Well, we’re crossing discussion streams significantly as this point, but I’ll have a go.

Depends what you mean by “afaik the japanese wanted to surrender…”. The fanatical military leadership certainly didn’t, and wasn’t going to. After Okinawa, it seemed pretty clear what an invasion of any of the home islands would look like. And the allies were VERY concerned about countering the USSR’s advance in Europe, hence didn’t want to get bogged down in a years long bloody ground campaign in Japan. It was a higher priority to stop the russians than to do things ‘the old fashioned way’ in Japan. It’s more complex than that, of course, there wasn’t just one single reason why the U.S. used the atomic bomb.

If you want to have a moral argument about ‘demonstrating their power on defenseless civilians’, well, I’m sorry I’m not likely to move you on that.

No doubt. They have become THE most advanced drone fighting force in the world. An entire, vital industry created from the crucible of war.

This sudden drone epiphany is in some ways similar to the early 20th century, the Age of the Battleship when heavy metal naval ships were still considered the ultimate expression of power, but then the advent of aircraft as highly cost effective ship killers emerged with torpedo and dive bombers. You can build a LOT of planes and bombs/torpedoes for a fraction of the cost of producing a naval vessl. It quickly became clear that planes kill ships much better than ships do. And then the sudden rush into aircraft carriers over gunboats, if your country was rich enough to do it.

Repulse and Prince of Wales were the most advanced British warships of their day, and were sunk by Japanese aircraft in hours. Same as Yamato. There had been lots of examples prior, like Bismarck & the battle of Taranto where it became clear that relatively cheap planes - including obsolete biplanes - were able to kill VERY expensive naval captial ships. Similarly, drones have proven to be the effective counter to mechanized infantry, tanks and artillery that anti-naval aircraft were to traditional capital ships.

Drones at scale have a MUCH lower barrier to entry, and Ukraine are now the experts.

What a sensationally kind thing to say.

no doubt. there’s only one man whose opinion really matters there, and even he has some incentives to consider ANY kind of settlement. More on that later.

I’m just suggesting that they test narratives - just saying something like this would have been somehwere beteen blasphemous and suicide just a couple of months ago. Anything that is said and tolerated should be assumed to be a “test” of the public’s reaction.

Even Pootz would probably like the war to end and be able to keep Donbas and Crimea at this point. Probably. And that’s not to say he’ll get it, or that they deserve it. But it’s probably their baseline ask. It gets said a lot that he’s a dead man as soon as the war ends. Well, he’s also probably a dead man if the war doesn’t conclude with some kind of prize this year too.

He doesn’t have great options, and though he would like us to think of him as a chess player, he’s really a poker player who bluffs all the time counting on others not being willing to suffer very much. You know - a bully. In this case, he reached too far, Ukrainians have a very strong tolerance for suffering, when the alternative is genocide and enslavement again. His idiotic hubris means he can only double down and escalate, lo and behold, you’re 4 and a half years into a 3 day triumph with no happy way to exit.

All that to say - however we got here, it’s extraordinary that we’re now where Russia is stalled and asking for peace, while Ukraine is deciding the best path forward.

Yep. They are absolutely screwed. This is a historic imperial own-goal disaster, at the scale of the Persians having their empire fall apart after going to fight alexander. They are vassals to China going forward, and Xi must kick himself at his good fortune and the stupidity of Putin for deciding he would go with his regional revenge project first. China becomes the undisputed leader of the Axis of Authoritarian Shitholes without losing a single soldier or piece of hardware. Maybe he would have liked Russia to win to try and force a bloodless de-facto concession from Taiwan, the latter having seen that the world is NOT going to come to anyone’s rescue.

But - his consolation prize is control over Russia and Central Asia, including the North Pacific, which china has NEVER had any kind of control over in 3,000 years of civilization. He can ask for ANY favor for the next several decades and Russia will not be able to say no. The parched chinese northern plain just solved it’s fresh water, energy, agricultural and mineral needs for the foreseable future. Siberia has become China’s boundless resource yard, and Russia has probably suffered a fatal blow to maintaining it’s current petromafia gangster state.

