Who's winning the war in Ukraine?

This invasion was taken differently than any previous invasion because it upset global stability.

I think the fact that Kyiv didn't fall within hours like everybody thought it would, and the morale/inspiration/call to action effect of "I need ammunition, not a ride," shouldn't be taken lightly either.

This seems mostly right, but I want to add a few points.

The first is that the Ukrainians won't stop fighting if the west stops supporting them. They may suffer some severe defeats and the nature of the war may shift to being more of a guerrilla insurgency, but they won't stop fighting.

The second is that even if the US withdraws support, it's not likely that European nations will necessarily follow, and between Germany and the UK and France, the Europeans can easily continue to support Ukraine at or above current levels.

My final point is that Ukraine actually is making slow progress in pushing back the Russians, it's just not going anywhere near as fast as anyone would like.

I also really dislike the term "stalemate" because it implies a static state of affairs as in a chess game where there are only so many pieces and moves, when in fact war is much different in the sense that additional pieces and moves can and probably will be added to the equation.

Culturally Russia sees itself as outside the rest of the world. At the very minimum, an equal to historical empires of Europe or Asia, but part of neither. It sees the USA as an ethnic mongrel with no culture or history, and hates the US power it projects globally.

I was wondering if you could provide something to back this up since these are rather sweeping claims.

The only thing I can think of that comes close is Dugin's writings but I have never seen anything that could suggest that his ideas are widely accepted or adopted as the state's doctrines.

I agree with what you said and appreciate the insight. Thanks for writing it.

I think part of it from Russia's side is definitely an attempt to rebuild Stalin's buffer to the west, but there are echoes of the appeasement that took place before WW2. Crimea was quick and done.

Then, it's a repeat years later in an attempt to grab more. Thing is, since then there was a lot of election tampering in the form of misinformation and it continues as an attempt to turn Americans against each other. Russia is waging war via the Internet and it's working.

I think the US government is unable to control it because there is no direct control of social media companies, and social media companies are ineffective. Their interests are purely financial and to truly be effective, it would require significant investment.

The US is instead providing just enough support, but I think it's purposely done. What happens if they were to provide double? Ukraine pushes Russia back to the border and then what? They continue forward? That's WW3. Even if they stop at the border, Putin may be forced to stop and may lose power. Then you're dealing with a potentially worse successor who wants to destroy at all costs...again a dangerous unknown.

They're doing it this way on purpose to bleed Russia slowly over time. Russia expected to drive a 40 mile column into the capital and finish fast. A long war is not sustainable for Russia economically and the population isn't interested either (as shown by the huge expatriation that took place when conscription was announced).

If enough western countries continue to provide arms, it will damage Russia for a long time to come.

Putin did expect the invasion to be fast and achieve their goals quickly. It was a mistake on his behalf.

Except that now we have Ukrainian chief negotiator having come out and openly admitted that Russia and Ukraine were on a verge of making a deal back in last March before Boris Johnson sabotaged it. The only reason this was is still going on is because the west couldn't accept peace and decided to cynically push Ukraine into further conflict.

The result was many countries around the world pledging military support.

What actually happened was that NATO countries wanted to break and balkanize Russia, which was openly said by lots of western officials. The west made a mistake thinking that they could easily break Russian economy using sanctions while using Ukraine as a proxy without having to put NATO boots on the ground. Now we're seeing this massively backfire with western economies going into a recession while Russian economy is now growing.

Western powers could arm Ukraine and it would win.

They literally can't, and even NATO officials now admit that the west lacks industrial capacity to keep up with Russia even in basic things such as shell production.

They have had no problem spending trillions of dollars over decades to protect their influence.

This is not a problem that can be fixed by throwing money at it. This requires building factories, training workers, creating supply chains and so on. These things simply can't be done overnight. All throwing money at the problem does is raise prices as anybody with even a modicum of economic knowledge could've predicted

In October, NATO’s senior military officer, Adm. Rob Bauer, said that the price for one 155mm shell had risen from 2,000 euros ($2,171) at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion to 8,000 euros ($8,489.60).

Putin does not care how many troops he loses. Russia doesn’t really care how many people it loses unless those people are from the cities. Russian culture dehumanises the poor and mixed ethnicities.

How to say you're a racist without saying you're a racist.

The hope would be that world leaders realise before it’s too late that the only way Ukraine can win, is that if Russia loses.

There was never any scenario in which Ukraine could win and it's absolutely incredible that western propaganda machine managed to convince so many people of this insane fantasy. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians lost their lives in a NATO proxy war with Russia, and Ukraine will likely cease to exist as a functioning state at the end of all this. All for the insatiable need for NATO expansion. Stoltenberg finally let the cat out of the bag and told us that this was the real reason for the war:

The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that. So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.