Major wars move through predictable phases, but it's hard to recognize them in the day to day minutiae while you're in them. It's only later that historians writing Wikipedia pages can properly couch the significance of this and that event, what the outcomes REALLY meant, and what they said about the final direction of travel for the conflict.

The Conflict Starts- the players decide what their strategic objectives are. They like their plans, whether it's on attack or defence, they like it enough to proceed. Attack? Fight? Flee? Brief or Long? How long can we stick to this phase? Everyone is pretty confident that they can or must prevail during Phase 1.

The Adjustments - Unless the outcome is quick, clear and decisive and the defending regime decides to flee or the agressor pulls back, Adjustments need to be made. This phase is strongly influenced by the respective sides' allies - how much, what kind and how long will support be counted on to continue? Tactical leaders will be replaced/scapegoated for failures, and Strategic ones may be changed out. Like when Westmoreland is replaced in Vietnam, McLelland in the U.S. Civil War, MacArthur in the Korean War. In Ukraine, this refers to when Zaluzhnyi and Shoigu step aside, and new leaders are brought in promising bold new ways of thinking. The political leadership doesn't change at this point, as they're pot committed to their original objectives. They're convinced, or tell themselves at least, that The Adjustments will salvage their original goals. How much they believe it is irrelevant - it just happens and tends to extend the war for both. These new commanders will get 2-3 years of leash - one year to change things, one year to assess the impact of those changes, and one year to explain their failures. If you have to change the overall leader again at this point - you're probably losing.

The Signal & The Lies - All possible adjustments have been made, and their impacts assessed. The parties are doing all they can. This is where The Leader tends to step in and take more personal control over battlefield decisions. Which almost never works and is immediately resented by miliary leadership. Firings accelerate, factions emerge, plots and coups start to germinate. The professional army is mostly spent, and the quality of The Average Fighting Man is in decline - but technology starts to advance more rapidly on both sides. Anything that actually works is quickly copied by the other side - Poison Gas, Tanks & Tactical Artillery in WW1, Aircraft Carriers & Air Power in WW2, Infantry ATGMs, SAMs & MANPADs over armor & aircraft during the various conflicts of the Cold War. This war's evolution is tactical battlefield coordination, scaled A.I. analysis/targeting & especially cost-effective Drones of every kind.

The eventual outcome of the war becomes pretty clear, but hubris & sunk cost sustains the killing. The Lying starts. To themsleves, to their armies, to their industries, to their bureaucrats, to the public. The realities of the conflict cut through regime propaganda - this is where rational actors taper off their goals and look for a settlement. Shortages of every kind reveal themselves - men, materiel, money, air & artillery support, fuel, food, ammo - there's not enough of anything. Lines remain frozen - because these societies can still give and take a punch - they both lack the incremental superiority over the other side that makes the others' position hopeless. In the Azeri-Armenia war, the difference was drones. Azeris were a 21st century army with drones, and Armenia was a 20th century army without them. Or without good allies either. They had no choice, and had to capitulate. The Ukraine war has no capability-imbalance at this point. Talk of peace begins -the settlement demands are still publicly unrealistic, but behind closed doors, the regimes want to surivive and talk more pragmatically. This is where the Iran-Iraq war ended, for example. We're here now with the Ukraine war. Or maybe just slightly past it. Even the Japanese in WW2 soooooort of stopped here, or slightly over into the next, optional phase.

The Madness - Irrational actors who are overinvested in the outcomes keep fighting long after the outcome is obvious. Military and domestic realities are ignored - whether it's on the offensive or defensive. It was well understood by 1943 that Germany would lose. More recently- like the Tamil Tigers fighting until their top leadership is literally eliminated in Sri Lanka. Like Gaddhafi, Ceaucescu, Hitler, Saddam, Assad - the leadership is not ever going to accept military defeat or disgrace. The conflict lasts until the leader is gone. Usually dead.

That's probably where we're at with Putin. There is absolutely no way he achieves his strategic goals of reconquering Ukraine and establishing it as a permanent colony. Zero chance. Regardless of how it happens, naturally or otherwise, this war lasts as long as he does, unfortunately.

