1mo ago

How do you guys explain Ukraine to friends and family members?

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The points I try to hit most are:
There is no way for Ukraine to win short of WWIII, so the best option for the Ukranian people is to negotiate an end to the war immediately. This will not be on great terms, because that's what happens when you lose a war.
Fighting longer will only kill more Ukranians and get them a worse peace deal.
If you can bring them around on these very immediate points, maybe they'll listen to what you say about why the war began in the first place. If you can't get through to them on "they lost, how many more have to die," it's not worth arguing much else.
- Fighting longer will only kill more Ukranians and get them a worse peace deal.
  Only Ukrainians?
  
  Depends on who you talk to. Some more twisted sorts see dead Russians as a win.
  
  The price of being the attacking side is heavy casualties, which will continue for Russia as they got 80% of ukraine to go and it gets harder the further west they go
  
  Russia does not have heavy casualties compared to Ukraine. The initial assumption may only be true for equal opponents, which is not the case - Russia has gargantuan advantage in artillery, armored vehicles, total domination of the skies, powerful long-range strike capacity, and now even drones. It has more of everything, including total manpower, and its military industrial base is vastly more powerful than anything the Western empire can muster. If a boxer can only punch once and then gets punched 9 times - that's not "equal".
  The other factor is the fact that we're talking about attrition warfare, where there's close to zero big arrow maneuvers, instead the Russian military is methodically grinding down the AFU until its combat capacity is negligible. That helps Russia keep its casualty numbers low, regardless of what Western propaganda press is trying to convince the public of. So it actually gets easier for Russia the longer it goes on - because at some point the AFU will not be able to hold the line, which is going to end up in the general collapse of the front line. If you destroy your opponent's ability faster than they destroy yours and you're more powerful to begin with - the collapse is a mathematical certainty.
  Also - Russia does not want to occupy all of Ukraine, that goes directly against their economic interests and it is something they want to avoid if possible.
  
  Mediazona seems to have a decent system for tracking Russian casualties and they put Russian KIA at minimum 75k, meaning there’s at least 150k more casualties, for a total of 225k. Ukraine could be having up to 10 times more casualties, but these are not irrelevant numbers for Russia either.
  
  Then why is Russia paying NK for their troops, shit can't be cheap...
  Russia does not want to occupy all of Ukraine
  when did position change?
  
  When was that ever the position held by Russia? I've only seen this assertion made by western demagogues without any evidence. The closest they have come is pointing at Dugin and his works but then they don't give evidence of any direct effect it has had on Russian policies.
  
  Russia invaded Ukraine jfc...
  Also study history and their geopolitical posturing
  
  There never was a clear position beyond Crimea, but things just kept escalating on both sides from there, so now it’s also Donbas. Since Putin keeps avoiding a full scale invasion it doesn’t seem likely to me they are after the whole Ukraine, but I could be wrong ofc.
  
  Neither of those statements is true. Russia is suffering less casualties than Ukraine because they have an enormous firepower advantage. And the most heavily fortified and urbanized part of Ukraine is the Donbass. It actually has been getting easier for Russia the more it has broken through those lines that have been fortified since 2014, and the more it has attrited and degraded the army that NATO had trained and equipped in Ukraine, leaving Kiev having to increasingly resort to dragging unwilling and unfit conscripts off the streets.
  
  Yeah, that's probably the case.
  I think the comment you were replying to earlier didn't leave out Russians because they weren't suffering casualties. More likely folks are going to be more sympathetic to the defenders in this war, especially with manpower shortages leading to more and more people unwilling to fight being forced to the front line.

31 comments