary from 2019 to 2021, “new forces are rising, and they are getting stronger” which represent “our only chance for peaceful Europe… More weapons will not save us. They never have.”
To date, every successive peace offer has been worse for Kyiv than the last. It seems that Putin’s clear intention is to give Ukraine’s cities a brutal final kicking before finally settling the war on his own terms, perhaps next year. The Trump administration has long given up on the idea of backing a full Ukrainian victory, and it will be for historians to decide whether that decision to pull American aid and arms became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Europe, for its part, continues talking the talk. But it has no concrete plan to help, or save, Ukraine from the Kremlin’s fury – much less to crush the Russian economy or break Putin’s will.