100 Days, And A Mouthful Of Ashes

 

And loving metrics in a hazy conflict, the media and Putin fanboys are all agog with the news that Russian control now encompasses 20% of Ukraine territory. (They forget that most of that 20% was Crimea and the Soviet puppet "breakaways" in the east they already held before the war began on 2/24 this year, but we'll spot them the difference anyways, just to be sporting.)

So, at that rate, this war will last another 400 days beyond the first 100.

That's also overlooking Russian losses and retreats, but acknowledging the obvious facts there upsets the fanboys to the point of flinging feces from their monkey cages, so we'll spot them that too.

Meanwhile, Russian losses amount to about 10,000 troops/month, by reliable accounts. To take the territory they were certain was already ON their side. More each month than we lost in Iraq and A-stan combined, in 20 years of trying. Three times more men than we lost in all of Vietnam in a decade. And out of missiles, running out of artillery shells, and burning through hard military assets Vlad couldn't replace in another ten years of trying, with a Navy and Air Force largely MIA for weeks, in a land war against an opponent with pretty much neither one. 

So in 12 more months, Russia will perhaps achieve a Pyrrhic (Mariupolic) "victory" over the whole of Ukraine, at a cost of nearly the entire initial invasion force, 150,000 men out of an initial estimate of 180,000, against an army it outnumbered on paper 10:1, but which it only attacked initially at 0.8:1, with a Russian Potemkin army composed of incompetent and unwilling conscripts led by drunken officers and fueled by gun-decked capability and maintenance reports, running now on mothballed tech left over from the 1960s, because it's all they have left to throw at the problem.

Yeah, that's going to do so much better against a Ukrainian ad hoc army that gets better equipment and more experience by the day, over the next 400 days, i'n'it?

Go, Vlad. Bleed yourself dry, only to achieve the capture of scorched earth, at a cost of a quarter of your entire national army, including probably 50-75% of all available actual combat forces, most of your war-making equipment, and beginning the next ten years of a partisan guerrilla insurgency in Ukraine that will make the last Russian foray to A-stan, or the British rule in Northen Ireland, seem like church picnics in comparison, while Russia is forced to genocide most of the surviving populace within Ukraine, and the 7M expats live on, with a seething hatred of Vlad and all things Russian that will outlive his own great-grandchildren.

While uniting NATO like it hasn't been in 50 years, increasing it in size and scope, and putting the entirety of it right back on Russia's borders from the Black Sea to the Arctic Ocean, exactly as Vlad didn't want.

Sanctions work both ways, but Russia spends the next century or two as the Iran of Europe. They couldn't feed themselves once from 1900-2022, but now that they're burning Ukraine to the ground, they're looking at not being able to feed themselves next year, or the five years after that, until the famines have done their job, and their entire population decreases appreciably. Along with that in the West, and the rest of the world. Famine hits the Turd World even harder, because when food gets scarce, the poorest are the ones who do without, not the well-off.

But watching millions starve and threatening global thermonuclear war is a small price to pay for being a worldwide pariah state, right?

Well-played, Vlad. Well-played indeed. Keep banging your head against that wall.