Since war is politics fought by other means, long term means this: the probability of Russia attaining the goal in Putin's "open letter" of July 2021 that Russians and Ukrainians be "one people". The daily equivalent of 9/11 that the criminal terror state of Russia is raining down on the Ukrainian people has guaranteed one ineluctable outcome: Russia will lose Ukraine forever. When you see Lavrov the Liar constantly moving the goalposts of Russia’s “SMO”, you know their original aims are utterly unreachable.

"Steady and systematic grind": It's less than a kilometer a day, for 50000 shells/day. LiveUAmap.com and Jomini of the West's maps (https://twitter.com/JominiW/with_replies) show how the pace of Russia's artillery has slowed substantially. Why? The gun barrels require regular maintenance and barrel replacement at the pace Russia is using them. Maintenance requires logistics. Russia's military is very deficient at both (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMEpxX7rS5I&t=270s).

Australian economist Perun's videos take a deep dive into the economics and math of the degradation and corruption of Russia's military using publicly available Russian sources. The Russian military is a Potemkin village like the rest of Russia, an institutional cross-dressing mafia with a flag pyramid scam in which about 1/3 of its assets on paper simply don't exist. Why else did:

• “Recruiiters” kidnap university students in Donetsk off the streets to press-gang them into the meat grinder after only one week’s training, which caused a mothers’ protest on July 1?
• The army raise the maximum recruitment age to 60?
• Putin go to Tehran to beg Islamo-fascist ayatollahs for drones?

Add HIMARS (4 at first, now 20) destroying 30+ ammo depots and the Russian have to deliver shells by trucks from the rear after offloading them from railheads. If you don't believe me, believe the Moscow Times: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/07/11/effectiveness-of-ukraines-himars-fuels-concern-in-russia-a78257.

Putin has already fired Gen. Dvornikov, the butcher of Aleppo who was supposed to save his bacon. Citing Shoigu as a source of military reality is beyond laughable. I guess Shoigu believes the destroyed 1970s era T-62s I've seen photos of are the most advanced are the best Russia has. He's as credible as Lavrov the Liar, who said Zelenskiy is a Jewish Nazi.

I suggest you read:

* Nadine Brzezinski (https://medium.com/@nadinbrzezinski), whose Russian is much better than mine.

• Kamil Galeev (https://www.wilsoncenter.org/person/kamil-galeev) , a non-ethnic Russian Russian citizen who’s been jailed by the Putin regime.
• Jack Watling (https://twitter.com/Jack_Watling), whose military expertise far outranks yours and mine.
• the Middle East Media Research Institute (memri.org), which has a very good Russia section with translations of the genocidal venom written by Putin's mouthpieces (such as Timofey Sergeytsev) in Ria Novosti, and
• Tom Cooper, https://medium.com/@x_TomCooper_x/ukraine-war-16-17-july-2022-a3186104d8da
• Watch the Borderlands podcasts with Sam P.N. Cook, Glen Grant and David Simms, three veteran and military historian friends and colleagues of mine. https://medium.com/illumination-curated/russia-ukraine-war-borderlands-april-28-podcast-2ae810cbafe1

They all realistically channel check the war like I used to when I researched stocks for hedge funds taking short positions in stocks whose rot was hidden under the surface.

Above all, if you know nothing of Russian history, you have no idea about the context of what you're looking at and should listen to those who do. I've written extensively about The Rules of Russian History and Russia tell you Russia is a resource-cursed commodity exporting kleptocracy on the periphery of global capitalist trading networks.

My UCLA classmate, who in 1983 in Leningrad studied the Stalin party purges in the Soviet archives, summed up Russian history succinctly: "whenever there's a fork in the road between being practical and a tragedy, they choose the second.”

You wrote about my "experience working in foreign policy": I never worked in a foreign policy institution, despite taking my first Russian history course at Georgetown in the summer of 1972. My only government jobs were as a bilingual teaching assistant in a middle school in Spanish Harlem in the cheap and dangerous NY of 1978-79 and as a graduate teaching assistant in the UCLA History Dept in 1981-83. But I write as a long time historian of warfare, since my thesis was on the Spanish Civil War, for which I interviewed many veterans who fought against Franco and then Vichy and the Nazis (https://medium.com/world-travelers-blog/innocent-abroad-living-in-spain-while-fascism-dies-4cb28c02be94).

I'm also the grandson of two grandparents who survived the Russian Civil War from Vinnitsya and Kyiv. Since my grandma told me Petliura was the worst pogrom perpetrator of all the warring factions, I have no illusions about the potential malevolence of Ukrainian nationalism and the adoration for Stepan Bandera many Ukrainians still express.

As an angel investor in startups who’s verified that most fail, an experienced forex and options trader, I must be an empirical skeptic about everything. I've pasted below a fair representation of my views on American empire building in Vietnam and Latin America, which makes your view of my thinking process as inaccurate and evidence-free as your articles about Ukraine: https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/mythbusting-tour-vietnam-a-war-with-no-winner-part-1-393f013bff01 , https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/post-cards-from-the-border-refugee-crisis-e152c3a7e96c)

This war has one ending: the Russian "federation", the most misnamed political entity on our planet, collapses and continues the shrinkage of the Russian empire begun in 1917, interrupted by the USSR in 1921 and continued in 1989-92. This breakup will likely begin in Chechnya. Don't expect tik-tok mafioso warrior Kadyrov and his buddies to die in their beds. I forecast the same end for Tsar Putin.