Ah yes, I forgot we’re doing the echo chamber thing here as well.

To add to this: taking territory is the easy part.

The hard part is holding it, because you don’t just have to worry about staffing the front line, but maintaining security in the occupied regions long enough for non-state actors to cease hostilities and accept the invading force as the new legitimate authority- which may never fully occur- all the while dealing with resistance fighters.

This means orders of magnitude more personnel, funding, and equipment for an unknowable length of time across a much larger area than just the line of incursion.

It’s taken them two years to fail to take the land, and now have an incursion into their own soil to contend with. so I’m skeptical they’d manage to keep it permanently.

Advances on land are definitely not a be-all/end-all kind of thing, but rather a metric in terms of current force ratio. If Ukraine had enough troops and supply of weapons, they wouldn’t have to give up ground. The current supply they receive is insufficient so they have to yield ground though. It’s a symptom.

Unless russia starts running out of either manpower or war supplies before Ukraine does, they are not in danger of losing. And as unpopular this opinion might be, with the current level (=limited in number and scope of use) of support Ukraine is getting, it’s far from decided that russian war effort collapses first.

Eh, it’s not to say it’s a worthy endeavour for them. But Putin doesn’t care about the dead, and there are very few signs that even the russian society at large does.

Russia may well go through another collapse after this, but that doesn’t mean they won’t cling on long enough to cripple Ukraine and/or annex parts of it. That is my concern.

Remember: Karelia still belongs to Russia, and the winter war wasn’t any less bloody for them.

Eh, they’ll just ban abortions and have more troops in no time /s