TwinkleToes
UkraineRussians are simultaneously more and less stupid than they seem to be at the same time. They are really run by the intelligence services, and they often "test narratives" to see how messaging goes over with the populations. They use deliberate 'repeaters', messengers and role players within their sociey to gague themes to try and advance their goals. You see public figures following their scripts consistently, from froth-mouthed apocalyptic lunatics like Solovyev and Medvedev threatening to end the world, down to malcontent grunt Z-Bloggers like Girkin muttering tactical level failures, acting as a release valve for the failings of the state 'not going far enough'. The ones who are allowed to speak on an ongoing basis are sanctioned to do so, for reasons that make sense to the FSB.
Until recently, any public talk of even ACKNOWLEDGING, much less ending the SMO/ aka "War" would get you locked up for discrediting the army. Now, they are starting to seep out war-ending off-ramp strategies. This is the first time I've seen one around the idea that the war should be stopped "for the good of the economy". That sounds more high minded than verboten military or moral alternatives like "we're losing" or "it's the humane thing to do". At any rate, it's at least tolerated public dialogue that explicitly talks of ending the war. None of these narrative tests are accidental - some are outbursts, where the messager is locked up or killed - but this is different in that it's from a named public figure.
Having them say "it's for the good of the economy" allows them to at least try to avoid the humiliation of a completely stalled front that they have been unable to move substantially for nearly two years. It ignores their invasion's absolute failure, doesn't acknowledge that maybe little brother ukraine isn't an inherently inferior race, or that the entire country ackshually belongs to Rusia, because - reasons - and doesn't have a right to exist. It doesn't even mention NATO as the REAL reason why they aren't vacationing in Kyiv today.
It's all a colossal tragedy, of course. But putting that aside - it's both funny and somewhat pathetic that this is where they're at more than four years in having squandered their entire soviet inhertiance on a petty 20th century revenge project led by an overpromoted gangster ghoul. But - it's also a good thing that they're openly talking about how to exit an aggressive war of invasion while being WELL short of their goals of conquest.
Will be interesting to see if this "for the economy" theme persists as a face-saving tactic. What do you think?
your economy is already beyond saving even prior to war, you wars was just to stave out your sole industries in oil/gas. population decling since ww2, and never recovered a massive alcohol and HIV problem.
After half a million deaths I think whatever garbage Russia can cook up to end the war is good.
I still can't believe this many people are dead over this nonsense. I can't believe Russia attack the equivalent of its own brothers and sisters. I guess it shows how powerful propaganda lies are.
They were doomed already before the war due to shit demographics and brain drain. Now they're so doomed I can't even put it into words. They are unironically going to become a Chinese vassal state. It's the only stable end state.
Ukraine: Ok. Give us back Crimea, and all land formally recognized as Ukrainian before 2014.
And all the stolen children + POW
And reparations for all the damage caused to infrastructure and the environment.
Yes, this. Actually I should have lead with this.
Chuck in a few trillion in reparations.
Also what's his names. Slowpunch McFacefart the ~~martial arts~~ sitting fatly champion of the world has been credibly accused of walking guns. At least war crime trial him.
Well - sure. All reasonable people with a remote appetite for justice would like that.
It's kind of fascinating that this is where russia has ended up, given all their theoretical advantages before the full scale invasion. Russia is squealing for some kind of favorable settlement it doesn't deserve. The central "Problem" seems to be that they can't advance anymore. They can't stop Ukrainian drone production, they can't stop effective drone deployment. The Russian theory of victory has two parts to achieve one outcome:
- Pushing small infiltration teams into soft areas. They are either killed immediately, shortly, or eventually. Mostly by drones
- Terror attacks from stand-off distance
- Keep doing 1 & 2 until Ukraine gives you something to make it stop.
