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3 hours ago, Scheiss Meister said:

The Poles have always been badasses.  The geography of Poland makes defending Poland very difficult.  Germany and Russia have meddled in Polish politics for centuries, influencing and directing events to their individual and mutual benefit, but the Polish military has generally been top notch.  Read up on who saved Vienna from the Ottomans.

When I was a young Marine mortarman, we learned about the Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces.  The Poles were always mentioned as equal to the best Soviet and East German forces.  On top of that, Polish intelligence was the class of the Warsaw Pact, even better than the Stasi.  Don't sleep on the Poles.

Exactly. I'm just waiting for them to figure out how to put wings on their new tanks.

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3 hours ago, RPM said:

Yeah and that X37B in orbit will dim the lights in Moscow 20 minutes later.

I think if they go through with a nuke, China gets involved, Turkey shuts down the Straits to the Russians (nukes over the Black Sea could drift into Turkey) and we start seeing some really serious shit.  Complete economic isolation  

I think NATO opens the floodgates on weapons and training as well.

Oh, and Russia gets the terrorist designation.

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5 hours ago, InkaUtexas said:

In most countries that have to do this, Older troops occupy territory. Fresh (young and trained) troops lead offensives. The question is do they have enough of the second group left. 

I don’t thin’ they do, otherwise we would have already seen them.

And there are reports of former Russian prisoners being killed in Ukraine and knowledge of their deaths making it back to Russia.

And Russia still can’t get off their peacetime footing and start mobilizing in earnest.  That’s the only way they are getting a lot of youngsters in the army.

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6 hours ago, DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt said:

You seem to know where this is headed. So tell me how this ends…?

I can think of several potential endgame scenarios, but everything comes down to manpower.  And lest we forget, Ukraine has about a third of the population that Russia has, and can mobilize far more troops to fight Russia.  Russia has a lot of security problems and areas to secure, that tie up hundreds of thousands of troops/personnel across Asia and the Middle East, as well as potentially taking over Belarus if things go down there, while Ukraine is focused on one enemy - Russia.

And we have to start off mentioning that Russia has a massive manpower problem, because it ties his hands and reduces his options.  They have demographic problems that have left them with a smaller pool of manpower to draw from than 10 years ago, and 10 years ago, they had a smaller pool of manpower to draw from than they did 20 and 30 years ago, etc.  This is why he’s combing through Russian prisons, why he begged for Syrians and Africans  to come fight, why he floated the ideas for North Koreans to come help.  It’s why he’s raising the cap to 60 year olds.

And he can’t mass mobilize, because that gets into all kinds of legal and constitutional mumbo jumbo, and more importantly, it’s going to get men and their families out into the streets in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and Russia doesn’t have the manpower to put any massive protests down, because we already know that much of that manpower (the civilian federal security/police/etc.) is actually deployed to Ukraine.  To put it another way, if Putin could have figured out a way to go to a war footing without protests on a massive scale, he would have already done it months ago.

Ironically, going to a wartime footing would allow him to use conscripts in Ukraine on a large scale, but the professional/contract soldiers have born the brunt of the deaths, and with over 1,000+ confirmed officers being killed, which means the conscripts are going to be missing out on experienced officers.  And we’ve already seen evidence of rebelliousness from professional/contract soldiers.  Suddenly throwing in tens of thousands of conscripts would complicate things as many fled or sabotaged their own gear, etc.

All of that leaves a lot of scenarios, but I’m sticking to a few

1. Russia is driven out of all  Ukrainian territory, including Crimea.  100% worst-case scenario for Putin that puts his life/power in danger.  Even though he controls the security services and media, this will be too much for Russians and the oligarchs to stomach. Russia takes territory in 2014, successfully holds it, then he starts a war for more territory and loses everything.  

Is it possible?  Yes, but it’ll be slow going, but as more HIMARS and other systems come online with Ukraine, more and more Russian supply dumps and hardware is destroyed, air defenses are reduced, leaving Russian soldiers isolated and under-supplied. Putin will do everything he can to prevent this, because it’s the end of him.  He will take Russia to a formal war declaration, and he will start grabbing people off the streets of Moscow to feed his war machine, before he accepts this.  I feel like if WMDs are going to come into play, this is it.

