To add to this: taking territory is the easy part.
The hard part is holding it, because you don’t just have to worry about staffing the front line, but maintaining security in the occupied regions long enough for non-state actors to cease hostilities and accept the invading force as the new legitimate authority- which may never fully occur- all the while dealing with resistance fighters.
This means orders of magnitude more personnel, funding, and equipment for an unknowable length of time across a much larger area than just the line of incursion.
It’s taken them two years to fail to take the land, and now have an incursion into their own soil to contend with. so I’m skeptical they’d manage to keep it permanently.
Advances on land are definitely not a be-all/end-all kind of thing, but rather a metric in terms of current force ratio. If Ukraine had enough troops and supply of weapons, they wouldn’t have to give up ground. The current supply they receive is insufficient so they have to yield ground though. It’s a symptom.
Unless russia starts running out of either manpower or war supplies before Ukraine does, they are not in danger of losing. And as unpopular this opinion might be, with the current level (=limited in number and scope of use) of support Ukraine is getting, it’s far from decided that russian war effort collapses first.
“Advancing” isn’t good enough. You can’t think of any times someone was able to advance at some point, but still ended up losing a war?
Wars aren’t about land, something Russians should know better than anyone else after what they did to Hitler and Napoleon.
To add to this: taking territory is the easy part.
The hard part is holding it, because you don’t just have to worry about staffing the front line, but maintaining security in the occupied regions long enough for non-state actors to cease hostilities and accept the invading force as the new legitimate authority- which may never fully occur- all the while dealing with resistance fighters.
This means orders of magnitude more personnel, funding, and equipment for an unknowable length of time across a much larger area than just the line of incursion.
It’s taken them two years to fail to take the land, and now have an incursion into their own soil to contend with. so I’m skeptical they’d manage to keep it permanently.
Advances on land are definitely not a be-all/end-all kind of thing, but rather a metric in terms of current force ratio. If Ukraine had enough troops and supply of weapons, they wouldn’t have to give up ground. The current supply they receive is insufficient so they have to yield ground though. It’s a symptom.
Unless russia starts running out of either manpower or war supplies before Ukraine does, they are not in danger of losing. And as unpopular this opinion might be, with the current level (=limited in number and scope of use) of support Ukraine is getting, it’s far from decided that russian war effort collapses first.