oski003 said:
dajo9 said:
This sums hanging Ukraine out to dry pretty well
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/02/26/politics/republicans-trump-ukraine-aid
So you believe my item #3 is hanging Ukraine out to dry? Perhaps we should fund Ukraine but let Zelensky know he needs to use this funding as leverage to negotiate more favorable peace terms. We would need to make sure that messaging doesn't get to the Russians. Hopefully, he quelled dissent and not just killed the peace deal when he killed his lead peace negotiator. He shouldn't expect us to give him tens of billions of dollars every year.
I don't think Zelensky ordered the killing, it's the SBU (Ukrainian KGB) and other crazed nationalists who are in charge who did it. Zelensky is not a killer, he's just an opportunist who has amassed hundreds of millions from being at the top of their bureaucracy, but he's not fully in control of the hardcore Ukr.militias. It's a symbiotic relationship, they use him as a PR head who can raise hundreds of billions in the West, and he uses them to get rich.
The Russians actually like Zelensky because he is very dumb when it comes to military decisions. Ukraine's military strategy has been based on keeping morale high at home and with its foreign financiers, and scoring PR wins. Zelensky kept doubling down on losing causes like Bakhmut and Avdiivka because he feared the PR fallouts, or he would extend those hopeless battles for weeks or months in order for example to delay Russian victories on important Russian dates like victory day in May.
Russia's goal is to destroy Ukraine's army while minimizing their own losses, so they have favored a more static warfare where they can exploit their huge advantage in firepower, mainly artillery initially, while working meticulously at suppressing Ukrainian air defenses, a campaign which took about a year and a half. They are now pressing their advantage through air superiority and glide bomb barrages.
Ukraine will reach a breaking point once one of these three items fails:
-They run out of weapons/ammo
-They run out of soldiers
-Their morale collapses.
They've done an excellent job of keeping their morale high despite the huge losses, partly because they have kept a lid on dissent. They've purged Ukraine of moderates like the negotiator who got killed, and they have also kept a large contingent of ideologically-driven militias in the main cities.
They're running low on ammo, but the equipment keeps coming. So the weak point might be the number of troops available.
