Comments by "Tim Trewyn" (@timtrewyn453) on "What will end the war in Ukraine?" video.

Winter is a good time to train troops for spring operations. Both sides are doing that training. There isn't much point in shipping Western weapon systems until Ukrainian troops complete their training with them. The army with the best ISR will achieve more objectives. We'll see. One wonders how much planning goes into the psychology of public statements by the various governments. The West seems to be using some techniques of managing the psychopathic nature of the Russian regime. There are workarounds for supplying electricity to Ukrainian buildings still able to receive it. I imagine there is a policy to leave lights off to help keep any heat on. The trouble with the workarounds is that they require extensive distribution of fossil fuel, but it can be done. The workarounds are likely to be more extensive in the next winter, and Russia does not have enough missiles to thwart a more distributed generation system. I have been disappointed to see that implementing this alternative power system has been as slow as it has.
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Are these findings the result of you personally performing a field inspection throughout the battlespace? I doubt it. I keep seeing new pictures of Putin and Zelensky so I figure they both are still alive. The rest is fog of war.
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I don't believe in the infinite capacity of any nation, but Russian commenters seem to believe that Russia does have infinite capacity, or at least more than any other nation. The historical cases against a larger nation thinking it can always conquer a smaller nation that is backed up by other nations are Vietnam and Afghanistan. And Afghanistan was accessible by land to the Soviet Union. Both of those wars went on for years. This could be similar. A difference is that China is dependent on exports to the West and is thus constrained from providing the kind of help it did to Vietnam that might to Russia at this time. And Russia is not the Soviet Union in terms of population. Nor are the Russian people in as much solidarity with the Russian regime as the Ukrainians are with theirs. In all three cases, a smaller nation is fighting for itself against an invader. There is no historical support for the certainty of Russian victory, the evidence indicates the opposite: years of fighting and eventual Russian withdrawal. I have seen many instances in these comments in which Russian sympathizers seem to be in denial of history and the fundamentals of economic and military power. We all like to feel we are part of something great, but we also need a measure of humility and tentativeness to avoid hubris.
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@lani6647 The leaders hide behind their nuclear weapons while they order common people to their deaths. Psychopaths do not care.
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@ieuanhunt552 Then it blows my mind that Russia started offensive operations on February 24th, unless they thought it was going to be a short war.
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My Ukrainian friends say they fight for liberty from the demonstrated depravity of the Russian regime. They fight for a better future for the people of their nation. Their businesses look to the European market and the day Ukraine takes Russia's place as a supplier of oil and gas. Exxon, Shell, and Chevron say it is there and they know how to get it.
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The hubris and delusion of the Russian sense of its own infinite capacity. A better Russia would have 400 million people or more by now. Where did they go? To their death in the camps. To Israel. To anywhere. Russia is committing genocide again, as it did in the Holodomor, without remorse. As Christopher Hitchens described it: "a psychopathic dictatorship."
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@elgatoconbolas Why did Russia have to mobilize more troops?
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@elgatoconbolas I have a hard time believing: " It fails to mention that all of the weapons that Ukraine initially had, have been destroyed. Also, all of the Soviet army era of the former Varsaw Pact, have been destroyed, too." Has all the Russian equipment captured by Ukraine also been destroyed?
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Hard to say. If the maps are close to right, then the sq km per day gained by either side indicates many months, even years before either side achieves its stated objectives. Each side is tempted to think the other will collapse if they just hang in there. So it goes on and on for a long time.
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@ks-qu4kj NATO bases its status on its perception of Russian military capabilities, which have clearly been overestimated. As long as Russia has a nuclear arsenal and asserts its sphere of influence over its neighbors, NATO will exist. After the poor performance of the Russian military and the addition of Sweden and Finland, NATO as a whole may determine that it can reduce its conventional forces and still repel a Russian conventional invasion of a NATO member. NATO will continue to rely upon the US nuclear arsenal as long as Russia relies on its nuclear arsenal.
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@ks-qu4kj Putin is a psychopath. There are thoughts that don't come easy to him, like thoughts of losing, and a compulsive need to win and be great. He is a somewhat like Donald Trump, although more intelligent I would say. He sees adjacent territory as available to add power to the Russian regime in the long run, even if that entails a huge setback in the short run. This is a long running characteristic of Russian leadership and contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union. The result was not a long-term increase in power, but a reduction in power. Psychopathic leadership demoralizes a population. The Russian nation, given its land area and agricultural capability, ought to have a population greater in number than the United States, but instead it is less than half the US population and far less than the population of the "West" it so often calls attention to. A similar comparison can be made between North and South Korea. Russia's underperforming demographics are a result of the success of the development of perhaps the world's most potent system of internal security. Those in that institution enjoy the finer things in life, while the rest generally underproduce due to despair and the alcoholism that often goes with that despair. That system sent millions in Ukraine and others all over the Soviet Union to their death in the camps or their disability if they survived the camps. As psychopaths, the leaders have no empathy for those they have treated unreasonably. To them, other people are a means to the leaders' perceived ends, because they truly believe that they know what is best for the country. They are always "right." That's what Gorbachev said about Putin, "He is always right." Surely you do not think he meant that literally.