Putin is an overpromoted gangster ghoul bully in the twilight of his life. There is no Ideological Spy -> Vengeful Tsar -> Glorious Restorer third act for him. Nothing that happens on any front in Ukraine is going to sway Putin to reasonableness. Forget Donetsk, Kherson, Zaporhizia - the realities of those places doesn't matter at all. The only front that can sway him is The Russian Front. Shortages of Gas, Manpower and economic collapse are the only thing that can force his hand. Ukraine would be wise to continue their current strategy to erode the Russian home front.

The Russian population in 2026 is NOT the same meek, uninformed serf-slave workforce of WW2 that can reolcate it's entire industrial base to the Urals to avoid invading Nazis. They won't work 24 hour industrial factory shifts, sustained by grim pots of rotten potatotes and sour cabbage, making low tech weapons tirelessly with a political commissar's pistol in their back. They can't even tolerate cancelling Crimean vacation plans and gas shortages.

Ukraine seems to realize this. They aren't close to cracking. But the russian population is. Once consumer spending and industry collapse, and in particular - when even the military can't or won't gather the resources requried to mush forward into an explosive death - then and ONLY then will The Madness end.

What do you think? Let's have a chin wag.

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[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 11 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

This is very simple, there is no war machine for a massive (de)mechanized ground war if you lose the air defense war.

Airpower cannot exert political power, but it is maximally effective at dismantling the means for industrial scale war.

Russia can call up all the untrained grunts they want, Putin can delude himself to the last minute, it does not change this calculus.

Veteran air defense crews and sophisticated air defense equipment don't grow on trees...

[–] TwinkleToes@lemmy.ca 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

EX-FUCKING-ZACTLY. Thank you.

Airpower has hard limits, as the U.S. just recently found...again...in Iran. You need effective boots on the ground to move the needle. Even the massive, sustained, years-long Strategic Bombing campaign in WW2 required sending in massed ground forces right into the center of Berlin to end the European portion of the war. No air campaign has ever by itself achieved strategic political objectives in history.

And the air war that Russia is using for stand off terror attacks is INCREDIBLY resource intensive. It's costing Russia billions to kill a handful of innocent people every day. Those assets, including the crews, are expesnive and the aircraft are essentially irreplaceable, with finite lifespans before you consider losses.

Russia essentially has a three part strategy at this point:

Push small infiltration teams into soft areas. Hope they live long enough to encourage organized resistance to fall back to the next line of defense.
Stand off terror bombing.
Keep doing 1 & 2 until they give you something to make it stop.

The problem with #1 is that your policy is Infestation. But - like bugs, mice or rats, you can kill them now, soon or later. But eventually, you can get them all with enough Repellent & Traps. In this case, drone saturation.

The problem with #2 is like you said - it does not achieve a political objective

#3 only works if #1 does, and #1 only works if Ukraine agrees to stop killing your forward forces. Just ask the U.S. how vietnam went. They could engage enemy forces and eventually win battles - but then your occupying forces get sniped, bombed, shelled, droned, counter attacked. Eventually you realize that the cost of holding land is untenable - you can't pacify the ground, so you eventually choose to leave. What "works" for infiltration is not the same strategy that works for occupation. If the Ukrainians never stop bleeding the Russians, then the entire point of occypying and exploiting economic activity on the stolen ground never materializes. And they have to leave.

This is the recurring argument I have with people online who say "UKRAINE CAN'T RETAKE CRIMEA". They don't have to. They just have to make the Russians leave. If Crimea has no food, no fuel, no water, it is a barren rock outcrop that is bloody well uninhabitable. A tragedy, but - in the interim, it is also a buffer zone between Ukraine and Russia. When Russia either grows up or collapses, then maybe a peaceful existence becomes possible. Seems insane, but - time is a funny thing. The Germans and Japanese were certainly rehabilitated as global community members, but only after their malignant political class was deconstructed.

