All in all, Russia is a very weak country with less than 1.5T GDP. As a result, any infusion of huge sum on money by external actors will tilt the balance in the favor of the party that gets the money .
Counterpoint: Afghanistan. Money and matériel are surprisingly ineffective without the people and institutions capable of leveraging them.
All that spin about NATO fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian is wrong. It's the Ukrainians themselves who want to fight for their country, with or without outside help. The outside help just makes it easier, but they would have fought either way.
NATO provides intelligence, training, counsel and supplies. You can't just pretend it's not involved and that at some point this war didn't become Russia's proxy war with NATO.
You've got to understand that while the current generation of Ukrainians grew up in relative freedom, their parents and grandparents grew up in the Soviet Union. And now with Putin trying to subjugate Ukraine, they fear that their children may grow up in a similar situation, and possibly worse, with all the Russian talk of genocide.
So that's why they're fighting so hard. They're fighting for their lives, their freedom, and that of their children and grandchildren. That's an incredibly powerful motivator, and I'm absolutely convinced that they'd fight just as hard without foreign support. But that support does give them a better fighting chance, enabling them to fight Russia on equal footing, instead of relying mostly on partisan/guerilla warfare, which is actually what NATO expected to happen.
With or without support, I don't think this is a war that Russia could possibly win; there's just too much at stake for Ukraine, and not enough for Russia. People are generally eager to fight for their own lives and freedom, but not to subjugate others. Especially not a brother nation, as Ukrainians and Russians used to see each other before this.
There is too much "nothing happened at Tienanmen Square" kind of stuff for "long-sought freedom" kind of scenarios to be believable.
That the people of China don't fight for freedom like this is a completely different issue, though maybe not as different as the reason Russian don't. For Ukraine, the situation is quite different, though: they have tasted freedom for 30 years, and there's a clear external party who undeniably wants to take it away from them. Can't get much clearer than that.
I'm sorry, but I just feel like your impressions of it are naive, as you reason in categories that don't have weight for real actual individuals in real actual life.
"Fighting for freedom after tasting it for 30 years" is something that only exists in storybooks. In reality it's always powerful people making the decisions and then agitating other people into submission.
Real individuals are preoccupied with much more mundane things, like providing for their families and so on. Ukrainians, Russians, Chinese, whatever. Denying them this is a very typical dehumanization and manipulation tactics, commonly found in western supremacist culture, i.e. "why don't they fight for freedom" tropes.
Yes, powerful people make the decisions, but those decisions are meaningless if nobody obeys them. You see that in Russia without hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the country in order to avoid conscription. They have no faith whatsoever in Putin's war, and don't want to fight in it. Ukraine, on the other hand, doesn't just have much of its own population willing to do what they can, they also have many foreign volunteers who believe sufficiently in their cause to help them. That is not something that happens when the decision only comes from the top. This is a massive difference between Russia and Ukraine, and it's visible in the vastly different morale of the soldiers on the ground.
> Real individuals are preoccupied with much more mundane things, like providing for their families and so on.
Yes, but how are you going to do that when your country is being invaded by someone who wants you dead? This is exactly why Ukrainians are so eager to fight and Russians are not: the effect the war has on them personally.
https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/317337...
Dated Sept. 28, 2022
"In total, the United States has now committed approximately $16.9 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since January 2021. Since 2014, the United States has committed approximately $19 billion in security assistance to Ukraine more than $16.2 billion since the beginning of Russia’s unprovoked and brutal invasion on February 24."
I'm not sure that all of the money/material has yet reached Ukraine. But that is what is said to be committed.
CBS published this report on the missing weapons stolen by corrupt groups operating within Ukraine. Shortly afterwards they were forced to amend a statement that someone is trying to track the newer shipments, without explaining any sort of actual plan for accountability.
War is racketeering. https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZWzxbS8eUKc
But even going down that path of thinking, it’s amazing Ukraine has decimated the Russian armed forces with only a fraction of the weapons they were supplied with!. /s.
You seem motivated to hide corruption lol
You also never mentioned the quote is from the very start of the war and how the situation of supplies is very different now.
Russia is a corrupt aggressor, but that does not mean Ukrainian abuses should be ignored. Zelensky is not allowing Ukrainian citizens the freedom to leave the country for safety.
How is it different now?
Interpol chief is Russian??
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/02/ukraine-weapon...
lol you have no idea what you’re talking about.
You have added some useful links to this discussion but this is the second time you’ve undermined your own argument by laughing at the person you’re responding to. Please be aware of the Hacker News Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
CBS is American but this idea that the majority of weapons aren’t being in Ukraine cause they are being sold or stolen or lost _is propaganda_. Nothing supports this idea for the current phase of the war and people have generally moved on from this narrative.