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Comment by Andrew_nenakhov | Hacker News Reader

This increasingly looks like a repeat of a Finnish war (1940), a colossal blunder when the Red Army couldn't push the Finns off their positions for almost two months, taking huge losses.

Russia has a 'tradition' of stating what seems a 'small victorious war', aiming to boost popularity and support for the government, and then blundering badly - Russian-Japanese war (1905), Russian-Finland war (1940), Afghanistan invasion (1980), two Chechnya wars (1994, 1999). So far, Ukraine 'special operation' seems to be a one more addition to this ignominious list.

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It's hard to tell this early into the war, because honestly we don't have any reliable sources on how successful or unsuccessful Russia has been. Ukraine might be exceeding expections, but the margin could be greatly exaggerated to keep the morale of the troops and the country high. It's very difficult to tell. I want to believe Ukraine is weathering this very well, but I also know that sometimes you need positive propaganda to keep your people motivated.

havent seen much positive propaganda out of Russia, aside from Fox & CNN's chyrons of "kyiv could fall any minute"

Because Russian propaganda is not on Fox news, but in Russian media, of course. Why would they care about the west, unlike Ukraine that badly needs western support? And Russian media is full of the positive propaganda right now.

You broadcast propaganda to your enemy to demoralize them. The fact that Putin has lost control of the narrative in the west is at least a data point. It's good to be skeptical, but there is hope.

I also find it reminiscent of the Winter War (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War), but it should be noted that the Soviet Union ended up winning that war. Finland far outperformed what should have been expected from a nation going up against an invader so much larger than it, but in the end the Soviets learned from their initial stumbles and overwhelmed Finland with sheer numbers.

I don’t think the Finns feel too bad about that “loss”. They got to keep their independence and 99% of their land against a orders of magnitude more powerful foe. If Ukraine fares as well I’ll be a happy man.

While they got to keep their independence, they lost almost 10% of their land.

Putin's strategic goals for this war clearly require a puppet regime in Ukraine.

If the war ends with Ukraine ceding some land but staying independent and anti-Putin, then that might be a loss for Ukraine but it would also be a loss for Russia as the strategic outcome would be worse than the pre-war global status quo, as we're seeing a more unified and militarized Europe (Germany just anounced literally doubling its military budget), Finland+Sweden likely joining NATO. I.e. Russia winning a battle in this way doesn't seem to lead to Russia winning the strategic war.

It should be noted that the Soviet Union ended up winning that war.

WP says "Most sources conclude that the Soviet Union had intended to conquer all of Finland", acknowledging that some don't. And also offers the following tasty tidbit:

  "Commander Meretskov announced publicly that the Finnish campaign would take two weeks at the most. Soviet soldiers had even been warned not to cross the border into Sweden by mistake."

In any case the narrative I've always heard is that whatever its initial goals were -- the final outcome (and especially the amount of territory ceded) fell far short of those goals and at far greater cost than anticipated.

If you know of an analysis that (cogently) suggests otherwise, feel free to share it with us.

Hopefully this turns out better for Kyiv then it did for Grozny...

There is almost no chance that Putin will pull off a Grozny that would have no support of the Russian population or the troops and would drag NATO into the conflict directly.

Unless Putin has decided that 2022 would be the last year of record of the Gregorian calendar at least for a while he isn’t going to bring on the apocalypse.

As horrible as this conflict is it’s pretty much the death knell of Russia as a superpower and probably for good.

It almost lost in Georgia in 08 which brought it a lot of army reforms and its performance in Syria has emboldened them to think that they can play in the big leagues again but it seems that they aren’t able to perform on the modern battlefield at all.

I have a feeling that a lot of people in the pentagon that have been concerned about Russia becoming a near peer to the US are now sighing in relief.

I almost want that once this conflict is over for the pentagon to release a statement in jest that it officially downgrades Russia from near peer to junk like the credit agencies did.

It's clearly time to pivot China into Russia's spot as the globe's #2 military. That seemed to be the case prior to Ukraine, and based on the showing so far, Russia's military may have been exceptionally badly mismanaged by Putin over the years. What did they do with all that supposed upgrade / modernization money? Where'd they funnel it to? The klepto state klepto'd their own military - it'd be a fitting outcome.

