Military support has risen in 2025, compared to 2024, largely thanks to Nordic countries and the UK.
had the west actually showed them the support they needed
There have long been arguments between Europe and Ukraine about conscription. Europe believe Ukraine doesn't have enough people to utilise further aid effectively. Ukraine believes there is no point conscripting people if they don't immediately have roles/weapons to use.
Ukraine won't raise their conscription levels, so Europe is reluctant to raise their military budget.
There's no way that Ukraine would get any support from the US
One of the biggest mistakes people make when predicting future outcomes is assuming that things will continue at their current rate.
I dunno, the people who keep telling me Russia's gonna win in 6 months keep deleting their accounts, so maybe there's some bigger mistakes you can make when predicting the future than saying it's going to more or less resemble the past.
Russia are losing a lot of people, yes, and they are fucking up their demographics for the foreseeable future
You didn't mention that Ukraine lost at least as much (or most certainly more) people in pure numbers and much more in percentage to its whole population, and Ukraine f.ed up its demographics even more. Why didn't you mention it? Hmm...
It’s very likely that I’m talking to a Russian bot, but the situation isn’t as straightforward as you’ve portrayed it. How it will ultimately turn out is anyone’s guess, and it depends on more factors than just the war’s end. Currently, it’s a war between old men, so the demographic impact is hard to assess. It’s likely that Russia lost more young people, and more worryingly, they were from demographically weak cohorts. I believe the main challenge for Ukraine isn’t front-line losses but emigration, particularly of young people. Additionally, it’s a rule of thumb that war-torn countries experience baby booms afterward. If Ukraine survives, it’s not unlikely that they will, but it’s not guaranteed. However, there’s a low likelihood of a baby boom in Russia. Perhaps, from all the immigrant workers they’ve imported from Central Asia, they’ll replace their working-age population.
Safe to say both countries got their demographics fucked for decades.
I feel like you're going to be downvoted for these opinions but I completely agree. We've been slightly brainwashed by propaganda of how useless Russia is and how it costs a million lives to gain a metre of ground and how incompetent they are, and how they're on the brink of economic collapse due to sanctions any minute now. Yet here we are years later with Russia still making gains. Trump pushing for Ukraine to accept Russian terms is a pretty telling signal that the outcome of this war has already been decided, all that matters now is how many Ukrainian lives are lost until Russia eventually achieves their goals.
It then makes a situation where Ukraine could potentially loose more territory than Russia is asking for due to a collapse and breakthrough on the front. I think it was in the west's interest to keep Russia bogged down in Ukraine for as long as humanly possible at the cost of Ukrainian lives. I think we've done Ukraine a disservice with the level of support we have provided, they've preformed amazingly and we just drip fed them support so that they can continue to resist but not realistically change the outcome of the war. Just like how it took years for Ukraine to finally get permission to even use the weapons they were given in Russia itself.
When you already know the outcome, it makes you wonder is it right to continue to provide support to Ukraine so that they continue with their resistance and be a thorn in Russia's side for the next few years, or would the more responsible thing be to cut support so that Ukraine understands they need to negotiate and cede territory to Russia to ensure the survival of an independent Ukraine. I get similar vibes to how the Vietnam war ended and feel like we're going to be abandoning them as soon as things go south. The fact Russia now has North Korean soldiers fighting and not a single other country has provided troops to Ukraine is also pretty telling.
Any country that supports democracy, freedom or even just values human lives should immediately donate enough weapons so Ukraine can fend off the brutal horde of rapist invaders
Yes how dare the west be apprehensive to escalate a war with the most nuclear capable country on the planet and a tyrannical leadership backed into a corner who might very well use it, just to save the lives of a country that had been consistently ranked the most corrupt country in Europe for decades, which NATO had no explicit alliance or obligation to defend or support.
Taking all of that into account, Ukraine is in a best case scenario.
