Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0zemp2c | Hacker News Reader

this is starting to look like a (practically) forever war

both sides seem committed to impossible goals - Russia wants to occupy everything up to the Polish border, Zelensky wants Russia completely pushed back even out of Crimea

both goals seem unrealistic, and both leaders will probably be replaced by new leadership with an even more zealous commitment to the conflict

on some level I feel like the US administration is fine with this...on the most cynical level, a smashed Europe helps preserve US status militarily and economically

View on HN

Ukraine liberating Crimea, while a stretch goal, is more likely than Russia defeating Ukraine.

Russia conquering Ukraine is now highly unlikely, but defeating Ukraine (essentially by obliterating it) remains very much within Russia's capabilities, unfortunately.

Whether Putin could see such a Pyrrhic victory as his least-bad option under some set of circumstances — and settle for it — is unknown, but the signs aren't particularly good.

Russia no longer has sufficient conventional forces to defeat Ukraine. They just don't have the manpower. The only way they could do it is with nuclear weapons, and it still seems unlikely that Putin would escalate to that extent.

Russia has large airpower equipped with heavy guided bombs (think JDAMs), which it only has started to use seriously due to the depletion of UA's long-range anti-air defenses (old Soviet S300 systems).

The problem is that Western long-range AA systems are exorbitantly expensive (~$1 bln for a Patriot system), take very long time to produce, and the West simply doesn't have it in quantities that could replace the rapidly depleting Soviet systems. Also, those expensive AA missiles get quickly attrited by cheap Iranian drones.

This is because the Western doctrine has always been about gaining air supremacy via airforce (fighter jets + AWACS + long-range air-to-air missiles complex), which UA doesn't have, and the US seems to be reluctant to supply Ukraine with all that — as they publicly say in the fear of escalation, but more likely due to the price tag.

So if that stance doesn't change, Russia would start bombing UA with heavy 1500kg+ munitions all over the place (inflicting very serious damage), and there is really not much UA could do with that, unfortunately.

“We will bomb the enemy into submission” has been tried in the UK, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Vietnam and has never really worked. The civilian population does not blame its leaders, it blames the enemy. And nightly reports of destroyed apartment blocks and murdered women and children is terrible optics for Russia.

You could argue that it didn't work with North Korea as well (as the regime is still there). But in fact the whole country had been bombed to such condition that it simply had no buildings left, it had been totally flattened, ~300k civilians dead. Could happen with Ukraine as well if they couldn't eventually counter the Russian air force.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_North_Korea

And Putin would be totally happy with the destruction of Ukraine if they don't submit. Either outcome is good for him.

No, Russia has a very limited stock of PGMs and is only able to manufacture new ones at a limited rate.

It could be scaled up, as it is a relatively "dumb" technology and everything needed for it could be manufactured within Russia, rendering sanctions ineffective.

What you observe is just the current state, as it takes time to reroute the supply chains disrupted by sanctions and ramp up the production. And I believe they have all the time in the world, as nothing currently threatens their resource extraction and production capabilities. It is a long game.

In theory anything can be scaled up. In practice they aren't having much luck due to the decrepit state of the Russian industrial base. They are also trying to scale up armored vehicles, artillery ammunition, tactical aircraft, air defense systems, etc. Can't scale up everything at once. There are limits to what a country with a relatively small economy can push, even on a wartime footing.

In the mean time the US and other NATO countries are still delivering longer range air defense systems. Even if Russia manages to produce more PGMs it's going to be very risky to use direct attack type weapons. They're going to have to increasingly rely on stand-off weapons which are effective, but which are much more expensive and contain components that are difficult to produce domestically.

But I agree that we should expect an ongoing war of attrition with no clear victory on either side.

> both goals seem unrealistic

Why do you think pushing Russia back from Crimea is unrealistic? It's very difficult, it might take years and we can discuss whether it makes sense at all, but I wouldn't call it unrealistic.

The one thing that is certain is that Ukraine will lie in ruins.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com