Hubcapped

😂
filler words things stuff head in sand

METO Guido

Won’t seem so amusing when sky dragons check into the Kyiv Hilton this summer. Nothing buoys incumbent polling like a war cry.

Excargodog

Because it ISN'T a stalemate. It's sort of like two people playing chess and one is down a bishop, a rook and, and two pawns. The guy with fewer resources isn't going to win the game by trading pieces. In the end he'll have nothing left and the other guy will have enough to win.



Au contraire. It is the Ukraine position that they must have back every square centimeter of their borders - including Crimea. I know of no one who believes that is realistically possible.


.


Except the Ukraine will be bled dry before Russia is because they have manpower and logistical advantages. And if this goes on until that happens the Russians may indeed see total victory.

Of course it is. Extremely inadvisable, but it's certainly possible. But even that woukd ultimately require either:
a. US boots on the ground.
b. Tactical nukes
c. Strategic nukes.

All of which you seem to have ruled out.


​​​​​​​And the Russians have demonstrated that their fortified positions within occupied Ukraine easily stood up to the Ukrainian Spring Offensive.

That's the problem. They ARE doing their best and it isn't working. Time is not on the Ukraine's side. This is like a ship that has been holed and it's taking on water faster than the pumps can handle. That doesn't mean it can't continue to inflict damage on the enemy but time is definitely not on their side. This isn't a stalemate, it's a slow motion defeat.

The fact that you don't know that military warfare depends greatly on manpower and logistics tells me you have precious little military experience. What you think about me personally will not affect the ultimate outcome of this war. Manpower and logistics sure as he\\ will.

METO Guido

Source?

Enemy measures of life & death aren’t yours, mine. What do you imagine might blowback, here, from 100,000+ toe tags shipped home on a botched cakewalk like special op Ukraine? What kind of leadership retreats leaving a trail of conscript & inmate cadavers behind? What might still be ‘mitigated’ or demands betting the farm? Don’t pretend not to know who it must be. Don’t pretend not to know what a loser’s share is. Consider the forgotten lessons of Ho Chi Minh. For which a sorrowful high price was paid. Then decide for yourself. Wrinkled boomer peckers did. We’re all counting on you, Stryker.

MaxQ

If I interpret you correctly you imply the toe tags as US GI's.
Ukraine needs weapons and ammunition.
Do not conflate sending them the means to defend themselves with the USA or other forces actually doing the defending.

I will grant the concern of escalation. It could happen. But coming up on two years into this expanded Russian invasion there has not been even a suggestion of anything other than material and informational aid to Ukraine.

I will edit my reply regarding lessons of Ho Chi Minh and your advice to consider. Since I don't know you or your families history there will not be vitriol in my reply.

America copied and pasted it's conclusions about Leninist Russian international communist visions onto post colonial Asian nationalist movements, leading to a war against a people who were fighting for ideas we didn't understand. (Russia is in a similar situation today in Ukraine)
There are elements of American thought and politics who are repeating the mistakes of Viet Nam and Iraq in regards to Ukraine, just in a different manner. Just as America confused an Asian civil war with it's understanding of Russian imperialism and worries of world wide communist revolution, so too are we today misunderstanding Russian imperial revanchism. Because we made ignorant and hubristic mistakes in the past, that caused incredible harm, they seem to think that anything we do is a repeat of the same errors.
Aiding Ukraine wth what she needs is vastly different than was sending soldiers to actively fight in SE Asia or invading Iraq.
Making such comparisons ranges from ignorant to dishonest.

METO Guido

Dead soldiers, correct. Quantitative cost wars are ranked by. Vietnamese rulers spent somewhere close to 1m of them. They won, we lost. Nothing dishonest about it. Claims to end a superpower occupation relying solely on artillery is. Not working? Complain about yankee concern for its own survival to President Mitterrand. Like JB does. Feel free to vitriol, just stow philosophic reference to ages long forgotten and remain on topic.

Good morning btw.

dera

Great analogy but it doesn't lead to the point you are trying to make.

In Chess you can easily have an endgame where one is down to a king and one has king, bishop, few rooks, and can never checkmate. Thats the more likely stalemate in Ukraine.

ReluctantEskimo

Excargdog is wrong... It's not chess. It's Monopoly.

The little thimble can keep the game going a long time as long as he keeps hitting Free Parking and getting supplied with fresh $100s. Maybe we can even loan them Atlantic Ave.

His total victory or bust scenario is just more obfuscation.

By every metric the Ukrainians are holding their own. It's pure propaganda to say that they're losing.

Excargodog

Not easily, although I did manage to get a stalemate once when I had nothing but a king and my opponent had a king and a pawn. But the pont still stands. Let's talk manpower alone.

The Ukraine started the war with about 45 million people. But 17% of those were ethnically Russian largely in the now occupied Oblasts who pretty much went over to the other side. About 6 million of the rest became refugees - the EU has something like 6 million of them (that they know about) and an undetermined number of draft dodgers some Ukrainians are trying to convince the EU to extradite.

https://news.yahoo.com/military-elig...121700343.html

Anyway, that gets us down to about 35 million people currently. The Ukraine has had a falling population since 1993. It has one of the lowest fertility rates in Europe - even worse than Russia at about 1.4 births per woman. And make life expectancy at birth has never been great - about age 65 -

https://www.statista.com/statistics/974733/life-expectancy-at-birth-in-ukraine-by-gender
/

and with the war casualties that will be dropping precipitously. Currently the average age in their largely conscript military is 43, which is simply insane. By comparison, the average age of the US volunteer military is 28 and for a us Army infantryman 23. The US doesn't even accept volunteers over 35 except in certain skill areas not likely to see combat (doctors and dentists mostly).

Despite the fact that the Ukraine has outlawed males between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country and have started pulling people off the streets in a fashion akin to the Royal Navy "impress gangs" of the Napoleanic era, the military is in desperate need of recruits to replace the estimated 200,000 wounded who are now too handicapped to effectively fight a trench war as well as the 70,000 estimated dead - estimated because like Russia, Ukraine doesn't releas actual numbers.

Now you can quibble over the analogy but the recently deposed Ukraine Army Chief said they needed another half million conscripts

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...T&opi=89978449

this from a much reduced pool of potentials. Despite lowering medical standards and conscripting older individuals, Ukraine is having great difficulty with manpower, far more than is Russia which has a good four and a half times the current population of Ukrainians. That is the point of the analogy. But quibble on if you must.

https://youtu.be/BkqEn-j4Dmo?si=cY3laXpJAmOXlNO2

https://youtu.be/bOTDPH2iCH4?si=1WOOd-LDUgGXmRU1

https://youtu.be/ANxo0gBM6GM?si=NpxzfRR9TOQNLir-

ReluctantEskimo

Thankfully the United States has 30 years of expertise in implementing force multipliers.

Everything else you typed is chaff.