Why doesn't the West make Russia's tolerable "forever war" against Ukraine an actual quagmire that hurts Russia enough until it leaves?
What will end Russia's forever war in Ukraine?
Seven years after Russia’s occupation of eastern Ukraine, the West’s hopes for peace are ostentatiously ignored by Vladimir Putin.
The article never answers the question in the title. From the beginning I've said the way to end Russia's aggression is to help Ukraine resist and send body bags back to Russian mothers:
[Help] Ukraine kill Russian soldiers at such a level that Putin can't hide the fact.
Heck, Putin isn't shy about increasing the body count of Russian foes. Why should we be more skittish?
Indeed, maybe Ukraine should be holding moving burial ceremonies for dead Russians in their custody and publishing them online.
Perhaps it has seemed crude for me to be arguing for an effort to kill Russian soldiers all along, but that's the reality of stopping Russia. General Hodges just stated the obvious.
This is a Russian weakness because Russians will not endure the casualties their World War II reputation suggests.
The initial article says "thousands" of Russian soldiers have died in the war already. If that is true, clearly it hasn't been enough.
Until the Russians remove their head from their backsides, nothing else will work.
Indeed (back to the first article):
Putin pays a price for his aggression but calculates that the costs are outweighed by the benefits of continually bleeding Ukraine. By keeping the conflict at a low-hostility level, Russia will continue to deplete Ukraine’s limited resources.
Which reinforces my call for Ukraine to resist Russia more effectively by defeating corruption inside Ukraine.
Russia decided to wage war against Ukraine. Let the Russians face losing that war. Is Ukraine willing to fight corruption to get that?
UPDATE: In for a penny, in for a pound?
Russian deployments are ongoing, and open-source reporting alone can only capture a fraction of the actual military moves. This makes it difficult to establish what exactly is happening. But there appear to be several moves taking place at once, and they are not necessarily related. Some seem to concern Ukraine alone, while others may pose a danger to the European Union and NATO at large.
After our Afghanistan skedaddle debacle, miscalculations could be deadly:
The result could be that an enemy believes it can push America and get away with it; while America believes it must do whatever it takes to stop that enemy in order to reestablish the deterrence of American power.
And so we will have a war. At this point the best-case scenario is that we have a war against a small power rather than against a major power.
Adjust your pucker factor accordingly.
UPDATE: This clarifying map from some Canadian troops many years ago bears repeating:
#WhyRussiaCan'tHaveNiceThings
UPDATE: Could the Ukraine crisis be a Russian feint to go after Georgia (again)?
Russia will not want to escalate in the Black Sea littoral because it does not want to upset Turkey, whose recent unilateral actions contradict U.S. interests to Moscow’s benefit.
That leaves Georgia as the only country in the region where the Kremlin can escalate. Of the basin’s five littoral states allied with the United States, Georgia is the only one east of the Black Sea and highly exposed to the Kremlin on its entire northern flank.
Hmm. Russia might think that NATO will forgive action against Georgia more quickly than against Ukraine.
And perhaps Russian finances, worsened by the Xi Jinping Flu, argue for a smaller target.
UPDATE: So the story the Russians are going to stick with is that even though Ukraine is planning something diabolically evil that Russia would not--or could not--mass troops to stop Ukraine?
The Kremlin on Monday strongly rejected the U.S. claims of a Russian troop buildup near Ukraine, saying it could be a ruse intended to cover up what it described as Ukrainian leadership's aggressive intentions.
Got it. Do the Russians even think through the implications of their lies before they blurt them out?
