From "The Analyst" (Military & Strategic): (2/3)

The reality is that minimum production lasted for the first year, as new plant was constructed to make more and then bring that online. It was only by the late part of 1917 and again the late part of 1943 that shell production - indeed general war production started to reach its peak.
Two and half years in, our factories and our production are starting to ramp up fast and by year three they will start to meet that production demand. That’s just the way it is. And that production and its delivery to Ukraine will start to have its impact.
Ukraine itself has faced onslaughts from bombs, missiles, frontline attacks and tragedies. Yet it still fights. It is still standing and it is still showing Russia that it’s not going to win. Its capacity to fight back, to fight on, to take the war into the heart of Russian oil, airfields, factories and military targets has multiplied exponentially.
Ukraine has hobbled and humbled the once mighty Russian navy and it doesn’t even own a warship.
It has held its ground. It has destroyed half a million Russian men and over 8,000 of its once feared tanks. It has drained the vast stockpiles of Soviet era weapons and equipment to the point of exhaustion. It has systematically destroyed so much Russian artillery that they have more shells to fire than guns to fire them from, a problem that worsens every day.
Armoured assaults of 60 tanks have vanished - if they can muster 2 or 3 for an attack it’s now a good day for Russia. Kharkiv is proving to be a catastrophic failure and underlines how badly Russian military forces have been degraded.
Without an air force to speak of, with no navy at all, with limited resources and a dependence on foreign financial and military aid Ukraine has pulled off a miracle. From its late 2022 counter offensive which Russia has never recovered from, to its fierce refusal to give up any land without a fight, Ukraine has held on. Its people haven’t been cowed by the attacks on civilians, on schools and universities, on hospitals and supermarkets, book printers and power plants.
They make a million drones a year in their homes at night. They cook food and they make uniforms, they work and they carry on, because they must . This war is the battle for their right to independence, to democracy, to a better world for them and their children. It’s existential. And they are our frontline.
We cannot fail them.
The war is far from over. I see no resolution even if Trump comes to office. Europe is now becoming the key to Ukraine’s victory. President Macron - once a member of the Talk To Putin Coalition with the Germans, has seen the light. And with him is far more of Europe than anyone expected. Russian propaganda has become pervasive and stirred up far-right sympathies and yet even they see things aren’t all as they appear in the Kremlin.
Russia buckles under the economic strain of the war. It struggles to make a handful of tanks and its strengths are few but very visible - drones, missiles, glide bombs, endless mindless manpower. Its weakness is it has failed to ever imagine Ukraine could reach so far into its lands and devastate its economy. That was never on the cards and has been a rude awakening with no easy answers. Sanctions are cutting deep and Russian gas is almost unsellable, its oil sold at barely cost price in dodgy trades on shady tankers. Its refinery capacity so reduced it’s having to import refined fuels from profiteering neighbours.
The Chinese have Russia up against the supply chain wall and have crept deeply into Russian interests inside Russia itself. Even Russia’s friends rip it off commercially because they know Moscow has no other choices. They’re so desperate they need N.Korean insanity and mad Mullahs to feed the war machine. The cracks are showing and the nuclear sabre rattling never ends.
Germany lost WW1 in April 1917 when America joined the war. It took another 19 months to end it.