[koube]

We were funding them before, but now we are not, and I believe the op of this thread was commenting on how we are not funding then right now.

By the time the election season is over and we have another chance at funding Ukraine, it will have been a year of blocked funding. Personally I find it fundamentally unserious that a participant in a war leaves for a year or more, let alone the world's top superpower.

[dragonwriter]

> We were funding them before, but now we are now

Its been less than two weeks since the last aid package.

> By the time the election season is over and we have another chance at funding Ukraine

I wouldn't discount the chance of a discharge petition succeeding. Heck, I wouldn't even entirely discount the chance of the spate of resignations continuing and Republicans losing their House majority before the election, though that's less likely.

[koube]

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/25/congress-approved-3...

[DoesntMatter22]

Was there ever really a chance Ukraine would win? Idk how they could. Russia has more people. Napoleon and hitler both learned that the hard way.

I can't see what winning would even look like

[dragonwriter]

> Was there ever really a chance Ukraine would win? Idk how they could. Russia has more people.

The USSR had more people than Afghanistan, too, and was much more legitimately a superpower than Russia is today.

The USA had more people than Afghanistan, and was even more of a superpower than the USSR when it invaded Afghanistan.

The USA had more people than Vietnam.

China had more people then Vietnam.

The Arab states in 1948 had more people than Israel.

The Arab states in 1967 had more people than Israel.

The Arab states in 1973 had more people than Israel.

I think your metric for when the attacker is guaranteed to win a war where it invades another country is... not well calibrated to historical evidence.

[Arnt]

If you think the number of people is what counts: there's a cliché that the attacker needs a 3:1 advantage. Russia's population of 15-30-year-olds was less than three times Ukraine's, if you exclude immigrants.

[tim333]

Winning would have looked like sending the invaders back to Russia. There was a chance for that early on if Biden had been a bit less dithering about arming them. Now it's trickier as the Russians are kind of dug in.

Russia has more people but the collective west backing Ukraine have more money and tech.

I'm not sure how it plays out. The Russians probably have the upper hand at the moment as the Ukrainians are running out of ammo due to the speaker and Trump supporters blocking aid.

Ukraine may make things expensive enough for Russia that they choose to back off. Attacking their oil refineries is going quite well at the moment.

[StewardMcOy]

It has never been as simple as whichever side has more people, and that has only become more true as military technology has advanced.

Many lessons came out of the first two world wars about how modern warfare would be fought. One of them was that it didn't matter how many well-rested soldiers you had willing to fight. If you ran out of ammunition and your opponents have enough left to annihilate you, you'll probably lose.

We'll never know for certain, but there's a real possibility that if it hadn't been for the Lend-Lease program, the USSR would have run out of weapons and supplies, and Hitler would have defeated the Soviets.

Obviously, there's limits. One soldier sitting on warehouses of ammo isn't going to take out a force of ten thousand. But at the outset of the war, active Russian troops outnumbered Ukrainian troops by only 4 to 1. In the right circumstances, those are winnable numbers. And even better for the Ukrainians, Russia couldn't send all of their troops in. They needed to keep the bulk of them in Russia for defense.

Estimates of causalities in the war range from 1:3 to 1:5 in favor of Ukraine. So even if Russian troops outnumbered Ukrainian troops 2:1, all Ukraine has to do is continue killing Russian soldiers at the same rate, and eventually Russia will run out of soldiers to send.

That's what "winning" looks like for Ukraine. This is a war of attrition. They win by exhausting the enemy before the enemy exhausts them.

But it relies on Ukraine continuing to have enough ammo to kill the Russian soldiers at that rate. This is a war of attrition. Russia's firmly on a wartime economy, and unless the bottom falls out on them, they'll continue to produce weapons and ammo for the duration of the war. Enough for every solider they field? Maybe, maybe not, but they won't run out.

Ukraine, on the other hand, relies on the West for weapons and ammo. If it runs out, it loses, and that's why so many people are upset about Western countries dropping support. It's a winnable war for Ukraine, but only if Russia's enemies stay committed.