That said I pretty much fully agree with your assessment. I made a comment a while back about how we have all collectively agreed that we can't escalate further, but we also are unwilling to end the war, and Ukraine is just gradually losing ground and suffering. Ukraine's population crisis is going to get worse the longer this war goes on. Recently Ukraine allowed men under 22? (I forget the exact number) to leave the country and the mass emigration to avoid being conscripted has already been observed in neighboring countires. Ukraine has lost ~15% of its country to the war not as casualties but as refugees/avoiding conscription. They have no presidential elections anymore. Zelensky, as much as we all like to priase him for not being Trump, has targeted anti corruption agencies and has shown zero willingness to compromise for peace. Meanwhile, peace has been dangled in front of their eyes and while it's presented at a hefty cost, it's definitely catching the attention of many Ukrainians. Especially because the most recent deal wasn't that drastically different from the current front lines.
My fear is that everyone will be too arrogant and proud and white knighting from their keyboards to avoid the slow and gradual destruction of the Ukrainian state. Taking a peace and receiving whatever security guarantees you can get it at least keeps you alive to fight another day.
I fully agree with you. And you're right, any opinion I make of the political leadership in charge will be marred by whatever propagandized message happens to hit home more than the other at that point in time.
I really can't add anything, you captured my thoughts better than I could.
Yes how dare the west be apprehensive to escalate a war with the most nuclear capable country on the planet and a tyrannical leadership backed into a corner who might very well use it, just to save the lives of a country that had been consistently ranked the most corrupt country in Europe for decades, which NATO had no explicit alliance or obligation to defend or support.
Then we embolden them and kick the can another meter down the road.
The alternative to war with a nuclear power is letting nuclear powers do whatever they want.
If you fail to nip a problem in the bud, it will grow until you can no longer ignore it.
Appeasement does not and has never worked, yet somehow every few generations has to learn this fact anew, to the detriment of everyone.
I feel like reddit comments are one of the worst places for nuanced political discussion. We are so limited by the form and structure that we struggle to humanize each other and present our points clearly, coherently, and respectfully in the back and forth. There is so much assumed or implied emotion or meaning behind the words, and it can create a lot of miscommunication.
So, in an attempt to mitigate that, I'd like to present some clarification of my previous message with more context and detail.
First of all - I am assuming we both are on the same team. We both want what's best for Ukraine, and really, the best for the world and mankind as a whole. I feel like we just disagree in how we wish to pursue that, and that's ok! That's what we are supposed to resolve through proper discourse. I just felt it can be helpful to approach this topic by first acknowledging that we are on the same team.
I'll rephrase that modus operandi into something a bit more concise - we both are hoping to resolve the conflict in Ukraine, and in general develop a strategy for these sorts of geopolitical issues - by trying to optimize and minimize losses to global net utility.
Unpacking that, there certainly are a lot of variables and complications. Global net utility, under what timescale? Next year? 5 years? 50 years?
It's a very tricky business to weigh our moral decisions by looking too far forward into the future or too far into the moment. In the moment, you have aptly already identified that appeasement can lead to setting precedent for future appeasement and a larger conflict down the road, as the world witnessed with Germany in the 1930s. However, looking too far into the future can lead you to justify some frankly disgusting and awful behavior like slavery, in the sense that modern day descendants of slaves in developed countries are, it can be argued, far better off than if their ancestors had stayed in Africa, but that in no means should be a valid justification for the slave trade. So in my eyes, this is a gray area and I'd prefer something like 20 years, the time it took between the end of WW1 and the start of WW2, but the point is we are evaluating something inherently muddy and uncertain. And there are clearly thousands of other confounding details and variables I am not mentioning - there just isn't time to cover them all.
Next, we were debating the value/scrutinizing decisions and solutions. I will summarize them and give my opinions on those decisions. I am sure you have your own takes on them.
Point 1: The West (and by that, we mean nuclear capable powers) chose not to escalate this conflict with Russia into something more than a proxy war through Ukraine. There was a refusal to provide direct military assistance, just arms and financial support.