2. Putin pulls back to pre-2022 areas and tries to get a cease-fire/armistice. Many in the West might be okay with this. This hurts Putin back home, since Russians will feel like they were lied to (his propagandists on state TV pump way too much sunshine), and it hurts him politically and with the oligarchs (who have lost a massive amount of overseas assets).  And there’s a shit-ton of Russians who will have lost family members, and you’ll have hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers who are pissed off because they were wounded or they felt their comrades died for nothing, etc.

Is it possible?  Putin might go for it, as he might be able to survive this since he controls the security services and media, but his security services are a few hundred thousand actual boots on the ground in a country of 140 million people.  And I doubt he could count on the military to back him in potential coups.  Putin can’t lose everything including the Crimea and survive, so this might be his actual red line, hence my comments about the WMDs above.

3. Putin tries to get a cease-fire/armistice with what Russia controls now in August of 2022.  Back in Russia, it’s Putin’s best scenario, because he can claim he built buffer zones around Crimea and the DPR/LPR and that he de-Nazified Ukraine. 

Is it possible?  No.  Ukraine will not allow that, nor will the West support it.  Ukraine has come too far and inflicted too many losses on Russia.  Ukraine will just bleed Russia dry in a way that Afghanistan and Vietnam never could to Russia or the US, because in those scenarios, both Russia and the US could just fly their troops home and be done.  Trying to retain what they have right now leaves them within range of Ukraine forces and artillery. The West will be happy to keep up supplies and keep Russia tied up there, and Ukraine will have too much momentum on their side over time.  How many years would the Russian public support death by a thousand paper cuts, when they are able to  access the footage of dead Russians on Telegram, and other social media, etc., unlike in Afghanistan when it was easier to cover up (but couldn’t be - Russian mothers were angry with Gorbachev, etc. and became a power).

It’s like dealing with the underpants gnomes.

underpantsgnomes1.jpg

Edited by atomheartbevo
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8 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

I can think of several potential endgame scenarios, but everything comes down to manpower.  And lest we forget, Ukraine has about a third of the population that Russia has, and can mobilize far more troops to fight Russia.  Russia has a lot of security problems and areas to secure, that tie up hundreds of thousands of troops/personnel across Asia and the Middle East, as well as potentially taking over Belarus if things go down there, while Ukraine is focused on one enemy - Russia.

And we have to start off mentioning that Russia has a massive manpower problem, because it ties his hands and reduces his options.  They have demographic problems that have left them with a smaller pool of manpower to draw from than 10 years ago, and 10 years ago, they had a smaller pool of manpower to draw from than they did 20 and 30 years ago, etc.  This is why he’s combing through Russian prisons, why he begged for Syrians and Africans  to come fight, why he floated the ideas for North Koreans to come help.  It’s why he’s raising the cap to 60 year olds.

And he can’t mass mobilize, because that gets into all kinds of legal and constitutional mumbo jumbo, and more importantly, it’s going to get men and their families out into the streets in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and Russia doesn’t have the manpower to put any massive protests down, because we already know that much of that manpower (the civilian federal security/police/etc.) is actually deployed to Ukraine.  To put it another way, if Putin could have figured out a way to go to a war footing without protests on a massive scale, he would have already done it months ago.

Ironically, going to a wartime footing would allow him to use conscripts in Ukraine on a large scale, but the professional/contract soldiers have born the brunt of the deaths, and with over 1,000+ confirmed officers being killed, which means the conscripts are going to be missing out on experienced officers.  And we’ve already seen evidence of rebelliousness from professional/contract soldiers.  Suddenly throwing in tens of thousands of conscripts would complicate things as many fled or sabotaged their own gear, etc.

All of that leaves a lot of scenarios, but I’m sticking to a few

1. Russia is driven out of all  Ukrainian territory, including Crimea.  100% worst-case scenario for Putin that puts his life/power in danger.  Even though he controls the security services and media, this will be too much for Russians and the oligarchs to stomach. Russia takes territory in 2014, successfully holds it, then he starts a war for more territory and loses everything.  

Is it possible?  Yes, but it’ll be slow going, but as more HIMARS and other systems come online with Ukraine, more and more Russian supply dumps and hardware is destroyed, air defenses are reduced, leaving Russian soldiers isolated and under-supplied. Putin will do everything he can to prevent this, because it’s the end of him.  He will take Russia to a formal war declaration, and he will start grabbing people off the streets of Moscow to feed his war machine, before he accepts this.  I feel like if WMDs are going to come into play, this is it.