I HAVE to think that Xi believed, like everyone else, that Ukraine would be conquered eventually, and that would have it’s purpose for him to be a warning to Taiwan of what was possible. He would have likely preferred Russia win and he get something from Taiwan for free - but he’s a more patient and reasonable man than Putin, it seems. He would have preferred a Russian victory, but a defeat has it’s uses too.

Putin is going to end up being the worst russian leader in history, which is REALLY saying something. Putin the Fool, who lost Ukraine forever, and the Baltics, Kazakhstan and maybe even Siberia too. But history moves at different time scales than we’re used to as muggles.

Am not remotely qualified to answer that formally. But - this a website, so I’ll give it a go anyways, with that caveat. Behold - the rantings of a confessed meatball.

In short - Ukraine’s wartime population has fallen by probably at least 10m people. That’s very, very bad. And it’s demographics are very bad, because people don’t tend to have kids during genocidal wars, as you’re waiting to see what happens before you commit yourself to having kids. How many will return to Ukraine? Who knows. It really depends on what Russia does over the coming decade plus. If it remains a credible menace, then Ukraine will continue to suffer. If it collapses into a rump state of St. Petes and Moscow down to Rostov, but loses the Caucasus and anything past the Urals, Ukraine may end up the dominant eastern european power in the region.

In some cases, industrial societies stay permanently altered after war. In some cases, the soldiers come home and there’s a massive industrial and baby boom as they…well…come home and put their minds into pursuits other than war. I don’t think this will be the case in Ukraine though, because this has frankly been an old-man’s war, on both sides. Ukraine has not recruited people under 25 and russia has done it’s own internal ethnic cleansing to ship useless mouths, including old men in many cases, to be liquidated on the premise of being redeemed for good ukrainian land.

Permanent damage to Ukraine has been done, but - they’ve survived as a sovreign state and Russia has blown it’s wad. This was a 1,000 year project of enslavement, cruelty and subjugation, but it appears the Russians will have to find another way if they’re stupid enough to try and spread their corrosive influence back over Ukraine again.

Europe has refused to give Ukraine of the seized ‘oligarch money’ you’re referring to. It’s frozen, and some of the interest I THINK has been provided, but the principal amounts haven’t been touched. Belgium have, in particular, been obstructionist assholes on this matter. This is a total guess, but I think that they have held this money as a last reserve, KNOWING that Russia will never pay a dime of actual reparations, and that this will have to be given in lieu.

They’ve survived with direct & indirect financial and material assistance. PURL initiative, many rounds of funding, Rammstein group, recent EU 60B “loan” that got freed up when Orban was voted out of Hungary. Unblocked grain corridor early in the war to resume exports through the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.

When the war ends, Ukraine will become the greatest rebuilding infrastructure project in the world for a decade or more. Lucrative contracts will come in to reconstruct an EU-aligned Ukraine rich in broken things, agricultural goods and mineral wealth, especially battery-essential lithium deposits in the east that are central to Russia’s motives for the invasion in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shevchenko_deposit

It just depends what side of the Donbas battle lines those deposits end up. Russia is just starting to unravel militarily now. They may not be able to reconquer lost territories in the conventional way, if you look at their failed counteroffensive in Kherson and Zaporhizia in 2023, but - their strategy seems like it might be to make Russian occupation untenable. They have increased the range and depth of their drone strikes, have started to (finally) hit Moscow and other big cities, and can probably deny Russia any benefits of exploiting occupied land indefinitely. That’s another conversation for another thread.

