Russia is now fighting a war of attrition and way better positioned for it than Ukraine but it wasn’t their intention and it took months for them to swallow the fact that it was gonna be necessary (hence the mobilisation only coming months after).

Yes - and now that they have shifted to attrition, why would they be in a hurry to end things?

You wrote in your original comment that “Politically this will have given western support for Ukraine a shot in the arm which is the opposite of what Russia needs if it wants to end the war sooner rather than later”, but if Russia has accepted the framing of this being an attritional conflict, why would they “[want] to end the war sooner rather than later”? And thus, why would this be “embarassing”, rather than just the plan to attrit Ukraine continuing on? You can’t attrit the enemy if you don’t actually fight them.

like sorry but this is just revisionism of what happened in 2022

I don’t disagree that Russia’s original strategy was maybe naive (although I also disagree with the framing people have of assuming Russia didn’t have, you know, a plan B - to me, the drive towards Kiev was just an opportunistic “if it works, it works” move, with a more conventional attritional plan to fall back on otherwise; there’s also other strategic considerations beyond just taking the capital)- but they’re not fighting according to that strategy anymore, so what is its relevance exactly? Yeah, sure, we can criticize them for taking so long to adapt - but they have adapted. Like, this is the kind of thinking that causes Westerners to think Finland won the Winter War, because the Soviets happened to underperform, even though they actually achieved all of their strategic objectives, and more. Could the Soviets have carried out the campaign better and with less casualties? Maybe, but we can argue about counterfactuals all day long. Did they win? Uh, yes!

Russia’s raid against Kiev was both a low-probability stab at ending the war immediately, as well as a pinning maneuver that held a large Ukrainian force immobilized and covered Russia’s two other campaigns in the south and east. If the Russians had expected the Kiev column to work on its own, why would they have bothered with the other two prongs of their attack?

Conversely, if it gives a huge strategic advantage and there’s a chance it could end the whole war instantly, why not do it? (In fact, as we now know, if not for Boris Johnson personally visiting Zelensky and swearing that NATO would give everything to ensure a Ukrainian victory, a peace deal would have been signed in April 2022)

This way of thinking betrays an undialectical understanding of why actors act, where they do things for ‘a’ reason rather than because the set of reasons to do it outweighs the set of reasons not to do it. Then, if the action fails to achieve ‘the’ reason, it is a failure as a whole: the actor must be foolish or have made a mistake, and any advantage gained was an accident, or it’s even asserted that because of the apparent failure they cannot have gained any advantage! Western commentators are unable to go beyond this - frankly, they’re unable to grasp that their enemies act for reasons rather than just an innate urge to do evil - but it’s useless as a way of analysing the world, especially when it comes to questions such as why the US even started this war in the first place.

I’ve seen people argue that the US miscalculated, that the war has been a failure because neither the Ukrainian military nor the sanctions have put a dent in Russia’s performance, but actually destroying Russia and breaking it open for the neoliberals to feast on was only the most favorable possible outcome.

• Cutting Europe off from Eurasian economic integration and making them dependent on US gas imports is still a win for the Empire
• Laundering enormous amounts of money through Ukraine and back into US MIC stocks and (Democrat) politicians’ pockets is a win for a subset of high-ranking imperial ghouls
• Privatizing Ukrainian assets to pay for war debts and seizing control of land and state resources is a win for rentier megacorps like Blackrock
• Tightening security in the face of an external enemy and dipping their beaks in the pot of US arms spending - even as their real economies die off - is a win for the European suzerains

Even if the capital-R ‘Reason’ of destroying Russia had only a slim chance of success and, as we can see, has failed, the other reasons to start the war still far outweighed the reasons not to.

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