2. Putin pulls back to pre-2022 areas and tries to get a cease-fire/armistice. Many in the West might be okay with this. This hurts Putin back home, since Russians will feel like they were lied to (his propagandists on state TV pump way too much sunshine), and it hurts him politically and with the oligarchs (who have lost a massive amount of overseas assets).  And there’s a shit-ton of Russians who will have lost family members, and you’ll have hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers who are pissed off because they were wounded or they felt their comrades died for nothing, etc.

Is it possible?  Putin might go for it, as he might be able to survive this since he controls the security services and media, but his security services are a few hundred thousand actual boots on the ground in a country of 140 million people.  And I doubt he could count on the military to back him in potential coups.  Putin can’t lose everything including the Crimea and survive, so this might be his actual red line, hence my comments about the WMDs above.

3. Putin tries to get a cease-fire/armistice with what Russia controls now in August of 2022.  Back in Russia, it’s Putin’s best scenario, because he can claim he built buffer zones around Crimea and the DPR/LPR and that he de-Nazified Ukraine. 

Is it possible?  No.  Ukraine will not allow that, nor will the West support it.  Ukraine has come too far and inflicted too many losses on Russia.  Ukraine will just bleed Russia dry in a way that Afghanistan and Vietnam never could to Russia or the US, because in those scenarios, both Russia and the US could just fly their troops home and be done.  Trying to retain what they have right now leaves them within range of Ukraine forces and artillery. The West will be happy to keep up supplies and keep Russia tied up there, and Ukraine will have too much momentum on their side over time.  How many years would the Russian public support death by a thousand paper cuts, when they are able to  access the footage of dead Russians on Telegram, and other social media, etc., unlike in Afghanistan when it was easier to cover up (but couldn’t be - Russian mothers were angry with Gorbachev, etc. and became a power).

It’s like dealing with the underpants gnomes.

underpantsgnomes1.jpg

Zelensky has made it clear that 1 is the only option and every Ukrainian is willing to die before any of the other options. 

I think Russia gets to a certain point of weakness then does something truly stupid/desperate that actually triggers article 5. 

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1 minute ago, immamac said:

Zelensky has made it clear that 1 is the only option and every Ukrainian is willing to die before any of the other options. 

I think Russia gets to a certain point of weakness then does something truly stupid/desperate that actually triggers article 5. 

I think too many in the West might be comfortable with the pre-2022 areas, to the point where it could hamper supplies to Ukraine and make it hard to push Russia completely out of Crimea/etc., and Putin might try and draw some actual lines in the sand before he loses those territories.

I do think that if Russia gets pushed back to the pre-2022 occupied areas, Putin starts a serious game of chicken and things get crazy, because at that point, this is literally Putin’s survival we are talking about.

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15 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

I think too many in the West might be comfortable with the pre-2022 areas, to the point where it could hamper supplies to Ukraine and make it hard to push Russia completely out of Crimea/etc., and Putin might try and draw some actual lines in the sand before he loses those territories.

I do think that if Russia gets pushed back to the pre-2022 occupied areas, Putin starts a serious game of chicken and things get crazy, because at that point, this is literally Putin’s survival we are talking about.

I think this game of chicken has been going on since April, and Putin is losing it and also looking weaker and weaker. Aside from Germany I think everyone is tired of his shit and isn't gonna back down. 

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Also.. I've thought this since the beginning... I think the endgame is him launching a nuke somewhere... Maybe over the Black Sea.. Maybe Kyiv. But wherever it is, it won't have the result he wants. He thinks everyone will back down, when in fact he will seal the fate of Russia forever. 

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2 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

I can think of several potential endgame scenarios, but everything comes down to manpower.  And lest we forget, Ukraine has about a third of the population that Russia has, and can mobilize far more troops to fight Russia.  Russia has a lot of security problems and areas to secure, that tie up hundreds of thousands of troops/personnel across Asia and the Middle East, as well as potentially taking over Belarus if things go down there, while Ukraine is focused on one enemy - Russia.