TL:DR - Instead of liberating stolen land directly, make the Russians leave. If the Russian state wobbles after this massive defeat, then opportunity to reclaim Donbas and Crimea may present themselves over time while Russia is going through post-Putin convulsions. Emphasis on “May”. Ukraine surviving as a viable, sovreign, EU aligned state is far more than most serious minded people could have predicted in 2022. It has the chance to rebuild itself from the sclerotic mess that the USSR left behind, just like Poland, Romania and the Czechoslovakians did.

true. but - he has said so for years. And his negotiating position is FAR stronger than it was in 2023/2024. And he doesn’t seem to be particularly starved for them. Trump tried to stiff-arm him into a bad peace, but as usual, he tries to negotiate with leverage he doesn’t actually have. He pulled direct U.S. support, and removed Russian oil sanctions, but the mainly-Euro supported version of the Ukranian army in 2026 can probably resist the current version of the Russian army for a long time yet.

Of course any reasonable leader would say they want the war to end - but Zelensky can be a LOT more assertive about how this goes going forwards than the russians can.

Russia is S-C-R-E-W-E-D, and they know it. Destroyed their army. Spent their 30-year war chest. Destroyed their diplomatic and political capital. Destroyed their entire soviet hardware inheritance. Destroyed their primary energy export markets. Became vassals to China. Lost Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Armenia. Is losing Africa. Lost power projection generally. Lost the Black Sea Fleet. Lost dozens of their strategic nuclear deterrent aircraft. Lost their AWACS. Destroyed/lost 1 million+ laborers for their economy. Have already extracted the easiest-to-get-to oil and gas and everything is harder from here on out. Their demographics were already terminal, and they supercharged the loss of human capital by failing to re-acquire a new colony to offset the losses of their slave army.

Hell - their entire way of war has been destroyed. Their myth of national inevitability. Their philosophy was Horde War - that it didn’t matter if your stuff was worse than NATO’s, as long as you had enough of it. They presumed they could march from Poland to Paris to Portugal before the feckless pussies in NATO could even start to respond. Well - it turns out they can’t even get to the Dneiper river right next door. They are a 20th century army fighting a 21st century war with 7th century brutality, and rebuilding a modern army will take longer than Putin has left to live. The entire concept of just marching a man forward and hoping the land turns from blue to red like you’re in a video game is itself obsolete in a world where cheap drones at scale have made invading and holding territory essentially a dead concept. They’ve not only lost this war - they’ve lost the 21st century.

You’d like a real satisfying ending where the black tower of mordor crumbles and the orcs scurry back eastwards to feud amongst each other rather than invading the neighbours - but that’s movie stuff. The core principle that russia has already lost the war is true, if way more boring IRL.

Well - sure. All reasonable people with a remote appetite for justice would like that.

It’s kind of fascinating that this is where russia has ended up, given all their theoretical advantages before the full scale invasion. Russia is squealing for some kind of favorable settlement it doesn’t deserve. The central “Problem” seems to be that they can’t advance anymore. They can’t stop Ukrainian drone production, they can’t stop effective drone deployment. The Russian theory of victory has two parts to achieve one outcome:

1. Pushing small infiltration teams into soft areas. They are either killed immediately, shortly, or eventually. Mostly by drones
2. Terror attacks from stand-off distance
3. Keep doing 1 & 2 until Ukraine gives you something to make it stop.

#1 is a REAL problem for Russia, as it’s labour and logistically intensive. But also because the only way it’s successful is if Ukraine agrees to stop killing Russian soldiers at the front. Pushing low-functioning grunts into blasted puddles of toxic rainwater until they are eventually killed isn’t a great occupation strategy. The point of a war of conquest is that you get to reap the benefits of economic activity in the land you conquer. But workers and occupation forces can’t generate wealth while under fire. They can’t live in charred craters - they live in soft housing and barracks and rely on there being peace in order to control the territory. But if Ukraine refuses to stop killing them - then the exploitation of the conquered territory can never begin. This is a BASIC and seemingly unsolvable problem for Russia at present.

#2 is also HUGELY resource intensive, uses platforms with EXPENSIVE inputs and things they don’t manufacture domestically, and machines you can’t replace at scale in the near term. It also has never, ever worked as a strategy for conquest in history against an industrial society. Even WW2 levels of YEARS of strategic bombing against Germany and Japan STILL requried ground forces for the former, and atomic weapons for the latter to force captiulation.