#1 is a REAL problem for Russia, as it's labour and logistically intensive. But also because the only way it's successful is if Ukraine agrees to stop killing Russian soldiers at the front. Pushing low-functioning grunts into blasted puddles of toxic rainwater until they are eventually killed isn't a great occupation strategy. The point of a war of conquest is that you get to reap the benefits of economic activity in the land you conquer. But workers and occupation forces can't generate wealth while under fire. They can't live in charred craters - they live in soft housing and barracks and rely on there being peace in order to control the territory. But if Ukraine refuses to stop killing them - then the exploitation of the conquered territory can never begin. This is a BASIC and seemingly unsolvable problem for Russia at present.
#2 is also HUGELY resource intensive, uses platforms with EXPENSIVE inputs and things they don't manufacture domestically, and machines you can't replace at scale in the near term. It also has never, ever worked as a strategy for conquest in history against an industrial society. Even WW2 levels of YEARS of strategic bombing against Germany and Japan STILL requried ground forces for the former, and atomic weapons for the latter to force captiulation.
So - neither #1 or #2 can, by themselves, achieve Russia's strategic goals. Ukraine doesn't seem to be in such desperate conditions that they need to consider #3 anytime soon. It's russia, the aggressor, who is asking for peace terms. Ukraine can probably continue to trade tiny slices of land while bleeding out the russian war machine longer than Russia can continue to support their invasion. Hence Russians talking about peace at all, and on basis of economic terms so they don't have to confront the enormity of their military failure.
Nobody who is serious minded expects the Russian Federation's current form to honor a long term peace agreeement. From Ukraine's perspective, the ONLY way to permanently guarantee their own security might be to keep fighting. Keep destroying everything you can, until there is significant change to the composition of the political system in Russia.
Great and accurate insights, thank you
did japan "require" two atomic bombs? or did the usa demonstrate their power on defenseless civilians? afaik the japanese wanted to surrender before, with the condition that the emperor is not harmed. after the atomic bombings vaporizing tens of thousands of civilians, they surrendered without conditions. and then the usa spared the emperor
They didn't surrender after the first one, so
idiots assumed usa would be satisfied after evaporating one city
Japan was indeed willing to surrender, but on the conditions that Hirohito would stay emperor, Japan wouldn't be demilitarized or occupied.
After the US dropped the bombs they allowed Hirohito to stay emperor.
No they did not, it was a horrible war crime.
Well, we're crossing discussion streams significantly as this point, but I'll have a go.
Depends what you mean by "afaik the japanese wanted to surrender...". The fanatical military leadership certainly didn't, and wasn't going to. After Okinawa, it seemed pretty clear what an invasion of any of the home islands would look like. And the allies were VERY concerned about countering the USSR's advance in Europe, hence didn't want to get bogged down in a years long bloody ground campaign in Japan. It was a higher priority to stop the russians than to do things 'the old fashioned way' in Japan. It's more complex than that, of course, there wasn't just one single reason why the U.S. used the atomic bomb.
If you want to have a moral argument about 'demonstrating their power on defenseless civilians', well, I'm sorry I'm not likely to move you on that.
using the a-bomb is one thing, blowing up two random cities, mostly civilians is another
okay, demonstrating the power of the bomb is necessary: why not bomb a military base? why not bomb an un- or at least less inhabited area? if they did it near a city, over the ocean, it would have made a similar impression
i'm just frustrated that this idea is widely accepted and repeated
also kinda reminds me of israelis saying "well it's sad but we have to kill them all"
Zelensky has also been floating the idea of talks lately.
true. but - he has said so for years. And his negotiating position is FAR stronger than it was in 2023/2024. And he doesn't seem to be particularly starved for them. Trump tried to stiff-arm him into a bad peace, but as usual, he tries to negotiate with leverage he doesn't actually have. He pulled direct U.S. support, and removed Russian oil sanctions, but the mainly-Euro supported version of the Ukranian army in 2026 can probably resist the current version of the Russian army for a long time yet.
Of course any reasonable leader would say they want the war to end - but Zelensky can be a LOT more assertive about how this goes going forwards than the russians can.