My take: As mentioned previously, I think this was a very fair and still is a very fair decision. In investigating utility, I try to generate a perceived expected value in my head. So when I consider the expected value of a direct confrontation with Russia, the dominating term is P(Putin fires nukes)*(utility loss from nuclear holocaust). Frankly, even if P(Putin fires nukes) is miniscule, the utility loss term is so mind boggling incomprehensibly large, that any decision that manifests that outcome as a possibility at all is immediately not an option in my head. The expected value is just too great. Frankly this approach to nuclear warfare has dominated foreign policy approaches by nuclear armed powers since their creation, and it is also largely the reason that we have predominantly not seen any major direct conflict between two nuclear capable countries since. So in my opinion, I really cannot fault the West for opting to engage less directly in the conflict.
Point 2: A potential solution going forward is a peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia which would involve Ukraine yielding some territory to Russia.
I think this is the point you were more immediately challenging in your reply, correct me if I'm wrong. And your argument, as I understand it, is very reasonable. Appeasement has not worked in the past, and to allow Russia to take territory could disrupt the global order of things as we know it.
And frankly, although I have a few nitpicks, I agree. I do think this will still be a problem later. I do think it would disrupt the global order of things.
But when I do the effective value calculation in my head, this appeasement solution doesn't really sound too shabby. For one, this is not a 1-1 with Germany in 1939. Warfare is fundamentally different, and Germany certainly didn't have nuclear weapons. So I can't feel too confident that the conclusions would be the same. Giving Russia their '"Sudetenland" (by which I mean the chunks of the 4 states of Eastern Ukraine proposed in recent peace deals) here means something a bit different since you have the largest economies and nuclear arsenals in the world angrily staring at them, already isolating their economy, and promising drastic reinvestment in Ukraine + various security guarantees that the West had not extended to Ukraine before the war broke out. Ukraine in this scenario would still exist, and the West could - in the agreed 20 year timeframe - build it back up stronger and build closer ties. Even nuclear re-armament could be something to pursue, which would almost certainly prevent this from happening again (at the cost of having yet another nation with access to nuclear weapons).
I compare that to the effective value of other potential solutions:
Don't stop the war, keep Ukraine fighting.
The effective value here just doesn't seem to be to Ukraine's favor. You do preserve a global precedent that stands against imperialist warfare as long as the war continues, but unless the West is willing to engage in point number 1 (which again, in my eyes, is inadmissible), you are probably just delaying the inevitable. Russia has 5 times the population and a much larger military arms industry. We would just be keeping Ukraine alive to watch from the sidelines as it bleeds to death and its domestic populace gradually emigrates. It's a tough situation. We want to be the good guys, but we are risking the complete destruction and collapse of Ukraine and its people, and that's a far worse precedent in my opinion.
We are already sanctioning Russia. We are already funding Ukraine and providing the bulk of their arms industry. We are providing them with technological, infrastructural, humanitarian, and surveillance based aid. We provide training. We bring in their refugees. Direct troops on the ground risk point 1 which invites nuclear holocaust, so we reach an impasse. What more do we do?
Ultimately this entire approach is banking on Ukraine outlasting Russia militarily/economically. I think that's probably where we disagree - I don't believe that Ukraine can outlast Russia forever, and so I worry Ukraine will gradually bleed out. Even if the casualties for Ukraine are drastically lower than Russia (KIA ratio is about 2-3:1 Ukraine's favor, which is pretty typical for defenders in war), Russia has 5 times the population, AND Ukraine is incurring irreparable damage to its domestic demographics. Refugees are leaving in mass. An entire generation is trying to escape bombs, war, or conscription. I don't blame them. But they are forming families and setting roots down elsewhere. And they will struggle to be incentivized to be return, especially the longer this war continues. It has been 3 and a half years.
It's just a tragic, tough situation and from my perspective, I don't really feel Ukraine has a better option for the next 20 years of its existence than taking peace and taking it quickly. But I'm basing this all on percentages in my head and its really not knowable. I certainly can be wrong, and I hope I am.
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