Reality Check: Russia has taken 20% of Ukraine

[TheProle]

One-fifth of Ukrainian territory is under Russia’s control, with Donbas “almost entirely destroyed,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said while addressing Luxembourg's lawmakers on Thursday.

“As of today, about 20% of our territory is under the control of the occupiers, almost 125 thousand square kilometers. This is much larger than the area of all the Benelux countries combined," Zelensky said to the Chamber of Deputies of Luxembourg via video link.

Zelensky also said fighting continues along the front line that is stretched over “more than a thousand kilometers” along the territories of Kharkiv region to Mykolaiv in the country’s south. He added Ukraine’s Donbas region is “simply devastated,” calling it “once one of the most powerful industrial centers in Europe.”

[cilla4progress]

1. Not good.

Take it back!!!

[edhopper]

2. Yes

but taking and holding are two different things. They do not have the forces to keep this without massive casualties. And that will degrade their ability to move forward. Ukraine will not cede ANY territory to Russia.

[TheProle]

4. I hope you're right, but fear you are wrong

[edhopper]

6. As do I

[ck4829]

3. A problem is population

Ukraine has a population of 40 million.

Russia has three times that and then some, a lot of them who will slit their own throats on Putin's command without hesitation.

[edhopper]

8. It's not population

it's ground forces needed to take an occupy a country. Russia may have lost a third of the forces they have deployed.
https://thehill.com/policy/international/3489148-uk-russia-has-likely-lost-one-third-of-ground-combat-forces-in-ukraine/
They simply don't have the forces to take Ukraine and they will continue to suffer losses as long as they stay.
They have already lost more people than they did in Afghanistan.

[ck4829]

9. And they have plenty more to lose, but keeping an occupied Ukraine will be a challenge

[edhopper]

13. They have a standing army

of about 300,000 ground forces. They need all of them and more. Which means not guarding any borders or any eastern bases.
I don't see Putin drafting a million more soldiers for Ukraine.

[Kid Berwyn]

5. But they didn't take Kiev.

And they really, really tried.

[Gore1FL]

7. They've had about that much since 2014.

The last three months have yielded very little in real-estate and very much in their own military's destruction.

[shrike3]

10. Thanks, I was just about to point that out.

Zelensky's estimate includes Crimea.

[TheProle]

11. Comparison

[DFW]

12. Russia and China are pushing their imperial ambitions differently

China wants Taiwan back as a province, and Russia wants the Ukraine back in the Soviet empire.

China is smart, taking all the time it needs. Even if it takes a few generations, political penetration, if cleverly done, can produce enough pro-reunification votes in a referendum to rejoin the mainland (think Brexit in reverse). But this will not fly today, or even in twenty years. Sure, China could bomb Taiwan to rubble, and make it a nuclear wasteland, but to what end? China wants an thriving industrial powerhouse to join them, not a Taiwan-sized Chernobyl. China is also seizing atolls in the Pacific, barely nubs poking their noses out of the water at low tide. They are then building them up with reclaimed land, and making them into military bases in the middle of the ocean, and claiming them to be Chinese territory, with all privileges of internatonally recognized sovereign land. Twelve miles exclusion, two hundred miles of national waters. If those territorial claims should encroach on Taiwanese waters or territory, well, too bad, they're Chinese now, Wanna fight over it? Nope?

"That ain't fightin' That's the way you do it. Islands for nothing and your land for free."

Putin, on the other hand, is probably confronting his own mortality right about now (or, if not, he sure is acting like it). He isn't interested in what the next two generations have in mind for Donbas. He wants it NOW, and if that means taking over a smashed wasteland that his treasury doesn't have the money to rebuild, well, his health wouldn't let him live to see it rebuilt even if he did have the money. "If I can't have it, YOU can't have it, either, so nyahh nyahh!"

[DetlefK]

14. Russia's biggest problem is time.

With every passing day, Russia loses modern weaponry it cannot replace due to lack of microchips:
* A missile-factory and a tank-factory have already shut down production due to lack of microchips.
* Downed russian jets were found to have a commercial GPS duct-taped to the console.
* The military parade on May 9th didn't include any fly-bys by planes. Neither regular military planes, nor their prototype for a flying military HQ.
* Russia is using mass-bombardments with dumb bombs and regular artillery as their strategy because they don't have the equipment for anything else.




With every passing day, Russia loses soldiers it cannot replace due to lack of morale.
* Intercepted phone-calls depict an angry and demoralized russian army. Russian soldiers complaining about lack of equipment, complaining about lack of smart tactics, complaining about lack of support. Russian soldiers who don't actually want to fight, they just want to cash their paycheck and go home.
* Russia has had to raise the age which new recruits may have.
* Russia has contracted soldiers to the frontline on short-term contracts, which have just expired this week. A good chunk of those soldiers want to go home.




With every passing day, the russian economy suffers.
* The ruble is doing great... because the russian government is spending money to artificially keep it up.
* Russia is running a foreign-trade profit... because they cannot buy anything abroad.
* Russia has defaulted on a foreign debt. It was a tiny sum, $1.6 million, but that kind of money should have been easy to pay for Russia. That's how much a brand-new tank costs.
* Any industry above a certain technological level depends on certain ressources/services that only foreign companies can provide. Which is no longer happening.
* The brain-drain has been on-going since 2005. Every year, Russia loses 1,000,000 artists, scientists, entrepreneurs because they emigrate abroad. And they get replaced with 500,000 unskilled laborers coming in from Central Asia, like Uzbekistan and Kyrgysztan. The war has accelerated this: There has been a wave of wealthy Russians who have left Russia during the war, because they don't want to get caught on the wrong side of a new Iron Curtain.

[ripcord]

15. If this grinds on into a war of attrition Ukraine is doomed.

They need more help, I know this will bother a lot of people but it may come down to NATO boots on the ground.

[localroger]

17. Actually the emerging consensus seems to be the other way around

Russia's supply lines are stretched about as far as they can go without becoming too vulnerable to maintain, and at home they are using up resources and losing personnel they can't replace. For the last month or so they have made no substantial progress, making a little progress here at the cost of a little Ukrainian pushback over there. This has required basically destroying the resources they "control" in order to prevent a hostile population from sabotaging and helping to flank them. And while Ukraine is steadily receiving more and more aid and building up a highly motivated army, Russian soldiers are poorly trained, demoralized, and motivated mainly by opportunities for looting which diminish as they destroy the territories they've overrun.

Russia's entire strategy was to overrun the country and take Kyev within a few days. That strategy had already failed on day 4 and the longer this goes on the more certain it seems that the Ukrainians will eventually push them back in the direction they came. A lot of soldiers and civilians will die and a lot of resources will be destroyed in the course of that, but Putin doesn't care and the Ukrainians have no choice.

[Bayard]

16. Ukraine is barely a blip on nightly news now

All gun violence, all the time--which I understand. But they still need our support.