23 hours ago, Sarex said:

How so? If Iran retaliates and NATO responds, how can Russia stop that? At that point it's anyone's game.

WW3 because Ukraine attacked an Iranian ship, seriously bro ?

Firstly Iran has been supplying military resources to Russia for years that have been used to perpetuate this war and kill Ukrainians

Secondly Iran has no military capability to go to war with Ukraine, they cant even stop the US from bombing them any time they want. There only strategy has been asymmetrical warfare where they launch drones and missiles against defenseless ships and Gulf States. They wont even target the US Navy because they know that will justify escalation from the US

So no, there wont be WW3 or nuclear holocaust because of this. You can quote me on that

On 7/28/2026 at 10:57 AM, Sarex said:

Idk if Ukraine is getting extremely ****y or extremely desperate, but they are on their way to trigger another world war.

so what did they do now that is worse than what russia did, I'm not keeping up with the news anymore

57 minutes ago, Lexx said:

so what did they do now that is worse than what russia did, I'm not keeping up with the news anymore

They attacked and damaged an Iranian ship and killed 1 sailor

Ukraine has said it was unintentional

They might have sunk it but as usual with this type of news its uncertain

Definitely a WW3 triggering event

4 hours ago, BruceVC said:

WW3 because Ukraine attacked an Iranian ship, seriously bro ?

Firstly Iran has been supplying military resources to Russia for years that have been used to perpetuate this war and kill Ukrainians

Secondly Iran has no military capability to go to war with Ukraine, they cant even stop the US from bombing them any time they want. There only strategy has been asymmetrical warfare where they launch drones and missiles against defenseless ships and Gulf States. They wont even target the US Navy because they know that will justify escalation from the US

So no, there wont be WW3 or nuclear holocaust because of this. You can quote me on that

Well attacking directly escalates things. Russia torpedoing a ship carrying missiles from the US would be the same. Iran can do asymmetric attacks as well, saw this today

The i Paper

Putin's war has collided with Trump's. The threat to us a...

Ukraine’s actions may widen both conflicts in unpredictable ways

It's the old chestnut that anything I/ we do is fine, because we have the best motives and justifications; and anything they do is awful, because they have the worst justifications and motives. Attacking or seizing ships in Hormuz is terrorism (though of course, so is breaking a bank's windows, at least in the UK. Not charged under terrorism, but that latter day Judge Jeffries Philip Parry wants to sentence them under it. Here's hoping he ends up in the Tower of London for his own protection like the historical Judge Jeffries) unless we're the ones doing it. At least I get a giggle out of all the outrage from people who never thought their tactics would be used against them by anyone. Hubris or stupidity, hard to tell really.

Going to be hilarious when Ukraine brings their complaints about Russia shutting down Odessa and sinking their merchantmen to the UNSC. The 'grain truce' may not have been renewed, but it was still honoured up until a couple of weeks ago, now Ukraine's harvest is rotting in fields since there isn't anywhere to put it. Kind of appropriate that the Euros are going to end up footing an even larger bill to keep the lights on in Ukraine, just a shame it won't be the Ursula's, Friedrich's and Emmanuel's who are actually paying.

lol I just got a notification because I've set a reminder for this post.

Mark my words. If the war drags on, expect Ukraine to be fighting to hold on to Kiev by July or August '26.

Guess that didn't work out so well.

18 hours ago, Lexx said:

lol I just got a notification because I've set a reminder for this post.

Mark my words. If the war drags on, expect Ukraine to be fighting to hold on to Kiev by July or August '26.

Guess that didn't work out so well.

Agreed.

I still believe Ukraine faces a potential collapse on their front lines because of how widespread draft evasion has become among young Ukrainians. But I certainly didn't expect the Russian side to fair so badly in this year's battles. I guess Russian battlefield incompetence is endemic, and the only way they ever "win" is by throwing masses of their people at the enemy.

As a casual observer they never really seemed that competent aside from Wagner.

5 hours ago, ShadySands said:

As a casual observer they never really seemed that competent aside from Wagner.

