That's it yes you read the title correctly I am calling the war
in Ukraine Russia's invasion exactly one month into the conflict. Ukraine has won!
Привіт and greetings from beautiful Budapest where I've temporarily relocated to with the war in Ukraine
and why am I calling the war now it's exactly it's day 29 of the war and let's get into it let's get
into what Russia's strategic objectives were when this war started and how far has have
they progressed and then I'll tell you why Ukraine has already won the war and actually in spite of
most of the coverage that I've been hearing that's from the very beginning has been saying that it's
inevitable that Russia will win the war in the short run at least in fact it looks like turning
out to be the opposite so let's have ... let's remind ourselves of what those strategic objectives
were when Putin decided to invade Ukraine a full invasion of the country's because he was already in
Donbas and in Crimea on the 24th of February 2022. So out here I have the Danube river near sunset so
at the beginning Russia stated that they wanted to topple the government in Kyiv that was their idea
of denazification they claimed the government in Kyiv is run by a bunch of nazis now that
seems to be changing their definition of what denazification is because we're on day 29 and by
the way most of the estimates I saw for how long this war would go on at the beginning we ran from
about 3 to 15 days maximum so the fact that we're already double past that should be an indication of
why Russia has failed so that was the first one denazification now the other one was
demilitarization in order to do that you would need to neutralize Ukraine force it to be neutral
destroy its army or at least capture its army and make sure that it agrees in writing
not to join in the future NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization obviously that's a military
alliance or the European Union which is a political and economic union the European Union
also has a mutual defense clause although it's not as strong as obviously being able to recall on US
military support you'd have to rely on the Germans or French to come save you if you wanted to invoke
that and obviously by achieving that goal they would effectively make Ukraine a vassal state
of Ukraine president Putin said at the beginning when he made that declaration of war speech two
days before the invasion that basically doesn't consider Ukraine to have a right to be independent
of Russia and that its borders are illegitimate and that was the fourth goal is to capture
Ukraine militarily especially all the territory east of the Dnieper and on the Black Sea and
let's give let's go and have a look exactly at what they've achieved by day 29 so Russia currently
controls as I'm making this video Kherson biggest population had about 300,000 people in the south
of Ukraine it is at the mouth of the river Dnieper they also control Nova Kakhovka which is about an
hour further north along the river from Kherson and that is strategically important because it
controls the water supply into Crimea which is the peninsula of Ukraine that Russia annexed in 2014.
Now in addition that they also control the territory going east towards the Russian border all the way
creating a land bridge in effect to the areas they previously controlled in Donbas in Ukraine
with Crimea with the exception of Mariupol which is currently under siege now they also
control some parts along the borders north near to Kyiv near to Kharkiv near Sumy seem to have
Chernihiv another city north of Kyiv more or less encircled but that is the grand scale of things
on day 29 so they have not toppled the Zelensky government in Kyiv they have not defeated the
Ukrainian army on day ... by day 29 they have not taken that much territory I mean the biggest
population center is 300,000 people actually today just before I started filming the mayor of Kherson
put a big Ukrainian flag somewhere on the building in the center of Kherson it looked like so
not even sure that they're going to be able to hold that city necessarily going forward
and yes they do have a lot of that territory close to Crimea running to Donbas but that is a very
minimalist goal if you look what they originally intended to do now a lot of people before the war
actually thought that would be the grand scale of Russia's ambitions would actually just to be
to try to expand their control in Donbas and in the south of Ukraine but at the moment that looks like
you know being a very reduced goal and definitely not what they set out to achieve and in fact
the Ukrainian troops have started to do small counter-attacks around Kherson around Mykolayiv
in the south and also up in the north around Kyiv so it's not entirely clear how Russia plans to one
expand because they can take Mariupol with a lot of fighting and a lot of destruction probably what
I'm seeing is a lot of loss of men materiel and ultimately money right in order to take all that
and that would maybe they can go on and encircle the Ukrainian armies in the ... in the south and maybe
get a pyrrhic victory is what I see at some stage by defeating those but it's