Russia is S-C-R-E-W-E-D, and they know it. Destroyed their army. Spent their 30-year war chest. Destroyed their diplomatic and political capital. Destroyed their entire soviet hardware inheritance. Destroyed their primary energy export markets. Became vassals to China. Lost Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Armenia. Is losing Africa. Lost power projection generally. Lost the Black Sea Fleet. Lost dozens of their strategic nuclear deterrent aircraft. Lost their AWACS. Destroyed/lost 1 million+ laborers for their economy. Have already extracted the easiest-to-get-to oil and gas and everything is harder from here on out. Their demographics were already terminal, and they supercharged the loss of human capital by failing to re-acquire a new colony to offset the losses of their slave army.
Hell - their entire way of war has been destroyed. Their myth of national inevitability. Their philosophy was Horde War - that it didn't matter if your stuff was worse than NATO's, as long as you had enough of it. They presumed they could march from Poland to Paris to Portugal before the feckless pussies in NATO could even start to respond. Well - it turns out they can't even get to the Dneiper river right next door. They are a 20th century army fighting a 21st century war with 7th century brutality, and rebuilding a modern army will take longer than Putin has left to live. The entire concept of just marching a man forward and hoping the land turns from blue to red like you're in a video game is itself obsolete in a world where cheap drones at scale have made invading and holding territory essentially a dead concept. They've not only lost this war - they've lost the 21st century.
You'd like a real satisfying ending where the black tower of mordor crumbles and the orcs scurry back eastwards to feud amongst each other rather than invading the neighbours - but that's movie stuff. The core principle that russia has already lost the war is true, if way more boring IRL.
Ending the war? My goodness, has it been two weeks already? My how time flies.
Two weeks and a day to the, um, eon.
If the russians ended the war today their economy would still be scraping bottom for years. They are reliant on China and will be for the rest of everyone here’s lifetime.
The progress they made selling gas to Europe - gone. Their military - depleted.
Trump is desperately trying to catch up to such incredible self-destruction. And he might do it, too.
Also, so many young people died or lost limbs, plus probably a 90%+ PTSD rate of the survivors which will be untreated.
Putin killed generational economic potential even if the bodies might still be alive. Russia will take decades to recover, if it can at all.
About PTSD:
Some 70 000 Soviet soldiers returned from the front in Afghanistan in late 1980's. They are what caused the mafia mayhem of the 1990's in the Russia.
Now there will be about 700 000 soldiers returning, to a country half the population of 1991 Soviet Union. The 1990's will look like a walk in a park.
It will be an absolute mayhem. PTSD is a horrible thing, also for the society.
I didn’t even consider the PTSD. Those guys are going to freak out when they hear a buzzing noise, like a drill or a bee.
It will probably not help their rampant alcoholism problem.
And they’ll be reaching for bottles of vodka and maybe opiates.
Russia is China's bitch now. Forever.
Yep. They are absolutely screwed. This is a historic imperial own-goal disaster, at the scale of the Persians having their empire fall apart after going to fight alexander. They are vassals to China going forward, and Xi must kick himself at his good fortune and the stupidity of Putin for deciding he would go with his regional revenge project first. China becomes the undisputed leader of the Axis of Authoritarian Shitholes without losing a single soldier or piece of hardware. Maybe he would have liked Russia to win to try and force a bloodless de-facto concession from Taiwan, the latter having seen that the world is NOT going to come to anyone's rescue.
But - his consolation prize is control over Russia and Central Asia, including the North Pacific, which china has NEVER had any kind of control over in 3,000 years of civilization. He can ask for ANY favor for the next several decades and Russia will not be able to say no. The parched chinese northern plain just solved it's fresh water, energy, agricultural and mineral needs for the foreseable future. Siberia has become China's boundless resource yard, and Russia has probably suffered a fatal blow to maintaining it's current petromafia gangster state.
