Mixed reactions from me I only just skimmed the video, some quite hot takes on this one lol, imo he is correct on some of them but on others it seems just like the same armchair analysis bullshit everyone does.

Debunking numbers is silly. If Russian numbers are false then Ukrainian sources are even more delusional, there is not much to discuss if you accept both are lying.

Russia couldn’t flatten Kiev/Ukraine because their bombers would have to fly into “contested” airspace. How exactly is Ukraine a contested airspace if Russia has air superiority and even if they didn’t surely all you need temporary fighter screening during the missions. 60 TU-95s are more than enough too. The fact they are turboprops is literally irrelevant these large bombers are fodder for any missile defense no matter what engine type they use. The entire point of air superiority is to remove threats to friendly aviation and allow for necessary missions into enemy territory with minimal losses.

His point is “they can’t because big plane bad and slow” lol. The only parts of Ukraine that can still be considered “contested” would be the far west surely. There have been literaly zero videos of Russian planes being shot down after the first week and I’ve only seen a couple of helicopters shot down recently.

He asks the question what that would achieve and answers “nothing”. Well yeah of course it achieves nothing the point of a massive bombing strategy would be to make it easier to capture those cities since you don’t have to worry about civilians and there are very few safe places to hide. They could have done this to capture Kiev.

Saying that destroying the Ukrainian army doesn’t matter because the west is giving away weapons is disingenuous. The west can’t simply ship hundreds of tanks or APCs overnight because there are logistic problems, lack of fuel is already a huge concern(not sure if he even addressed this anywhere), Russian airstrikes on such convoys etc.

But most importantly if his point was correct then Ukraine would be flying F-16s and those NATO Mig-29s already, and yet for some reason it seems those countries couldn’t just give away all their fighters to be destroyed for free. Those planes couldn’t even get to Ukrainian airbases because 1) they were destroyed already 2) they’d be intercepted along the way.

Spoiler alert: His answer, albeit with lots of hedging and caveats, is that Russia is not winning. That it has not and now cannot reasonably accomplish its stated goals.

Edit: He starts directly answering the title question at 40:42 minutes in.

“But just so we’re all clear, Ukraine is not a fascist state.”

LOL, a state with the following features:

Ethno-nationalist political platform, banning of political opposition, merging of an explicitly fascist paramilitary with the government… yup, totally clear, definitively not fascist at all. Massive debunking, myth busted!