Where has modern China fought though? What battles have they won?

> There is almost no chance that Putin will pull off a Grozny that would have no support of the Russian population or the troops

Honest question because I don't know: Does Putin listen at all to public opinion, or to the sentiment of his military.

Not really, but no man is an island and no one rules alone.

Unclear regarding Putin.

Stalin was probably the most powerful man on Earth during his lifetime, but even he didn't always get his way in the Politburo. Sometimes Stalin was on the losing side of a debate. But win or lose, the Soviet leadership emphasized speaking with a unified voice regardless of whether one had supported or opposed the outcome.

Is there a Politburo for Putin? Is there a group of people around him who can influence him and, sometimes, change his mind?

We don't know exactly, but there has to be a head of police, one of secret services, one for the military. All those people need to be trusted up to a point.

Unfortunately, as long as they have nuclear weapons they will remain poignantly relevant.

I think the idea that we can predict what Putin's lines are went out the window four days ago.

Not really as it was clear that he intends to invade for a long time.

If he is completely deranged and wants to start a nuclear war he could’ve done so without sacrificing so many Russian troops.

He can sit in his bunker and order a nuclear strike and even if most forces would disregard that order it only takes one launch to bring on the end of the world as we know it.

He knows he is running out of time and he wanted a new Russian empire to be his legacy but I don’t think turning Europe and North America into glass is on his todo list.

At least I hope not.

Very few people accurately said he was going to invade. The president of Ukraine said like two days before hand that it was unlikely. Tryin to make specific predictions at this time about what he will or will not do is not a good idea.

> Very few people accurately said he was going to invade

Quite a lot of people said he seemed like he was going to, for quite a few weeks in advance, though they were trying to dissuade him, just counting people in the US government, NATO, etc.

> The president of Ukraine said like two days before hand that it was unlikely.

He said that the West needed to move forward the sanctions threatened for after an invasion to before, and that Russian behavior depended on immediate, united Western action.

The US media played up the part you refer to and downplayed the I assume our friends will heed my clearly-correct and urgent advice context, because they had a narrative they were selling of “Biden Admin sees imminent invasion, but the Admin is paranoid and everyone else, even the people who would be attacked, disagrees”.

The US clearly had some sort of intelligence that the order had already been given, but France and Ukraine, and other countries without access to that or skeptical of the source specifically said it was unlikely up until a day or two before. The point is that unless you have an advanced intelligence apparatus, trying to guess what Putin is going to do is meaningless at this point, you have to prepare for every eventuality. Here's an article clearly saying that invasion was not imminent based on Ukrainian intelligence on 20 Feb.[0]

[0] https://fakty.com.ua/ua/ukraine/20220220-reznikov-meta-kreml...

The US and NATO allies predicted it days in advance

Some knew months before: https://twitter.com/dalperovitch/status/1473362460673515527

Nobody "knew" what would happen.

Some had very strong hunches. But that's not the same as "knowing".

Unfortunately, most people's predictions are no better than darts, and if you treat them all equally, of course you'd be lost. However if you're informed and know where to look, things start revealing themselves to you.

I'd been concerned about the buildup for a year, but was practically certain once the abrupt demands to NATO and Alperovitch's analysis came out 3 whole months ago:

https://twitter.com/dalperovitch/status/1473362460673515527

If he is completely deranged and wants to start a nuclear war he could’ve done so without sacrificing so many Russian troops.

It's not so much that he "wants to" start a nuclear war.

The concern is whether he may end up doing that anyway -- if the moment arrives when he is sufficiently cornered and feels he has nothing more to lose.

>I have a feeling that a lot of people in the pentagon that have been concerned about Russia becoming a near peer to the US are now sighing in relief.

Not in the Pentagon, but I'm still very worried about their capabilities on the cyber front.

>I have a feeling that a lot of people in the pentagon that have been concerned about Russia becoming a near peer to the US are now sighing in relief.

