- President Zelenskiy announces use of U.S.-made fighter planes
- Ukraine has long waited for the higher-capability jets
- Kyiv hopes they will change war, Russia vows to shoot them down
Aug 4 (Reuters) - Ukrainian pilots have started flying F-16s for operations within the nation, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Sunday, confirming the long-awaited arrival of the U.S.-made fighter jets more than 29 months since Russia’s invasion.
There’s only so many forces that can exist. You wear them down, they’ll run out of people. It’s already happening. They conscripted prisoners and that’s not even enough, so they are coercing people from other countries to come to Russia and then conscripting them.
It’s a pretty morally reprehensible thing to do, but I could see them thinking that’s worth doing.
But the thing is that Ukraine is getting worn down as well, and the longer this drags out the more emboldened Russia will become, not to mention the fact that right now Ukraine doesn’t have the capacity for retaking territory – if the war ends with Russia making territorial gains, you can bet your ass this won’t be the last Russian invasion in Europe in the near future.
But who could they invade it with? The betting, as I see it, is that they are essentially sacrificing Ukraine to save their own asses. Russia is just running out of people to put on the lines.
Russian population growth isn’t 0, though. Yes, the war’s going to make a demographic dent, but they’ve turned their schools into military indoctrination machines
It isn’t zero but it takes a long time to replace a decimated military. Even if you take conscription down to 16, you can only lose so many people per year before you can’t replace them before they age up quickly enough.