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| Belmont Club: The Surprising Indeterminacy of the War in Ukraine | |
| 2024-02-26 | |
The Ukrainian soldiers are getting fewer, and Russia's military equipment is getting older by the day. Both things are occurring simultaneously. Each is weakening and gaining strength in his own way. On some time spans, it means disadvantage Kyiv. On other time scales, it spells game over Moscow as a world capital. The analyst must reckon which effect is dominant. One of the challenges in understanding the situation is drawing the right map. The terrain map measures how much land Russia has acquired in exchange for its loss and suggests how much more it must spend in men and treasure to win completely—or in Kyiv's case, regain completely. For the moment, it seems unlikely Russia has the power to seize all of Ukraine to its Western borders, just as it is hard to imagine Ukraine retaking all its Eastern losses. Absent a collapse on either side, the division line may settle in between. But you can draw another map that depicts the gains Kyiv and Moscow have made in the world in terms of supporters. The war is being fought on a geopolitical scale, too. Winning and losing are measured in terms of the world's balance of power. Here, the picture is more definite. The global, rule-based world has been shattered. People have described our current state as "the era of competition." But those are weasel words. It is more direct to say that we're in the middle of Cold War 2. | |
| Posted by:Frank G |
| #1 Russia will do this until they run out of money or win. We're already out of money. |
| Posted by: no mo uro 2024-02-26 13:14 |