The Russian commander of the “Vostok” Battalion fighting in southern Ukraine said on Thursday that Ukraine will not be defeated and suggested that Russia freeze the war along current frontlines.
Alexander Khodakovsky made the candid concession yesterday on his Telegram channel after Russian forces, including his own troops, were devastatingly defeated by Ukrainian marines earlier this week at Urozhaine in the Zaporizhzhia-Donetsk regional border area.
“Can we bring down Ukraine militarily? Now and in the near future, no,” Khodakovsky, a former official of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, said yesterday.
“When I talk to myself about our destiny in this war, I mean that we will not crawl forward, like the [Ukrainians], turning everything into [destroyed] Bakhmuts in our path. And, I do not foresee the easy occupation of cities,” he said.
It is a proxy war against America. You don’t win those. You just set yourself up a good position and dig in. America gets bored and leaves and then you can pick over what is left of what was destroyed. So you don’t win, you just wait for America to forfeit.
Russia does not have the resources for that. A reminder this isn’t a proxy war for them, even though it is for the West. Russia is there in person conventionally and is somehow losing to a minor Western ally.
The Ukrainians aren’t going to run out of stuff within the next year for sure, and maybe not ever because even if the US gets bored Europe is highly invested. Russia has negligible productive capacity of it’s own, and is bound to have serious problems eventually, unless they convince China to help and China has so far been uninterested. They could theoretically win by population attrition, I guess, but nobody’s really talking about that yet. And, to do anything, they need political stability, after already having one mostly-failed coup.
How are you defining “losing” here? They’re occupying the separatist parts of Ukraine and can do so indefinitely.
Their original objective was to topple the government in Kiev, and they’ve gotten fairly continuously further from that. Saying they’re winning has “Mission Accomplished!” energy at this point.
They’re occupying Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea if that’s what you mean, although it’s in question if they can do that or anything else including exist indefinitely.
Citation needed.
Here’s a map of the invasion a few weeks in. Kiev (Киев if you can’t read Cyrillic) is the capital of the nation. What does it look like they tried to achieve right off the bat?
Edit: Oooh, Wikipedia has an animation if it’s still not clear.
Lmao, okay.
Well, there war goals were to protect Donbass, kill a shitload of Nazis, and de-militarize Ukraine. Plans change but it still looks like they’re doing what they set out to do.
Ukraine is looking plenty militerised, and more pro-Western than ever.
There are a finite number of 18-35 year old men.
“Kill nearly every young man in Ukraine” is their main path to victory, but Russia has only about 4x the population of Ukraine, so they’ll have to mind their casualty ratios pretty well. And avoid any more coups.
Presumably the young men of Ukraine will realize that throwing themselves on to the enemy guns is a losing proposition at some point before that but who knows?
According to who? If you read the article from U.S. military analysts posted elsewhere in this thread, not even they think that was the point of the early war thrust towards Kiev.
Interesting you mention “Mission Accomplished” – would you say the U.S. and its media did a good job of accurately informing the public about the War on Terror? Would you say they had good intentions?
What did they decide the Kiev thing was about? Was it a botched attempt at a decapitation strike to prevent basically everything else that happened?
It’s very much worth a read. The broad strokes are:
The Kiev attack’s goal appears to have been “disrupt, divert, and if you see opportunities, take them.” I bet if the Ukrainian government had shown signs of folding or if the defense of Kiev had been weaker they would have pushed for more, but that didn’t happen, the separatist regions were taken successfully, and the Russian Kiev column had no more reason to be there.
Okay, sure. That fits.
Removed by mod
Press X to doubt.
Could you link that? It goes against everything I’ve read and I can’t find it myself.
Nobody who has even a modicum of understanding of geopolitics doubts this. India and Russia have a very strong relationship that goes back to the days of USSR which was one of the biggest forces that helped liberate India from western colonization. Meanwhile, Russia losing the war would be an utter disaster for China. US is very openly trying to surround China militarily, and Russia acts as a shield in the west. The worst possible outcome for China would be the west managing to destabilize Russia and put a pro western government in power. If there was even the slightest chance that Russia could lose this conflict then China would step in.
I disagree. The Cold War is ancient history and China’s probably just as happy carving up Russia as living beside it.
