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Comment by poisonborz | Hacker News Reader

> Ukraine could somehow "defeat" Russia while still avoiding WW3

Why? These kind of cold-war era proxy wars happened throughout history. One big power makes a move directly or indirectly, while the other side will be supported indirectly by other powers. It becomes a pure resource war, and no party has a reason to escalate it beyond the conflict zone. Russia has no reason to open new fronts even if NATO props the war zone, or covertly supports sabotage attacks within Russia's border - the same way the US or China fights proxy wars, based on success, they take it or leave it (for the time). Ukraine is a long term strategic investment for Russia, not a life and death struggle.

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This is not a proxy war. Russia is involved directly on its border. A proxy war is in a far off land.

Afghanistan was on the border of USSR. Why was that a proxy war and this one isn't?

USSR is not Russia. Afghanistan was a not a "core interest" or existential threat to any of the USSR nations.

If we use the Afghanistan analogy, Ukraine is on the border of NATO too. Interestingly, then NATO would be the overextended multinational entity trying to expand even further in this scenario. If we expect an "Afghanistan" scenario to repeat itself, then logically one would expect NATO to collapse.

I was not saying that USSR is Russia.

In earlier comment you said: "Vietnam and Afghanistan .... Those were pure proxy wars. This is not a proxy war, it is a direct hot war." And here you wrote: "This is not a proxy war. Russia is involved directly on its border. A proxy war is in a far off land." And I was saying that Afghanistan was not a far off land, it was on the border, so your two usages of "proxy war" weren't consistent.

Sorry, I don't understand your second paragraph, I was not trying to draw an analogy with USSR and Afghanistan.

As I understand, your argument is instead that: "Afghanistan was not important to USSR, so USSR did not consider using nuclear weapons then", while "Ukraine is a core interest of Russia, so it will rather start a nuclear war (and risk destruction of the world) rather than back down and return to the positions before Feb 24th." I don't know if this statement is as obviously correct as it may seem to you. Certainly many believe that Russia is not willing to self-destruct to stand the ground here.

It is a proxy war for the US. After all, Russia is not at war with Ukraine, it is at war in Ukraine, against NATO.

This is wrong, which even Putin has confessed. It’s all about Putin wanting to create a new Great Russia.

That doesn't contradict what I said though. Yes Putin wants to expand the Russian sphere of influence, and yes NATO is fighting against that in a proxy war led by the US, in Ukraine.

This isn't just Ukraine v Russia, hence the proxy war label is correct.

I think most Ukrainians would disagee.

Russia is certainly at war with Ukraine.

US/NATO isn't involved in this war? It's just Russia vs Ukraine?

In those debates I just asking what my debatee knows about Ukrainian reconnaissance satellites.

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