[8note]

russia is currently holding just about all the land it wants in Ukraine

They might not be taking Kiev for a hundred years, but the fortress belt is well within reach in the next couple of years

If they were to negotiate an end tomorrow, Russia certainly wouldnt be giving up territory in ukraine. i dont see how thats not winning

[onlypassingthru]

Russia is not only on the precipice of giving up territory in Ukraine, it's likely to give up so much more because its ability to function as a country is being systematically destroyed.

The only barrier between Russians and anarchy is the last nine meals they’ve had. How's the summer harvest coming along?

[afavour]

If you’re looking at win vs loss you also need to look at what you got in return for what you gave. A ton of casualties and further international isolation aren’t really worth the middling gains Russia could negotiate for peace today. Which is probably one of the reasons they still haven’t, sunk cost fallacy and all that.

[GJim]

> If you’re looking at win vs loss you also need to look at what you got in return for what you gave.

This.

Russia is suffering over 400 casualties for every square km (1036 per square mile!) of territory captured in Donetsk, screwing their own economy and turning themselves into a pariah. Russia certainly isn't winning.

https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian...

[fsuts]

Ukraine taking on rounds after rounds of multi billion euro loans also isn’t winning…

They need a peace deal but external parties don’t want Ukraine to do this. The same ones lending the money

[illliillll]

Neither side needs a peace deal as of right now, that’s completely ridiculous.

[solumunus]

Is that land worth the costs Russia has endured? Very obviously not, that’s why it’s not “winning”. If they could turn back the clocks they would.

[somenameforme]

The benefit of war is almost never worth the cost. It just tends to scale up from repeated mutual miscalculations. For instance WW1 started from a Bosnian Serb assassinating the Austro-Hungarian heir and the next thing you know Brits are killing Germans over it. Everybody would have certainly turned back the clock there if they could, even moreso given that "The War to End All Wars" directly set the stage for WW2. But that doesn't mean that the Allied Powers didn't win WW1.

[solumunus]

It's nowhere near the same thing.

This was supposed to be an imperialist land grab by Russia. This war did not emerge organically. Russia had a goal, to seize Ukraine - easily and quickly. Russia have failed at that goal. Failing is not winning. Not only have they failed to secure their objective, the attempt to do so has cost several orders of magnitude more than intended. The land they do control is of low value.

Again, spectacularly failing to carry out your goals is not "winning", in any sense of the word.

[somenameforme]

Would you say that Austria-Hungary choosing to outright invade Serbia because the assassin was a Bosnian Serb who might have had some backing from the government, was reasonable? Or was that a land grab? And when when Russia joins Serbia was it solely an action of obligation or because they thought they might be able to get a piece of Austria-Hungary? And similarly when Germany jumps in seeing they can now shift the balance back towards Austria-Hungary, and so on.

And then this just kept iterating until suddenly everybody's fighting everybody, tens of millions are dying, and absolutely nothing was achieved. Then you get the Treaty of Versailles which desperately tried to justify it all by being excruciatingly punitive on Germany, but of course that ultimately did nothing but essentially guarantee WW2 where tens of millions more would die again, and again for basically nothing, with a good chunk of Europe left in rubble.

In the modern war Russia claimed that their motivation for the war was to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO. Their early movements were largely performative or Hail Marys (like the decapitation strike) and within 48 hours they were engaged in negotiations with Ukraine that involved 0 land concessions, but primarily focused on Ukraine not joining NATO. Ukraine chose to fight, at the urging of the West, and so here we are.

[mrguyorama]

>In the modern war Russia claimed that their motivation for the war was to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO.

If Russia is so terrified of NATO invasion, why do they keep taking defenses off the boarder with Finland which just became a NATO member as a part of this war? Why does Russian state TV insist they should nuke Britain?

Why didn't Russia invade any of the NATO members already on their border?

>Ukraine chose to fight, at the urging of the West

It is well known that the US admin had prepared to airlift Zelensky out of Ukraine and support a literal insurgency because they expected Russia to win easily, and were not actually prepared to support Ukraine in a regular war. This resulted in Zelensky's famous "I need ammo, not a ride" statement.

Why did Russia violate their treaty terms with Ukraine, which explicitly guaranteed their security? Why should you ever trust negotiations with a leader who has clearly demonstrated they do not respect what they sign?

>Their early movements were largely performative or Hail Marys

No it wasn't. Attempting to take Hostomel was standard doctrine, and they fully expected to succeed, which is why their convoy was not in fighting shape, and carried parade uniforms.

Russia, at the very top, fully believed and intended to defeat Ukraine in 3 days. They were literally not prepared for a drawn out war.

