Comment by aguaviva
14 days ago
Doesn't need to be a huge escalation.
Just enough to send the tide of attrition turning slowly the other way for a while.
After which HN will instantly fill up with comments about "how badly Russia is losing", "it's clear Ukraine has already lost", and so forth.
There were plenty of options to pressure Ukraine into preventing Russia from having a causus belli in early 2022
Russia never had casus belli in this conflict, and no one did anything to present it with such.
I'm not sure Ukraine wins a war of attrition in any meaningful way. Russia is also shockingly good at wars of attrition, and the entire Russian economy has been built around war with the West. Ukraine is a small state in comparison, and they are running out of men, money, and munitions so fast that even tipping the scales by 10x will sink Ukraine before Russia retreats from the territory they now own. In 2022, the goal would be to make it costly to acquire territory so ideas about attrition would have worked a lot better, but it's 2024 and Russia has already grabbed the land. Someone needs to go take it back.
Here's a memo for you on Russia's causus belli. You can claim that they didn't have a legitimate one (I don't think they did), but they had one that got them enough local and international support to work in both 2014 and 2022: https://www.ponarseurasia.org/vladimir-putins-casus-belli-fo...
In your opinion what could Ukraine have done to avoid the causus Belli in 2022?
The causus belli was twofold, and was aimed at the Russian people:
1. Prevention of NATO encroachment toward Russia
2. Protection of ethnic Russians in Donbas
Any and/or all of the following would have weakened or broken Putin's narrative:
1. Stop the military buildup in Donbas that had started in 2021
2. Cease admission of new NATO member states for 3-5 years
3. Stop the process of Ukraine getting closer to NATO and the EU
4. Reduce or stop US military assistance funding to Ukraine
5. Drop the Biden administration's economic sanctions of Russia
6. Continue implementation of the Minsk accords
7. Stop the planned deployments of US missiles to Ukraine
There are many more options. The US administration in 2020 was bringing Ukraine into the fold (because it wanted to be there), but that is not a recipe for peace. NATO had previously agreed not to get close to Ukraine or other states bordering Russia.
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