Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦@IAPonomarenko
So today, Russia’s full-scale invasion aimed at destroying Ukraine has reached the same duration as the Eastern Front of World War II.
For 1,418 days, Russia has been unable to defeat Ukraine, unable to break through the front, unable to destroy its military, unable to seize its key major cities, unable to cause a Ukrainian collapse.
During those same 1,418 days, history once passed from Hitler’s attack on his ally Stalin, through the total catastrophe of 1941, the formation of the Anti-Hitler Coalition, the monumental battles for Kyiv, Kharkiv, Sevastopol, Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk, the meat grinder at Rzhev, the Allied landings in Italy and Normandy, the siege of Leningrad, operations in Eastern and Central Europe, to the Battle of Berlin and the fall of Nazism.
Putin’s Russia, meanwhile -- amid endless bravado and claims to global dominance -- is still smashing its head against a wall, trying to seize the ruined remnants of what was once a Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk in Donbas, just 45 km from the original 2022 front line.
And don’t tell me about a “war of attrition.”
Yes, there is a war of attrition -- at least since 2023, when the roughly 1,000-km front line fully stabilized and has since shifted only marginally and locally.
But.
If you are the “world's second strongest military,” with the third-largest military budget on the planet (around 40% of the entire annual state budget!), vast Soviet-era stockpiles of equipment, enormous revenues from oil sales, and ammunition supplied by your totalitarian allies -- and you still cannot defeat Ukraine after four years -- you are in deep trouble.
If, because of this war, you were forced for the first time since WWI and WWII to conduct military mobilization and place your economy on a war footing at enormous cost -- you are in deep trouble.
If, by the fourth year of the war, even your gigantic Soviet reserves of mothballed equipment are gradually running out, and you have long since been buying millions of shells from North Korea -- you are in deep trouble.
If, over these 1,418 days, you have definitively lost the European gas market, lost influence in the Caucasus, Venezuela, and Syria, and fallen into complete vassal dependence on China -- you are in deep trouble.
If, in the middle of this war of attrition against Ukraine, Ukraine manages to invade your own territory and occupy part of your region for more than half a year, forcing you to buy Kim Jong Un’s expendable combat slaves to push Ukrainian troops out of Kursk -- you are in deep trouble.
If, after 1,418 days, Ukraine destroys your oil industry night after night and eliminates your generals in the center of Moscow, and at one point wipes out an entire fleet of strategic bombers on their airfields -- you are in deep trouble.
If, after 1,418 days of full-scale war, your state TV propaganda is orgasming over the capture of yet another set of useless ruins of small, remote towns in the Donbas -- places you smashed your head against for months, sometimes years -- you are in deep trouble.
If your confirmed and documented tank losses alone (over 4,300, according to Oryx) are already comparable to the entire actively used tank fleet of the U.S. Army -- you are in deep trouble.
If global intelligence services estimate your losses at 1 million killed and wounded, and even after 1,418 days of war the capture of just one Donetsk region does not appear remotely achievable in the foreseeable future -- you are in deep trouble.
Not to mention any “grand breakthroughs” toward Kharkiv, Odesa, Kyiv (where your blitzkrieg collapsed completely at the very beginning), or Lviv.
If, after 1,418 days of full-scale war, you still have not captured a single major regional capital in Ukraine since the 2014 war -- and the one you did take in 2022 you later lost due to military defeat -- you are in deep trouble.
If your vaunted Black Sea Fleet has been defeated at sea by a country without a navy, your flagship was sunk back in 2022, Ukraine regularly destroys port terminals and sinks your submarines, while successfully keeping its maritime routes to Odesa open -- you are in deep trouble.
If, despite all the indecision and slowness of the West in providing military aid to Ukraine (and now, with the key ally, the United States, having almost completely withdrawn support and twisting Ukraine’s arm to force capitulation), you still cannot defeat exhausted fifty-year-old Ukrainian men -- and 2025 becomes your bloodiest year yet, with no end to the war even visible on the horizon — you are not “winning.”
When you are unable to defeat Ukraine for longer than the entire duration of your so-called “Great Patriotic War,” around which you built a deranged, cannibalistic cult of violence, hatred, revanchism, and conquest -- you are “winning” only in the bravado of zombifying TV propaganda and in the imagination of useful idiots who mindlessly consume it.
Once again in your history, you are rapidly driving your “empire” into the grave -- where it belongs -- and you have not yet suffered a resolute defeat only because of the extraordinary weakness, indecision, short-sightedness, and often outright corruption and intellectual limitation of those leading the countries of the free world.