So - neither #1 or #2 can, by themselves, achieve Russia’s strategic goals. Ukraine doesn’t seem to be in such desperate conditions that they need to consider #3 anytime soon. It’s russia, the aggressor, who is asking for peace terms. Ukraine can probably continue to trade tiny slices of land while bleeding out the russian war machine longer than Russia can continue to support their invasion. Hence Russians talking about peace at all, and on basis of economic terms so they don’t have to confront the enormity of their military failure.

Nobody who is serious minded expects the Russian Federation’s current form to honor a long term peace agreeement. From Ukraine’s perspective, the ONLY way to permanently guarantee their own security might be to keep fighting. Keep destroying everything you can, until there is significant change to the composition of the political system in Russia.

Not sure what reliability or relevance any poll on public opinion is in a kleptocratic slave state like Russia. Asking individuals what they think isn’t the same there as it is here where we, you know, vote. And that’s not what drives change in mafia style dictatoships anyways. Russia is the kind of country where power changes by factions and coups - control is seized, not given from a fair mandate of voters. I agree with you, the war ends when Putin does, and that the only path for Ukraine that brings lasting peace is to degrade Russia’s ability to fight long enough until there is fundamental change in the pollitical leadership.

Yep, you’re probably right. This war lasts as long as he does. Increasingly, he seems to be aware of that and is making himself less visibile than in even the recent past.

thanks kindly. I think Trump is actively trying to erode the financial priorities of Ukraine’s backers by launching the Iran war, plus it helps his boss besides. As in - if you can’t MAKE them stop supporting Ukraine, try and recession them into doing it themselves. And make a few bucks manipulating markets while you’re at it.

Closing the Strait of Hormuz is litearlly in the Russian’s war contingency plans, and lo and behold - they did it. Also - the FIRST thing - the VERY FIRST policy decision that Trump did after launching the Iran war? “Temporary” removal of Russian oil sanctions. Which, of course, are permanent. They even “talked” about revoking them, but - gee golly - guess what they actually did - kept them in place, without making too big a stink about it. Keep the water murky in order to confuse people not paying attention, and get the money train rolling again.

Think you’re right, their clumsy, ham-fisted backing of fascist franchises across Europe is going WORSE with them in charge than it was pre-Trump. There’s, ironically, an unintended Trump effect that galvanizes opposition to him, both in America and especially Europe, where his handling of the Ukraine war isn’t just a partisan sideshow, but rather, a literal imminnet threat to life and liberty right next door.

I’m for big sensational strikes like the kerch bridge and attacking Moscow more directly and more often too. I don’t see what else Russia is likely to do in response - this IS their full court press, because anything less than that would make no strategic sense for what is a stupid vanity war of revenge for an overpromoted gangster ghoul.

Every passing day, Russia gets weaker, and probably things become less sustainable than they are for Ukraine. I think Ukraine can continue to trade small slices of land, get better at cost effective air defense and increasingly automating their kill capacity, while russia has to spend more and more resources and manpower than they can afford to. Their 2026 offensive is achieving absolutely nothing, if they needed 500,000 more troops today than they have to make a strategic difference, then they would have needed to mobilize those forces 6 months ago. Guess what - they didn’t, and I think they know they can’t. It’s endgame stuff now - Trump’s impotent indifference, <6m before whatever is going to come out of U.S. midterms, Putin’s increasing paranoia, rising discontent in Russia, and the static nature of the frontlines are all signs that there’s not much more Russia and Krasnov can do.

Call me a bit wary - the Russians didn’t seem quite furious enough about losing their obvious stooge agent vessel that they use to screw up NATO & the EU. That made me think they might just have been better at hiding their influence on Magyar, presenting it like a win for the west but really just slow playing things. They’re down to having ONLY Fico as an obvious spoiler, and he has been less obstructionist than Orban was so far.

Ukraine could absolutely be fighting a dirtier war than it is. They could be much more aggressive with attacking soft targets in big russian cities, car bombs, shooting up stores, assassinating government figures, blowing up civilian structures. They’ve already shown a capability and willingness to do this, assassinating Dugin’s daughter and some high priority targets here and there over time.

