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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

In order to negotiate, both parties need to be able to offer concessions. What concessions could Russia possibly offer the US, related to the Ukraine situation, that the US would be motivated to take? Our people aren’t dying and our territory isn’t threatened. Because we’re, as you pointed out, not paying the price for the conflict, we don’t have any incentive to try and stop it… we can’t negotiate in good faith because we don’t have any chips on the table.

We can influence the Ukraine/Russia negotiation of course, by increasing or decreasing our support for Ukraine. But, since they seem to be willing to continue fighting, decreasing aid would be a pretty huge betrayal.

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The US is spending a great deal of money, those are chips, and not having to spend money is a concession. Your framing of the situation makes little sense to me and appears to be angling towards the conclusion of unlimited support for Ukraine until their 'inevitable' victory. I'm less optimistic about Russia collapsing and also not optimistic about America's continued support for Ukraine, they wouldn't be the first country to be abandoned by the US. The aim is to give Russia a bloody nose and deny them an easy victory not for Ukraine win the war. "To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.” - Henry Kissinger

There definitely is a limit to US support for Ukraine, but currently Ukraine’s only hope is that Russia’s willingness to fight will run out before either US support or Ukrainian willingness to fight does. So, hopefully we’ve had serious discussions behind closed doors with Ukraine about how far we’re willing to go. But signaling that publicly would weaken Ukraine’s position (by giving Russia a light at the end of the tunnel).

My understanding of the situation is that realistically the US has a lot of latitude to influence Ukraine, but should not go behind their back and negotiate with Russia. Any diplomacy that routes around Ukraine means their priorities will be given less emphasis. Since they are the ones actually paying in blood and human suffering, we owe them deference when it comes to when and how to negotiate. We’re spending money but it is the sort of spending we can handle for a while.

As my quote points out, the US has a long history of abandoning ‘friends’ after they’ve outlived their usefulness. I’d be surprised if Ukraine is any different.

Sure. That US support isn’t actually infinite is something Ukraine will have to account for. But it is something that we should handle with them behind closed doors.

Of the USAs 700 Billion yearly defense budget, we spend around 150 billion to contain Russia, and we've spent that or more since the 1950s (so over 10 trillion dollars). We aren't spending new funds to support Ukraine. Most of the 'spend' so far has been moving numbers from under 'In XYZ DoD warehouse' to 'Transfered to Ukraine' in an accounting spreadsheet. When we are sending Ukraine more than 150 billion a year and exceeding what we typically spent on containing Russia then America might START to think about the costs of this war. Maybe we should be scared the we no longer have a surplus of Javelins in case we need them to blow up Russian tanks, because they have been used to...blow up Russian tanks...but that's a hard fear to sell.

I agree that fundamentally this is an expense that we can keep up for quite a while, but I’m not sure about the idea “these weapons are to contain Russia, therefor we don’t have to worry about using them to contain Russia” for a couple reasons.

First, hypothetically is the US were to fight Russia, we’d use a different mix of weapons. So it is putting unexpected pressure on our supply of Javelins, because they are doing the work that would normally be done by, whatever, JDAMs or something.

Also there must be some of what we programmers would think of as oversubscription or deduplication of weapons — I mean if we have like 2 war’s worth of weapons to handle all our competitors and we expend one war’s worth of weapons to handle one competitor, then we suddenly only have one war worth of weapons to handle all the rest. We haven’t expended one war’s worth of resources on Russia but it is worth keeping in mind that this isn’t like, literally zero cost or something like that.

Edit: also another thing that rubs me the wrong way with this description is, it seems to play into the narrative that Russia and the US never could have gotten along. The real hope is that the overwhelming US lead has a deterrent effect on countries that might want to start a war. The best weapons are ones that don’t get used.

With diplomacy we could have turned those tanks around and sent them into China. Like what was done in WWII but for Germany. From the very onset of WWII Churchill smartly appeased Russia in an effort to get Russia to flip and it worked. China is the burgeoning hegemon and the real risk the US dominance. From memory the impetus for the conflict was China sharing US intel about plans to militarize Ukraine with Russia in order to goad Russia into the conflict. Now China and Russia are inseparable. This will make the future conflict over Taiwan infinitely more difficult.

Right now the EU is bearing the brunt of the economic costs and they're not wealthy so they'll run out of money sooner. But ignoring the money spent costs; what is being discovered in this war is the efficacy of mass low cost long range drones. It's unlikely to ever be cost effective to defend against this and conflicts settled this way will be immensely destructive. I remember when it was unthinkable to militarize drones to remotely kill people from a long way away, then we did it, and soon it'll be done to us.

> we don’t have any incentive to try and stop it

Inaccurate. Russia is getting backed into a corner, where they believe the wests goal has been to destabilize and break Russia all along. The more desserts they get more likely they are to use a thermonuclear weapon in Ukraine.

