that's not a limited war, have you seen the estimated numbers of casualties ?
it's not Vietnam or Afghanistan.
this is the deadliest war for Russian and Ukrainian soldiers since WWII.
Ukraine is not alone, because, independently of the US backing, if Ukraine fails to win back its territory alone, the Russian war will continue with Europe, and expand.
there was a lot everywhere, and, before the war, most of them weren't even Russia fanboy.
I mean, I'm not, but I did believe the "2nd army in the world" ranking.
The war proved everyone wrong, and when Wagner was still around, the Russian army was the 3rd army in Ukraine, and the 2nd in Russia.
they are still advancing ? they've not since more than one year, except at Bakhmut, at what cost, for what gain ?
and now China is the new labelled 2nd army in the world...
but are you sure they'd done better than Russia in Ukraine ?
I see you're from France.
There's usually a so-called moral high ground when opposing Russian actions in Ukraine.
Except I'm a realist, and a cold one. Seeing that you're from France, perhaps you'll get my point. The pro-Us imperialist camp, or generally just the pro-US or vaguely sympathetic camp, tries to condemn and attack Russia's actions in Ukraine while turning a blind eye to the predatory, destructive face of US imperialism in the last 4 decades or so. It as if Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, coups detat and so on did not matter, throwing napalm on innocent civilians in some Afghan or Vietnamese backwater doesn't matter, but hey only Bucha matters because "muh fweedom, muh democlazy", "muh make mine fweedom".
These people aren't that different from Russia fanboys, because they parrot official propaganda. There's no difference between condoning the record of unjust and immoral US global interventions in the last decades because of "fweedom", and drawing a "Z" and saying that Russia is out there to "denazify" Ukraine.
While Ukraine is pretty much a banana republic and a failed state, and is sliding towards a Weimaresque state where real nazis hold too much power and influence behind and in the actual political scene, I don't believe either in "Z" or these liberal imperialists who keep saying "hey we're in to throw bombs and saction Putin because of fweedom and dumbcrazy". Lol.
Like I said, I don't believe in either.
As for the Russian Army, I never believed in it. It is big, but not rather remarkable. The Russians have many modern weapons systems, like the S-400 and S-500, the AK rifles, the Armata tank, and so on; these are fearsome, but they rather make the core and not the bulk of their arsenal. The truth is that the Russian army suffers from poor logistics, rampant corruption, incompetent leadership, obsolete tactical doctrines and has still a core of mostly obsolete Soviet-era equipment pretty much like the Ukrainian army.
They can keep up in quantity/quality terms with making interventions in their own backyard, but I never bought into that stuff they were supposed to be "second in the world".
Again these are my opinions, my outlook, my research. I'm not a fanboy of any type.
As for the Russian advance, well, Kherson, Bakhmut, were "advances". Just like the French Army technically "advanced" a couple of square kilometers in Verdun, at an obscene cost. But these are about the same rate.
As for the Chinese Army, if we would be talking of Mao's Chinese Army, well, it wasn't a good thing to start with. But now the Chinese are rapidly modernizing, developing a professional NCO corps, developing whole new weapon systems in bulk. The Chinese Army is both fearsome in terms of quantity and manpower, and is now increasingly becoming the most modern army in the world in qualitative and technological terms. That's why they are fearsome. But I don't know their official ranking.
