Putin Still Holds All the Cards in Ukraine, With No Reason to Fold

spare a thought for Volodymyr Zelenskiy

But not for the Ukrainian civilians who are still being fed into the meat grinder so that they can live in a super-charged neoliberal hellstate afterwards.

He has nursed a personal grudge since, in his first term, the Ukrainian leader refused to help him skewer Hunter Biden.

Does Trump even remember or care? I mean, he got out of that situation pretty cleanly. This feels like personal conjecture.

Ukraine can keep fighting for maybe four months before it runs out of key munitions

This calculation is based on what exactly? Why is it 4 months? Why not 2? Why not 6?

Meanwhile, Putin sees himself holding the cards, a view Trump has publicly endorsed. Economic sanctions, which since January the US has quietly eased on Russian financial transactions, are nowhere near tough enough to make the Kremlin quit.

It was literally never possible to make them tough enough to force Russia onto its knees by using sanctions.

North Korea is estimated to have provided Russia with 6 million artillery rounds, around 40% of its consumption.

A tiny (20-ish million population), sanctioned to hell communist state's military production prowess is literally on the same order of magnitude as the entirety of the western imperial cabal's military production (with pop 1 billion). This shit will never not be funny.

even if the Russians can’t conquer Ukraine, they can keep it a scary place to live and a rotten bet for investors.

The fuck did the Russians do to fuck up Ukraine's domestic politics? The Russians did not nazify or impoverish the country. It was already like that before the war.

a dismaying number of his people, see as their national greatness.

Maybe you should have let the USSR live instead of killing it and millions of its people. Then there would not be such yearnings or wars or hyper nationalism.

While polls suggest no great love for Putin’s tyranny, they show a decline in hostility — an unwillingness to treat Russians as enemies — such as we have taken for granted since 1945.

Oh no! Americans grow weary of nationalist bs because they have more important things to worry about! What a tragedy.

The Ukrainians excel at asymmetric warfare, launching terror hits deep inside Russia

Freudian slip up

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Uh this shit is too long. I don't want to respond anymore. It's mostly just standard lib nonsense.