This war is existential for Ukraine, and no serious minded person expects the russians to honor any peace agreement long term. Russia gave Ukraine no choice - Death, Enslavement or Fight. If Russia stops fighting, there is still a Russia. Probably. If Ukraine stops fighting, there is no Ukraine. Not as a country, not as a culture, not as a people. Bleeding the Russian army until there is fundamental change in the political leadership or structure of the Russian Federation is probably the ONLY way for Ukraine to secure a lasting peace.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 9 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Those are all great points, and hilariously even if you ignore all of them... russia has still failed here since their infiltration tactics are not politically compatible with prodding the Vassal State of Belarus into joining the war (which they desperately need to do since anywhere Ukraine is allowed to focus their power they are brutally crushing russian forces), since domestically how does a leader present the launching of a grand war where all the troops are driven into the middle of nowhere, given almost no supplies and told to blindly crawl forward by themselves and try to hold out starving in a basement until reinforcements come hopefully...? There is a direct immediate political problem to russia's disinterest with tactical proficiency at armored warfare they are so bad at it, which is really saying something.

Without any kind of formula, Belarus has no way to actually actuate on entering the war in a way that won't immediately become politically untenable domestically and internationally. The answer russia has pointed to for concentrated armored maneuver in the drone age are Turtle "Tanks" but the problem is they don't work perfectly against drones and for that meager benefit the trade off is they are horrifyingly less effective at protecting against every other anti-tank weapon and doctrine NATO has spent decades perfecting the use of......

I would go as far as to say this is the same thing North Korea concluded when they tried to step in heavily to bolster the russian war effort, I think at some point the reality became apparent to North Koreans that there just isn't even the basic outline of a working strategy that russia has stumbled on after so much costly trial and error, they are just bullshitting their way through everything at this point and reflexively saying "We will solve it with drones!" to every problem like idiots.

[–] TwinkleToes@lemmy.ca 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Without any kind of formula, Belarus has no way to actually actuate on entering the war in a way that won’t immediately become politically untenable domestically and internationally. The answer russia has pointed to for concentrated armored maneuver in the drone age are Turtle “Tanks” but the problem is they don’t work perfectly against drones and for that meager benefit the trade off is they are horrifyingly less effective at protecting against every other anti-tank weapon and doctrine NATO has spent decades perfecting the use of…

I would go as far a

To be fairer to them than they deserve - it wasn't supposed to go this way. Ukraine was supposed to roll over, Zelensky was supposed to flee. It's been said by people more clever to me that Putin wants to be seen as a 4D Chess player, but what he really is, is a Poker player with a fat stack who always bluffs.

But hubris is a prison and he can't only get what he holds now for all that they've spent. He's on tilt, to continue the poker analogy.

I think the total lack of a Purpose of this plan other than the glory of making gangsters a little bit richer leads to the extreme brutality we see. Indiscriminate terror bombing, beheading, executing POW's, Bucha, Irpin etc. When you don't have a bloody purpose for being there, then soldiers go to us-vs-them genocide pretty easily. Chaos is never more than a couple paycheques away they say - or something like that. In short - they don't know what the hell they're doing, therefore they don't how to stop or when they're "Done". The Idiot Tsar has set a ludicrous condition of triumphant tank columns rolling through Kyiv as the only condition for success. Since that is not going to happen - now what? Keep the industrial murder rolling until something changes.

As for Belarus - well, I can't see that they'd be a needle-mover. Their security forces are intentionally kept small to be affordable and be useful only for internal repression. They aren't even a 5th class assault force that could save the day where the entire Russian army has bashed it's brains in to the bristling hardened hedgehog that Ukraine has turned itself into. If Lukashenko sentences his citizens to death for Putin's glory, AND he pisses away his relatively tiny army in a month or two dying in the boggy lands of northern Ukraine, his head will be on a pike, either by Putin for failure or by his own citizens giving him the Ceaucescu treatment.

They don't have a plan, really. They never had a plan other than "Ukraine surrenders, we incinerate a million or so to make the rest docile and we all get slightly richer".

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I hesitate to say funny, because it is also devastatingly tragic... but IT IS also funny that if Putin had genuinely come to the table last summer before the summer offensive had begun to bleed itself dry the war could have been ended and Putin would have very likely gotten to keep Crimea while also preserving a semblance of international respect for their military. Now Putin is going to lose almost everything and the fossil fuel empire of russia that is now being smashed to pieces will be rebuilt as a nation of electric bicycles, solar panels/wind turbines and batteries by China... which ok good better than the state of things now -_-

The timespan between then and until whenever russia agrees to halt the ground war will be remembered as one of the largest, stupidest military-geopolitical blunders in modern history.

