[wahern]

> As a result, any infusion of huge sum on money by external actors will tilt the balance in the favor of the party that gets the money.

Counterpoint: Afghanistan. Money and matériel are surprisingly ineffective without the people and institutions capable of leveraging them.

[mcv]

Exactly. The reason it's worth it to send those weapons, is because Ukrainians themselves are so eager to fight for their country. That is the massive difference between Ukraine on one hand, and Afghanistan and Iraq on the other; Ukrainians know exactly what they're fighting for, and what they're fighting against. I don't think it's possible to break their fighting spirit.

All that spin about NATO fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian is wrong. It's the Ukrainians themselves who want to fight for their country, with or without outside help. The outside help just makes it easier, but they would have fought either way.

[foverzar]

Why imply that Ukrainians motivation somehow excludes NATO from the equation?

NATO provides intelligence, training, counsel and supplies. You can't just pretend it's not involved and that at some point this war didn't become Russia's proxy war with NATO.

[mcv]

Russia may see it as a proxy war, but Ukrainians don't. To them, it's entirely about the future and freedom of Ukraine.

You've got to understand that while the current generation of Ukrainians grew up in relative freedom, their parents and grandparents grew up in the Soviet Union. And now with Putin trying to subjugate Ukraine, they fear that their children may grow up in a similar situation, and possibly worse, with all the Russian talk of genocide.

So that's why they're fighting so hard. They're fighting for their lives, their freedom, and that of their children and grandchildren. That's an incredibly powerful motivator, and I'm absolutely convinced that they'd fight just as hard without foreign support. But that support does give them a better fighting chance, enabling them to fight Russia on equal footing, instead of relying mostly on partisan/guerilla warfare, which is actually what NATO expected to happen.

With or without support, I don't think this is a war that Russia could possibly win; there's just too much at stake for Ukraine, and not enough for Russia. People are generally eager to fight for their own lives and freedom, but not to subjugate others. Especially not a brother nation, as Ukrainians and Russians used to see each other before this.

[foverzar]

IMO, these bitter-sweet kind of "freedom fighting" narratives just too rarely represent real life, and the iceberg of this conflict is surely huge.

There is too much "nothing happened at Tienanmen Square" kind of stuff for "long-sought freedom" kind of scenarios to be believable.

[mcv]

I don't deny that it's rare, but this is a pretty clear and blatant case of it.

That the people of China don't fight for freedom like this is a completely different issue, though maybe not as different as the reason Russian don't. For Ukraine, the situation is quite different, though: they have tasted freedom for 30 years, and there's a clear external party who undeniably wants to take it away from them. Can't get much clearer than that.

[foverzar]

It's only that clear and blatant, when you cozily watch it on TV. A nice captivating narrative with clear morals, "good", "bad" and all the other storybook stuff that literally never happens in real life.

I'm sorry, but I just feel like your impressions of it are naive, as you reason in categories that don't have weight for real actual individuals in real actual life.

"Fighting for freedom after tasting it for 30 years" is something that only exists in storybooks. In reality it's always powerful people making the decisions and then agitating other people into submission.

Real individuals are preoccupied with much more mundane things, like providing for their families and so on. Ukrainians, Russians, Chinese, whatever. Denying them this is a very typical dehumanization and manipulation tactics, commonly found in western supremacist culture, i.e. "why don't they fight for freedom" tropes.

[supergirl]

it's silly to compare Ukraine with Afghanistan. Ukraine was an important part of USSR. so they were once the nr. 2 super power in the world. morale helps but it's far from the deciding factor. they were preparing for some time, it's easier to defend, they get huge help from tens of countries. Russia went it too weak. they assembled a force equal in size to Ukraine but you need much more if you're the attacker.