Oh, Russia performs not much better, if we count the victory as their goal. But for Putin, too, the war is the goal, an instrument of delaying decisions critical for future without path dependence to be built. The war became an equivalent of QE for him, and at the same time something of an evocation aimed at locking Russia to long now, where any thoughts about its framework without Putin's standard library are deemed lousy. Quoth Volodin in 2014, "With Putin, there is Russia, without Putin, there isn't."
Hence we could see that all actors are much interested in kicking the Ukrainian can down the road.
Biden and Dem Party simply don’t understand how to disembark from the ship of fools, clumsily do they try to reassemble crumbling rules-based rudder of erstwhile unipolar hegemony; while Zelensky and Putin, each for reasons of his own, continue to send troops into the meat grinder lest such questions about their gross miscalculations arise that couldn’t be denied with farcical martial law restrictions. There isn’t even a war formally declared among them, and in Russia borders aren’t closed for males aged 18–60, unlike Ukraine, where corruption bloomed subsequently in all things connected to draft, and in some cases people simply disappear in the streets after manhunt, to reemerge already on the frontline without any proper training.
Regardless of the end net result of the war, Ukraine is damaged irrepairably, just like a gross majority of the US vassals had been in the current century. And should the WWIII proper (but still without nuclear weapons) ignite, the whole Ukraine, along with significant swathes of land in the neighbouring countries, will turn into ruin. Of course, Zelensky and his cronies will then already have been evacuated with their spoils.
One delicious example from Tajikistan (the poor Central Asian country from whence Crocus terrorists hail): senior Tajik police commander who defected to Islamic State was trained in America and worked with the US forces in Afghanistan on five separate occasions. He subsequently rose to the post of supreme ISIS military commander, though it seems the Russian airstrike in Syria got him at last in 2017.
Listen, you American pigs, I’ve been three times to America, and I saw how you train fighters to kill Muslims,
declared this jaunty fellow after defection.
Even former Yugoslavian republics, whose development after the civil wars and NATO bombardment could be reckoned larglely successful, still provide to us a couple of ghastly examples — see humpty-dumpty confederation of mutual enmity in Bosnia, or a generally unrecognized drug traffic junction outside the walls of Camp Bondsteel, called Kosovo.
