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Comment by ssssvd | Hacker News Reader

Except Putin doesn’t need to outrun America — he just needs to outrun Ukraine.

There’s a finite number of Ukrainians, and an even smaller number of Ukrainian men actually willing — or physically able — to fight.

20% of the population already left, and around 1.5 million of them went to Russia. Another 15% are stuck under occupation.

Ukraine’s demographics were already a disaster after the WW2 wipe-out, the Soviet collapse, and 30 years of economic decline and emigration. Now they’re drafting 18 to 60-year-olds just to keep units filled - at 40%.

So what happens in a year or two, when there’s no one left to draft?

The Poles aren’t volunteering to die en masse, and they’re the only EU country with anything resembling a real army — and even that is one-fifth the size of Russia’s.

So who’s holding the line then?

The US Army? The Marine Corps?

Is anyone actually ready to send Americans to die in the Donbas?

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Russian economy doesn't have enough juice to "outrun Ukraine" under the sanctions regime and the war intensity they maintain to impress the Westerners. It's not a "year or two", it's a decade at least.

So what’s the plan here, exactly?

Keep Ukraine on life support for a decade, hoping Russia collapses under sanctions?

Cuba’s still standing after 60 years. Iran after 40. The USSR took decades to fall — and none of them had China bankrolling their survival.

Russia’s economy bleeds, but it’s not cut off. China sends tech and machines, India buys the oil, and Europe keeps quietly paying top dollar for gas through backdoors.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s population shrinks, its economy is wrecked, and its army can’t fight without Western money, Western weapons — and soon, Western bodies.

Because if you actually want to push Russia back — not even collapse it, just push it back — that means European and American troops on the front line. Conscription, mobilized economies, the whole package.

Without a sustained meat grinder to chew up Russian forces, Russia just consolidates and digs in — with China keeping the whole thing afloat.

And if the West isn’t ready for that, who exactly do you think will still be standing in 10 years?

The only guaranteed winner? China — with Russia as a client state, Europe as a deindustrialized theme park, and America too exhausted to stop them.

If this is a game of who bleeds out last, Ukraine’s already done, Europe bleeds out first, Russia bleeds to its usual stupid level — and China walks away without a scratch.

The Westerners have been tirelessly making excuses about how it's impossible to defeat Russia for a while now, so forgive me for not being impressed, but the proposition is quite simple really — if you don't want to support Ukrainians fighting for themselves against Russia today, Ukrainians will be sent to fight poles and others for Russia tomorrow. Of course as it's clear now, the US wouldn't defend Poland either, fighting Canada is the new geopolitical priority, so there's that.

Agree that China is a winner of it all simply by virtue of not being mad, but as they like to say in Russia — it's not the evening yet.

Funnily enough, this is exactly Putin’s own logic — just flipped.

“We had to support those rebel Ukrainian states so Ukrainians fight them, not us.” “We had to preemptively disarm Ukraine, or we’d be fighting Ukrainians inside Russia within five years.”

As for China — surely they’d be nervous if Taiwan was one-third of their population and shared a land border.

Ukraine isn’t just a border state, it’s alt-Russia, as Taiwan is alt-China (and so was Hong-Kong). A competing civilizational project trying to jump off the imperial train and build a Polish-style normal nation-state — and that makes it an existential threat. Not because Ukraine is strong, but because it offers Russians a dangerous glimpse of an alternative path — a Russian identity without the empire.

> Funnily enough, this is exactly Putin’s own logic — just flipped

Except Ukrainians ask the West for support to fight for themselves, so the West is given a rarest opportunity to do a morally right thing while furthering its own interests.

> they’re the only EU country with anything resembling a real army

??????

guess France is out of EU or... ?

French land army is 77k total, with maybe 30k actually combat-capable — the rest are admin, logistics, and training. Add 9k Foreign Legion, but only a fraction of that is high-intensity capable.

With rotations, France can probably field about 15k troops on an actual frontline — and after that, it’s draft time.

For comparison:

* Russian armed forces: 1.1 million. * 500k deployed in Ukraine. * ~300k on the active frontline right now.

In terms of real land warfare capacity, France is in the same weight class as Belarus or Romania — and about 20 times behind Russia.

Even if you argue technical edge (better equipment per soldier), France has zero industrial mobilization capacity and no modern large-scale combat experience.

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