[somenameforme]

The rhetoric about Ukraine falling in 3 days came from the West, not Russia. [1] And it's highly improbable that "we" actually even believed that. Wars don't ever end in 3 days, and Ukraine had been pumped full of arms for years, had multiple cities that been heavily fortified for war, and an army approaching a million men, large numbers of of "ultra nationalists" itching for a fight, and all of this before all men of "fighting age" (up to 60) were locked in the country and started being forced into the military. Why we were putting out nonsensical rhetoric that could serve no viable purpose other than to try to entice an invasion (and as such would normally be classified) is a question with only one apparent answer.

The only other NATO members that bordered Russia before the Ukraine War were were the Baltics. They have poor geography for an invasion and would also be immediately cut off from mainland Europe in the case of a war by the Suwalki Corridor - a tiny stretch of about 40 miles that is the Baltics only connection to Europe outside of Russia/Belarus. By contrast Ukraine has ideal geography for an invasion. Kursk is also the path the Nazis ended up taking when trying to press into Russia during WW2, and also where they suffered a very costly defeat.

I do fully agree that Russia expected their negotiations with Ukraine to be successful, and had the West not intervened they likely would have been right.

[1] - https://www.newsweek.com/even-russian-propaganda-was-hesitan...

[solumunus]

Ukraine were no where near joining NATO at the time, although as it turns out - if they were their motivation would have been entirely valid. Russia didn’t want Ukraine to join NATO because it would prevent them from annexing Ukraine, that’s simple logic.

> within 48 hours they were engaged in negotiations with Ukraine that involved 0 land concessions

So you think the plan was to invade Ukraine to scare them into a hand shake that they wouldn’t join NATO? I really don’t want to insult you but…

[somenameforme]

Not joining NATO would be an extremely small price to pay relative to what war could, and ultimately did, entail.

There's a nice timeline here [1] of relations between Ukraine and NATO. It's an archived version from the day before the invasion began, so there's no hindsight posts. Things were accelerating rapidly on the Ukraine-NATO front. In January 2022 there was apparently even a bill that was to be introduced in the US declaring Ukraine a "NATO+ country" immediately. And NATO's responses towards Russia's expressed concerns began to be completely dismissive with not even a vague allusion to reconciliation.

So I think the main goal was certainly to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, but I think a major secondary goal was for Russia to make it clear that their claims of red lines and such are not toothless. If a country makes repeated claims of things being a red-line but never acts on such claims, then their future claims will be casually dismissed.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ukraine%E2%80%93N...

[wolvoleo]

That guy wasn't important at all. The other countries were just looking for an excuse to start a war. Until then wars were kinda glorified, governed by pretty strict rules and not much attention was paid to the destruction.

WW1 changed all that with the tank, the machine guns, the toxic gas, the trench, the air warfare.

[DANmode]

> If they could turn back the clocks they would.

That’s not my very objective understanding of Russian history.

[mrguyorama]

Russia's explicit and communicated goals for this war were utterly failed by day four of the invasion. Arguably they lost within hours when they failed to take Hostemel airport.

By Russia's own accounting, they lost years ago. It does not matter what the outcome is, Russia has taken massive pain to sustain this war they never planned to sustain. They entirely used up their immense Soviet inheritance, which was something they held in high regard and used to insist made them strong. It's gone now. Used up.

The gas station of Europe can no longer produce sufficient gasoline for internal use. It will take at least months to get that capability back.

They have utterly failed to substitute sanctioned components, having switched back to imported components after their internal substitutions performed so poorly.

Their navy is being taken apart by a country that scuttled it's own navy on day one. Ukraine sunk the flagship of the black sea fleet with supposedly just a few missiles, something which the Moskva by all accounts on paper, should have handled just fine. Except all their craft are in such poor condition that many of the systems on the Moskva were likely just nonfunctional, including defense radars, communications, and anti-missile defenses.

Russia was totally reliant on an American private company for their battlefield communications, and is not coping with the shutdown of their access, which they should have been prepared for long ago. They were also dependent on Discord and Telegram.

Russia is being seriously wounded by a country much smaller than it, which also ostensibly had all the same problems as Russia, like poor soviet doctrine, corruption, a poor economy, and demographic issues.

Russia is failing to compete industrially with a former vassal.

Russia had to import soldiers and ammo from north korea.

Russia's weapons export industry is dead. Nobody wants their trash that has proven terrible on the battlefield. Nobody expects Russia to actually be able to build what they claim to sell anymore.

Russia is so run dry on arms that they couldn't help Venezuela against the US invasion. They sent a single anti air weapon system.

Half a million Russians are dead.

If the war ends today and Russia is allowed to keep all the land it is currently standing on, it still has lost. It's not even a Pyrrhic victory at this point.

[benj111]

>russia is currently holding just about all the land it wants in Ukraine

Based on? The fact it tried to take Kyiv in the first week? That it's still trying to advance?

If Russia were to collapse tomorrow, they would lose everything, I don't see how that's winning.

[t0mpr1c3]

It still hasn't got all of Donbas.

Russia can't even keep what it previously took. Crimea is becoming indefensible.