[–] TwinkleToes@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

No kidding. You're right, Ukraine might well have accepted a ceasefire along the current frozen lines, including Crimea in early 2025. A year and 400,000 casualties later, they have been able to make ukraine retreat from Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad. But - the viability of Crimea is teetering, the country is in outright energy crisis and Moscow itself is capable of being droned regularly with air defence growing weaker every day, every where.

It's hard to view this conflict in historic terms - but you have to go back to the Persian Empire deciding to show Alexander who was boss before having their ass rolled back to Bactria for a comparison of a totally unnecssary imperial self-own of this scale.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

We haven't even mentioned the fact that Ukraine has chased russia out of the sea starting from almost nothing.....

[–] TwinkleToes@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

That's another chapter in the future Wikipedia page. But - the problem with having ships, as any boat owner knows, is that they're bloody expensive to build and operate, but kind of fragile. Surface gunboats were the ultimate expression of power projection in the 19th century, then once planes got invented, people figured out that it was way more cost effective to sink ships with massed planes than with other ships. Submarines were a stealthy superweapon under sonar and depth charges could be outfitted on just about any ocean going vessel.

Ships are so expensive and time consuming to build, that they're nearly obsolete between the time they're ordered to the time they launch. Ukraine has found several ways to destroy surface ships cost-effectively with missiles, air and sea drones. China, who have been on a ship building binge for years, might be re-thinking their entire doctrine. Taiwan has certainly been paying attention to Ukrainian Naval activities. And you think tank and air crews are expensive and time-intensive to train? Think about the operating & training costs of a friggin' ship with hundreds of specialist technicians, engineers, sailors, logistics etc.

Historically, 2nd tier navies who've tried to compete with big dogs, like the Italians, Germans, Austro-Hungarians spend all this time and money on fleets, then the have one big engagement, lose a few ships, and decide it's safer to stay in port. Or worse, like Taranto for the Italians, Bismarck for the Germans, Yamato for the Japanese, your uber weapon ships get destroyed by last generation bi-plane swarms dropping torpedos. Navies are a funny thing that way.

[–] pluggerslugs@piefed.social 5 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Luka probably doesn't sleep to well these days. On one hand, there might be a cup of polonium tea with his name on it; on the other hand, his people almost certainly have no desire to be involved in that whole clusterfuck. Considering that all of Belarus is easily within Ukraine's drone/missile range and has nowhere near Russia's AA protection, he'd be better hope people don't think to stockpile gasoline for Molotov cocktails before kinetic sanctions begin.

[–] 100@fedia.io 2 points 3 days ago

his plan from the start after the 3day operation failed seems to have been to lay as low as possible and bullshit his way thru to survive by sucking off russia and avoid direct involvement

[–] Vergissmeinnicht@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Wouldn't it be pretty much lights out for the whole country in pretty short order? Almost half of their electricity generation is from natural gas.

Ukraine should be able to pretty quickly hit all their refineries, fuel, oil, and gas storage, and gas pipeline connections to Russia, and the country just stops functioning. Hit the transformer station at their single NPP and interconnects with Russia and it's pretty much a complete blackout and not a rolling one either, just no more electricity, period. Unlike Ukraine they can't be supplied from outside because their only friendly neighbour is already struggling themselves...

And Lukashenko would know that. No chance in hell he would ever risk that.

[–] TwinkleToes@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago

Very good points. Lukashenko has been an obedient pup for Putin over the years, yet he has been meek and more conciliatory of late. Not out of benevolence, of course - he's had a knack for survival, must know he's bet on the wrong horse and has found himself isolated.

[–] TwinkleToes@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago

There's no reward to the Belarussian people for dying for Putin's vanity. Do you thnk the average Belarussian gives a sparrow's fart about the prestige of hosting Russian tactical nukes? Any reward Putin gave for their service would of course be for the corrupt gangster class. It's a non-starter, AND Belarus' army is useless for the challenges Ukraine poses.