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Hundreds of thousands of Russians have lost their homes to save their lives. Tens of thousands of Russian young men have lost their lives for the gleam in old men's eyes. Russia's demographics portend the eventual ceding of East Asia to China. Your argument of inevitability is based on the Russian population exceeding Ukraine's. China's population exceeds Russia's by an even greater factor. Similarly with China's economy vs. Russia's. The writing is on the wall, and this war is hastening the day. Russia, under KGB leadership, is self-defeating, again.
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@newcoatresurfacing5477 It's true that Ukrainian electricity supplies are low. It would make sense to use what they have to operate pumps and heat rather than light. The absence of light makes it harder for Russian reconnaissance to figure out where the distributed generation actually is. Gradually, distributed generation increases the availability of power, and with too many targets for Russian missile capacity to take out. Distributed generation can also be mobile, moving to new points of connection to local distribution systems. In essence, the number of small distribution substations is increased. This is similar to Russia dividing large stores of ammunition into smaller stores.
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Try stating Russian progress in square km per day over the course of the last month. Divide Russia's desired sq km in Ukraine by that progress factor. That's a lot of months to go. Russia keeps waiting for Ukraine and the West to crack, and they don't crack. The Russian sense of its own infinite capacity is self-defeating hubris and delusion. Russia was raking in Western money, and then let its head get too big. This is the kind of setback that will set the stage for China to manage Russian East Asia. American energy companies are settling into the European market while renewable energy projects temper future demand for Russian oil and gas. The good old days have come and gone for Russia. They blew it for delusions of grandeur.
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That would provide the West the excuse it needs to attack Russian forces in Ukraine and the Black Sea and set the stage for China to begin "assisting" Russia in managing East Asia. Russia would like NATO to attack first in the hope that the Russian people would finally get riled up enough to volunteer for the army.
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Yes. It's always just around the corner. Why wasn't this done yesterday?
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The back-channel discussions between the US and Russia probably included promises of tit-for-tat on chem weapons. A lot of this is about managing public opinion.
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@RedeemedKJV Yeah, prosperity is always just around the corner.
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@brennanm100 I've marked my calendar. We'll see. What does "wins the war" mean exactly?
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@brennanm100 Russia has been trying to take the Donbass since 2014. Zelensky is a term limited leader who can be replaced. If the Russian military hasn't destroyed the Ukrainian military after 11 months, it probably is not going to destroy it anytime soon, because another crop of Ukrainian boys just turned 18. If Russia actually agreed to a new border agreement, what's left of Ukraine would be irrational if it did not join NATO because neutrality just tees it up for later conquest. Ukraine will be reconstructed with seized Russian assets. And because all of this remains unacceptable to Russia, the war will go on and on until Russia has another Afghanistan moment of truth. Ukraine seems to have a determination equivalent to the Taliban. The US thought it was going to be aiding a Afghan style Ukrainian insurgency. Instead, the survival of the conventional Ukrainian military provides an opportunity to actually reach a line of exhaustion and establish an armistice in a shorter period of time. The Russian regime has shown its true nature. It remorselessly kills tens of thousands of Russian speakers, be they Russian or Ukrainian. The consistent use of pretext and delusions of grandeur led to the Soviet collapse. The new cast of leaders is cut from the same cloth.
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There are a lot of major problems going on within Russia right now. I don't recall Putin listing US economic collapse as a war objective. I recall pretext about Nazis, demilitarizing Ukraine, NATO "expansion" (liberty from Russia), and rescuing supposedly oppressed Russian speakers in the Donbas. Whatever its particular set of problems, the US and the West's population and their economies outweigh that of Russia, yet Russia presents itself as essentially infinitely resourced and infinitely capable. That is delusion and hubris. What Russia has, next to China, is the world's most potent system for domestic control, which gives the leadership of the regime an outsized sense of power. At the same time, that domestic control does not create a large mass of motivated soldiers. The regime obviously sees the common soldier as expendable. This lack of empathy and undue sense of power has led Russian leadership to a large-scale confrontation with its own limits, right up to waving its nuclear cards. Limits and loss are something very uncomfortable for the regime's psyche. In the West, loss more often leads to evaluation, correction, and returning to compete again. What Russia does is look at the speck that is in someone else's eye, and not at the plank that is in it's own. It is a form of avoidance behavior. "Everything is going according to plan and will be fine." Delusion and hubris. The US government, in consultation with the people of the US, and of course its special interests, are in a continuous and often contentious dialogue of self-improvement. In Russia, people have to be very careful about complaining about the government's plans. The Russian regime is driving people out of their country and essentially committing the genocide of tens of thousands of Russian speakers, be they Russian or Ukrainian Russian speakers, for the sake of the leadership's vanity. Millions of foreigners are trying to get INTO the US. Why? Usually, to make more money, because it is here to be made. The Russian population is far less than it should be because of the practices of the Soviet and Russian regimes, and the trend does not look good for Russia at all. But no worries, China, with its own problems, yet with its huge population and economy, will help manage things in the Russia of the future. That's something even Putin is scared to talk about.
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