> deliberately wading into a multi-year attritional struggle I don't understand how people expect anything different here. Even the US with all it's superpower

> deliberately wading into a multi-year attritional struggle I don't understand how people expect anything different here. Even the US with all it's superpower fanciness spent years in Iraq and decades in Afghan. I am also skeptical over that whole "my opponent is more stupid than me" attitude. We can already see how people made fools of themselves spelling Russia's haste economic demise, while Russia is expecting an economic growth now according to the World Bank. Idiocy would be setting unrealistic expectations and treating this like a computer game, when a well-fortified Ukrainian army at the Donetsk border (that Zelensky was inspecting a few times in 2021) would somehow de-spawn or vanish in case Russia would hastily take Kyiv.