Having said all that:
>At the rate they have been going in 2025, it would theoretically take the Russians around 100 years and tens of millions of casualties to conquer the rest of Ukraine.
I don't think Russia needs / ever intended to take all of Ukraine, and they don't seem to have any serious wavering of public support.
If Ukraine can't realistically push Russia out I'm not sure they're "winning" just yet.
> it is already clear that Putin has failed to achieve his chief war aim — the destruction of the Ukrainian nation.
I think they likely just intended to install a puppet friendly to Russia along with claiming some land as a token prize, that's a goal that can still be accomplished by lots of means sadly.
Russia's strategy is mass volume of soldiers and in theory at least, they still have lots of population to draw from.
"it is already clear that Putin has failed to achieve his chief war aim — the destruction of the Ukrainian nation."
and this excerpt particularly stood out to me, because it's basically the one thing Putin has most assuredly done. 1/3 to 1/2 of the country is gone for good. Most, by Kyiv's own admission, will never return. Their industrial heart in the east is either captured or bombed out. They will need hundreds of billions of euro they can't afford to borrow to rebuild back to 2021 levels of HDI. And with a birth rate below 1.0 and the inability to attract productive migrants postwar (unique language, india level wages), what's left of their aged and shrinking population will never be able to recover.
Their best hope is to wrap up the war as soon as they can and beg to get in the EU and live off that teet until as long as they can. I'm not sure how they can ever convince a Ukrainian who has been living in Berlin for 4 years to come back to Odessa and work for $6k a year, so the demographic picture is pretty much unsolvable as far as I can tell.
doener•1h ago