The increasing probability of nuclear war should be sufficient motivation for america to broker a peace deal. Instead we’re sending more weapons to Ukraine.

The media narrative has removed the 20 decades of context on how we got here. Focusing only on what’s happening now, the narrative is that Russia is motivated by some strategy to conquer Europe and any different perspective means the person is stupid or a Putin shill.

> The more desserts they get more likely they are to use a thermonuclear weapon in Ukraine.

I'm still confused when people assert there's any chance Putin will use a nuke in Ukraine.

I'm far from an expert on Russian politics, so I imagine I'm missing something in terms of reputation or intimidation or face saving, but I always figured that Russia wanted to own/control Ukraine, since it's a fertile, resource-rich part of the former USSR (it's a huge grain exporter; consider all the famine warnings since the war began?)

Why would they choose to destroy this thing they want to control? Using a thermonuclear weapon specifically seems really counter-productive. If I stretch I could imagine a future where they deploy some tiny tactical nuke for intimidation/escalation, but same logic applies, I don't think they want to destroy the thing they're trying to conquer, so they'd want to limit collateral damage.

> I always figured that Russia wanted to own/control Ukraine, since it's a fertile, resource-rich part of the former USSR (it's a huge grain exporter; consider all the famine warnings since the war began?)

This isn’t the motivation. Putin has been saying since 2007 that NATO expansion is an existential threat to Russia. Now whether we agree with that or not is besides point. They view it that way.

They warned in 2007 Ukraine entering NATO would lead to war, but we basically told Russia that there a has been and they don’t matter. This led to what happened in 2014. Then in 2021, we basically come out in full support of pulling Ukraine into NATO.

What’s happening now is extremely dangerous. Russia can’t win in Ukraine because of west helping Ukraine and their economy is ruined after sanctions. They see this as an end of Russia.

You’re backing them in the corner. This is when rational state actors act irrational. The chance of thermonuclear war is increasing because Russia cannot take on the west in a conventional war.

We had a significant role in how we got to this war, but we won’t ever take responsibility. We pulled out of Afghanistan and now the military industrial complex is making billions through Ukraine.

These sounds like the same old Russian talking points. Ukraine is not allowed to choose who it allies with. It obviously shouldn’t fear Russia invading and taking over the country. Even after it has already happened.

Your argument applies equally to North Korea. Should we accept them invading, say, Japan (or just to make it maximally interesting, Taiwan) just because they may have nukes? (and by that I mean the effective ability to nuke at minimum Seoul by ICBM)

I'm saying "may" because while Russia clearly has the ability to make Nukes, and ICBMs, that would have required constant heavy, maintained, spending on their military that they clearly didn't do for, oh, tanks, air defense, aircraft, new aircraft designs ... At best their Nuclear arsenal is one generation ahead of what the Soviets had, whilst the West's defenses have advanced 5 generations in the same time. I get that's a gamble, but ... Nuclear weapons require constant re-enriching of the warheads fissile material, and maintaining 7000 warheads requires running tens of gigawatts of nuclear power plants without getting any electricity or heating out of them. Not to mention: you need tens of thousands of highly qualified engineers to do it. Are they doing that, not just lying about it? I mean, I get that they're hiding this, but one reason we don't hear much of it could be that it simply doesn't exist anymore. I've never once read an explanation of how this infrastructure survived the fall of the Soviet Union.

Russia is vastly overplaying their hand. We can be sure of that, given the facts.

Second, the Russian economy will die faster than the European or Ukrainian economy over time. Time is not on their side. Russia is slowly losing the ability to attack even without any war, without anyone destroying them. Europe, and European states will gain more and more ability to attack over time. I'm saying whatever their reason was to attack in 2014 and 2022, they will have more reasons to attack as time goes on. This war won't end just because we force it to, it will simply move.

And all of that is assuming we DON'T move away from fossil fuels. If by some miracle we move either transportation or heating of of fossil fuels, then Russia is done for 10 years before such a move is complete. That will definitely kill their ability to support their military. I mean what do you expect Russia to do? Attack France when ITER declares success? Because ITER, and 100 other similar efforts, also are existential threats to Russia.

Russia has "lost", the empire doesn't exist anymore, and the conflict in Ukraine, even if they 100% win, doesn't change that. If their perception is such that if they lose they will use nuclear weapons, then it's unavoidable, and the conclusion is just the opposite of what you suggest.

The correct course of action if Russia will truly will chose to go out in a nuclear "blaze of glory" or if Putin has the ability to "commit suicide by World War 3", then the only option is for NATO to attack Russia, ASAP. For the simple reason that Russia, the empire, is done for.

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