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Originally Posted by Itse
Personal, tangentially related comment:
- While I don't want to be overly pessimistic, this video just reminds that it's very premature to suggest that the Russian military is all but beaten in Ukraine, and that a Ukrainian victory in the battlefield is all but inevitable. It's possible, but Russia is just so damned big, and while Ukrainians are extremely motivated, there's likewise no signs of there being a limit to what the Russian population is ready to put up with when it comes to fighting this war. The question of popular support seems to be mostly irrelevant when a dictator has such an iron grip over his people.
As long as Russia just keeps pouring men and resources into Ukraine without consideration for the country's future (let alone moral implications), they are very likely to stay in the fight, and they will learn from their mistakes, no matter how slowly. We might mock and/or stare at horror at the Russian way of feeding untrained and poorly equipped men to the grinder, but it does work to some extent.
This war is very far from over or decided.
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The Shahed drones that Russia has been using on civilian targets are no more effective then V2 rockets in WWII.
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According to a 2011 BBC documentary,[6] the attacks from V-2s resulted in the deaths of an estimated 9,000 civilians and military personnel,
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You would iook at this number and think, wow those V2s were amazing
The Shahed drones have killed what, a few dozen people so far?
They are largely using GPS to aim at soft targets, but those targets are all civilian in nature. Are they a big problem. Yes very much so as Ukraine (and most countries) don't have the ability to counter this new type of warfare well.
But this has zero impact on the tides of battle. The first wave caused the most damage due to how many were sent and Ukraine was not ready for such an attack, but the missile barrage a few days prior did far more damage then the drones did despite most being shot down.
If you read between the lines on what is occuring in Kherson right now, the city proper is likely to fall within days to weeks.
Also...the fact that we are even talking about Ukraine having difficulty controlling airspace 8 months into the war...which is an area that Russia was expected to have not only air superiority right away, but air supremacy within weeks, is a testament to how well prepared Ukraine has been, and how poor Russia has been.
Again...Russia is supposed to be invading here and they are barely hanging on to what they still have left, dug in or retreating everywhere except Bakmut where they stubbornly have been trying to take since May, while the tactical reasons to capture it are all gone.
The tides of war in WWII was clear by early 1943 that Germany would lose, yet it took 2 years. Even the Pacific theatre, despite US being near the main island and Japan being clearly beaten, it was estimated that the invasion of Japan itself would have taken hundreds of thousands to millions of more lives, with the US suffering minimum 50K casualties by conservative estimates and the actual invasion of Japan (Kyushu) was planned in November 1945, a full 3 months later then what we now know as the atomic bombs which forced the surrender of Japan.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...n-used/376238/
Clearing Russians will take time, and no one has ever claimed this will be a quick Ukrainian decisive win.
But winter is coming, and the Russian emperor has no winter clothes