But - unlike the russians, they have allies/supporters who care about moral conduct of a war and an ethical high ground, thus they don’t bother with those kinds of attacks at scale. But if Russia were to start using nukes to kill large numbers of Ukrainians in a clear final act of extermination (a Final Solution, if you will) , there would be no reason for them not to fully unleash a terroristic campaign like that, and really make the passive enabling Russian population feel the venom that their government has unleashed.

A tactical nuke is just a big shell - depending on a programmable explosive yield, it might blow up a single building or a few city blocks. Militarily, there isn’t a single target that changes the trajectory of the war by being nuked - but politically and strategically, using any level of nuke probably creates way way way more problems for russia than it solves.

Why believe that? Because they clearly didn’t use them at points where there were more concentrated Ukrainian defences that might at least at a simple tactical level, have an argument for their use if you turned off your brain and soul and thought like a Russian does, for a minute. They could have used them against any number of fortress belt cities where Ukrainians were (or are still) stubbornly entrenched like Bakhmut, Sieverodonetsk, Avdiivka, Pokrovsk, Mynohrad etc, and expect that the Ukrainians would quickly retreat and reconsider their defensive posture for the next town down the road. But - the central contradiction here for Russia is that they insist Ukraine belongs to them - ergo is their property. Why would you nuke your own property, especially with all the other entanglements it presents. This is a war of land seizure by a mafia state looking to steal wealth and treasure from their neighbour. You can’t extract value as quickly from a completely decimated moonscape, plus your reconstruction costs are higher.

They’re not going to use nukes of any kind. And China probably would pull all support if they did, which would QUICKLY deindustrialize the Russian army to the point where they’d be using slingshots and sticks on meat assaults in a couple of months.

You think the vulgar talking yam will be out within the next 6 months? That’s optimism up the ying yang.

think that this war is in stalemate position for russia. It cant win, but continues to fight just to delay inevitable loss.

It does not matter whether huilo ends or continues war. Economics and society will collapse because of sanctions and being tired of putin.

Ukraine, while does not have ability to actually win back on front, can cause disaters in the back, and keep defensive positions with continued support from allies.

Rose @lemmy.zip to Ukraine@sopuli.xyz • What Exactly is the Russian Theory of Victory At This Point? In the short term, it’s probably what Russia says it is: getting the territories that it wrote into the constitution. Stopping at the areas currently in control would also be acceptable, as that’s already more than Russia had before 2022. Then it’s going to be about regrouping for new attacks and invasions, which don’t have to be aimed at Ukraine. Even if attacking Europe were out of the picture, there are former Soviet countries to its south.

Sure, but those states have already aligned themselves to China (Kazazhstan and the rest of the Central Asian Republics), Turkey (Azeris) or otherwise disavowed themselves from Russia like Armenia. Georgia and Belraus are pale consolation prizes for what was a one-time shot at restoring the great russian empire.

Well - here’s the thing. The worst part of the war for Russia might not even have started - occupation. A war of conquest is only meaninful if you can exploit and extract value from that territory. If Ukraine retains the ability to snipe, drone, bomb, harass and kill occupation forces and any moronic Russian pioneer replacement settlers, then what good is owning burning rubble. Just like the U.S. experience in Vietnam, if the terrioty you take can’t be held or pacified when your most qualified troops are killed or move to the next objective, then what has been the point of taking Hill 835 or whatever. You have to leave at some point because it’s not worth the ongoing bloodshed, and then the ‘enemy’ just comes back.

