The best rebuttal I've heard to this line of thinking is: "Some say we lost Afghanistan because we weren't willing to be brutal enough. Well, the Russians were willing to be brutal enough, yet they also lost Afghanistan."
Same in Afghanistan, NATO lost hard after being slowly kicked out of the country.
In both cases, none of the US or NATO strategic goals were achieved, while almost all of the opposing sides were. If you think the US won in Vietnam, Iraq won the Gulf War (number two, in the 90s).
Had UK given up and signed a peace with Germany then it could have been possible that there wouldn't have been what we call WW2 today at all. Given what Germans planned to do then fortunately it didn't happen. We can thank stubbornness of Churchill for this. But Germany made it even worse - it declared war on United States.
But there were no treaties between Germany and Allies until Germany had unconditionally surrendered.
But my claim was a little different. I wrote that US didn't lose until it "lost its sight". I would argue that it was not understood what is US actually doing in Afghanistan and when you don't have any idea what you are doing then you can't win anything.
The victory against Poland was, in the end, meaningless with the failure of Barbarossa. As was the victory against France in the West, as soon as the war in Borth Africa was lost by the axis. There never was a path to Axis victory, and winning the first to rounds by points is meabingless if you get knocked out by round 6. Should be self-explanatory.
Wehrmacht rapid advance was stopped, but it didn't yet mean pushing them out would have been possible without tremendous material support through lend lease, without what there wouldn't have been any adequate Red Army logistics and armor.
USSR was able to produce around 40 000 tanks and this force overwhelmed German armor capacity, but they were able build this much only considering that US provided 400 000 trucks, if it was not so, considerable amount of tank building capacity would have to had been shared to build trucks, but even then the steel to build tanks came from US. On top of this USSR got 14 000 planes and also rail wagons and engines.
If there was a pipe dream then it was Red Army countering Wehrmacht without US material support. Russians like to minuscule the importance of US support but it was substantial and most likely essential for their victory.
Maybe it would hang around longer if USSR was intact and assisting.
The idea which ended both wars was that continuing this war is a war crime against our own nation even as we continue to score victories.
A majority of these republics were founded by the USSR by carving them out of RSFSR, without the regard of wishes of people who ended up split by these borders.
I guess its karma when USSR wanted to be the example of affirmative action socialist state ran by ethnic minorities, only to get framed for imperialism by the autonomous republics it has created.
These "autonomous" republics were anything but autonomous. They were autonomous within the very strict framework provided by Russia. Puppet states would be the closest description, but even then not fully accurate. On top of this there was no need for Russian help to "create" these fake republics. Nations were completely capable to create their own governance like was for example the case with Ukraine. All what Russians did was to use the cover of communism to continue their imperialist ambitions.
RSFSR contained ASSR (Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics) and these had even less autonomy. Most of these nations should have also been given the opportunity to have statehood as they wanted.
If you were talking about ASSR before WW2 that were transformed into SSR then again, see the previous point.
USSR got the following bits and pieces after WWII:
* Kaliningrad, added to RSFSR
* West Ukraine, added to Ukrainian SSR
* Some ex-Polish lands added to Belorussian SSR (Poland get even more of better, ex-German lands though)
* Baltic states
* Tuva.
Of these, perhaps three Baltic republics were not happy about Afghanistan (and everything else), but they were quite small.
The rest of stuff, such as UkrSSR, BelSSR, Caucasus and Central Asian SSRs, were carved out of RSFSR (Russia) in the 1920's by the USSR, after being part of Russian Empire for a century or more. Most of them did not exist as a separate state previously, especially in the assigned borders. Some briefly existed, often as anarchist or German puppet states, between 1917 and 1921.
USSR did indeed gain control of various Eastern European countries such as Poland or Romania, but they were not part of USSR so they did not have to fight in Afghanistan.
The rest of stuff about nations and statehood opportunity is frankly bullshit. These ASSRs were also carved by USSR out of Russia, and almost universally have 40% to 80% of Russian population within them - the only separatist opportunity they have is to be a particularly poor reissue of Bosnia. People are not stupid and they understand that.