Now, you can say that UN failed to prevent the invasion and do its job, but expelling Russia means you’re left with no forum for dialogs and negotiations. Contrary to the scenes made out of the sabre-rattling in public, it all comes down to money and power - and those things get negotiated in private in these forums.
Russia has no real military power, as the last 7 months have shown us. It was not even a founding member of the UN Security Council – the Soviet Union, a real world superpower, was.
> Now, you can say that UN failed to prevent the invasion and do its job, but expelling Russia means you’re left with no forum for dialogs and negotiations.
That's exactly my point: the UN failed to prevent the invasion, because the invading country had a veto right in all of its decisions.
Any dialogs or negotiations with Russia are an illusion of naive Western powers who don't understand how Russia really works: it doesn't care about or respect any international agreements it signs.
Source: I was born in the Soviet Union.
If it doesn't really care then I don't see how it's a failure of the UN.
The UN only works if its members are willing to allow it to work, the only power that the UN has is derived from the willingness of its members to cooperate.
It's a forum for discussion not the solution for everything bad in the world.
Russia has plenty of military power, it is just that Russia may not be able to handle its own military power.
The idea that Ukraine can resist the fully mobilized Russian Federation - military and industry is plain silly.
The reason that this has not happened so far is because the people at the top fear that putting the entire country on war footing will result in internal instability will be the end of those people.
The upcoming annexation may change all that.
For instance, like loosing more than 70% of all its tanks since the beginning of invasion[1]?
> The idea that Ukraine can resist the fully mobilized Russian Federation - military and industry is plain silly.
The idea that amateurs with zero military training could achieve more than 235,000 killed or wounded professional Russian soldiers achieved in the last 7 months sounds pretty unbelievable to me.
https://www.mil.gov.ua/en/news/2022/09/29/the-total-combat-l...
(Maybe because Ukraine's Ministry of Defence is only counting complete "liquidations".)
According to the government it's at war against.
For the US this is the equivalent of listening to Baghdad Bob.
https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-docum...
That’s still a huge amount of tanks to lose in 8 months. It’s no wonder they are cracking out the T62s already.
Also, Russia is not even a world superpower: neither economically, nor militarily. It could easily be replaced by India as a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2022/09/27/russia-putin...
Personally I don't think it IS just a matter of time before nukes are used. Putin is not a nice guy, but he isn't a comic book villain. Plus this is a ground war, so any nuke ruins the land they're fighting over and kills as many of their own troops (who aren't exactly equipped for basic fighting, let alone fallout)
Russia has enough nukes (almost 6000, and the ability to deliver them) to annihilate any other country, and put the whole planet into nuclear winter. That makes them a super power, even if they cannot win a ground war with Ukraine. For reference, India only has 160
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264435/number-of-nuclear...
Also, given it's history of annexing it's neighbours and conflicts with China and Pakistan (both also nuclear states) India is a very poor candidate for Security Council membership (at least as a "better" substitute for Russia).
Whenever somebody said that "Putin is not that crazy to do X" – he eventually did exactly that.
Hear it from the Russian soldiers themselves:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/28/world/europe/...
The thing is, he might have no other choice: he is a strongman, and for any strongman loosing a war would mean the end of being in power.
> Plus this is a ground war, so any nuke ruins the land they're fighting over and kills as many of their own troops (who aren't exactly equipped for basic fighting, let alone fallout)
If you know the history of the Soviet Union, you know that they don't care about the lives of their own people, at all.
How many Soviet soldiers died in WWII? About 10M.
How many Russians soldiers died in the past 7 months alone? Between 50-80K.
> Russia has enough nukes (almost 6000, and the ability to deliver them) to annihilate any other country, and put the whole planet into nuclear winter. That makes them a super power, even if they cannot win a ground war with Ukraine. For reference, India only has 160
Many analysts point out, that all the Russian nukes are from the 1960s-1980s, and given the state of all their military equipment during the invasion there is an extremely high likelihood of complete failure to deliver any threat at all.
Those are Ukrainian reports.
US reports put the number at 15k, Russian reports put it at 5k.
I find it kind of astonishing people are citing Ukrainian numbers as anything short of blatant propaganda, just like Russian ones.
https://fortune.com/2022/03/14/ukraine-russia-death-tolls-mi...
If there’s so few casualties of the initial invading force it makes absolutely no sense for putin to start mobilisation, which he did.
>If there’s so few casualties of the initial invading force it makes absolutely no sense for putin to start mobilisation, which he did.
Russian army doctrine is different to US army doctrine. Russia always had a conscription heavy army and needs vastly more manpower than the US to fight a war. I imagine they were expecting the Ukrainian army to collapse like the army in Georgia did in 2008 which is why they weren't prepared for an actual fight.
This is the first real war between advanced economies since Desert Storm. It is a painful lesson that second rate powers can again standup to first rate powers on the ground since military tech now costs pennies on the million.
I _really_ hope the West is taking notes because if we're not than we're in for a surprise just as unpleasant as the one the Russians are getting.
US reports are worthless, because it has no soldiers on the ground.
The extremely high Russian casualty rate has been reported by multiple independent sources from inside Russia.
For instance:
> "Everyone went to the SVO," Astashov told RFE/RL, using the acronym for "special military operation," the euphemism the Kremlin has insisted on using when discussing the war in Ukraine.
> According to Astashov, the size of the brigade when it deployed was about 1,500 troops. The total number of dead, by Astashov's estimate: "At least several hundred."
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-army-casualty-rate-64th-briga...
Also, many huge Russian loses in Ukraine were confirmed by NATO countries with visuals:
> The British defense ministry on Friday said satellite imagery has confirmed that Ukrainian forces decimated a Russian battalion as it tried to cross a series of pontoon bridges over a river in northeast Ukraine earlier this week, a dramatic setback for Russian forces already struggling to make significant progress along the eastern front.
> Russian battalion groups generally have between 700 and 1,000 men.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/13/world/europe/ukraine-russ...