Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

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What makes anyone on this platform believe that Ukraine has any chance of victory? It doesn't even have a working economy anymore, the US tax payer is paying both the government and the military's salaries. It's most resource rich areas are now in Russian hands. They started with over a thousand tanks, hundreds of jets, got hundreds of soviet tanks from various places, got hundreds of artillery pieces and hundreds of thousands of ammunition and somehow we assume that the 120 stitched together leopard1, challenger, and other tanks will now be the wunderwaffe to help them win. All the while all authoritative western military institutions have said that the neither the US nor the EU can compete with Russia when it comes to either artillery nor missile production.

People on HN are engineers, how can we not comprehend that you can't just take random objects stitch them together and somehow the whole thing will still work. It's as if I'd have a rails project fire 90% of my engineering team and then hire cobol, C++ and Rust developers and then hope that if each one of them builds their own respective feature in their favourite language I can somehow stitch it together. Such a thing hardly makes sense for a random tank supply chain. Doesn't seem to work for the railway system which uses Soviet gauges and makes even less sense for an integrated air defense system.

EDIT: guys, how can you not talk about any of the facts when you guys respond?

When people agree that Ukraine loses multiple times as many people for every Russian that dies, when even the US Navy secretary says that Ukraine is depleting NATO weapon stocks, when even the thinktank that predicted the fall of the Russian government are now saying that NATO cannot match Russia in weapon stocks, then you are not winning, just because the borders don't change.

The border does not matter. What matters is how much western weapons and Ukrainian personal has been destroyed vs. Russia.

Russia has had 1 mobilization and those troops haven't even been committed to battle yet. Ukraine has gone through 12 or so. They lowered the mobilization age to 16. It goes up to 60 and it doesn't even exclude disabilities anymore. That's not winning. That's sacrificing your population.

Even the ex Israeli prime minister now said that the US blocked peace deals.

> What makes anyone on this platform believe that Ukraine has any chance of victory?

Because for this platform the definition of "victory" is not "did Russia collapse ?" but rather "did Russia loose more than they gained ?". And as time goes by the cost (both economically and politically) of the war is increasing (steeply) and the gains are stalling (at best).

The goal of the western world is not to "beat" Russia, but rather to show that launching any kind of agression against it is not a clever move.

Opinions quickly changed when this Russian equipment broke down constantly, or flat out did not work, or had key parts stolen while in storage for all these years. It turns out NATO has been equipping to fight the military Russia said it had.

> When people agree that Ukraine loses multiple times as many people for every Russian that dies

Sure, if you listen to the Russian propagandists and ignore the common sense in the simplest of questions, Ukraine doesn't have any chance of victory. But we'll soon get to the anniversary of Kyiv fallen in 3 days.

> That's sacrificing your population.

Big if true, but if you haven't noticed the population doesn't want to be butchered by Russians instead, or recycled by Moscow in the future wars, like Russian speakers of the 2014-annexed territories were.

> What makes anyone on this platform believe that Ukraine has any chance of victory?

A year ago, basically nobody gave Ukraine a chance to hold out more than a couple of weeks maximum. And here we are.

This war is very much undecided and can go both ways. Russian collapse is far from certain, but also far from impossible.

Ukraine has many generals trained by NATO, and is getting more NATO training. Yes the west is propping them up, but they have plenty of training. They are also helped immensely by Russia making a lot of military stupid decisions. They are winning now - a good defense is often better than a great offense.

Ukraine has no chance of outright battlefield victory, however sufficient military aid can keep them in the fight and produce a grinding stalemate like in WW1. The hope is that this war of attrition will eventually lead to regime change in Russia and perhaps a further fragmentation of the country to continue the process started in 1991. Even if Russia holds together politically and continues to occupy parts of Ukraine, they are losing so many soldiers that they won't be able to credibly threaten our allies for years to come.

IMO the only regime change likely in Russia will not make you happy. There're some very pro-military leaders arise recently. Putin does not allow for war to go full-scale. Those leaders will.

