Ukraine

I keep writing this here and there, so I'll reiterate it here.
When the Soviet war in Afghanistan ended, some 70 000 absolutely mental soldiers returned straight from the front, and there were another 400 000 or so that had been rotated away from frontline duty and were a bit less of lunatics but doing bad all the same. Those 70 000 + 400 000 were too much for the Soviet Union of 300 million people.

One of the most important causes for Soviet Union's collapse were those Afghan veterans who were accustomed to extremely violent way of doing things. The crazy years of 1990's and the famously violent Russian mafia were a result of those 500-ish thousand madmen having been freed to roam the Soviet Union and later the Russia. All that instability eventually led to the total economical collapse of 1998.

So... Now there are some 700 000 soldiers more or less on the front, and another 700 000 doing other military duties. Those 700 000 + 700 000 will have quite an effect on the Russia of 140 million people. Once the war ends, ten times as many lunatics will return to the Russia of only 140 million as returned to USSR of 300 million. That will be absolute carnage and the 1990's will look like a walk in a park compared to what's coming up.

This is already unavoidable, but if the Russia is victorious, it can still avoid being ripped completely apart by that carnage. That's the main reason the Russia cannot end the war. It will wage the war ad infinitum, unless made physically unable to continue. And if they some day cannot get any more soldiers, then that'll finally the physical barrier they've been looking for.

However, the larger issue for Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to a retired US Army Russian military analyst in Washington, is that “he needs a win somewhere. He needs some dramatic change in the disposition of the front line to somehow justify these casualty numbers,” he explained.

“His army is bogged down almost everywhere and the domestic situation continues to worsen as these Ukraine attacks on Russia’s oil industry have caused shortages of petrol and other disruptions of people’s daily lives,” he continued.

See here is the thing, yes Putin doesn't care about the lives of his soldiers, yes theoretically this means if he can retain an iron grip that the war can continue indefinitely and yes that means english language publications can wax poetic about the unstoppability of Russia... however human lives ARE valuable, Russia and Putin not seeing the value in the lives of their own people is a WEAKNESS not a strength.

It should disturb all of us all over the world that even in our own countries there are rightwing people that similarly cannot see the value in human beings, who cannot see refugees or people with a different colored skin or ethnicity than them as having any generative potential rather than just being a burden. It is this ideology precisely that makes Putin weak and it is the same ideology that makes all rightwing ideologues weak.

Human beings are the valuable thing, it is the genius, strength and will of living breathing human beings that gives rise to power in this world, and to pretend otherwise is to participate in a delusion that makes you weak relative to those who treat human life as valuable and build coalitions based on that principle.

We should treat human beings as human beings because it is the right thing to do, but beyond that it is also the thing that powerful militaries do to their own soldiers. The more a military treats its soldiers as human beings and does not cast human lives away under a cynical delusion that shitty AI war machines that can do nothing but kill are more valuable than motivated, professional human beings, the more powerful that military becomes.

...so in my opinion, it is a tragedy, but let Putin continue to see no value in the lives of his soldiers, it will only doom his war effort faster.

Edit I also want to add another point that other than oil and just raw space all Russia really has is its military technology industry. With that in mind imagine for a second you are a leader of a nation looking to buy weapons for your nation's military, for the purposes of this hypothetical let us say you don't care about the Ukraine war either way you are simply looking to purchase military arms to equip your military and gain the political benefit that comes from doing so and advertising it to your people.

Imagine you look at the news and see Russian military equipment getting blown up one after another in rapid fire in humiliating ways where it is obvious that the Russian soldiers are basically walking into deathtraps given how badly suited the equipment and doctrine they are using is to the current war.

Even if you don't care about the military equipment actually working and you just want to do business with Russia and get some PR for buying shitty military machines that don't really do the job they advertise they do, the fact that there is footage ALL over the internet of these machines bursting into horrific flames and killing everybody inside makes any purchase of Russian arms actually a potential political liability because citizens could turn around and say something along the lines of "Wait, you got us tanks that are going to give our family members a false sense of safety and end up killing them from ammunition cooking off inside when they climb into them and defend our country? What the hell? Why?!? Are you corrupt? Do you want us to lose?".

TL;DR Lack of empathy is not strength, it is admission of weakness and lack of vision.

numbers mean nothing unless you’re talking about money and sq. km of stolen land.

Not even that. Sanctions cost Russia a lot. So ending the war would give Putin a lot more money. He might even get away with some land from Ukraine.

The real problem is that ending the war in something, which might look like a defeat is a risk. The only ideological group in Russia allowed to operate somewhat freely are nazis. However they really like the war against Ukraine. So ending it is a risk.