> Was there ever really a chance Ukraine would win? Idk how they could. Russia has more people.
The USSR had more people than Afghanistan, too, and was much more legitimately a superpower than Russia is today.
The USA had more people than Afghanistan, and was even more of a superpower than the USSR when it invaded Afghanistan.
The USA had more people than Vietnam.
China had more people then Vietnam.
The Arab states in 1948 had more people than Israel.
The Arab states in 1967 had more people than Israel.
The Arab states in 1973 had more people than Israel.
I think your metric for when the attacker is guaranteed to win a war where it invades another country is... not well calibrated to historical evidence.
All those conflicts you mention with the exception of Israel are guerilla warfare wars, which this is not. The Russians couldn't just sit there and shell/bomb the towns of Afghanistan because they hardly had any actual towns. Same thing for Vietnam
Here Russia can just sit back and obliterate the Ukraine's cities. The point about people is that Ukraine isn't going to be able to push Russia back, which for the most part they haven't.
> All those conflicts you mention with the exception of Israel are guerilla warfare wars, which this is not.
“Guerilla warfare” is just what happens in an modern invasion/occupation/regional separatist warfare when the local/peripheral side is sufficiently weak in conventional military terms relative to the invader/occupier/central authority.
That the Ukrainian side of the Russo-Ukrainian War is not forced into guerilla war is not a positive sign for the Russian side.
If you think the number of people is what counts: there's a cliché that the attacker needs a 3:1 advantage. Russia's population of 15-30-year-olds was less than three times Ukraine's, if you exclude immigrants.
Nobody said anything about the economy. The second most powerful country. The have a massive amount of nuclear weapons and their ability to manufacture traditional weapons is far less than the United States.
Ukraine, is just depending on a hope and a prayer from other countries to support them, which is faltering and realistically they have lost a ton of young people and many of the kids don't want to fight, they want to escape.
I don't see any realistic situation they can do anything to Russia. Russia's economy hasn't collapsed. So I'm not sure what they can do.
Mostly irrelevant to their ability to defeat Ukraine in a conventional war, though it may constrain outside aid to Ukraine somewhat.
> and their ability to manufacture traditional weapons is far less than the United States.
This is not something that works in their favor.
> Ukraine, is just depending on a hope and a prayer from other countries to support them, which is faltering and realistically they have lost a ton of young people and many of the kids don't want to fight, they want to escape.
Russia has also lost a ton of young people (far more than the USSR lost over a decade in Afghanistan, a major contributor to the political collapse of the USSR), and seen lots of people trying to escape. Or firebombing recruitment centers, etc. They've also lost a lot of not young people — quite a lot of their senior/experienced combat pilots, and an unusually large proportion of field grade and general officers.
Winning would have looked like sending the invaders back to Russia. There was a chance for that early on if Biden had been a bit less dithering about arming them. Now it's trickier as the Russians are kind of dug in.
Russia has more people but the collective west backing Ukraine have more money and tech.
I'm not sure how it plays out. The Russians probably have the upper hand at the moment as the Ukrainians are running out of ammo due to the speaker and Trump supporters blocking aid.
Ukraine may make things expensive enough for Russia that they choose to back off. Attacking their oil refineries is going quite well at the moment.
It has never been as simple as whichever side has more people, and that has only become more true as military technology has advanced.
Many lessons came out of the first two world wars about how modern warfare would be fought. One of them was that it didn't matter how many well-rested soldiers you had willing to fight. If you ran out of ammunition and your opponents have enough left to annihilate you, you'll probably lose.
We'll never know for certain, but there's a real possibility that if it hadn't been for the Lend-Lease program, the USSR would have run out of weapons and supplies, and Hitler would have defeated the Soviets.
Obviously, there's limits. One soldier sitting on warehouses of ammo isn't going to take out a force of ten thousand. But at the outset of the war, active Russian troops outnumbered Ukrainian troops by only 4 to 1. In the right circumstances, those are winnable numbers. And even better for the Ukrainians, Russia couldn't send all of their troops in. They needed to keep the bulk of them in Russia for defense.
Estimates of causalities in the war range from 1:3 to 1:5 in favor of Ukraine. So even if Russian troops outnumbered Ukrainian troops 2:1, all Ukraine has to do is continue killing Russian soldiers at the same rate, and eventually Russia will run out of soldiers to send.
That's what "winning" looks like for Ukraine. This is a war of attrition. They win by exhausting the enemy before the enemy exhausts them.
But it relies on Ukraine continuing to have enough ammo to kill the Russian soldiers at that rate. This is a war of attrition. Russia's firmly on a wartime economy, and unless the bottom falls out on them, they'll continue to produce weapons and ammo for the duration of the war. Enough for every solider they field? Maybe, maybe not, but they won't run out.
Ukraine, on the other hand, relies on the West for weapons and ammo. If it runs out, it loses, and that's why so many people are upset about Western countries dropping support. It's a winnable war for Ukraine, but only if Russia's enemies stay committed.
I don't think there is any actual way that Ukraine is going to beat Russia in any actual sense. They have been losing territory (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60506682) and Europe is suffering without Russian gas.
I don't have a horse in the race, I just think it's absurd to think you are going to "win" in any sense. Ultimately I think Putin would drop some sort of nuke on the Ukraine before admitting defeat.
Accurate wartime numbers are certainly difficult to get. I'm sure even the Russians and Ukrainians don't have accurate numbers. But I have no trouble believing that the Russians are suffering more casualties. That much seems obvious to all sides. Yes, Russians have taken territory. Ukrainians have also taken some territory back. Again, war isn't a simple matter of who has more troops. There's issues of concentration, supplies, strategic importance, and circumstances on the ground.
And I never said Russia's economy is doing terribly. It did grow. Some fear that it's being propped up by war manufacturing, or is otherwise in a pattern that it can't hold indefinitely, but I don't have enough insight into it. My point was actually to assume that Russia will continue to be able to produce weapons and ammo for the duration of the war, but it could still lose a war of of attrition when it becomes too costly in human lives to continue.
And yes, Putin might nuke Ukraine. The Russians were floating a plan of detonating a single nuke to "shock" Western Europe into fearful inaction. I don't think that will work. If anything, it will only further anti-Russian sentiment and possibly lead to war.
Yes, the West has set and ignored red lines with Russia in the past, to their own detriment. But this will different. If Russia detonates a nuke after failing a military operation that they themselves started, it will show they're not good stewards of a nuclear arsenal. Essentially, they would have proven to the world that they can hold it nuclear hostage to their whims. To not reply in force would throw the MAD doctrine into doubt.
The USSR had more people than Afghanistan, too, and was much more legitimately a superpower than Russia is today.
The USA had more people than Afghanistan, and was even more of a superpower than the USSR when it invaded Afghanistan.
The USA had more people than Vietnam.
China had more people then Vietnam.
The Arab states in 1948 had more people than Israel.
The Arab states in 1967 had more people than Israel.
The Arab states in 1973 had more people than Israel.
I think your metric for when the attacker is guaranteed to win a war where it invades another country is... not well calibrated to historical evidence.