Thank you for the response, Patrick.

You bring up an interesting point about the occupied regions. And yes, the Russians faced fewer problems in occupying Donbas after their initial invasion. But they did face significant armed resistance.

But as a ground combat analyst with over a decades worth of experience in studying various conflicts, and also having spent a few tours of duty on occupation duty myself, I have a pretty solid understanding of how occupations vs. resistance movements work.

Occupations and resistance movements are a funny business. It doesn't take a large percentage of the population to give an occupation force significant headaches. But there has to be enough of the population to have the means to resist, the will to resist and the belief that their resistance will change the outcome of the occupation. It is highly likely that two of those three conditions were met by a significant enough minority of Ukrainians in Donbas, but they may not have believed that their resistance would be capable of ousting the Russians. Also, when you have friends and neighbors that turn collaborators, the chances of having a successful insurgency pluments.

But that was then.

Now...? In case it wasn't intuitively obvious, the Russians haven't exactly been greeted with the heroes welcome they had come to expect from 2014.

The rest of Ukraine's 40 million people are effectively mobilized against Russia. That is a really large potential insurgency if the Russians managed to actually conquer Ukraine.

So, comparing the simmer of conflict in Donbas eight years ago, because there has always been some conflict since the Russians rolled in, to the bubbling volcano that is Ukraine now, is not a valid comparison. Or maybe it is, if your name is "Vladamir Putin", because he used the same logical process.

By the way, if you are interested, I've been writing weekly assessments on the war at https://medium.com/warinukraine.