You don't think Ukraine can win, because you live in the saidit world of alternative facts.

In the real world, Ukraine have done some extremely interesting things over the past few weeks. Crimea is now demilitarized. You can't argue that. There are no air force or navy based in Crimea anymore. They all went back to novorossia. That's a successful operation by Ukraine.

Here is a very interesting tweet from the ISW today.

https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1704815837100523528

By this time in the Normandy campaign, the allies were dealing with the Market Garden failure and were three months away from winning the Battle of the Bulge.

Have a look at this also extremely interesting interview from yesterday with Ukraine's GRU chief

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/exclusive-interview-with-ukraines-spy-boss-from-his-dc-hotel-room

He explains how ruzzia is being demilitarized behinds the lines too.

Their assets all across ruzzia are being picked off by drones. At the secure government airport in moscow their doomsday airplanes and recon jets and all kinds of interesting military jet liners are being taken down, one by one, and the factories where they were built burned down so they can never be recreated, and their foreign purchasers swapped for Ukrainian-built drones so russia can never militarize again.

Meanwhile the Baltic became a NATO lake. That's an absolute loss and was caused by Ukrainian victory.

Also Armenia is now absolutely divorced from russia and Georgian Dream have been almost-overthrown multiple times. Putin has an international arrest warrant that will never go away. The sanctions are breaking down aeroflot one by one. On multiple times in August and September, aeroflot have had to crash land in fields. They don't have roads - you cannot drive across ruzzia because they don't have roads. Because of sanctions, travel in their country will literally return to trains and horse drawn carts. They don't have any ball bearings for new trains and partisans keep blowing up tracks.

There's a chronic diesel shortage in ruzzia and farmers in large parts of the country are unable to harvest. Their crude oil exports are under a Lloyds of London price cap - so ruzzian oil can never travel by sea unless it's being sold at a discount.

The illusion of Putin was shattered when Utkin drove to Moscow and Prigozyn set up a breakaway state in Rostov for one afternoon. The regime image can never recover. They have been on continuous purges of wagner-connected elements ever since, which was everyone, because Wagner were everywhere.

Africa. Okay I'll give you this.

Russia is winning in the coup belt. The Ukraine war has worked to expand the coup belt for russia. However - easy come easy go. I don't think they'll be around long enough to exploit the additional billion dollars or so in annual revenue from the gold and gem slave mines.

Overall this is a complete shambles for Putin and a victory for Ukraine. Please put forward your theory of how it could be otherwise

ETA - this week, azeris shot up a car full of uniformed russian army officer peacekeepers, and all shoigu could do was write a stern letter. It's because of Ukraine. To lose that kind of face in this part of the world is irrecoverable.

Additionally, China revised their map to include part of an island which russia considers sovereign russian federation. China now says: it's outer Manchuria, and by the way, we haven't forgotten those unequal treaties you made us sign.

Again, it's face loss, there is no russian army guarding Manchuria for the first time in almost 200 years, and it's due to Ukraine's victory