But territory can only be exploited from economic activity underwritten by a peaceful state of things. And occupation forces can’t live in smouldering puddles of rain water - they live in barracks among communities that generate economic wealth. Russia is YEARS away from reaping occupation, reconstruction and repopulation benefits, and that’s assuming Ukraine stops shooting at all. Nobody seriously expects Russia NOT to try again in a couple years, so from Ukraine’s perspective, the only path to lasting peace is to keep bleeding the Russians dry until something fundamental changes withe the political leadership

He may not have a reason, but he has many barriers, including the loss of support from his overlord in Beijing. And the military folks who have to execute his order have family that is going to live on this earth longer than he will. It’s less about his lack of restraint and more about the likelihood that it doesn’t actually achieve anything positive for Russia. They’re just a big, posionous bomb. Used against territory they claim as their own. It’s shitting on your own birthday cake.

Ukraine haven’t even mobilzed people under 25. It’s terrible what they’ve suffered, but they’re nowhere near societal collapse. Russia has been in a nearly net-zero state of casulaties to recruits for nearly two years. And what’s not stated there is the declining quality of the average Russian Fighting Man. They started off as a fairly professional mechanized army - destroyed that. Then they went with mass of men and materiel, as they always do, but perofmance and quality declined. Then they went to irregular units driving buggies, bikes and horses into combat. And at each stage, their forward progress and the cost of recruiting new troops rose higher and higher to absurd levels.

Even globally, there is a finite amount of idiots willing to die for a paycheque that likely won’t be paid anyways. Just like how ISIS found there is a finite amount of devoted islamists willing to die directly figthing an organized enemy in Iraq and Syria, until they melted away. Russia wants you to think they’re bottomless, and not just in terms of their depravity. But - nothing is infinte, and just being able to replace raw numbers without any regard to training quality is obviously leading to decreased performance of your slave army. Russia is losing net territory so far this year, and that’s pretty darn hard to hide, or reverse. If they COULD be doing 1% better than they are now, they would be doing eveyrthing to achieve it. This is it - this is the most they’re willing to do - throwing useless mouths into pounded rubble until they are blown to bits, and hoping Ukraine gives them something to go away. You know - like a terrorist does asking for ransom.

I keep thinking how giddy Xi must have been with this idiotic quid pro quo where Russia would attack Ukraine first before Xi pressed on some Taiwan reunification threat. Without losing a single soldier or piece of equipment, China has become the undisputed leader of the Axis of Authoritarian Hell Holes, taken influential control of the Central Asian republics today, will control eastern Russia tomorrow, can make any demand of Russia going forward with no chance of them saying no. They have secured all the resource materials, energy, fresh water that China will ever need, and gained naval use of the erstwhile Russian North Pacific, something they have never, ever had in 5000 years.

The spirit of this question might be more “how would you win”, though. It’s tricky, by all accounts Russia is running out of manpower and seems afraid to conscript more aggressively. Their foreign reserves will run out eventually too (although they’re deeper than I had realised). Most conventional tactics or strategies that are scalable are being tried and not working. I guess they could try bombing some new things.

That leaves escalating to tactical nuclear weapons, and hoping Europe doesn’t respond by directly fighting Russia. Of course, potentially ending the world might be too heavy a cost if you’re not just a Lemming running a hypothetical.

There’s a few other twists and turns before you go to tactical nuclear weapons - which may not achieve anything militarily. It’s bad juju to run a war of conquest to own an irradiated wasteland. Big Poppa Xi probably wouldn’t allow anything but a small show of force in terms of nulear weapons - a demonstrative underground detonation, let’s say. But let’s be clear - why would such a tantrum change Ukraine’s defense calculus? This is already a genocidal war where russia presumes ukraine ‘Belongs’ to them and they have no right to exist. It’s win or die, full stop. Tactical nukes wouldn’t change that and if the Russians could precisely target military targets that efficiently, they’d already do it. The delivery systems are the same - only the warhead would be different.

If Russia uses any type of nuclear weapon, you’ll immediately see China’s support change for the worse from Russia’s perspective, and you’d see an instant all-gloves-off response from Ukraine. There would be mass assassination & suicide bomber attacks in Moscow and St. Petersburg, as there would be absolytely nothing restraining Ukraine doing as much damage as possible if you’re being incinerated out of existence anyways.

TL:DR - Can’t see nukes making anything better for Russia.