Going off the headlines in MSM you would think Ukraine is on the verge of victory so this is an enlightening update. Appreciate it.

I think the efforts of the MSM were initially like a nuclear bomb of propaganda for the first week or two, with the Snake Island thing and the Ghost of Kyiv, and then it settled down into a Great Wall, where no opinion even vaguely critical of Ukraine could penetrate. This has only really broken a bit in the last week or so, with a slate of articles suggesting that Ukraine might not actually win this. But today, there's a return to the old narrative. I ultimately think that they'll push the pro-Ukraine narrative right up until the last Ukrainian soldier dies defending the last Ukrainian city, if it comes to that. They report Russian advances as losses, but those losses are getting suspiciously closer and closer to Ukrainian cities...

This is what I’ve been wondering about. Since neutrality doesn’t seem to be on the table are they just going to go for the whole thing?

There's been a whole saga over the last few months about what exactly Zelensky and his party are going for. Zelensky himself isn't a very helpful source, as he jumps between "We will need to negotiate with Russia to end this war" and "We will retake Donbass and Crimea no matter what!" on consecutive days. I think there's a good case that he and his party are being controlled by the West - there was an example about how the timing of Ukraine withdrawing from negotiations was at the exact same time that Boris Johnson went to go visit and talked to Zelensky. Since Istanbul in March(?), there hasn't been any serious attempt at restarting negotiations. The West has gradually shifted from "Ukraine will obviously win this war" to "Okay, Ukraine might not win, and besides what even is victory? But we need to continue giving them weapons so that they can have the best negotiating position possible." The obvious problem with that is that Ukraine continues to lose territory every day, and they aren't really getting any stronger compared to Russia, so if that remains the official policy, the war will never end unless Ukraine is fully annexed, or at least the government is captured and a puppet government is put in its place.

Russia likely wants Novorossiya, which is a region that broadly constitutes the east and south of Ukraine. Odessa, Myklolaiv, Kherson, Zaporozhye, Donetsk, Lugansk, Kharkiv. Maybe Dnipro, maybe not. You can freely speculate whether Russia will actually get all that before Ukraine capitulates, or whether Ukraine will never capitulate and Russia will just continue advancing towards the west and north. Medvedev just said “Who said Ukraine will exist on the world map in two years?” in response to the US proposing a Lend-Lease program that will last until 2024. Is that just a threat to scare them into surrendering? Is that a promise? I don't know.

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Russia already shares borders with NATO. They don't want NATO to have open terrain to drive through to Moscow from Kiev, nor for NATO to control a country that is (or at least was) an important ally to Russia.

Ukraine would resume it's historical role as Russia's borderlands, a buffer between Russia and Europe.

Latvia and Estonia exist.

Russia can’t go faster cause:

A) ukraine still has s300, and russia hasn’t planned for dealing with their own anti air systems in their doctrines

B) ukraine gets full recon from the west, so there can be no surprise attacks with large scale movements of heavy weaponry

C) the state of russian spetznaz is not so great to do deep sabotage/the fortified regions are impenetrable to this in any case

D) russia hasn’t learned railway bridges locations in ukraine

The price of everything is going up everywhere, the EU is almost certainly going into recession, the US probably will too in the next year or so. Supply chains are getting fucked up, there's gonna be a global food crisis, there's an energy crisis that may be even worse than the crisis of the 1970s. Meanwhile, Russia, which is a largely self-sufficient economy with some capacity for state control, has faced the incredible amounts of sanctions placed against it and kinda shrugged it off. It certainly isn't looing good aside from a couple metrics, but it's very far from fatal, and the damage on the West is definitely higher than the damage on the East.

In a bigger sense, the dollar hegemony's decline is accelerating, partially due to the US seizing Russia's foreign reserves and thus undermining global trust in the financial system, and also because Russia, China and friends are beginning to explicitly move away from the dollar and towards national currencies. The ruble is the best performing currency in the world this year, to the point where it's actually now too strong and, if anything, Russia's economists aren't doing enough to keep it under control.

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