I don’t think that Russia is going to slow down in winter. I think they have slowed down now during the autumn and come December-January i think their advances are going to accelerate. This has always been the pattern for the SMO.

It’s definitely looks that way at this point. Although, it does look like there is a qualitative change now in terms of how Russia is approaching this. The destruction of infrastructure and logistics is happening on a huge scale. Ukraine is running out of people, and the front is becoming harder to supply now. Meanwhile, Europe is itself in a crisis, so their ability to support Ukraine is much weaker now, and the US is actively trying to extricate itself from the war.

From Russian perspective, the war isn’t about Ukraine though. Ukraine is just a NATO proxy and NATO is the real long term threat. So, the ideal scenario for Russia is to drive a wedge between the US and Europe. If the US decides that this is a lost cause and makes a deal with Russia, then they are likely to abandon Europe since it’s going to lose its strategic value.

The Russian Army is on the verge of collapse and will do so in 2 weeks.

Source: vibes.

I don’t see why they should end it. Ever since Ukraine nazis got convinced by the west to fight, Russia have been fighting an attrition war - not against Ukraine, but against all of NATO.

It is working, and Russia should continue to drain the West of all their military gear, money and internal social capital (=riots).

The worst situation is either a seize fire, or winning here&now in Ukraine, as both will leave EU to continue pressure. Russia need to stay at the ‘attrition sweetspot’ between slamming Ukr/EU hard, and take a few mosquito bites via drones etc. Anything else will cost excess Russian lives and have no end.

War is crap, but EU are ordered to attack and won’t stop until they are beaten to the ground and can’t stand up anymore. US is the main agitator in Ukr but are not very active re feets on the ground, and are willing to sacrifice EU. So any way it goes there’s almost only one road - long attrition war until EU yields, and EU elites won’t yield until forced to do so, or US cant force them anymore. If I’m right then Russia’s strategy has little to do with Ukraine, and it will take 2-3 years until EU is all the way down and stay down for good.

Honestly when the Kursk offensive failed I thought it was going to be over by last year, let alone this one.

Within 24 hours of the war starting it was already clear to me it was going to take a few years. And then, when I started following what was going on with the war after 2 or 3 years since it started it was clear it could only end with a full collapse of Ukraine, at least…

I think it will continue until Ukraine collapses and can no longer continue fighting, considering they keep throwing people into the meat grinder, this is a slow process. Also, this allows Russia to extend the West. The US is clearly struggling with Iran, for example. Europe is trying to arm up, but so far that hasn’t amounted to much.

rule number one with the SMO: every time anyone makes a prediction another second is added to the clock . The current timer is set is 7.2 years from the start.

It became more clear after the recalibration back in year 1-2 where they withdrew from Kherson and Kharkov that the war was going to be one of attrition. The point for Russia, so to speak, is to transform this war into its own Iraq, where the home front can proceed as closely to a “business-as-usual” footing as they can. This is why the Western strategy has been to primarily attack this through the attempts at economic blockade and the sanctioning of attacks within Russia in order to disrupt this sense of “business-as-usual.”

It’s more likely that this war will turn into Vietnam’s Second Indochina War, where the frontlines are more or less stalemated for years on end, until the final moment where large swathes of territory was taken by the PAVN in a matter of weeks in April 1975. That particular stalemale lasted over 15 years. As for the overall Russian strategy, I think it’s fair to say at this point that it closely resembles China’s in the Third Indochina War against Vietnam, precisely because the USSR’s backing of Vietnam would have made that conflict particularly more significant to Russian military strategy than in the West.

The Chinese strategy in the Sino-Vietnamese War was to punish Vietnam for siding with the Soviets over China; for allowing the Soviets to base military detachments in Vietnam which allowed the USSR to threaten a North-South pincer against China during the height of the Sino-Soviet split; and once the conflict started, to use the opportunity to overhaul its military operations which had not drastically been updated since the Korean War.

The most significant fighting occurred in 1979, which is where Vietnam today claims victory, but it takes two to tango and, through the lack of a settlement, fighting continued until 1991. It was a very long war where it was convenient for Vietnam to claim they won through the 1979 phase and for both sides as socialist governments to massage as relations became better afterwards, as it would have been easier to mend ties if the sticking point was a conflict that ended in 1979 rather than from 1979 to 1991.

Similarly to what Russia is doing now, the PLA used the opportunity to completely reform its military doctrine, using the 12 year conflict to conduct trial and error and rotate army divisions into the Southern Theater Command in Yunnan to give them combat experience. Since that was the beginning of the Reform and Opening Up period, clearly, the CPC found success in turning a 12 year border conflict into “business-as-usual” on the home front.

The Ukraine War, to be quite frank, is now the global laboratory for military combat and weapons experimentation. Both sides of the conflict, at the military level, find value in its continuation for this aspect. The DPRK’s active participation in Kursk Oblast was, in part, to give the KPA military experience and the undoubted role of Chinese manufacturing in supporting drone warfare and other technological necessities means that the PLA is gaining valuable direct and indirect data. The RUAF, of course, has certainly fallen from the mythological heights it had, similarly to what happened with the Soviets in Afghanistan and what is happening now to the Americans in Iran, but this thereby gives it the opportunity to reform, which is what it is now doing to varying degrees of success.

Similarly to the Sino-Vietnamese War, which ended with bilateral diplomacy between China and Vietnam’s backer, the USSR, the Ukraine War will not end until bilateral diplomacy between Russia and Ukraine’s backer, the US, create the conditions for it. The Chinese got what they wanted. For Vietnam, the conflict with China occurred just 4 years after the unification and the establishment of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. This mean the war was a massive impediment against Vietnam’s economic recovery, as the Sino-Vietnamese border was just relatively north of Hanoi, although both sides at the military level knew that the war was not one of territorial annexation and would be limited to the border. This is why it took until 1986 for Vietnam to announce its own Doi Moi economic reforms.

Eventually, the war ended because, as one author of the war (a US Air Force College professor) wrote:

The Vietnamese leadership never seemed to comprehend the PRC’s strategy and war objectives, persistently maintaining that the 1979 invasion simply constituted a prelude to Beijing’s long-­term scheme of infringing on Vietnamese sovereignty and independence. After China announced its withdrawal on 5 March, Hanoi called for a nationwide general mobilization for the war and began constructing defensive positions in and around Hanoi. By the end of May, the PLA had reverted to its normal alert status. Vietnam, however, remained on guard, stationing a large number of PAVN troops (allegedly 300,000)44 along border with China at a time when the economy was “in a worse state than at any time since 1975.”

As a result, Hanoi’s attempts to fight simultaneously in Cambodia and on its northern border took a growing national economic and social toll, subsuming Hanoi’s effort to modernize its economy and, more important, undermining its geopolitical ambitions. According to Fred Charles Iklé, “Governments tend to lose sight of the ending of wars and the nation’s interests that lie beyond it,” and many are “blind in failing to perceive that it is the outcome of the war, not the outcome of the campaigns within it” that determines how well their policies serve the nation’s interests.

The Vietnamese leadership clearly failed to grasp the gravity of the situation and continued depending on the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991. If the Vietnamese should draw any lessons from the 1979 war with China, one is, as one Vietnamese general later remarked, “We must learn how to live with our big neighbor.”

Xiaoming Zhang, 2015. Deng Xiaoping’s Long War: The Military Conflict Between China and Vietnam, 1979-1991. The University of North Carolina Press.

Although the Russian territorial annexations make this somewhat more complicated, the Ukraine War will eventually end on similar lines.

The amount of misinformed shit i see here… People live in bubbles