Business, Economics, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

The Ukraine Debacle

28 Comments

…showcases Joe Biden’s failures.

[Thursday-afternoon update]

The Ukraine invasion was the result of a quarter century of appeasement.

[Update a couple minutes later]

From June through last month, I had been working with a bunch of young Ukrainians in Kiev (men and women). I suspect that some of them have enlisted. And the Russians are protesting the war in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

28 thoughts on “The Ukraine Debacle”

  1. I wonder how far it will go? I was a little surprised to see the Russians take out the Ukrainian air force overnight. Hopefully Putin will be smarter than Bush: taking out the civilian infrastructure of Iraq was dumb. It took a secularizing modern population and threw it into the arms of Medieval religious nuts. If Putin preserves Ukrainian industry, Yuzhnoye and Yuzhmash are real moneymakers.

    2. I wasn’t. It sounds like the professional Ukraine army is greatly outnumbered in all categories. What will be telling is how fast that defense crumbles. Will it be UK fast (like the Second World War defenses of Hong Kong and Singapore) where the defense lasts a day for every month it was hoped to last, or will it last much longer? If the Ukraine is still in action two weeks from now, I’d say they’re greatly exceeding my expectations.

  2. What would be a better name for a Russian electronic band: “Don and Bass” or “Trance Nistria”?

    (P.J. O’Rourke has left the building. I do my best, damn it.)

  3. I remember when we had the “Max Headroom for President” meme.

    I never thought that 34 years later we’d end up with Min Headroom AS President…

  6. I didn’t think they would do it. I don’t think Putin only did this because Biden told him it was ok but it shows the world has judged him incompetent. Who else will act on the margins?

    The next few years are going to be tense and we have furries and money multiplier fairies in charge

    When Democrats rigged the election, they could have installed anyone but for whatever reason, they chose Biden. Way to go brainiacs. You thought he would be your own Reagan, to take the fall for all the illegal schemes, but it didn’t work out. Biden sucks too much.

    1. Joe Biden is just an animatronic puppet that was just supposed to drool while rubber stamping whatever legislation Pelosi rammed through the House…

  7. If regular Ukrainians decide to dig in and fight, I think they’ll win unless Putin massively ups his troop numbers. A few weeks ago I ran some numbers on 140,000 troops, which I’ll update here to 190,000.

    Ukraine:
    Area 233,031 square miles
    Population 44,130,000
    Population density 189.4 per square mile

    Indiana:
    Area 35,825 square miles, 6.5 times smaller than Ukraine
    Population 6,785,528, 6.5 times smaller than Ukraine
    Population density 189.4 per square mile – exactly the same.

    So 190,000 troops to invade Ukraine is the same as using 29,210 to invade Indiana, which is about the same as the number of Indiana’s police and national guard (27,000). Indiana has 92 counties, so that’s 318 invading soldiers per county. Each soldier would be outnumbered by 232 local residents. And since Ukraine is 6.5 times larger, the supply lines through hostile territory are, on average, going to be 2.5 times longer going into Ukraine than they would be for Indiana.

    When the US and its allies went into Iraq in 2003, the local population to allied soldier ratio was 83 to 1, about four times higher than what Russia is using, and we knew almost all the Iraqis wanted Saddam overthrown.

    Russia fought two wars in Chechnya recently, where the area was 6,700 square miles (34 times smaller than Ukraine) and the population is 1.4 million (31 times smaller than Ukraine).

    In the first Chechen war in 1994-96, the Russians fielded 70,000 troops, and the Russians suffered about 5,700 deaths. In the second Chechen war in 2000,the Russians had 80,000 troops and suffered about 7,200 deaths, for a total of about 12,900 deaths in the two conflicts. (And Russian casualty numbers should be taken with a large grain of salt.)

    So the population to Russian soldier ratio was 20 to 1 in the first conflict, and 17 to 1 in the second, whereas their ratio in Ukraine is a whopping 232 to 1, a twelfth of the troop density they’d used in Chechnya.

    Scaling the Chechen wars casualty figures up by 30 would predict 387,500 Russian military deaths, which is over twice as large as the total size of the invasion force.

    Russians are good at numbers, but to me these indicate that Putin is either
    1) off his rocker or
    2) sincerely thinks Ukrainians will flip sides or not fight, or
    3) his generals are bunch of yes-men, or
    4) the invasion is just a partial bluff and Putin thinks he can get a bunch of concessions for pulling back, once he’s scared the heck out of everybody.

    1. I heard that Chechens can be hard-core.

      Two of them fought off the entire Suffolk County Sheriff department, or at least for a couple of days.

    2. 4 shows Putin knows too well how the west settles problems. Declaring the independence of those two regions provides a fallback. He knows he won’t be made to give them up. Going farther allows for more bargaining and maybe he could get up to the river?

      But why stop? Only Ukraine will try and stop them.

    3. I’d bet on #4, in combination with the second part of #2, at least. #3 is a given, of course. As for the rest of it, well, that’s in the same universe as the one where the US Army is defeated by the Deer Hunter Militias.

      1. Someone else suggested a #5, that Putin was going for a quick decapitation strike and thinking that would end it. His new puppet would take over and Ukraine would become a happy and loyal client state again. At worst, perhaps it would be like rolling tanks into Budapest in ’56 to crush a rebellion.

        Well, it looks like Putin’s plan has been utterly wrecked because now it seems the Ukrainians will fight bitterly and never accept Russian occupation. From here on, there are likely no good outcomes for Putin. He’s reportedly livid and threatening to unleash hyperbaric weapons on Ukrainian cities.

          1. If he does something like that, I don’t even think he could pacify Russia. All the cities already have huge antiwar protests because he’s bombing not only former fellow Soviets, but ones who are basically fellow Russians. He’s starting a bloody Slavic civil war just because he has some Cold War strategic fantasy stuck in his head, as if people had loved autocracy and secret police.

        2. TBH Putin is doing the US a favor – Zelensky is a Democrat (if not Biden) stooge. Surprised to not see more support for Russia on here. I hope things fall in Putin’s favor and I think they will.

  8. If the US were being encircled by an enemy, for example, if the Russians based their missiles in some Carribean banana republic, we would *never* be so dishonorable as to invade a sovereign foreign nation, or even institute an illegal naval blockade! Why… oh. Wait a minute. Sorry, I forgot. 1962 was such a long time ago…

    Somewhere, in some toasty corner of Hell, Nikita Sergeevich is laughing his ass off.

    1. We always like to blame ourselves, all events must be because of something we did or didn’t do. Of course our actions have influence but we always have to keep in mind that the person most responsible for the person’s actions is themself.

      Is Putin motivated by NATO creep? Maybe but his motivations are far more complex and have more to do with his desires than NATO’s.

      1. I think part of his paranoia comes from the Cold War situation where Moscow was 1000 miles from NATO’s forward lines. If Ukraine went NATO that distance would be down to 200 miles, and that probably has the old fossils freaking out. They’re still thinking in terms of a nuclear exchange with the West.

        Yet most European capitals are close to national borders, in some cases artillery distance. The only one that’s got a 200 mile buffer is Rome. Longing for a thousand-mile buffer zone in Europe is absurd.

        1. Could be, I’m sure he doesn’t like it.

          All of his recent acquisitions have had strategic benefits aside from gaining more territory. What does Putin want to do with the lands he has taken?

Comments are closed.