marcelh wrote:MohawkWeekend wrote:What did Vietnam look like after 7 years of US airstrikes, artillery and naval gunfire?
Who won that one? The NVA and VC believed in their cause. The US got tired.
I'm amazed by the courage of those who serve defending Ukraine. The Russians will get tired too.
The elephant in the room is when the supporters of Ukraine will get tired.
Possible but Putin with the nuclear threats, his repeated threats against others makes him a larger threat than any Russian leader since Stalin, also the first without an effective Politburo or anything else to reign him in before he embarks on destructive adventures.
The fact both Finland, in their case now free to do so without Soviet intimidation, plus Sweden, who never went with NATO membership, even with Stalin’s clear intentions for Europe, starting with West Berlin in his attempt to starve it out (who blinked first there?), then the Korean War (it was very widely, if erroneously with hindsight, believed that this was orchestrated as a feint to distract the West before going after Berlin and likely West Germany too). Still, throughout all this and more, such as Soviet bloody suppression of workers in East Germany (Corbyn, Der Linke and other useful idiots take note), then in Hungary, the ‘Prague Spring’, telling the puppets in Poland to crush Solidarity, Sweden instead went for expensive heavily armed neutrality, albeit very Western facing.
Now what has happened, I think that an over media saturated and in many was less informed, often trivial political class and electorate in Europe have had an existential shock, this sort of thing was not supposed to happen any more, by that I don’t just mean large scale conventional warfare in Europe but also, since this is Russia, large scale atrocities, if the territory so far retaken by Ukraine is anything to go by.
As others have stated, the long, post Cold War era is over, it was really over in 2008 when Georgia was attacked, let alone Ukraine in 2014, it just took people a long time and an escalation of actions culminating in February last year to drive the point home.
History, certainly in the last century, is filled with despots who took the freedoms and yes, often trivia filled democracies as weak and unwilling to act, as often they are, until.....
Germany in the 30’s, Japan in the early 1940’s both made that mistake.
Putin’s misreading of just about everything that would happen if he attacked Ukraine, reminds me of Von Ribbentrop’s assurances to Hitler just after Pearl Harbor, as he mulled declaring war on the US. As someone who had been in the US before, the head of the Reich’s Foreign Service told Hitler that the United States was dominated by ‘Jews and Negros’ and such is the decadence of that society it would not be until around 1970 before they could put serious military hardware and combat power across the Atlantic.
Eleven months later was Operation Torch......
They will be winning up until the point when the last truck rolls back across the Russian-Ukrainian border. 
