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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Ukraine is a cautionary tale in that as much as military technology can change, that conflict is being decided by trenches, minefields, artillery, fixed fortifications, the inability of either side to cross a river and manpower attrition.

At this point, it's basically a World War One conflict, mainly because neither side has air superiority.

Russia's strategy now seems to be to wait out the Western will to provide material aid to Ukraine, at which point it will have gained territory, a vital land bridge to Crimea and a Black Sea port.

In this potential outcome, Ukraine is likely to swing far right, politically, and Russia will face their own draining insurgencies in former Ukrainian territory.

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Ukraine is a really cautionary tale to always have nuclear weapons and never give them up. Russia would never have tried this if Ukraine still had the capability to demolish a city with a button press

Look at how cautious the rest of the world is in helping Ukraine.

Ukraine had some parts of the nuclear weapon system, but it didn’t have the system as a whole. There’s all kinds of very specialised plants and tech the country has to develop and maintain, and USSR made a point to distribute all industries (not only nuclear or even military) and supply chains among the republics. To be able to demolish a city in 2023, Ukraine would have not only not given the weapons away, but also invest tens (or hundreds) of billions of dollars over the years, developing some components completely from scratch.

I think the point is that Russia would have been worried Ukraine had done exactly that.

Publicly giving up all your nuclear stockpile is the complete opposite.

Until quite recently (and there is still a massive and extremely hard road ahead) Ukraine was basically a failed state and/or a Russian puppet. So I doubt Russia would’ve had to worry about something like that at all.

Ukraine had a functioning public health and transportation systems, universities that attracted students from other countries, a music industry that had outcompeted Russia in its own language, and tech sector with senior dev salaries routinely going up to $60-100k - and that’s just the things I have had first hand experience with. For all it’s problems, it definitely wasn’t a failed state.

For some people living there it wasn’t. On average however it was, there is no way around it extreme corrupt/poverty, GDP per capita on the same level as 3rd world countries.

It started off more or less on the same level as the Baltics, Bulgaria, Romania and not that far from Poland. But economically it permanently remained in the 90s. Unfortunately it's an extremely poor country by European (both Eastern and Western) standards

> dev salaries routinely going up to $60-100k - and that’s just the things I have had first hand experience with

IIRC those developers paid(pay?) approximately no taxes which would partially explain the below subsistence level retirement pensions?

> Unfortunately it's an extremely poor country by European (both Eastern and Western) standards

Yes. Which is still pretty far from "failed state". Somali, Afghanistan and Venezuela are failed states. A lot of countries around the world are just poor. But in case of countries like Argentina or Ukraine, you have to keep in mind that they can at the same time be very cheap — and thus offer a much higher standard of living to their citizens that you would imagine just by looking at dollar figures.

> IIRC those developers paid(pay?) approximately no taxes which would partially explain the below subsistence level retirement pensions?

It also explains suspiciously low official GDP stats in Russia, Ukraine and other countries in the region. A lot of economic activity is completely invisible to the government and, therefore, statistics.

North Korea managed.

So what? That’s not particularly relevant

It is, it shows how little a country needs to maintain/develop nukes

They dedicated massive amounts of resources to this over very long periods of time. This wouldn’t be possible at all even in somewhat less restrictive authoritarian states let alone somewhat democratic ones like Ukraine.

There is no way any government in Ukraine during economic turmoil of the 90s that decided to spend billions on developing nukes would’ve stayed in power.

So I still don’t see how is that in anyway relevant?

Yes, it's trench war. No, drones nowadays pay huge role in combat - fpv drones take out majority of fighting vehicles, terrorize and kill humans in trenches by dropping grenades, by striking inside of covers, other drones put mines, etc. It became a big problem for both sides so that most of supply and forces rotation is done at night. But there are also fpv drones with night vision. Drones became a pillar equal to artillery due to their cost and effectivness - single fpv costs $800-$1500, one artillery shot costs more. Plus drones have higher success rate.

The tactics are an artifact of the players attempting to avoid a broader-scale conflict. Moreover, direct conflict between two nuclear-armed states isn't something we've ever done before. Nobody wants to go down that road.

If the US and/or NATO were directly involved, it wouldn't look anything like trench warfare, and we wouldn't be using 30+ year old military tech. We really want to avoid this, though.

> Moreover, direct conflict between two nuclear-armed states isn't something we've ever done before. Nobody wants to go down that road.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kargil_War

In theory, considering the state Russia’s military is in at this stage of the war, NATO could just steamroll the entire country just like US/UK did in Iraq. If they wanted to AND there were no nukes.

Of course the current balance of power and military doctrines etc. wouldn’t really exist without nukes

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