And we have to start off mentioning that Russia has a massive manpower problem, because it ties his hands and reduces his options.  They have demographic problems that have left them with a smaller pool of manpower to draw from than 10 years ago, and 10 years ago, they had a smaller pool of manpower to draw from than they did 20 and 30 years ago, etc.  This is why he’s combing through Russian prisons, why he begged for Syrians and Africans  to come fight, why he floated the ideas for North Koreans to come help.  It’s why he’s raising the cap to 60 year olds.

And he can’t mass mobilize, because that gets into all kinds of legal and constitutional mumbo jumbo, and more importantly, it’s going to get men and their families out into the streets in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and Russia doesn’t have the manpower to put any massive protests down, because we already know that much of that manpower (the civilian federal security/police/etc.) is actually deployed to Ukraine.  To put it another way, if Putin could have figured out a way to go to a war footing without protests on a massive scale, he would have already done it months ago.

Ironically, going to a wartime footing would allow him to use conscripts in Ukraine on a large scale, but the professional/contract soldiers have born the brunt of the deaths, and with over 1,000+ confirmed officers being killed, which means the conscripts are going to be missing out on experienced officers.  And we’ve already seen evidence of rebelliousness from professional/contract soldiers.  Suddenly throwing in tens of thousands of conscripts would complicate things as many fled or sabotaged their own gear, etc.

All of that leaves a lot of scenarios, but I’m sticking to a few

1. Russia is driven out of all  Ukrainian territory, including Crimea.  100% worst-case scenario for Putin that puts his life/power in danger.  Even though he controls the security services and media, this will be too much for Russians and the oligarchs to stomach. Russia takes territory in 2014, successfully holds it, then he starts a war for more territory and loses everything.  

Is it possible?  Yes, but it’ll be slow going, but as more HIMARS and other systems come online with Ukraine, more and more Russian supply dumps and hardware is destroyed, air defenses are reduced, leaving Russian soldiers isolated and under-supplied. Putin will do everything he can to prevent this, because it’s the end of him.  He will take Russia to a formal war declaration, and he will start grabbing people off the streets of Moscow to feed his war machine, before he accepts this.  I feel like if WMDs are going to come into play, this is it.

2. Putin pulls back to pre-2022 areas and tries to get a cease-fire/armistice. Many in the West might be okay with this. This hurts Putin back home, since Russians will feel like they were lied to (his propagandists on state TV pump way too much sunshine), and it hurts him politically and with the oligarchs (who have lost a massive amount of overseas assets).  And there’s a shit-ton of Russians who will have lost family members, and you’ll have hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers who are pissed off because they were wounded or they felt their comrades died for nothing, etc.

Is it possible?  Putin might go for it, as he might be able to survive this since he controls the security services and media, but his security services are a few hundred thousand actual boots on the ground in a country of 140 million people.  And I doubt he could count on the military to back him in potential coups.  Putin can’t lose everything including the Crimea and survive, so this might be his actual red line, hence my comments about the WMDs above.

3. Putin tries to get a cease-fire/armistice with what Russia controls now in August of 2022.  Back in Russia, it’s Putin’s best scenario, because he can claim he built buffer zones around Crimea and the DPR/LPR and that he de-Nazified Ukraine. 

Is it possible?  No.  Ukraine will not allow that, nor will the West support it.  Ukraine has come too far and inflicted too many losses on Russia.  Ukraine will just bleed Russia dry in a way that Afghanistan and Vietnam never could to Russia or the US, because in those scenarios, both Russia and the US could just fly their troops home and be done.  Trying to retain what they have right now leaves them within range of Ukraine forces and artillery. The West will be happy to keep up supplies and keep Russia tied up there, and Ukraine will have too much momentum on their side over time.  How many years would the Russian public support death by a thousand paper cuts, when they are able to  access the footage of dead Russians on Telegram, and other social media, etc., unlike in Afghanistan when it was easier to cover up (but couldn’t be - Russian mothers were angry with Gorbachev, etc. and became a power).

It’s like dealing with the underpants gnomes.

underpantsgnomes1.jpg

I completely agree with your assessment of Russia’s manpower issues and the structural problems with expanding that pool.  We think of the Red Army in World War II fighting an existential war with allies. That’s not at all similar to Russia today fighting a war of choice with no friends. 

I do think that Russia is going to attempt a run at solution (3).  That’s why all the referendum stuff is already in place. 

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@atomheartbevo I agree those scenarios are the most likely, but I didn’t ask for likely scenarios. I asked how you think this ends.

