Only Self
The Kremlin's war against Ukraine has been going on for a year now. And it's a horrible, bloody war, an actual war and this whole circus of refusing to call it a war, only a "special operation," is just a plain lie. And as much as I and many others would like it to end soon, or in a year like some are predicting — no. It won't be over in a year. It terrifies me to think about, but I don't see any other option except Ukraine itself becoming industrially and militarily more powerful than the entire military and economic force of Russia, plus all their little helpers like Iran, North Korea, China, and even Cuba. Who are helping economically and maybe even more.
Any help from the West will always be extremely limited, and for several reasons at once, the main one being the complete political and ideological decay of Europe's elites. But also for economic reasons. They have their own problems they're incapable of solving, and the situation will only get worse. First and foremost, China will keep taking away their manufacturing year after year, while the US takes away their technological development. And not because the US and China are so devious (although they are), but because Europe is simply incapable of doing anything about it. That's why I'm convinced Europe will help, but mostly with small handouts, money, and a tiny bit of weaponry. All of this is, of course, very necessary and valuable, but nowhere near enough to stop the war.
The US will behave worse and better at the same time. Rhetorically, there'll be less support from the US, but in practice more, still very limited, though. Biden's administration is simply incapable of doing anything meaningful. There's some hope, of course, that if Trump suddenly gets elected, something might change, but I wouldn't count on it. He'll talk plenty and loudly, but in the end won't do any more than Biden. On top of that, he's a big fan of various dictators, and it's not yet clear whose side he'll be on. And I just have so little faith in both Democrats and Republicans that I fear that when the election comes, the American public will face a shameful choice between those two, while the majority of people would rather see neither of them.
So Ukraine has only one option to end the war on its own. And right now, that is very, very far away in practice.
The scenario where Russia takes over all of Ukraine also doesn't seem particularly likely. It's hard to describe what a horrific catastrophe this war already is for Russia. A huge number of people are dead and will be dead before it's all over, and since I think the war will go on for a long time, that means many times more will die. Both Ukrainians and Russians, soldiers and civilians. Cities near the front and deep in the rear will be devastated. The number of cripples and all kinds of deranged thugs who will return years later, utterly brutalized it's beyond description. What Russians who are against the war can do, I can't really imagine either. I see that there's some segment of reasonable, talented, and morally decent people there, but they are few. The complete ghouls aren't the whole country either, the majority are indifferent people raised over years, or centuries, to live in oppression and lies. But that segment who are against the war is unarmed; who can they stand up to? The internal troops—all the cops, the CheKists, the presidential guard, there are probably twice as many of them as the entire army currently fighting against all the armed forces of Ukraine, who are getting some, albeit little, help from the West. An unarmed opposition is powerless. First of all, it's fragmented; secondly, it's too naively pacifist. But even if it united into a single force and tried to actively resist, I have not the slightest doubt that they'd just be shot dead if needed—there is plenty of precedent in the past. During the civil war, the well-armed White Army couldn't manage it. For something to change, either decades must pass with a complete generational shift and with it, shifts in the economy, technology, demographics, etc. or some enormous cataclysm has to happen, and at this stage, that apparently means total military collapse. And as horrible as that sounds, and it truly is horrible, since it means enormous human losses on all sides, destruction, and economic collapse. it's all a nightmare, a horrible nightmare. Thus the sooner the war ends the better for Russian people, and especially all those people and their families that will avoid the death, brought with every additional day of it, not to mention the deep moral degradation that engulfs most of the population.
And by the way, more or less the same logic applies to Israel and Taiwan as well. And this is not just a fantasy. If the free world truly believes in its advantages, then it must use those advantages for its defense. The ancient Greeks were able to defend their democracies against the Persian invasion on the battlefield. Although they were later destroyed by their own weakness, it now seems that the West has been destroyed from within even before the invasion.
