• ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
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    5 months ago

    Likely yeah, the problem with this plan is that it’s the west that’s likely to end up with a failed state on its border rather than the other way around. Russia will likely annex friendly and neutral territory, and then leave a dysfunctional rump state in western Ukraine for the west to deal with. This is going to become an economic black hole fore Europe because if they let it fail then there’s going to be a new immigration crisis. So the only thing Europe can do is to keep pouring resources into trying to prop it up. Meanwhile, Russia has already demonstrated how quickly they were able to reconstruct places like Mariupol where life is back to normal now.

    I imagine that keeping the front static and away from major population centres may be part of the Russian strategy as well. What Russia needs to do in the long run is to collapse the Ukrainian army through attrition. And they’re well on their way towards achieving that. Once that happens, there’s going to be no need to fight over big cities like Kharkov.

    • porcupine
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      5 months ago

      I think the US is fine with another destroyed state in eastern Europe. Both Russia and the EU will have to deal with the refugee crisis caused by prolonging this war, but as we’ve seen with the attack on Nord Stream, the US is happy to economically sabotage the EU if it also hurts Russia. The US doesn’t need Ukraine to be capable of supporting a population or economic activity in order to stage weapons there, and I think that’s why the longer the US artificially prolongs the war, the more Russia’s going to feel that taking control of the entire territory is the only way to prevent that from happening.

      Counter to the US line that Russia always intended to annex Ukraine (and then the rest of Europe), I think Russia tried very hard for years to maintain a status quo where Ukraine was neutral and independent, but also not creating a refugee crisis in the Donbass and staging NATO resources on the Russian border. When the Donbass republics seceded and the Ukrainian regime and their handlers made clear they wouldn’t stop accelerating the provocations, I think Russia felt that directly securing the Donbass would eventually force the Ukrainian regime to the negotiating table.

      As the US makes it more clear that they won’t permit any negotiated end to the war, I think it’s likely that the US is fine with the collapse of the current Ukrainian state as long as they can they can leave behind an ISIS-like group of Banderites launching terrorist attacks into Russia for the foreseeable future. NATO saying even now that Ukraine is too corrupt to join just reconfirms for me that preserving the Ukrainian state was never NATO’s objective in orchestrating this war. That puts Russia in the position of having to either capture, rebuild, and administer the entire destroyed country in order to completely snuff out the Banderites, or risk a Syria-like situation on their border where NATO just waits for the Ukrainian government to collapse and starts directly setting up military bases in the west under the guise of “humanitarian peacekeeping” and “fighting terrorism”.

      It remains to be seen whether the empire actually has the economic resources to occupy Russia in a prolonged proxy war for years to come where also exterminating Palestine and preparing for an attack on China. I think there’s obviously a strong case to be made that the US doesn’t have that capacity, but nobody making imperial policy decisions would ever acknowledge that possibility.

      • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
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        5 months ago

        For sure, US was very concerned that Europe started becoming economically integrated with Russia and China. If this was allowed to go on, then US would lose control over Europe. The war served to sever the economic ties with Russia, and US is now strong arming Europe to decouple from China as well. The ideal case for US was to break Russia, and preventing Eurasian integration is the secondary objective that they’re now likely to achieve.

        I know a lot of people expect these ISIS like terrorists to attack Russia, but I’m highly skeptical that this will be happening at any appreciable scale myself. It’s far more likely that Russia will be able to do the same thing in Ukraine as they did in Chechnya. There’s going to be a pro Russian government, and if living standards start improving under it, then vast majority of people will want to just get back to living their lives. There’s not going to be any support for some sort of insurgency.

        Also worth noting that US sees China as the main threat, so the amount of resources that US is willing to devote to Europe is limited by that. My expectation is that the US will leave Europe holding the bag on the whole thing and start pivoting to Asia.