Food For Thought

Takeaways:

1) Ukraine will never stop fighting short of annihilation. (We told you this from the get-go last year.)

2) Russia cannot afford to stop fighting. Even if Putin goes away somehow (actuarial tables, coup, whatever.) Their elites are trying to re-establish the Soviet Union borders, as a means of internal security from perceived external threats. And that typical Russian paranoia is bringing about the exact external threats that didn't exist in January of 2022. NATO is now bigger than ever, meaner, and more anti-Russian than any time since the Berlin Wall went up in 1961.

3) Half of current "Russia" isn't made up of Russians. Moscow feels this in their bones.

4) If Moscow revolts, the whole enterprise collapses.

5) Russia has a history of riding forms of government right into the smoking hole of history. {cf. both Czarist Russia, and Communist Russia.} There's no reason to think they won't ride the current system right into total collapse either. It's what they do.

6) Besides destroying 1/3 to 1/2 of their ground combat power since 2/22, Russia has driven fully a third of its draft-aged males out of the country. They've got a lot fewer folks to draft, and the people running things at every age group and demographic aren't being replaced. That's everything from farms to manufacturing to research labs to nuclear power plants - and nuclear weapons. Most of their best minds who could get out are long gone, and the actuarial brain drain accelerates with every passing year.

7) Pushing generals out of windows isn't making the Russian Army leaner and meaner. It's just cutting off its head, as Stalin's purges did to it in the 1930s. Which is why Hitler's armies were able to push them to the brink of destruction for four years before total mobilization and Western aid finally turned the tide. 

8) There's no aid coming this time, from anywhere, least of all China, and they're currently begging countries like the Norks and Iran for any scraps they can spare. China and India are simply buying Russian oil and gas at fire-sale prices, but it's less than half of what Europe was buying, in hard dollars, which isn't helping Russia's economy much. It's mainly just slowing the collapse.

For the perennial fucktards out there with a room-temp (at the North Pole) IQ, that isn't saying anywhere that Ukraine is "winning". Yet again, look at photos and reports from France circa 1919, and tell the class what "winning" looks like when your front yard is the front line. 

Ukraine winning looks like national survival. And week on week, them eventually regaining Crimea looks likelier and likelier, and eventually pushing Russia completely out of Donetsk and Luhansk isn't beyond belief either. 

Leaving Russia, just as after their Afghanistan debacle, with nothing to show for their effort but international embarrassment, crushing economic decay, and a large heap of dead Russian troops for their trouble.

What it does foretell is that as long as the West is resupplying Ukraine, Russian short-term prospects get bleaker by the month, and their long-term prospects died early last year. Their long-term future is as a shell of their former self, split up internally, their population gutted by war losses, refugee/draft-dodger flight, and the march of time.

Most of the -stans are already getting restless. And Putin has no one left to send if they all tell him to f**k right off.