113 sats \ 5 replies \ @petertodd 8 Jul \ parent \ on: Lessons From the Cold War: Now Is the Time for De-Escalation - Antiwar.com history
If you want the war to end sooner, give Ukraine the weapons they need, and crucially, the permission to use them against Russian targets.
You don't make the war end sooner with "peace negotiations" and "ceasefires". That just sets the stage for Russia to come back again, which is how were in this mess in the first place.
Peace will be achieved when Russia is no longer capable of fighting. That requires us to kill Russians by the hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) and destroy their infrastructure. Not a difficult goal – Ukraine has already killed or seriously wounded hundreds of thousands of Russians and has already blown up a non-trivial % of Russia's oil and gas infrastructure. We simply need to keep at it.
Peter, do you believe the story of the civil war in Ukraine. Those ethnic Russians that wanted to leave the Ukraine and become their own nation?
That's Putin's actual pretext at the start. At least that is what I recall him saying. He's said many other ridiculous things since but I think most people forget that there was a civil war before this all started with Russian and NATO supporting Ukraine.
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The civil war narrative is nonsense. It was Russian troops fighting against Ukrainians.
If anything, Russia has done an excellent job of making "Russian speaking"¹ Ukrainians really hate Russia, as more of them have died in the past three years than any other group of Ukrainians. Mariupol for instance was slaughtered, and mostly Russian speaking.
- Most Ukrainians speak Russian; I don't actually know any that can only speak Ukrainian myself.
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how many troops does Ukraine have?
How many troops for Russia?
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Russia is short enough on troops that they've been forced to bring them in from outside Russia.
The two numbers aren't really comparable anyway as the two countries fight quite differently. Russia is happy to lose large numbers of troops in cheap "meat" attacks to make up for their shortages of decent weapons; Ukraine is not willing to do that, and (in theory) has access to much better weapons.
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Russian meat grinder
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