Well, they were pretty scary at the height of the Cold War, weren't they? All those tank armies at the IGB poised to swamp and crush the hapless West Germans. 😉

Doubt they'll ever be fighting to hold on to Kiev, really, issue of competence aside this war has a nasty environment for attackers.

Sure is an odd war lately, Russia's blowing up gas stations, Ukraine's blowing up commercial warehouses.

Edited Sunday at 08:06 PM1 day by Malcador

Getting out of Crimea in the first few days was extremely competent and lead to the biggest territorial gain of the war. Theoretically that should have been pretty difficult since it's a natural bottleneck that Ukraine had 8 years to prepare. Not much since though.

Then again, neither side has showed much in the way of offensive ability since the first few months, which suggests that either everyone is terrible at attack or everyone is great at defence. Or more realistically, that attacking is indeed very hard in the current environment. Which is also bourne out pretty well by other conflicts where the nominally far stronger sides are not doing/ have not done anywhere near as well as they might expect.

We can also see what is happening in Iran. War is hard...

The poster child for it is probably still Afghanistan. Total air dominance, total technical/ technological dominance on the side of the west. Estimates for losses: 66-92k for one side, 53-82k for the other. Amazingly, the Taleban figure is the lower estimate. OK, different style of war and OK, the vast majority of the dead on the western side were Afghans, but still. If you're up against a determined enemy it's not easy by any means.

Very easy to knock both the sides in Ukraine for being tactically unimaginative and wasteful, but it's not like anyone else has done very well recently; and the 'expert' advice that we know about from the west tended to consist of gems like "just drive around the minefields". Which was... well, it didn't come from a modern day Hannibal, Temujin, ibn al Walid or Alex the Great to be sure.

15 hours ago, kanisatha said:

Well, they were pretty scary at the height of the Cold War, weren't they? All those tank armies at the IGB poised to swamp and crush the hapless West Germans. 😉

I don't know, I was a little kid back then at the tail end of it. Just meant that they seem to be bumbling around Ukraine. I assumed they would have steamrolled Ukraine in the beginning of the war and now here we are years later. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad for it, as I've said I've got in-laws in Kiev.

Makes me wonder how we'd hold up against our neighbors. Would they make us look that bad too?

Disagree with Zor on Afghanistan, though, even though he admitted it's different, as the invasion was over quickly and the occupation was costly and I would expect it to be costly for Russia as well once/if they finally "win". Obviously though none of the comparisons can be very close.

Edited 21 hours ago21 hr by ShadySands

6 hours ago, ShadySands said:

Makes me wonder how we'd hold up against our neighbors.

Probably pretty easily, airpower and vast numbers. Only hope would be for domestic resistance to attacking us (lol, right)

7 hours ago, ShadySands said:

Disagree with Zor on Afghanistan, though, even though he admitted it's different, as the invasion was over quickly and the occupation was costly and I would expect it to be costly for Russia as well once/if they finally "win". Obviously though none of the comparisons can be very close.

But what would they occupy exactly? The local population would not be against Russian rule as most of the territory they are after is or would be Russian speaking. I don't see the comparison between Afghanistan and Ukraine there at all. They would do what Croatia did in the 90s, a mass exodus of undesirable people and just ethnically cleanse the new territories. The rest of Ukraine would have lost at that point and be without a military organization.

8 hours ago, ShadySands said:

I don't know, I was a little kid back then at the tail end of it. Just meant that they seem to be bumbling around Ukraine. I assumed they would have steamrolled Ukraine in the beginning of the war and now here we are years later. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad for it, as I've said I've got in-laws in Kiev.

Makes me wonder how we'd hold up against our neighbors. Would they make us look that bad too?

Disagree with Zor on Afghanistan, though, even though he admitted it's different, as the invasion was over quickly and the occupation was costly and I would expect it to be costly for Russia as well once/if they finally "win". Obviously though none of the comparisons can be very close.

