Ukraine has become a breeding ground for lethal drug-resistant bacteria

Russia was already suffering a demographic cliff, this was effectively the last generation of men that could be thrown at a war.

Russia is a racial hegemony of the Caucasian Rus ruling over central Asian ethnic 'stans. Think chechnya and Georgia at a minimum.

So if too many Russians are conscripted and die, they cannot be used to keep the other provinces in line. The entire Russian state collapsed.

Consider that each conscription round entails as much or more population flight from the country, do you raise 100,000 soldiers, 250,000 more flee the country.

Jeffrey Sachs is an economist and he's been criticizing the war for the entire time , repeating points that I'm pretty clearly are direct Russian propaganda parroting, but fine one mans propaganda is another mans opinion.

Putin has shown the usual authoritarian contempt for peace, treaty, and diplomacy. Negotiating a cease fire at this point is appeasement, "peace in our time" foolishness.

Putin thinks Europe is weak and cowardly, and now he thinks the US is working in his interests and will not honor article 5 of NATO.

Jeffrey Sachs is just some guy. He has no more expertise in this area than I do so you can take whatever opinion you like.

The question was what weapon would significantly turn the tide.

So we are actually kind of in in agreement.

An optimistic estimate for the overall war would be more like 2.5 to 1, but realistically it's probably lower.

Equipment kills are another story.

Here is a sober assessment of the strategy from Anders Puck Nielsen. He is an extremely well informed source on these matters. I highly recommend all of his videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8ZPbnVqHrY

The NATO concern with Russia in a conventional conflict isn't whether they would win, it's if they would win so convincingly that Russia would immediately escalate to nukes.

"The Russian military is large and modern, but the modern part isn't large and the large part isn't modern" is a basically true statement. They have a handful of modern platforms for prestige reasons but in very small quantity, and a large quantity of leftover Soviet trash. And even the "modern" stuff is several tiers below Western kit.

Their 5th stealth fighter => isn't stealth

Their naval fleet => literally has tow boats following them on missions

Newest tank => T90 => barely build... 60?

Practically all their tanks are build a long time ago. The engine was a bad engine copy of the Germans.

Nuclear arsenal => they forgot maintenance like with everything else

Rocket missles => yes, it was still used a lot. Not reusable and was still based on a design from the 1960's.

Lada => taken over by Renault to make it profitable

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Sure, during the cold war, Soviet Union was powerful, their facilities were all funded by the US during the world war, this is where they got the tech ( see reason of Holodomor). But it's only 2 modern cities and the rest is shitty to stay in.

Additionally, their invasion is just similar like the past. It ain't tech, it's literally meat grinder tactics.

Russian military intervention is arguably the only reason the Syrian regime survived the civil war, but this time the Russian military has their own problems and can't intervene without stealing resources from their efforts in Ukraine.