In your original post you ignored a reality that you acknowledged in a subsequent post: this isn’t a war between Ukraine and Russia. You made a comment to the effect of “Ukraine won’t allow it.” 

This war is between the West and Russia, and it effectively ends the minute the West decides the cost is too high to bear.

We’re in a situation now where the Russians are dug in and UKR either isn’t capable or willing to accept the losses required to regain territory. So many of the strategists predicted the tide would turn this summer. They were wrong.

So where does that leave us?

Either something drastically changes tilting the balance on the battlefield or we’re in a stalemate.

I don’t foresee anything changing for the next couple of months which takes us into winter. So the question becomes which side can ride out this stalemate. You seem to think Putin/Russia are in a constant state of imminent collapse which seems to suggest you think a stalemate favors Ukraine. You’ve fantasized a lot about the Russian population rising up against Putin, etc. 

What you don’t talk about a lot is the risk (which in my opinion is higher) in the West:

IF large populations of Europe freeze this winter, support for this war from the West effectively ends. 

Ukraine’s ability to fight this war ends when the weapon shipments cease. Absent a constant supply of arms from the West, they lose all leverage at the negotiation table.

What happens then?

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I think the agreement should be that Russia gets 10 square miles of land that previously wasn’t theirs, and any animals on the land (hopefully pigs). Putin gets to go home saying he expanded Russia and got some food with it. While the ukr is happy they didn’t lose their land and gave Putin pigs as a symbol and they are secretly infected with some poison agent. Win win all around. 

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TLDR-is there any scenario we send troops to Ukraine or is a missile shootout from us much more likely?
Was at a get together last night and have a conversation with a seemingly smart guy and he brought up an interesting question. If a nuke was dropped by rus or the power plant fails causing a disaster, would we retaliate with nukes or would we actually go over there? Basically we were debating what it would take for us to send troops there, not NATO troops, our RWB superheroes. Is there ever a possibility for that with how it is now or is it pretty clear that it would never happen and just turn into a warhead contest. 

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7 minutes ago, berlinerbaer said:

Am I the only one who thinks it would be easier for UKR to push Russia out of Crimea than the East? If Kherson get's recaptured, then resupply of Crimea from the North gets much harder and then there's only the Kerch bridge to take out and the canal to dry up. 

I don't have a read on the Russian population and what it would take for Putin to officially declare war and mobilize the Russian population for war. But Ukraine taking Crimea might be considered an act of war that allows Putin to declare war against Ukraine and mobilize its population for war.

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33 minutes ago, berlinerbaer said:

Am I the only one who thinks it would be easier for UKR to push Russia out of Crimea than the East? If Kherson get's recaptured, then resupply of Crimea from the North gets much harder and then there's only the Kerch bridge to take out and the canal to dry up. 

The Russians still control the Black Sea shipping lanes and ports and they’ve turned the peninsula into a big military base.  They are insensitive to civilian suffering and would be able bring in enough supplies to keep the troops fed by sea. Ukraine has no amphibious landing capacity. The isthmus of Perekop is 4 miles wide and any offensive from the mainland without air superiority would end in total disaster.  The East and south is far more favorable to an offensive that allows maneuver and to recapture and hold territory. 

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49 minutes ago, RockyMountainHighHorn said:

TLDR-is there any scenario we send troops to Ukraine or is a missile shootout from us much more likely?
Was at a get together last night and have a conversation with a seemingly smart guy and he brought up an interesting question. If a nuke was dropped by rus or the power plant fails causing a disaster, would we retaliate with nukes or would we actually go over there? Basically we were debating what it would take for us to send troops there, not NATO troops, our RWB superheroes. Is there ever a possibility for that with how it is now or is it pretty clear that it would never happen and just turn into a warhead contest. 

The most likely escalation would be: Russia drops a nuke or blows up the plant > NATO (US) air assets engage over Ukraine to impose a no-fly zone and/or help Ukraine gain ground> Russia retaliates or attempts to retaliate with a conventional strike against NATO-nation bases hosting those aircraft with their own missiles and aircraft> NATO (US) air assets attack Russian bases>Boom.

Very hard to see things escalating to the point of Russia vs. U.S. on the ground.  The two scenarios are really Russia giving up or the whole thing going up. 

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