I was in college during the last few years before the wall came down. And I was a fanatical Cold War wargamer. I had the entire orders-of-battle for both Warsaw Pact and NATO forces across the IGB perfectly memorized. The grand total of combat troops, tanks, AFVs, and especially artillery tubes the Soviets had amassed among 1 Guards Tank Army in the north, 2 Guards Tank Army in the south, and 3 Shock Army in the middle was staggering. I always felt really bad for the troopers of our Blackhorse cavalry regiment at the Fulda Gap, because their lifespan was estimated as mere seconds if WWIII ever broke out. Their entire job was to die sending word back to SACEUR that the Soviets had crossed the border.

And I also agree with you that winning the battle/war is fundamentally separate from a subsequent occupation. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and dare I say even Vietnam, the US decisively won every set-piece battle it fought. It was only occupation that sucked hard and cost us so very dearly. I still recall being on a panel at my university a few weeks before Bush sent us into Iraq in 2003. I was the sole person in the room who rejected both sides in the debate about going to war. I disagreed with the Administration's military plan, but I equally rejected those opposed to invasion, both here in the US and especially certain European governments, who were ridiculously arguing to stick with an obviously failed status quo. So, when asked what my plan would be, I suggested the classic Machiavellian realist alternative, which was to secretly cut a deal with Hussein for him to be our patsy and do exactly as we say in exchange for us walking away from all UN sanctions and our blockade. But then I also added that if that was too distasteful for our squeamish liberal internationalist elites (liberal in the poli sci theory sense and not the US politics sense), then another alternative would be to go in hard and fast, remove Hussein from power, hand over the country to an Iraqi version of Egypt's Mubarak (which we had there), and then get the hell out of that counrty ASAP. The domestic politics of liberal democracies are just not capable of handling what one must do to effect a successful occupation of a hostile enemy. Hint: it's what the Allies did to the civilian populations of both Germany and Japan in 1945.

I don't think it's a good comparison at all but I also don't think what's left of Ukraine is all that friendly towards Russia or is going to be after it's finally conquered. Just as we in the US turn people against us by killing them and their kin. I have no special insights into the opinions of Ukrainians in Ukraine, just anecdotes.

But yeah, if Russia just eliminated everyone that wasn't demonstrably pro-Russian then that could likely kneecap a lot of insurgency efforts. Incredibly hard to defend though.

Edited 12 hours ago12 hr by ShadySands

5 minutes ago, ShadySands said:

I don't think it's a good comparison at all but I also don't think what's left of Ukraine is all that friendly towards Russia or is going to be after it's finally conquered. Just as we in the US turn people against us by killing them and their kin. I have no special insights into the opinions of Ukrainians in Ukraine, just anecdotes.

I think you overestimate the people's willingness to fight. Ukraine is having major issues filling out their ranks and are facing mass desertions and draft dodgers, to the point where people are being kidnapped from the streets in broad daylight. I think that a regular Ukrainian wants this war to be finished much more than a regular Russian. I am not saying that things are peachy in Russia, it's just that Ukraine is much worse off.

I'll go back to the example of Croatia, the remaining Serbian population did not produce any trouble and overall they just integrated and hid their origin.

The only issue I see for Russia, in case of a victory, is integrating Odessa and Transnistria.

The recruitment problem is one Ukraine has had since near the beginning, to an extent. Then, a lot of people volunteered thinking they'd be defending their home town and weren't keen at all to be sent off to fight in the Donbass. However, many of those people dodging TCC patrols would still potentially be willing to fight, if it were their town threatened. That's more true the further west you go. The problem now is that those who signed up to defend Ukraine in general are in various ways unavailable and that only leaves those who don't want to fight at all, and those who'd only fight for their own area.

Thing about Afghanistan is, you'd think with 30(++) years of technological advances the west would have done better than Vietnam at counter insurgency, and no doubt they thought they would have as well. Objectively, they very likely did worse, even significantly worse. That's with drones, satellite technology, far better communication and in theory far better munitions, no jungle (but mountains, certainly), the example of the soviets in Afghanistan prior and the Taleban using Vietnam era soviet kit for the most part and no capacity to hit aircraft flying above manpad ceiling. It's not really a direct homology to Ukraine, it's definitely analogous; but the attitude, expectations and the result when the opposition don't behave as you hoped is similar.