I HAVE to think that Xi believed, like everyone else, that Ukraine would be conquered eventually, and that would have it's purpose for him to be a warning to Taiwan of what was possible. He would have likely preferred Russia win and he get something from Taiwan for free - but he's a more patient and reasonable man than Putin, it seems. He would have preferred a Russian victory, but a defeat has it's uses too.
Putin is going to end up being the worst russian leader in history, which is REALLY saying something. Putin the Fool, who lost Ukraine forever, and the Baltics, Kazakhstan and maybe even Siberia too. But history moves at different time scales than we're used to as muggles.
If TwinkleToes posts, I read. Full stop. Thanks for your insight as always
What a sensationally kind thing to say.
Who knew war is expensive? /s
That being said, I'll take it with a grain of salt given the source, and while it's still "vaguely prominent Russian said...".
no doubt. there's only one man whose opinion really matters there, and even he has some incentives to consider ANY kind of settlement. More on that later.
I'm just suggesting that they test narratives - just saying something like this would have been somehwere beteen blasphemous and suicide just a couple of months ago. Anything that is said and tolerated should be assumed to be a "test" of the public's reaction.
Even Pootz would probably like the war to end and be able to keep Donbas and Crimea at this point. Probably. And that's not to say he'll get it, or that they deserve it. But it's probably their baseline ask. It gets said a lot that he's a dead man as soon as the war ends. Well, he's also probably a dead man if the war doesn't conclude with some kind of prize this year too.
He doesn't have great options, and though he would like us to think of him as a chess player, he's really a poker player who bluffs all the time counting on others not being willing to suffer very much. You know - a bully. In this case, he reached too far, Ukrainians have a very strong tolerance for suffering, when the alternative is genocide and enslavement again. His idiotic hubris means he can only double down and escalate, lo and behold, you're 4 and a half years into a 3 day triumph with no happy way to exit.
All that to say - however we got here, it's extraordinary that we're now where Russia is stalled and asking for peace, while Ukraine is deciding the best path forward.
I mean, they could have done that in the beginning....
Okay, prepare for some ignorant questions from someone who is rooting for Ukraine but doesn’t know the specifics as well as you do.
The war is destroying Russia’s economy. Got it. What about the Ukrainian economy? Has international help and the seizing of Russian oligarch’s money really helped that much? How have they been able to survive?
Am not remotely qualified to answer that formally. But - this a website, so I'll give it a go anyways, with that caveat. Behold - the rantings of a confessed meatball.
In short - Ukraine's wartime population has fallen by probably at least 10m people. That's very, very bad. And it's demographics are very bad, because people don't tend to have kids during genocidal wars, as you're waiting to see what happens before you commit yourself to having kids. How many will return to Ukraine? Who knows. It really depends on what Russia does over the coming decade plus. If it remains a credible menace, then Ukraine will continue to suffer. If it collapses into a rump state of St. Petes and Moscow down to Rostov, but loses the Caucasus and anything past the Urals, Ukraine may end up the dominant eastern european power in the region.
In some cases, industrial societies stay permanently altered after war. In some cases, the soldiers come home and there's a massive industrial and baby boom as they....well....come home and put their minds into pursuits other than war. I don't think this will be the case in Ukraine though, because this has frankly been an old-man's war, on both sides. Ukraine has not recruited people under 25 and russia has done it's own internal ethnic cleansing to ship useless mouths, including old men in many cases, to be liquidated on the premise of being redeemed for good ukrainian land.
Permanent damage to Ukraine has been done, but - they've survived as a sovreign state and Russia has blown it's wad. This was a 1,000 year project of enslavement, cruelty and subjugation, but it appears the Russians will have to find another way if they're stupid enough to try and spread their corrosive influence back over Ukraine again.
Europe has refused to give Ukraine of the seized 'oligarch money' you're referring to. It's frozen, and some of the interest I THINK has been provided, but the principal amounts haven't been touched. Belgium have, in particular, been obstructionist assholes on this matter. This is a total guess, but I think that they have held this money as a last reserve, KNOWING that Russia will never pay a dime of actual reparations, and that this will have to be given in lieu.
