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- cross-posted to:
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There is little doubt that Russia will be successful
Oh yeah? In Putin’s head maybe.
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Ask Singaporeans, Indonesians, Malaysians, Vietnam, Thailand… The only regions where the sentiment of “Russia will fail and relinquish all captured territory” holds is in Europe and North America.
Ah, the famous experts for land wars in Europe: Malaysia and Thailand.
Tbh the experts for land wars in Europe was the Soviet Union… It’s not even close. Soviet military doctrine won the Second World War against a better trained, better supplied, and more technologically advanced force. The scale and scope of Soviet operations is astonishing and enabled the Soviets to approach casualty parity in the later stages of the war.
Soviet improvement as the war went on was a function of lend lease, Red Army finally recovering from the Stalinist officer purges, and Germany’s failures (incompetence, lack of material, overstretched supply lines, etc.)
Regardless, the Red Army no longer exists and Soviet Cold War doctrine isn’t really relevant to this conflict.
Are you pretending like Russian doctrine today isn’t heavily derived from Soviet Cold War doctrine?
Anyway, let’s look at the lend-lease claim:
The Soviets produced around 100k tanks in WW2. The Americans supplied 13k.
The Soviets produced 157k aircraft in WW2. The Americans supplied 14k.
The American lend-lease program produced two key elements that the Soviets lacked: advanced trucks, and aviation-grade petrol. Both were problems that could have been engineered around (particularly since lend-lease peaked after the Red Army had turned the tides on Barbarossa and was gaining ground across the entire front), but American support made that unnecessary (and for which we are all thankful, because the alternative would have cost even more lives). These were two massive contributions that rapidly accelerated Bagration, but they don’t fundamentally change the fact that the Soviets were beating the shit out of the Germans after the failed push on Moscow and the attritional war in Stalingrad.
This also glosses over the point that lend -lease was primarily meant to create conditions of extreme and unpayable debt. The British empire was gutted and effectively taken over by the US after the war in exchange for not calling the debt due, a debt which is still on the books today. The Bretton Woods institutions were built off of these unequal bargaining positions as well.
The Soviets saw the broad strokes of thus coming, especially when the US came to them with a post-war rebuilding lend-lease proposal. If they hadn’t, the USSR would have been dead before Kennedy.
Yah, Vietnam would never expect that a foreign invader would try to invade a country, fail, and then leave entirely. When would they have ever witnessed that happen?
And his cronies apparently.
We can’t change horses mid-stream which is why Zelensky will not hold elections. But ousting the military chief of Ukranian Armed forces? Of course that would happen.