gonna cost them so much and the problem with a pyrrhic victory is that you win the battle
but ultimately you will end up so weak from it that you end up losing the war because it's become
a series of doubling down once the original strategy hasn't worked which is to take Ukraine
pretty quickly expecting it to collapse in effect at least militarily and politically
well if you keep doubling down it becomes more and more expensive to get those very limited goals and
you end up very weak so an example of that is actually with the Soviet Union when they invaded
Finland in 1940 in the Winter War and they actually won and got a peace deal basically then
Finns had to give the Soviets what they more than what they originally wanted but it left the Soviet
Union so weak that that when Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa afterwards it was very easy
for them to get very far very quickly because the Soviets basically had gained a pyrrhic victory and
originally I had seen Ukraine probably winning this war in the very long term basically they would
lose the original military battles and then it would become a partisan war with the West arming
Ukraine to the teeth to basically do what they've done in Afghanistan by arming the mujahideen
and basically over a long period of time to build up attrition of the Russian willingness to stay
there and occupy Ukraine now I don't even see realistically how Russia is even going to hold
on to a lot of the territorial gains that they've made because of the amount of costs that it's
they've been subjected to and we don't know exactly how many Russian soldiers have died but it
seems to be somewhere between seven and thousand fifteen thousand would have been
what the Soviet Union lost in ten years in Afghanistan so even if it's the low ball figure
of 7,000 that's still half and it's one month I mean this is really big and really problematic
for their ability to stay and the morale of the Russian soldiers because not very clear what
they're fighting for from I can see of course with you know the propaganda about de-nazifying and
you know there's the Azov battalion in Mariupol so I guess the Russians can say
if they win there that they de-nazified by defeating that particular battalion which has
you know many people from the far right who have a philosophy similar to nazism but that's not
originally what they meant they had originally taken out the government in Kyiv so yeah I just
don't see how they can sustain all of that and that's why I'm calling it already for Ukraine
so should you care that I'm sticking my neck out and calling it for Ukraine well probably
not really I'm not a military expert and whilst I have a background in international relations and
strategic studies I haven't worked in this field you know or really been focused on it for most
of the last 20 years so probably you should just take my opinion like all the other opinions that
you're reading online because most people unless they are really the expert they're just reading
other people's opinions and working on that so you know my former head of faculty Elliot Cohen has
come out with that conclusion already more or less a week ago I reviewed Francis Fukuyama in
that video when he wrote also so like maybe even 10 days ago at this stage that Ukraine was
going to win and what I'm doing every day is I'm reading the pro-Western, pro-Ukrainian media
and also the pro-Russian media and I'm just not seeing the receipts from the pro-Russian media
and the pro-Russian side anyways was lying to us from the beginning they claimed there was going
to be no war there with Western hysteria those troops they're just sitting there on the border
and you know a lot of the people who parrot that and I know they're powered up because
now I read it for Russian media every day and you know they take down their videos
afterwards like Gonzalo Lira and The Duran when it turns out that they yeah they're basically just reading
I'm guessing they're just reading what's there they're seeing online from you know pro-Russian
media - No one over the age of 12 or with an IQ over 90 seriously believes that the Russians are
going to invade anytime soon - I am not going to take down this video even if I'm wrong
and you know I'm just going to leave the video up and you know how I felt on day 29 of this war
So while I didn't agree with Francis Fukuyama Eliot Cohen from SAIS when I was actually there
because it was time around the time of the Iraq war this time they have been on the side that's
been most right from when I look at the different medias and it definitely seems to correlate what
I'm seeing online and the other side that you know those who have to delete videos because it
turns out that they were you know following the media of the side that has been losing
the war so far in terms of achieving its strategic objectives just not convincing to me and I'm
making this video I'm not going to delete it and I think I'm going to be on the right side of
who wins this particular war and also on more importantly on the right side of human history
Слава Україні! Героям слава!