What if Ukraine falls? This is no longer a hypothetical question - and it must be answered urgently

[erronis]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/13/ukraine-europe-donald-trump-nato
Simon Tisdall

Europe offers platitudes, Trump dithers, and Ukraine and its extraordinary people stand on the brink. Nato must step up

or 40 cruel and bloody months, Ukraine has fought the Russian invader. Since February 2022, when Moscow’s full-scale, countrywide onslaught began, its people have faced relentless, devastating attacks. Tens of thousands have been killed or wounded, millions have lost their homes. Ukraine’s industries, shops, schools, hospitals and power stations burn, its fertile farmlands are laid waste. Its children are orphaned, traumatised or abducted. Despite repeated appeals, the world has failed to stop the carnage. And yet Ukraine, outnumbered and outgunned, has continued to fight back.

Ukrainian heroism amid horror has become so familiar, it’s almost taken for granted. But as Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, escalates the war, raining nightly terror on Kyiv and other cities using record waves of armed drones, as US support and peace efforts falter, and as Ukraine’s overstretched frontline soldiers face exhaustion, such complacency looks increasingly misplaced. A no longer hypothetical question becomes ever more real and urgent: what if Ukraine falls?

Answer: Ukraine’s collapse, if it happens, would amount to an epic western strategic failure matching or exceeding the Afghanistan and Iraq calamities. The negative ramifications for Europe, Britain, the transatlantic alliance and international law are truly daunting. That thought alone should concentrate minds.

It has been evident since the dying days of 2023, when its counteroffensive stalled, that Ukraine is not winning. For most of this year, Russian forces have inexorably inched forward in Donetsk and other eastern killing grounds, regardless of cost. Estimated Russian casualties recently surpassed 1 million, dead and wounded. Still they keep coming. While there has been no big Russian breakthrough, for Ukraine’s pinned-down, under-supplied defenders the war is now a daily existential struggle. That they manage to keep going at all is astonishing.

. . .

Two outcomes now seem most probable: a stalemated forever war, or Ukraine’s collapse. Defeat for Ukraine and a settlement on Putin’s hegemonic terms would be a defeat for the west as a whole – a strategic failure presaging an era of permanent, widening conflict across all of Europe. For Russians, too, neither outcome would constitute lasting victory. Greater efforts are needed to convince Russia’s politicians and public that this war, so costly for their country in lives and treasure, can be ended through negotiation, that legitimate security concerns will be addressed, that the alternatives are far worse.

But first, they must give him up. The chief architect of this horror, the principal author of Russia’s disgrace, must be defanged, deposed and delivered to international justice. Putin, not Ukraine, must fall.

[Vogon_Glory]

1. A question that must be pondered, BUT

Nobody outside Vladimir Vladimirovich’s inner circle in the Kremlin and certain extreme-right circles here in the US seems to think that the Russians are winning either.

The Russians haven’t made a major advance since the start of their invasion and they’ve been bleeding treasure and their young manhood in quantities not seen since the eastern front in 1941-1945 and the trench warfare before that.

I do not condone Europe’s limited support and the current administration’s passive acquiescence to Russian aggression angers me. (What the Hell did we fight the Cold War for?). But I don’t see a Russian victory like Stalin’s in 1945 in the bag. A Pyrrhic victory maybe, be not a VE Day.

[Kid Berwyn]

2. Absolutely.

Zelensky is Churchill.

Putin is Stalin AND Hitler.

And without Joe Biden, there is no FDR.

[marble falls]

3. Did you mean, "what happens when Putin falls?"