> Especially when you can't project your military power a few hundred km over your own border.
Quite a lot of western commentators were just as surprised as Putin to discover that Putin commanded a force that managed to lose its own tanks to local farmers.
The difference is we got out the popcorn, and he got filmed anxiously gripping his own desk for 12 minutes.
Since then Putin has put his country into a war economy, and now it is a war of attrition because Ukraine is given just enough support to not lose but not enough to win either — Biden is both afraid of Russia winning and also of Russia escalating it if they lose too hard.
This war will go on until the west gets tired of supporting Ukraine or decides that escalation is a risk they're willing to take or Russia collapses under the weight of the war economy or Ukraine develops nukes; but I don't mean "the USA" when I say "the west" despite the fact that most current support comes from the USA, as many European countries have been building up their militaries both in reaction to what Putin did and in anticipation of Trump taking the US out of NATO.
I count that under "decides that escalation is a risk they're willing to take". We can all see the claims and threats made by the Russian government, we know they want us to fear their nukes, that's why the US government has been concerned about escalation.
I personally think there's a 75% they can't use any of their nukes and a 92% they can't use a strategically decisive number of nukes.
But I'm doing armchair analysis here, and even if I wasn't those odds are only sufficient for me privately to not worry, they're not enough for a government to not plan for the worst. I'd be more worried if the US was more hawkish and cavalier about this.
Though that's even assuming Putin (etc.) actually tries to use them — as I said, Biden's deliberately not given enough aid for Ukraine to win hard precisely because he doesn't want to risk it.
He's limiting support to enough to not lose, which is different than winning; he doesn't want Russia to keep rolling tanks to the line of the old Iron Curtain either.
Quite a lot of western commentators were just as surprised as Putin to discover that Putin commanded a force that managed to lose its own tanks to local farmers.
The difference is we got out the popcorn, and he got filmed anxiously gripping his own desk for 12 minutes.
Since then Putin has put his country into a war economy, and now it is a war of attrition because Ukraine is given just enough support to not lose but not enough to win either — Biden is both afraid of Russia winning and also of Russia escalating it if they lose too hard.
This war will go on until the west gets tired of supporting Ukraine or decides that escalation is a risk they're willing to take or Russia collapses under the weight of the war economy or Ukraine develops nukes; but I don't mean "the USA" when I say "the west" despite the fact that most current support comes from the USA, as many European countries have been building up their militaries both in reaction to what Putin did and in anticipation of Trump taking the US out of NATO.