Give any example or argument that shows China would want to carve up Russia
More territory is good, if the opportunity would present itself this would make China stronger. They also don’t want another Xinjiang they have to genocide, though, so I imagine they wouldn’t actually annex much. Maybe just take back the old Qing cities and puppet the rest.
Like actual material evidence that China would want to do it and not just fantasy theory crafting in your mind
This is pure projection on what you’d do if you ran a country
US literally says it wants to prevent China from developing and has surrounded it with military bases, but whatever you say buddy. The brains of Chinese leaders aren’t as smooth as yours.
Only if you believe your own propaganda, because none of that occurred at all.
None of what occurred? If you’re gonna lie then at least lie about something that can’t be easily googled.
It’s not just the US though. The European powers are far more firmly committed. It’s not at all clear that the rest of NATO will simply walk away if/when the US does. Especially the former Soviet nations; this is not a fucking game to them. The loss of US support would be huge, but I don’t see a universe in which the Europeans just roll over for Putin once the US loses interest.
So firmly committed that america had to blow up one of germany’s pipelines? Are you having a fucking laugh?
Everyone I speak to, you know, normal people, thinks this is a fucking stupid distraction from domestic politics and the consistently declining standard of living we are seeing. America has ended european prosperity with this shit and it won’t recover for 50 years. You think people here haven’t noticed that?
USA invaded Ukraine? That’s news to me
The US assisted in the 2014 fascist coup that led to the fascist transitionary government, the deployment of all the fascist militias to attacking the donbas, and the 8 year long civil war that led to Russia eventually invading.
Your mindset on this shit is that it began in 2022 which is false, the US has been stoking it since 8 years earlier. If you want we could go even further back though, Operation Aerodynamic was the US operation to fund, arm and support fascists in Ukraine in order to destabilise the soviet union. Absolutely none of this would be happening today without the US’ historic support of fascists.
Imagine liking a queerphobic dictatorship.
What are you talking about? I said I don’t like America. How did you get it backwards?
America is a plutocracy which accepts queerness in its federal law. Your gotcha went too broad.
Bwahahaha
Oh wait you’re serious
Bwahahahahahahahahaha
Mate. Respect for Marriage Act 2022 is a federal law protecting same sex marriages. It’s there. It’s fact. Bwaha etc.
Someone else is going to have to explain the ignorance present in this statement for I do not have the time or energy, could one of our cishet hexbears be a good ally?
You are incapable. That is because the comment is factually correct. US Federal law has protections for queerness. The cited law proves it. What point are you trying to make exactly?
The long and short of it is that legalizing gay marriage isn’t even a strong step to lgbt liberation, it is literally just tepid assimilationism. We are only “accepted by federal law” in most narrow and on their terms sense. Call me when the US government federally covers trans Healthcare, makes conversion torture a federal crime, deals with the queer(especially child) homelessness problem, and purges the people calling us all pedophiles.
Also, learn some fucking humility.
Imagine having the reading comprehension of a sixth grader.
Putin can hang from a barbed wire noose and also this is a US proxy war
Wait a minute… Who invaded Ukraine in 2014, and again in 2021? Who illegally annexed sovereign territory? America is not blameless, but in this war they are just the arms dealer
After whose coup d’etat?
Ahhh let’s talk about those! The one in Russia last month was pretty cool. Sending Wagner to Belarus to mess with Poland, only for Poland to send 10,000 troops and see Wagner get shipped out of Belarus was pretty funny. Russia keeps trying the same playbook, and now it’s being met with equal force, so they’re pissed. Same reason the EU border states just expelled thousands of Russian citizens.
They keep trying to stage coups using Russian citizens. The coup in Ukraine in 2014 was preceded by a border buildup of “special operation forces.” It also noteworthy how Russia has changed the lingo and now calls it “War in Ukraine.”
The USA has been training Ukraine military and irregulars for years. They organized a volunteer force to go fight there. They sent their politicians to support the right-wing coup. What the fuck are you talking about they are just arms dealers? They are providing recon and military intelligence, they are mobilizing their satellites and aerial assets, they are doing political work to get other nations to provide support and they are putting constraints on peace deals. They are not a fucking arms dealer.
The US also sent a large number of politicians to spend 4th of July (their biggest nationalist holiday) in Russia.
Was there a coup immediately after their visit?