I doubt anyone in the pentagon was woried about Russia becoming an near peer in conventional arms. The US economy is 14 times the size of the Russian economy. The US spends about $800 billion on its military each year, the Russians spend about $60 billion.

The effective purchasing power of $60B in Russia is far greater than of that amount in the US and by many estimations their actual spending is much higher.

The fear of near peer came from their reforms following 2008 where they decided to modernize their army especially their infantry adopt modern combined arms and maneuver warfare and basically mimic the US individual squad battlefield doctrine.

They shifted on paper form a conscripted army to a professional one and have revamp their NCO core.

And their relative success in Syria did make it seem like they were making a lot of progress now it’s clear that what ever progress they have made was either all a smoke screen or limited to such a small number of units that it doesn’t make an impact on the battlefield.

This war has shown that even what the west feared the most the so called elite airborne troops which were always a key part of Russias military doctrine aren’t effective at all at taking and holding military objectives.

Russian armor seems to also be extremely vulnerable to western ATGMs so the fear of Russian APS systems has also now proven to be completely unfounded and Arena/Afganit seems to either be non existent in the field or utterly and completely useless especially when compared to western battle proven APS systems like Trophy/Windbreaker which have seen great success against Russian modern ATGMs.

Basically they aren’t even a paper tiger at this point they are a wet tissue.

We have now hard indisputable proof that they aren’t capable of anything more than leveling cities from 100 miles away which they won’t be able to do due to NATOs total air superiority or bringing a nuclear annihilation which hopefully they aren’t mad enough to do.

How is it possible to draw such conclusions on day three of a war? This article makes it seem like Russia is winning and will soon be in Kiev. I've not seen anything saying the Russians are suffering massive losses, but rather that they are limiting their offense to minimize civilian casualties, have been rebuffed in some places, and are closing in on the enemy capitol.

Did anyone publish, prior to the invasion, a timeline of how they expected it to go that had Russia far ahead of where they are on day three? If so, can you link it? If not, how do we know they are behind schedule?

It’s not a question if they can take Ukraine but at what cost.

They are behind schedule they couldn’t maintain objectives they captured and are still fighting over the same cities.

They have given up on many objectives in south Ukraine and failed to secure a land bridge to Crimea.

They have already given up on taking many primary objectives and are now bypassing them and pretty much concentrating nearly everything on Kyiv.

The Pentagon, UK MoD and plenty of other entities have been publishing daily analysis.

The fact that they lost so many assets and haven’t been able to establish air superiority (despite Ukraine having pretty much no Airforce and very limited AA) is a also clear indication of their current capabilities also.

And I find it laughable to claim that they are limiting offenses on civilian targets when they are using MLRS and cluster munitions on cities and have been since the war began.

Behind what schedule? In my previous comment I asked for a schedule posted before the invasion. Has the Pentagon or MoD published such a timetable for how they expected it to go?

What assets have they lost and what are reasonable expectations for losses? The kind of stuff I'm seeing here seems like half an analysis. "Russia has done X" okay, but what should we be expecting? How do we know if X is good or bad? I just haven't seen it. How much was this expected to cost Russia?

The Winter War was not a colossal blunder, the Soviet Union got the territory it needed to protect Leningrad from attack, which happened a year after the Winter War ended.

Also various reforms happened after the Winter War that readied the Red Army for the soon coming invasion of the USSR.

There were military, and possibly political, blunders by the Soviet Union in the beginning of the Winter War, but the result was a successful one for them.

I would say, this is different.

If we look at history, it's closer to Iran-Iraq wars.

Saddam pulled a historical grudge out of the ass, wrapped it in bizarre, artificial semi-religious ideology, and tried to draw an image of "people's war" with propaganda.

Then he started the war with people who 1) actually have a real historical grudge, 2) are real religious warriors, and crack good at that, 3) were much better at "people warring" than him, forcing him to retreat in complete ignomy after poking the beehive, which later causes an existential crisis within his regime.

Heck, I would say Putinism is the closest thing to Baathism. Random nonsense from communism, religion, and fascism glued together, and called an "ideology," which then not even its own members can understand, or explain.

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