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Comment by valval | Hacker News Reader

Oh yeah, Russia will lose any moment now :D

The fact that Russia, without foreign support or not, has not managed to capture one of the poorest states in Europe is a joke. Imagine the US failing to capture Mexico after 2 years, even if Mexico got weapon supplies from abroad. That would totally discredit the US military.

Yes almost as ridiculous as the US not being able to pacify Afghanistan after 20 years of occupation.

Russia doesn't care about pacifying Ukraine. If the US had approached Afghanistan with a mindset similar to Russia, there would be no Afghans left, except the few that swore loyalty out of fear. Any dissent would mean death. The US clearly had different goals. Ones that are much much harder to achieve than just killing everyone.

I don't necessarily share the parent commenter's sentiment towards Russia, but I'm curious about your statement - what would those goals of US in Afghanistan be? I mean except from extracting $2.26T from the taxpayers and distributing a significant portion of it to private sector and shareholders, tied to the Senate.

I think the goal was last attempt at nation building in middleeast (that started in 70s, due to oil being way more important for US than now). In order to do nation building of course you have to shake the country and its structure, but you try to shake out the bad people, install stable and reasonable government and plant seeds for democracy, try and introduce some liberalism, education, infrastructure.

It failed, yes. But it succeeded in great many places, eastern europe, large part of south east asia, some african countries.

Russia is just a sorry ass loser, their country is in downward spiral and needs to exert power over its sphere of influence, thing is that countries in that sphere some time ago decided they dont really want to be aligned. Thus Russia decided to punish Ukraine otherwise the rest will also fall out of sphere (ironically I think they accelerated that process even more).

It could be that moral of Ukrainians is deciding factor: million of civilians ready to turn into soldiers, dig into the ground and die there is very strong force.

That's a very weird way of phrasing that Russia has barely anything to gain while Ukraine has everything to loose. It's not like Russia needs any further territory, they are the largest country and haven't yet properly integrated the already invaded cultures.

> while Ukraine has everything to loose.

the point is that many countries through the history surrendered very fast and agreed on whatever aggressor demanded.

> It's not like Russia needs any further territory

that's Putin's wish, he wants to become some historical figure, and people have little choice but follow to meat grinder

But did those countries still have multiple generations that remembered what the invaders did last time they controlled them? And was what the invaders did as bad as the actions of the USSR?

I don't think USSR did anything specifically bad to Ukraine after ww2, in contrast, Ukraine gained lots of territories, soviets invested heavily in Ukraine, as result Ukraine became leading industrial and technology region of USSR, most developed and educated compared to all others parts of USSR with exception of handful key regions in Russia.

In fact it is common knowledge that before 2014 Ukraine and Russia were brotherhood nations. Ukraine couldn't imagine being attacked by Russia, that's why the army was a joke at that time and Putin took over Crimea so easily.

They do seem to care about their accesss to the mediterranean sea though...

They already have it, even without Crimea.

It's because of the crippling sanctions!

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