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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> Let's be honest, without this backing the war would've ended in the first month as was drafted in Istanbul

The West didn't really help Ukraine in the first month [1]. We thought the Russian army was competent and would ride into Ukraine like we did in Iraq. It wasn't until after the weakness was made apparent that aid started dripping in.

Ukraine repelled a Russian invasion on its own. Our generations-old anti-air systems are downing their latest weapons. Meanwhile, our generations-old missiles are taking out their state-of-the-art systems.

To the degree Russia has been able to claim any victory, it's in not being demolished. That's the standard. Not winning. Simply surviving.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_aid_to_Ukrain...

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The West was actively supplying Ukraine since 2014, especially after the Debaltsevo embarrassment. Yes, it pales in comparison to the post 2022 levels, but it still was far from insignificant. Even your Wikipedia link lists a lot of pre-2022 aid and I am pretty sure this page is far from being comprehensive.

And it's even without mentioning the direct role of Boris Johnson in tanking the Istanbul accords.

> it still was far from insignificant

Stil far from closing the gap between the 6th and 13th largest armies. Russia invaded an inferior force and got stymied. This would be like America's Vietnam being Cuba, where we fully committed the U.S. military and economy to the task and still continued to fail. The fact that Russia has never even established air superiority knocks it out of the category of running a modern military.

The Russian military doctrine is quite different from the US one. It places far more importance on artillery and anti-air forces than on air superiority. The Russian army clearly sucks at maneuver warfare and together with the unrealistically optimistic views which were prevalent in the Russian government (read Putin), it explains perfectly well the extremely poor performance in the first months. The performance in the recent months shows results of a more "comfortable" for the Russian army mode of warfare.

Also note that the Russian army was not "fully committed", it was not using conscripts (there was a small scale deployment of conscripts, but after the public scandal they were quickly removed from Ukraine) and did not fully pull forces from all its military districts.

Meanwhile Ukraine was fighting in the total war mode from the first days (they do not pull "recruits" from streets in the broad daylight into military buses just for the fun of it) with huge external support. And having the well trained by the West ideologically charged army backbone with 8 years of practical warfare experience has helped immensely in the first months.

> Meanwhile Ukraine was fighting in the total war mode from the first days (they do not pull "recruits" from streets in the broad daylight into military buses just for the fun of it) with huge external support

Did they do that during the first few months of the war? I recall them having more volunteers than they could use in the early days.

At the moment, Russia has fully conquered (and integrated into their nation) 20% of the largest country in Europe. They seem intent on going for about 50% of it.

US cannot claim a single victory in the past 4 decades, it's been debacle after debacle.

> US cannot claim a single victory in the past 4 decades, it's been debacle after debacle

Militarily? You've got to be joking. Russia is still struggling with the military part of the campaign.

Russia's "top of the line" weapons are routinely being potted by decades-old NATO kit. They are a spent force, conventionally. The military turned from a fighting force into a propaganda tool, aimed at projecting masculinity to a domestic audience over maintaining martial capability.

The problem in the West is there are a lot of Soviet-era talking heads who make money when Russia gets attention. There is no money to be made if Russia is a loser. So it's in the interest of that foreign policy wing to trump up Moscow as if it's a competent military versus the dumpster fire that it is without Pyongyang and Tehran.

Looks to me that Russia is winning the war of attrition. Is that view inaccurate?

Yes, that's basically accurate. Russia has a huge advantage in manpower and equipment, and has been using that to gradually take more territory. Ukraine will have to achieve about an 8:1 casualty ratio in order to achieve an outright battlefield victory, which they haven't been able to do even with foreign military aid. A more realistic goal is basically to inflict enough Russian casualties that domestic political and economic pressures force a withdrawal from most of the occupied territory. That's not impossible but it's kind of a long shot.

Another approach which is more likely to work is for NATO countries to step up and really hurt Russia through every means short of war. That mainly means finding a way to reduce their fossil fuels export income.

> That mainly means finding a way to reduce their fossil fuels export income

Which is happening now.

EU is about to impose sanctions on the shadow fleet of Russian tankers.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20241111IP...

Is that view inaccurate?

Technically no, but a more forthright assessment would be: "Russia has been winning the war of attrition, but very slowly, and only for the past year. At current rates, it would take several decades to reach Kyiv. Meanwhile, for the sake of these extremely modest gains, it's spending about 10 percent of its GDP."

Context it is everything.

I don't remember desert storm being a debacle, but maybe I missed it. Certainly arming Iraq in the 80s and fighting them in the 90s was problematic, but you know things happen.

The 2000s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were pretty successful. The holding of Afghanistan and Iraq, not so much. Russia doesn't seem to be having nearly the level of success in invading Ukraine (although invading Crimea seemed to be pretty successful).

The direct role of Boris Johnson in tanking the Istanbul accords.

Which is a myth - oft repeated, but with precisely zero substance.

Zero substance? It was reported by Ukrainska Pravda (and Ukraine is far from being famous for its freedom of press) not by some Russian propaganda outlet. It's the same as saying that WSJ citing "sources" has zero substance.

Regardless, you can believe that the West did not provide any assurance to Ukraine during the Istanbul talks and that Russia has blown its own pipeline. It's your right.

It was reported by Ukrainska Pravda

It was speculated as a possibility by that article, but then it was looked into by others, quite thoroughly, and the narrative fell apart. That happens, you know.

The Foreign Affairs article in the aforementioned thread has a pretty good writeup about the whole thing, if you are interested.

You can believe that Russia has blown its own pipeline

You can change the subject as many times as you want, and speculate, falsely, about what you think other people believe about random topics, all day long if you want.

But this has absolutely no bearing on what we were just talking about.

> supplying Ukraine since 2014

You are moving the goalposts, though. Support between 2014 and 2022 wasn't even remotely close to:

> They send almost everything they can outside

Also even now they aren't exactly sending everything they can, rather everything they want to.

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