Subj : Re: Russia's Defeat
To : hollowone
From : Kaelon
Date : Sun Jul 30 2023 10:20 am
Re: Re: Russia's Defeat
By: hollowone to Kaelon on Fri Jul 28 2023 02:22 am
> - I believe this war will continue for the next 2 years toward losing at
> least significant part of what they have conquered in Donieck and
> Zaporoznia, maybe the rest of Donbas, I don't believe it will be easy to win
> back Crimea, but I'd say this is important to Ukraine to try and destroy as
> much as possible all the strategic advance Russia thinks it has in the Black
> Sea... that must continue after the war
Agreed. I think Ukraine will spare no expense to making Crimea as irrelevant to the Russians as possible. The deployment of advanced sea drones and the repeated attacks on all of the bridges to the peninsula, along with the massing of major elements of their armored divisions on the "dragon's teeth" spine-line, show that they are prepared to do whatever it takes and force Russian generals to make catastrophic decisions, further collapsing what little morale remains.
> - With or without losing any land, Ukraine will never surrender until it
> secures its ambition to be connected with NATO/EU through various direct
> alliances or intermediate moves that will get it close to be part of these
> alliances
I do think, personally, that a return to the pre-Kruschev borders (ceding Crimea, which is culturally and politically Russian) will be part of a lasting formula with the Russian Federation to end this war. Ukraine's admission to both NATO and the EU are a given, IMO. Belarus' fate remains to be seen, but Putin is expediting cultural and political integration of the two polities through the Union State initiative.
> - Above will bring influx of money to Ukraine in after the war and it must
> be secured by NATO military presence as conditions that will create an
> obvious threat in Belarus, which will be surrended by NATO forces and with
> an example of Ukraine that rebelling against regimes and puppet govs is
> possible..
I definitely see Belarus being absorbed into the Russian Federation.
> - Cold war continues as Russia cannot afford losing Belarus now.. In the
> long run, all depends on China, as if it wakes up to test NATO/USA in a risk
> for an open conflic in Pacific area, Russians for sure would like to use it
> to come back to Ukraine and to destabilize EU.
Russia, as a power, is now third-rate, at best. Putin's misguided and delusional aspirations to restore it to a major power (nevermind a superpower) have been demonstrably destroyed, most likely for the balance of its existence. Russia's military is entirely incompetent, low-morale, and incapable of delivering a combination of forces necessary to achieve geopolitical aims. This is a huge wake-up call to everyone, IMO, and has revitalized NATO (as a U.S.-led institution) and the EU (as a democratic economic bulwark to Sino-Russian machinations).
> Chess game continues.
The real question is, like you say, what happens with China. It was pretty clear that the Chinese were looking at Russia's seizure of Ukraine as, in essence, the Spanish Civil War to its invasion of Poland. Both - Ukraine and Spain - were respective preludes to World War III and World War II, but unlike the Spanish example (which demonstrated the resilience of the Axis and the relative complacency of the world's democracies), the Ukrainian one has really complicated China's goals to seize the world's microchip supplies.
In the Chess Game, China's own demographic crisis gives it a time horizon of less than 5-10 years to make its next move, and increasingly more likely it will make its move within this decade. It has a largely dysfunctional population eager to leave its oppressive state, and its only trump card has been numbers for cheap labor and centralized control to drive precious minerals and high tech gadgetry. Seizing the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) would place China in control of ~90-95% of the world's silicon supply.
With the United States building a vast state of the art factory in Arizona, and the European Union opening up precious minerals mining on its territory, it is increasingly clear that if China wants to combat the certain oil embargo it will face when it attempts to take Taiwan, it must act in the next 24-36 months. But it won't be check-mate for the West: China's entire gamble has been predicated upon the belief that the West wouldn't fight to intervene in smaller countries against the newly ascendant powers. Now that Russia is certainly not ascendant, and China's future becomes increasingly cloudy, I think we're in store for some very interesting and scary times.
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-=: Kaelon :=-
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