you gotta bomb something

Indeed, it’s the framing that’s the most revealing part here. The west sees the world as being hierarchical with the US being at the centre of it. Seems that the idea of a multipolar world where different countries are able to pursue their own independent interests while cooperating with one another towards common goals is incomprehensible to western propagandists.

tankies and the burden of being right all the time

I think it stems from being used to treating the west as the whole world, and now having to grapple with the fact that the rest of humanity exists and can no longer be ignored.

shocking isn’t it

I see the whole Ukraine in 3 days thing constantly over at lemmy.ml, that’s how they rationalize it now.

The answer is not well, and one of the most visible aspects is how much faster Russia is able to take towns now. It used to take many months for the Russian army to take a single town, and they’d have to shell the shit out of it first. Now, Russia is taking multiple towns on weekly basis, and mostly intact because the units defending them simply retreat, and they no longer have sufficient ammo to put up much of a resistance when they don’t. So, the pace of events is very much accelerating. Once Ukraine loses Pokrovsk and Chasov Yar, they’re basically going to lose all of Donbas, and that could be the basis for surrender.

From Russian perspective, they mainly don’t want to do big arrow offensives because they are very costly. However, there’s not much benefit for Russia to drag this out indefinitely. We can also see that Russian army is starting to push more aggressively in the past few months as the resistance weakens. I imagine one thing Russia would like to avoid would be to end up in a direct conflict with NATO, and the longer the war goes the more chances of that it could happen at some point.

From western perspective, there is a lot of incentive to keep this going politically. At the very least, Ukraine can’t collapse before the election in the US happens. However, it looks like the west is starting to run dry of the support it’s able to provide in material terms. On top of that, there’s now a brewing war between Iran and Israel which is already diverting resources from Ukraine.

Personally, I can’t see how Ukraine holds out for another year here. The manpower shortage is their biggest problem, and the west can’t fix that short of putting boots on the ground. Yet, even if that could somehow happen, then there’s still the issue with shortage of weapons and ammunition.

I can’t see how it can go past next year, but realistically it could end this year as well. Now that the collapse of the army started, the pace of events is going to accelerate dramatically. There’s going to be an inflection point where there just aren’t enough experienced and motivated people to hold things together, and we might be on the cusp of it already. The AFU isn’t able to hold positions, they have mass desertion, and everybody knows the war is lost at this point.

indeed

I’m cautiously optimistic here, but you’re right things can turn ugly very easily.

exactly

Good news is that relations between India and the US are in the gutter right now, also likely why de-escalation is happening in the first place. If India isn’t going to bend the knee then they need BRICS which means making nice with China. I suspect economic pragmatism will win in the end.

but muh Ruzzian interference!

I can’t see any scenario where the border issue could result in a hot war. The whole thing is basically symbolic because the territory itself has little practical value to either side.

in fact, we can see that China is leading the transition off fossil fuels while growing its industry

This might be a rare case where blockhain actually makes sense. You want a public ledger that’s not owned by any single entity, and that’s basically what blockchain is.

lol right

Exactly, people running the industry want to make as much profit as possible which translates into producing as little as possible at the higher cost possible.