• i remember arguing by i think your side in lemmy news posts with libs all those years ago, who insisted with every fiber of their being that we were brainwashed stupid bots. Ukraine was gonna be back in Crimea any day now, Russia was gonna collapse, Russia was incapable of victory…

    but again, we have been proved right, as always. Ukraine killed itself as a nation to fight as a proxy for the west and now they face complete and utter loss. We were right, Russia wins.

  • RiotDoll [she/her, she/her]@hexbear.net
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    10 hours ago

    I have no idea how anybody thought Ukraine could win anything, seriously.

    I wasn’t on this site when this stuff started, but I was telling people this wasn’t what the media was saying, the western posturing looked like they wanted another Afghanistan and were completely willing to make Ukraine into that. That was correct.

    I also knew militarily the nuclear powers would only engage in a limited manner, and therefore strategically ukraine had nowhere to go.

    The winning move was to sue for peace immediately and avert as much devastation as possible. Setting aside the moral highground or justifications of any actor in this cluster, that was also correct. Objectively. There was never going to be a dliberate crossing of the rubicon with nukes over fucking Kiev, for all the bluster and posturing, there’s nothing in Ukraine worth that blood spilled either way.

    The only options were, capitulate immediately, or sell the nation out as a prostitute and turn it into a Russian meat grinder for a while, until the strategic inevitabilities came to fruition, which was always just gonna be russia going as far as they want to.

    I’ve read so much cope and ignorance over the years. I’m super gay, super trans, really just a big homo queer lady - i don’t have any love for modern day Russia for any reason - their mandate was lost in 1992 - but this was never going to be anything but what it is now, a protracted, brutal, dehumanizing loss.

    • BashfulBob [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      6 hours ago

      I have no idea how anybody thought Ukraine could win anything, seriously.

      The goal was never to win. It was simply to bleed an enemy via a proxy war. Operation Cyclone 2.

      The winning move was to sue for peace immediately and avert as much devastation as possible

      Debatable. After Georgia and Crimea, I’m not sure what the winning move was supposed to be shy of direct confrontation by NATO.

      But when the game is to destabilize, eviscerate, and enslave whole nation states - and your regional arch rival has decided to Uno-Reverse-y your Neoliberal strategy - maybe the winning move is to stop playing this shitty, awful game.

    • FlakesBongler [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      9 hours ago

      Yeah, a lot of life lost and for what?

      Russia is doing gangbusters with their economy being revitalized by Western sanctions, culturally they’re becoming more anti-West because they see that the average Joe is a blood-addled dullard and the world is closer to all-out war than it has in decades

      porky-happy is sleeping good on this

  • FlakesBongler [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    10 hours ago

    I still remember telling people when this war broke out that it wasn’t going to go well for Ukraine

    They pointed to the early strife and went “Ha! These foolish Russians can’t take over a whole country in a month, epic Ukrainian victory is assured!”

    Meanwhile, I bit my tongue because I knew they wouldn’t accept the fact that the early Ukrainian strategy was going to drain them over the long term

    USAans are so divorced from the reality of actual warfare, they don’t understand logistics, they don’t understand maintaining an actual fighting force, they just don’t understand that you don’t just win by blowing up a whole lot of stuff real fast

    So of course, they’re mighty quiet this year