Fragmentation is possible but I don't believe it, at least for now.

Russia loses soldiers but they obtain much more soldiers with perfect battle training, they acquire priceless experience as to which weapons are effective and so on.

It's not that simple.

If anything, threat to eastern Europe is as huge as ever.

Sometimes I think that Putin slows this war on purpose. To train more soldiers, to weed out bad blood from commanders, to put their weapon to real test. Basically to build a real army.

> IMO the only regime change likely in Russia will not make you happy.

Don't be daft!

Any new Russian leader, no matter how hawkish they currently talk, knows full well that Russian forces are depleted and will be incapable of waging a "major" war for many years to come.......

I saw a video recently where a column of Russian tanks was advancing along a road when the lead vehicle was hit by artillery. The others proceeded to ... just stop and wait until they were also hit.

Now I'm no expert in mechanized warfare but I think when you're caught by artillery fire on an open road with no cover you're not supposed to sit there and wait to get hit. Advance past the kill zone, retreat, or disperse but don't stop and wait for orders. Apparently this is the result of "perfect battle training" a year into the war.

There're hundreds of thousands of soldiers. There're dozens of thousands of tanks and other vehicles. Incompetence is unavoidable and those kinds of situations put this incompetence to focus and hopefully measures will be developed to prevent it from happening in the future.

Why would you hope for that? We should all hope that Russian soldiers remain incompetent and die or withdraw without hurting anyone else.

What tanks? T62? T34?..

"obtain much more soldiers with perfect battle training"

Funny how those soldiers with perfect battle training still suffer from enormous incompetence, resulting in routs such as in Vuhledar. The units that fought there were reportedly Russian elite marine units. They died like flies in an unforgiving terrain, without air and even arty support.

"Perfect" soldiers would not even start an assault in such conditions.

"All the while all authoritative western military institutions have said that the neither the US nor the EU can compete with Russia when it comes to either artillery nor missile production."

That is bullshit and you know it pretty well. Most Russian missiles are shot down by AA already and the terror waves have become smaller, indicating that Russians actually need to save the remaining missiles.

Russia can almost certainly outproduce the current West when it comes to arty ammo, but that factoid, while true, is irrelevant. Western artillery is much more precise and precision is what really matters. The Russians are great in turning random fields into a pocketed lunar landscape, WWI-style, but a single Excalibur round that obliterates a Russian headquarters or ammo dump has done orders of magnitude more damage.

Ukraine alone wouldn't be able to win this, no. But Ukraine with support of countries that, together, are about 30 times richer than Russia, is going to win this. The main problem is the human cost, but that is unavoidable when fighting a horde of orcs.

"When people agree that Ukraine loses multiple times as many people for every Russian that dies"

Russian propagandists agree on all sorts of bullshit, but it would be extraordinary if the ratio of losses on a static front favored an attacker. This only happens if the attacker is much stronger than the defender, like the US vs. Iraq, but in such a situation, the defender usually collapses rather fast.

We see the very opposite, the Russians have been trying to take Bakhmut for half a year, so far unusccessfully, and throwing more and more meat into the mix. Second army of the world, more like 140th.

> What makes anyone on this platform believe that Ukraine has any chance of victory?

Quite interesting question with the timing of this great summary of Russian information operations [1]. An excerpt:

> Russia uses the narrative that Ukraine is incapable of defeating Russia because of inherent power disparities between the two states to mitigate major Russian setbacks or Russian failures to achieve rapid successes in major offensive operations.

[1] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offens...

  > What makes anyone on this platform believe that Ukraine has any chance of victory?

The reality is Russia isn't just at war with Ukraine, they are at war in Ukraine but they're fighting against a military backed by NATO. That doesn't mean Russia will lose, it really just depends on how much money and humans NATO wants to send into the meat grinder. As long as it's only Ukrainians dying, people in the US and EU are fine with burning the money.

So it really depends on what constitutes a victory.

Because when empirical evidence defies theory, it's time to reevaluate the theory.

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