Good analysis. Territory doesn't mean "squat" unless, it has large deposit of oil, minerals, natural gas, strategic mountain side, uranium, etc.Shemp wrote: ↑September 7th, 2023, 8:24 amCorrect, though it's more complicated than you make it seem. Surrender is not that easy in a messy war zone, when you have to cross mine fields and no guarantee the Russians won't mistake you for wanting to attack versus surrender. Desertion a better idea, but Ukraine has special enforcer soldiers to stop that. So you'd have to shoot a fellow Ukrainian soldier while deserting, which is murder, and no guarantee you'll succeed or that you will be able to escape eventual capture and punishment for murder. Avoiding conscription also difficult, because most Ukrainian civilians don't have weapons but commissars do, and even if civilians did have weapons, once again it's murder or at a minimum assault with deadly weapon to fight off the commissar. Borders are all carefully guarded, so you'd have to kill a border guard, then no guarantee the neighboring country won't send you back, since you're guilty of murder. As for the leaders and higher ranking officers, they are hardly stupid, because as soon as war ends, money spigot gets turned off and they are toast, so they desperately need to keep the war going until they all have escape parachutes ready.Natural_Born_Cynic wrote: ↑September 7th, 2023, 6:25 amAnswer: Yes, the Ukrainians are f*cking stupid.
It's people like @ladislav who are truly stupid, in the Ukrainian peasant way. All peasants think owning square kilometers of land matters. As if USA would be more powerful if it moved the border of North Dakota north some so that USA "owned" some more farmland. Ownership means nothing. Military control is what matters. Russia wants, and will get , military control of all of Ukraine by the time this war is done. If they are smart, Russians will "own" as little as possible of what used to be Ukrainian land, precisely because stupid peasants like ladislav, who is Ukrainian ancestry if I'm not mistaken, think "ownership" is important. Whereas what is really important is who has military control.
As for ladislav's talk of expanding empire, that is a projection of USA ambition to expand its empire into Ukraine. Russia is not increasing its empire, since Ukraine was part of Russia's effective empire until 2014. Russia is merely defending its empire against USA encroachment. Ukraine will always be a vassal of another empire. It tried switching empires from Russia to USA and is currently being punished for that act of treachery.
Switching empires is usually considered treacherous and thus dangerous unless the new empire is willing and able to protect the incoming vassal. USA was not willing or able to protect Ukraine, so Ukraine was foolish to attempt switching sides. By contrast, China will eventually be both willing and able to protect Taiwan, South Korea and Japan when they switch from USA vassals to Chinese vassals. Taiwan will switch by 2030, South Korea maybe by 2050, Japan late in this century.
What the Russians are holding the Eastern Ukraine and black sea has oil and natural gas and all valuable resources in Ukraine.
The rest of the Ukraine is just farmland. I don't understand why Ukrainians are so fixated with farmlands and villages and wasting hundreds of thousands of men to get couple of square km of farmland.
. Those territories don't matter when you have lost your entire NATO trained army and equipment. Both as really really hard to replace and humans don't "respawn" like in Call of Duty or in CS GO. The Ukrainian Southern offensive is pretty stupid. They should have kept it a secret and not announce it on Western media for several months, giving Russians ample time to prepare. And they just attack without proper air support and they keep sending troops in piece meal fashion across the entire front. It's retarded.
