[dragonwriter]

> 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.

[DoesntMatter22]

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.

So I don't know how you can 'win' anything.

[dragonwriter]

> 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.