Ukraine

There is light everywhere, but it does't come like you wish it would in a movie, with the detonation of the Death Star, or a fleet of A-10's arriving over the horizon to rip the enemy vanguard into strips of fruit leather to the soundtrack of Rock You Like A Hurricane

• 3 years on, Russia is an uber ride away from their starting points from territory they controlled a decade prior.
• Their vast and utterly irreplaceable Soviet stockpile is gone
• The Black Sea Fleet is effectively neutralized
• Their strategic bomber fleet is vastly reduced
• Their primary oil & gas export markets are dead
• They are junior vassals to China going forward. No request from Beijing can be refused beyond this point.
• The decades-old war chest of filthy oil & gas money is gone
• The easiest oil and gas to extract has already been taken. Every barrel they make going forward is more expensive, requires expertise they lack and can no longer lease from other countries, and is of declining strategy importance going forward anyways.
• The manufacture dates on Russia's stand off terror weaons show a hand-to-mouth production flow. As soon as things are made, they're fired at Ukraine. This means stockpiles are essentially empty.
• During 2024, Russia lost more men than any other year of the war, and used less heavy equipment. The heavy stuff is gone, and even 70 years of loaf vans are becoming rare. The golf carts, motorcyles and donkeys are evidence of their declining power. It takes exponentially more flesh to achieve anything that heavy metal ought to have done. It's not sustainable for anyone. Even though their macho chest-thumping boasts that they are vast and bottomless, the only thing that actually is, is their brutality and lack of humanity.
• Their A-50 AWACS-type fleet is functionally dead. They lost two of them last year, can't replace them.
• During August, there are now gasoline shortages and rationing starting in the far flung territories. This effect at the consumer pumps will spread, especially if Ukraine keeps hitting facilities. The price of a gallon of gas in Russia is currently the same as it is in the U.S., except that Russian salaries are 20% of what american ones are. Translation - consumers are now feeling the pain paying 5x what an american does for gas. This is going to lead to runaway inflation as the cost of transporting goods rises due to fuel costs.
• Their current strategy is to push small infiltration teams forward looking for weak spots. But they lack the reserves to exploit and reinforce those if they find them. Just last week we were hearing how there was a breakthrough of 15km north of Pokrovsk. Welll guess what - they couldn't reinforce it, the Ukrainians went in, cut them off and wiped them out. It was all posturing ahead of whatever that Alaskan boogaloo was with Trump.
• Pushing small infiltration teams forward, only to be wiped out in a couple of days is not a great strategy for conquest. It's more like pest-control. Sure, there's mice or roaches around, but you're able to kill them given enough time, drones and perseverance
• Ukraine, while suffering, is more than holding it's existential own against an alleged superpower. They haven't been drafting people under 24 yet. Their domestic capabilities are getting stronger and further reaching.

Russia is in an utterly disastrous military, economic and social situation. The ultimate proof is that they're stuck where they are, and can't seem to move forward in any meaningful way. This is it. This is all they can do. Ukraine isn't yet remotely desperate. They have many more cards to play, despite Trump's obedient insistence to the contrary. Ukraine's path to victory doesn't require full liberation of all territories yet. It would be wiser to keep bleeding Russia's dying war machine, and trade what are in the big picture, small pieces of land while Russia burns itself out in it's stubborn suicide.

Russia talks a lot about how good they are at war. Except - look at the history.

• Crimean War. Lost. Their expansion really never recovered after this
• Russo-Japanese War. Uttlery crushed.
• WW1. Beaten so badly, that the entire system collapsed.
• Polish-Russian War. Defeated.
• WW2. Rolled back to Moscow, after being backstabbed by their Nazi allies. Without lend-lease and invasions of Italy and Normandy, there might not be a russian state west of the Urals.
• Afghanistan. Rolled.
• Chechnya 1. Rolled.

The last war Russia won on it's own, was against Sweden in the 17th century. The rest has all been punching down on tiny neighbour states and running internal ethnic cleansing. They're absolutely shit at war. The evidence is there. They keep dying in vast numbers, waiting for something to happen. Often, in the long view of history, that something is a revolution, or a collapse, or both. But autocracies seem stable, until they're not. This Death Festival is unsustainable for any country, even one with such depraved leadership as russia.

Their macho moron strategy of Horde War presumed that having crap compared to NATO gear was fine, as long as you had enough of it. They could roll from Poland to Portugal before the feckless pussies in the West could even muster the stones to respond. Right? Well - that clearly is not the case, given that they can't even subdue a presumed inferior race right next door with the bare minimum of logistics challenges. Their entire Way of War has turned out to be fairly worthless compared to drones and stubborn national resistance in Ukraine. FIghting a unified Europe is so utterly out of the question now. We aren't quite grateful enough to Ukraine for what they've done. It was, of course, in their own service and they didn't get the support they deserved. We're trading Ukrainian blood for democratic liberty.

It all sucks. It sucks that they chose to do this. This is a brutal, disgusting war of hubris driven by vile gangster ghouls trying to get a little bit richer. But the divorce is final. There will be a Ukraine with territorial integrity and no delusions about Russia's malign nature going forward, if there ever was. And Russia will continue to try corrosive mischief for a few more decades yet before imploding into a wasteland plagued by infighting, casual ethnic cleansing and corporate warlodism.

Putin's legacy will be maybe the worst Russian - ever. Which is saying something. There are no upsides to Russia going forward, especially if their orange puppet croaks before extracting some kind of bad peace that the military situation on the ground doens't justify. It just takes time and won't come in a super satisfying endpoint. Ukraine wins by suriving. Russia loses in every scenario. They've lost The Very Future and will be a dead zombie society going forward.