> They will sell their gas at discount to China until the very end.

Yes and no. There's a minimum price they need to sell it, and somewhere in between they may not actually make enough between the minimum and sale price to actually fund their military. Nevermind the awesome job you guys are doing blowing up refineries and other industrial facilities. It'll be good when Europe stops importing Russian gas and steps up their seizure of sanctioned ships too.

Sanctions can and will work against Russia. Part of the strain they face today is due to these sanctions, it just takes awhile and in the meantime, unfortunately, there are people dying.

As a strong supporter of Ukraine, I would say ultimately wars are won or lost by economic forces (the side that can't afford it any more loses). That's how the USSR lost the Cold War, and all I can hope is that all of Europe really has your back in this one.

That is probably true, but if they are selling at a loss, it can only go on for so long.

It’s very difficult to utterly destroy a country’s military force, particularly a country as huge as Russia, which has also a sizeable population. Ukraine cannot do it on its own and I see no appetite from anybody else to do it, so I think it is unlikely to happen.

Of course, it is also very difficult to utterly destroy a country’s economic power. Unfortunately, in Russia’s case, they have the raw materials and a population they can basically enslave. Hitting hard at refineries is a good strategy, it’s a weak point in the whole structure. Hopefully it’ll be enough.

Honestly, I don’t see an easy or clean way out of this. One possibility is that they’ll grind themselves badly enough to become completely irrelevant. Unfortunately that means a good chunk of Ukraine gets ground down along the way. One can hope for a coup, but then whatever comes after might well be worse.

Then, hopefully Ukraine can rebuild as a free nation.

As someone with no firsthand knowledge at all, I am inclined to believe your position is correct. But I also think the Economist is making an important point: Russia's continued prosecution of this war will shred their internal economy with consequences lasting for decades or centuries. What people often underestimate is just how much damage an economy can suffer before breaking down entirely.

But Putin doesn't care about that, so the war will continue until something changes militarily.

Thank you for your esteemed presence. I've got an unsatisfied hankering for kneeling since george Floyd died, but now that you're here, take that kneel.

The article is not as unrealistic as that, the author does point out that Putin is not just looking at the state of Russia, he’s also looking at the relative state of Ukraine and its support from the West.

The death zone isn’t the point at which they die, it’s the point at which they are consuming their own long term strength and capacity to recover in order to sustain their effort .

To our utter shame, we have never actually committed to Ukrainian victory or Russian defeat, but merely to tenuous Ukrainian survival. I firmly believe this war would already be over, or effectively so, if Ukraine’s allies had spent what we have up till now in the first 2 years. Even from a cynical financial point of view it would have been the better policy.

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