Ask HN: What If Russia Wins? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What If Russia Wins?

20 pointsumberwall18 comments

Any takes on how the West would respond? With the recent events with the Taliban that seem to have taken people by surprise, why isn’t this outcome taken into consideration?

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It is, and has been from the beginning. Most people thought it would be a walk in the park for the 'great' Russian army, especially the Russians. The only real holdouts to this opinion were the Ukrainians. And as it turns out they were bang on the money on this one.

First of all I would ask what is this win scenario you envision?

Is it: 1)Russia takes over all of Ukraine and installs a puppet government, subservient to the Kremlin? That option is long gone.

2) Russia expends thousands of tanks and young men to capture some of East Ukraine? They would face an insurgency and ongoing battles for control, not like ISIS in Afghanistan, more like the trench warfare from WWI or urban fighting from WWII.

There is no win scenario for Russia that will account for the loss of: 1. soldiers

2. Military equipment (destroyed/captured/spent)

3. The mythos of the Russian Armed forces being destroyed

4. Russia's Economy

5. The young talent fleeing the country (brain drain)

All of these losses will take decades to recover from and the Russian people will suffer long and hard, they already had a falling population, this will accelerate the problem.

A phyric victory that comes at a great cost to Russia.

do we know what the actual goals of the russians are?

In Sun Tzu's inimitable Art of War, he observes, “All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive.”[1]

[1] google

I believe a major objective has been to destabilise the EU. The initial reaction at least looks to have been the opposite.

One fairly plausible explanation is that Putin is not, as everyone assumed, an evil genius, but is rather an evil idiot. But it was probably largely to shore up his internal position (one of the downsides of being a dictator is that your retirement options are limited, so they often go very odd in their old age as they try to avoid appearing weak), and that might even work. There's some indication he's more popular internally than he was a couple of months ago.

Like, there's no outcomes here that are good for Russia, but there are outcomes which are good for Putin personally, and that's likely all he's interested in.

Nuke Kyiv, claim all land east of Dnieper, exterminate/send remaining Ukr population to Siberian gulags. Its still on the table.

What's the win for Russia in this scenario?

If you understand the war as one facet of a broader struggle for economic dominance, and a prolonged conflict as something desired by both sides, the question doesn't really make sense.

I think a better question is: what if this conflict - and the accompanying energy and food shortages - are here to stay for the foreseeable future.

You know, this was something everyone should have thought about before giving Russia billions in trade surpluses by deindustrializing the West's economies.

I just checked http://stopgas.org/en/, it's still turning over.

Buying gas does not lead to deindustrializing. In fact, quite the opposite.

If the west was still more industrial, rather than moving to service, it would need MORE gas not less.

It used to be that we could generate power without needing massive amounts of Putin-enriching natural gas. Germany has to use it because the peaking plants are a useful way of disguising the fact that all the reliable baseload generation is shut down.

Actually it was because we burned coal. But we don't want to do that anymore. The mines are depleted and our people were dying prematurely in masses because of it.

What does "win" mean, here? If you mean "occupy the whole of the Ukraine", that seems implausible. If you mean "strengthen their hold on the parts of the Ukraine they'd already occupied", then I mean, maybe that could happen?

The west's approach in that circumstance would probably be to leave the sanctions in place indefinitely.

Well Putin has stated in his Feb 24 address that he does not intend to occupy Ukraine, so he's not bound by that in order to claim a win.

> With the recent events with the Taliban that seem to have taken people by surprise, why isn’t this outcome taken into consideration?

The only real surprise was how fast the Taliban was able to take the country back, not that they were.

To answer the rest of your question. I think it's pretty clear that the response would be mostly condemnation and sanctions. There's no appetite for direct military conflict between NATO members and Russia, at least on the NATO side, so what are you going to do?

I'm sure the US would supply arms to insurgents, but that's something the US does a lot.

Russia’s terms for winning will be an extended protection of the assets and security of the current upper leadership. Those terms do not necessarily involve the measures that preoccupy the Western press: territorial expansion, foreign PR, involvement in Olympics, treatment of foreign and national citizens, economic robustness or ecological protection. I’m not very informed, but I don’t see many in the West expecting this to evolve in a direction of justice, liberation, or national honor for the Russian people. But, we expect Russia will win.

Who knows, but I wonder how the recent events of the failed and botched withdrawal in Afghanistan resulting with the Taliban taking over and then emboldening another leader to escalate into yet another war has happened so quickly?

I'd put my money on the perceived weakness and incompetence being shown in one of the larger western countries that enabled all of this to happen.

It seems that someone likes creating wars all over the world and is doing nothing to prevent them.

As a result of failing to prevent it, ultimately in the end everyone loses.

They already lost, isn’t it obvious?

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