They've survived with direct & indirect financial and material assistance. PURL initiative, many rounds of funding, Rammstein group, recent EU 60B "loan" that got freed up when Orban was voted out of Hungary. Unblocked grain corridor early in the war to resume exports through the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.
When the war ends, Ukraine will become the greatest rebuilding infrastructure project in the world for a decade or more. Lucrative contracts will come in to reconstruct an EU-aligned Ukraine rich in broken things, agricultural goods and mineral wealth, especially battery-essential lithium deposits in the east that are central to Russia's motives for the invasion in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shevchenko_deposit
It just depends what side of the Donbas battle lines those deposits end up. Russia is just starting to unravel militarily now. They may not be able to reconquer lost territories in the conventional way, if you look at their failed counteroffensive in Kherson and Zaporhizia in 2023, but - their strategy seems like it might be to make Russian occupation untenable. They have increased the range and depth of their drone strikes, have started to (finally) hit Moscow and other big cities, and can probably deny Russia any benefits of exploiting occupied land indefinitely. That's another conversation for another thread.
TL:DR - Instead of liberating stolen land directly, make the Russians leave. If the Russian state wobbles after this massive defeat, then opportunity to reclaim Donbas and Crimea may present themselves over time while Russia is going through post-Putin convulsions. Emphasis on "May". Ukraine surviving as a viable, sovreign, EU aligned state is far more than most serious minded people could have predicted in 2022. It has the chance to rebuild itself from the sclerotic mess that the USSR left behind, just like Poland, Romania and the Czechoslovakians did.
The Ukrainian economy is in tatters and Ukraine is relying on foreign aid to survive.
But unlike Russia Ukraine is receiving foreign aid.
Also Russia has to produce or buy all of their military equipment, Ukraine is receiving considerable amounts from allies for free.
Also, Ukraine is fighting for survival, so there's a much higher pain tolerance. Russia is not fighting for survival and despite all the propaganda Russians know this.
So, yeah, if Ukraine didn't receive any foreign help they'd be in a worse spot than Russia. But they do receive lots of help both for altruistic and geopolitical reasons. Russia receives little to none.
One point to add the other folks didn’t mention- Ukraine’s military industry has blossomed giving them a new potential for income as their shores look to them for sourcing drone tech and manufacture. Multiple euro groups setting up production there.
No doubt. They have become THE most advanced drone fighting force in the world. An entire, vital industry created from the crucible of war.
This sudden drone epiphany is in some ways similar to the early 20th century, the Age of the Battleship when heavy metal naval ships were still considered the ultimate expression of power, but then the advent of aircraft as highly cost effective ship killers emerged with torpedo and dive bombers. You can build a LOT of planes and bombs/torpedoes for a fraction of the cost of producing a naval vessl. It quickly became clear that planes kill ships much better than ships do. And then the sudden rush into aircraft carriers over gunboats, if your country was rich enough to do it.
Repulse and Prince of Wales were the most advanced British warships of their day, and were sunk by Japanese aircraft in hours. Same as Yamato. There had been lots of examples prior, like Bismarck & the battle of Taranto where it became clear that relatively cheap planes - including obsolete biplanes - were able to kill VERY expensive naval captial ships. Similarly, drones have proven to be the effective counter to mechanized infantry, tanks and artillery that anti-naval aircraft were to traditional capital ships.
Drones at scale have a MUCH lower barrier to entry, and Ukraine are now the experts.
representatives of big business and financial circles
They don't matter because all absolute power is in Putin.
His head stays on his shoulders as long as the war goes on, or victory (chuckle) happens.
Now if something unfortunate were to happen to Putin... things might change.
I'm not suggesting any particular course of action for any persons.
I'm not suggesting any particular course of action for any persons.
Someone should do a murder on Putin.
