[Skybird]

Putin already has lost the war. Russia's nimbus of being unbeatable, is destroyed. Second strongest army in the world? Laugh on! The military apparatus is in ruins. The economy is punished and wll be in delcine for years. Look at the Southern areas, former sovjet areas: they all suddenly stand up and fight each other, are not scared of Russian masters anymore. And China does not see Russia as an equal anymore. His own personal fate Putin tied to the war, and this his fate is in question. Russia has lost this war, no matter what happens in Ukraine. The price for whatever they acchieved in Ukraine already is way too high.

The question is whether the ukraine can translate Russia's defeat into an own victory, and that also is in quesitonc considering the enormous destruction, the damaged economy, the financial situation, the wiped out cities. As I see it, Russia AND Ukraine have lost.

Also lost have the Europeans. Their - especially Germany'S and France's - diplomacy and its underlying assumptions are in smoking ruins, its whole diplomatic model has collapsed, and the constraints of existential realpolitik are forcing Europe, with ice-cold grins, to abandon ideological maximalist positions that have always been unworldly but now threaten to threaten its very existence. Not to mention to the massively hurt economy and the acceleration of the impöosion of the Euro system.

Lost also has China. Russia has created a so unsettled world situation that China's own ambitions and global projects have taken huge damage, and this in a time of further self-inflicted damage due to rigid zero covid policies, and demographic problems, and imploding fiscal systems and property bubbles bursting. I doubt Bejing has warm feeling for Putin. He really messed up their own powerplay. That Russia now more depends on china than the other way around, hardly is compensation for that. If Putin now uses nukes, China will really have big problems with that.

There is also a clear winner: the US. All others take economical, military and financial and reputation and influence losses. The US gaines on all these. Plus it can now sell fracked LNG gas to before oh so hesitent Europe, and it can dictate the prices for it. And it is so far away that any fallout from the Ukraine - physically or poltically - will not reach it. And Europe's dependency has clearly been demonstrated. The costs for rebuilding Ukraine will be left to the Europeans. And I do not even disagree with that: the US has delivered several times more military aid than all of Europe together.