I totally agree with you, russia definitely has the technological capability to strike from afar and even drop a shit ton of nukes.
Exactly.
They basically showed Ukraine they have the precision munitions capable of hitting targets anywhere they want, whenever they want.
Where russia seems totally corroded by corruption and incompetence is at the lower level. So while they could obliterate ukraine remotely, they seem incapable at this juncture of actually seizing control and holding onto territory, and since that seems to be their primary objective they are failing.
We'll, let's just think about that for a minute and try to apply some logic to the situation.
Russian intitial military forces was around 120-150k troops by most accounts. That's clearly not enough to occupy all of Ukraine, or even conquer anything West of the dniper river.
Surely Russia knew this.
US forces in Iraq were well over 500k by comparison.
So I can't see the Russian objective was ever to conquer all of Ukraine. That just doesn't make sense. Especially when Russian statements initially were to destroy the Ukrainian military that the US/NATO had been building in Ukraine since 2014 and liberate the ethnic Russian people of the far east and south of Ukraine. That's what they said they wanted to do.
It seems that holding territory hasn't been something the Russian military has really committed itself to doing anywhere except specific places in the Donbass and Crimea. Otherwise they've moved fairly fluidly around as circumstances changed.
Take the recent ukranian "gains" for instance. Ukraine gained some fifty miles or so of territory at an astronomical cost of tens of thousands of casualties. While the small Russian forces in the region did retreat and ceded the ground, Ukraine paid probably 4 or 5 to 1 difference in casualties.
And this has been the case in the vast majority of these ukranian offensives. Remember ukranian forces intitial numbers were 500k-700k by most accounts and Russia was only 150k on the high end estimate.
Now consider this last missels barrage. Ukraine claims to have shot down 27% of the Total Russian volley of 200+ rockets, and maybe that's true, who knows? but we do know they've also lost 80% of their missels defense systems and are in a panic for the US to supply more.
They've lost power generation capabilities to huge parts of western Ukraine, with winter hitting in just a few weeks, key infrastructure they needed to transport additional weapons in the east and even some key intelligence centers in Kyiv itself.
When you sort the facts from the propoganda, this isn't looking good for Ukraine.
If their objective is to turn ukraine into a country wide chernobyl zone they can most certainly do that in a matter of minutes, but they are not doing that, and to do that would render their entire war effort pointless.
Agreed. I don't think they have any intention of nuking Ukraine. They way they held back most of their big guns looks to me like they want to get along with the Ukrainian people at some point. After they've destroyed the current ukranian regime maybe.
TL;DR I dont think Russia can achieve their goal, but i do believe they can annihilate ukraine (not their goal though)
See, I think that's all a matter of what you think thier goals are.
The western propoganda narrative is that "Putin's goal is to conquer all of Ukraine then move on to eastern Europe" then I'd have to agree that's not going to happen. In large parts because Russian tactics have certainly not been inline with that objective. They haven't used any heavy bombers or heavy missel strikes or even really attempted anything seriously west of the Dnieper river.
If you take their own words, it was to destroy the Ukrainian war machine the US/NATO alliance had been building and to liberate the ethnic Russian people in the far east and south as their objective , then you can see the Ukrainian military has probably lost 70-80% of it's best fighting men and the territory where the ethnic Russian people live is firmly in their control.
They've just knocked out most of Ukraines air defense capability and shut down the power generation capabilities in the region of the ukranian headquarters along with much of the needed infrastructure to ship supplies to the Eastern front.
Now, I know we're constantly told that Ukraine is winning and we need to keep spending money on this war.
But the reality doesn't look like that to a rational person that tries to analyze the situation.
And this "regime change in Russia" nonsense? Well that's not going to happen.
Joe Biden is far more likely to be thrown out of office for this mess than Putin, and before it's all over, he just might.
At some point the American public is going to want to know why we're going broke fighting Russia in Ukraine when our dollar is collapsing, our inflation is soaring, our borders are wide open and our own economy is tanking. Just because Ukraine paid Joe Bidens crackhead son millions of dollars is not worth the American suffering he's putting us through.
It's just a matter of time.
Meanwhile, Russia is selling the hell out of energy in China and India, Saudi Arabia is doing business with Russia and dealing in ruples, talking about buying Russian weapons intead of US and most of Asia is siding with Russia.
Not good. Biden is a fuckin moron. And the people who supported him are even stupider then he is
