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The real comparison is probably closer to Iraq-Iran in the 1980's. Iraq launches a huge mechanized offensive, gets into Iran, runs out of steam, and slowly gets pushed back, at high cost for both sides. It gets ugly, fast, and kills a whole bunch of people. It goes in for ~8 years before it eventually just peters out, and lasts that long because of international support for each side: Iraq had the US and similar 1st worlders; Iran had the USSR and COMBLOC.
Emphasis on inches. Ukraine War Mapper [1] does a good job documenting the line of control. It's not a good look for what, until recently, looked like a dominating regional power.
Of course, they are going slower than that. And also, at the current rate of attrition, Russia will run out of Russians long, long before that.
Something is changing every day as Russia's annual defence budget's worth of modern arms and training are deployed by Kyiv [1][2].
[1] https://www.cfr.org/article/how-much-aid-has-us-sent-ukraine...
This spring will show if they can change the current calculus but if not Russia is going to change the end game.
I'll do the same:
> Russia has gone backwards for a year now.
This is false, Russia went backwards, and then went forwards. Maybe you meant to say "has gone backwards with respect to where it was last year". That is true.
Please write precisely, write what you mean, so others don't have to realize you actually mean something else than what you wrote
In the media you are allowed to see.
It just reads like a massive cop-out, a "you are misinformed, sheeple"-style of empty platitude trying to sound somewhat smart, or deep, or "more informed".
One of the worst things I've seen happening in my lifetime is this transition to a post-modern, post-truth world. It's just exhausting that people feel it's ok to say "you are misinformed" in different ways, without ever providing a different proper source for information, a source where others could at least try to gauge if they're misinformed or not.
It's simply a thug-of-war between people living different realities, both accusing the other side of falling to some propaganda without basis.
Sorry for the rant, y'all, but this bullshit really grates, hard.
You aren't making your point clearer, you are just repeating "wake up, sheeple" with a different word salad...
Suppose Ukraine manages to push Putin's army back to original pre-2014 borders. Is this victory? With a large part of the country in ruins, a terrible GDP decrease, thousands of men with PTSD, not to mention those dead. There is simply no victory here, just enormous pain because of someone's sick ambitions.
Putin seems to have painted himself into a corner where now his continued rule over Russia depends on being able to paint this as either a victory or a loss that's in no way his fault (because NATO started it and he was just defending himself). But also it seems that at the very least, he needs Crimea.
For Russians in general, they don't really need anything here. The real loss for them is that Putin is willing to sacrifice their entire country to bail him out of his fiasco. A win for them would be getting rid of Putin and not replacing him with someone even worse.
For Zelensky, the bare minimum is of course independence from Russia, and he seems to have won that at least. But millions of Ukrainians have been captured and often deported/abducted by Russia, and that's a loss too. He wants those people free, and he's absolutely right to. And he wants to keep Ukraine whole; accepting any loss of Ukrainian territory is a loss to him. Not to mention that it sets a precedent; Putin has a history of making small land grabs, and without hard security guarantees, it's likely that Putin will try another land grab in the future. And indeed Putin is still trying to grab more land right now. Putin wants that corridor to Moldova, and then Moldova itself. Leaving Putin in a position where he can try this again and again, is also a loss for many countries in the future.
So even if on the short term it would be good for Ukraine if the fighting stopped; if it's really just a temporary cease fire during which Putin can regroup in order to try again, that may be worse for Ukraine than trying to completely block Putin right now.
Still, it's much easier to protect oneself against Hamas' handcrafted rockets than Russian Kinzhals...
Ukraine may win... after 5+ years of brutal war and heavy destruction. Is that better than a life back under Moscow's rule?
> Ukraine may win... after 5+ years of brutal war and heavy destruction. Is that better than a life back under Moscow's rule?
Hey that's a good example!
But now? They don't have any regard for human life. Not just the lives of Ukrainians, but their own. Putin is knowingly sacrificing tens of thousands for his sick ambition. There is nothing Russia gained from this war. Utter tragedy for everyone.
Considering the treatment they experienced in occupied cities - yes, it might be. Being under Moscow's rule won't be an occupation like Eastern Europe had under USSR, but a brutal regime made the extinguish the concept of "Ukrainians". Putin is clearly signaling that.