The Ukraine War seems to have reached a turning point. Ukrainian attacks on the Russian oil and gas infrastructure, and on coal and natural gas fired electrical power plants, often deep inside Russia, are having an impact that ordinary Russian citizens can no longer ignore. And, when Russia can not longer supply oil and gas to Western Europe, European resolve to take a firm stand against Russia strengthens.
In a few cases, strikes deep in Russia have been carried out by Ukrainian special forces acting in concert with domestic minority nationalist groups, raising the specter of a Russian civil war, or at least a renewed insurgency at a time when it's military is stretched thin to beyond a breaking point.
Russia is almost completely out of heavy armored vehicles and has dramatically reduced artillery resources. Russia is still suffering about 30,000 casualties a month, a rate at which it can just barely replace the soldiers it's losing with green conscripts.
Russia's provocation of NATO countries from Poland to Hungary to Denmark is driving these countries in Europe to vigorously prepare for war and take more aggressive measures against it.
Russia is deploying huge numbers of drones, missiles, and glide bombs to Ukraine at unsustainable levels, but many of these are intercepted before they can do harm, and those that done usually result in modest Ukrainian civilian casualties that incited outrage, but have little military effect and have not broken Ukraine's spirit. And, those attacks are unsustainable because Russia's capacity to procure new drones and missiles, and the replace its military equipment losses is far lower than that of Ukraine and its Western allies.
And, while Trump's America has been a feckless ally to Ukraine, it also hasn't turned out to be the solid supporter of Russia that Putin had hoped to receive.
It isn't over, but the tide has turned definitively in favor of Ukraine.
2 comments:
Not so sure. Putin has almost infinite bodies to throw into Ukraine.
What Putin doesn't have is almost infinity oil and gas resources, almost infinite electricity generation capacity, and almost infinite military industrial capacity.
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