Ooooh! I'm on "ignore"! Got tired of losing arguments? :-)

Did that cause Putin to stop? Nope.

Not yet. But it will. As long as the west is supplying Ukraine materiel (because Ukraine's industrial base by itself couldn't sustain a conflict like this), the map isn't going to change. And that's really really bad for Russia.

Putin needs that map to change, and in his favor. And, as you rightly point out, it mostly isn't. He didn't learn the lessons of the USSR in Afghanistan, nor the British in Afghanistan, nor the USA in Afghanistan, nor Vietnam, nor Iraq... And, unlike most of those examples, he doesn't even "own" the country. They still have a working government directing an active military. That wasn't the case for most of the examples I just gave.

If the west went insane, and totally abandoned Ukraine [not gonna happen], Kyiv would probably collapse. And then he'd have an insurgency to deal with. But he hasn't even gotten that far yet.

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