Comment by fock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fock | Hacker News Reader

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I also wonder about a point raised by russian propagandists (which imho is valid): the ukrainian things are relatively low and don't have that mast (see here: https://www.twz.com/ukrainian-drone-boat-appears-to-have-bee...). So how do they find their (relatively small as of late) targets in a 20x100km² area 600km off their deployment point without a) sending those on an industrial scale (unlikely given the western supply chain...), b) these things loitering for days (unlikely given the size?), c) having some very advanced sonar things (which also would need some more depth if I look at publically deployed solutions), d) Russian captains are really incompetent (likely) or e) they are actually guided by the plentiful western surveillance assets. Which would be just like the Houthi missiles which are a) fired in volleys and b) probably depend on data by the iranian/chinese ships lurking around ...

The last 2 points make this thing really very good in this specific war (surveillance assets can do whatever they want and russian captains seemed very complacent), but very inefficient anytime else. Also I'd say you should be able to easily adapt something like the various CIWSs (which currently have ancient designs...) to this threat. Also: once you notice the threat (which 2/3 last incident did?), why not level the playing field for your (hopefully not all drunken...) sailors and just flare up the whole environment (which should have helped here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwXzaBixvL8 - also I don't really agree with this guy, that more ships help in defending against a swarming attack when they don't know how to kill the swarm...)

Every Russian naval ship sunk by Ukraine in 2024 has been sunk in sight of land, at a small port or bay that they have been stationed at.

It's not that Ukrainian USV are making pinpoint attacks in a vast ocean, rather they are driving over to a port that a ship has been hanging around for months.

- Ivanovets, sunk in "Lake Donuzlav", where it had been for months - Tsezar Kunikov, sunk in sight of Alupka, and located right where drones would pass on their way around Crimea. - Sergey Kotov, sunk in the tiny confined space of the port next to a bridge it was guarding.

It's (e). They're getting intelligence from NATO countries.

I thought that was publically acknowledged? Could be wrong.

Yeah it's not a secret that this is happening. UK/France/Germany are helping with targeting.

What confuses me is, how is this even a talking point? Under what theory is EU supposed to sit back and watch a bordering country get invaded and not pass that country intelligence?

Are we supposed to believe that if the EU invaded Belarus, that Russia wouldn’t pass any intelligence to the Belarusian government?

Because, firstly, EU is not a country, I'm a EU citizen and I certainly do not approve of this policy but there's no way for me (or for other people who think the same as me) to vote out the people that make those decisions (I'm also not a French citizen, maybe that way I could have had an effect on Macron holding power or not).

It's a double-edged sword for the EU leaders in the middle to long-term, because once a great part of the European population will start realising that they have been in effect disenfranchised then said population will have no qualms in following new political leaders that will leave "democracy" at the side, and thus leaving the concept of the EU for dead.

If you're an Eu citizen - you should care that russia is stopped in Ukraine as they said multiple times - their goal is up to Lisbon.

> their goal is up to Lisbon

That was in fact Mitterand's goal in late 1989 - early 1990, the other way round, that is, until the Americans (well, the honorable James Baker) freaked out and nothing came out of it. I still think from time to time what could have been if "from Lisbon to Vladivostok" had become real, just as Mitterand had wanted it. [1]

[1] https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/155777507.pdf

Last time I checked, Lisbon was in fact in the EU... Vladivosstok not so much.

It could never have been as Eastern European countries would do anything not to be in a union with Russia

My country, Romania, had in fact signed a pact with the USSR after 1989, so not all Eastern European countries would have been against it.

It funny that those people claiming to be disenfranchised have no problem with leaders who won't give them any rights at all.

It makes it more honest, for one thing.

And second, it may sound as a paradox, but those authoritarian leaders are more connected with the masses and their needs (and vice-versa) compared to a pseudo-democratic and very opaque assembly composed of some hundreds of members (what are now called “parliaments”) of which no-one knows all that much, for that matter.

So a switch to an authoritarian leader would in effect, and comparatively speaking, mean a return of effective power to the masses, because it is on those masses that the legitimacy of said leader depends. Today’s parliamentarian regimes have long lost their legitimacy (notice senile 90+ years old ladies being parliament members in the most “democratic” country on Earth), it’s all a Glasperlenspiel [1] at this point, following prior moves blindly while the reason behind those moves has long been lost.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bead_Game

> there's no way for me (or for other people who think the same as me) to vote out the people that make those decisions

You can vote for your country's elections. You can also vote for the EU parliament.

And ever EU nation supports Ukraine, with the exception of Hungary. In this case the policy of the EU is very much aligned with the policy of ... pretty much the entire EU.

My country, Romania, has no effective say in this matter at the EU level. As for the European Parliament and its democratic legitimacy, the lesser said the better. We also used to have “elected” representatives under Ceausescu’s Romania, with the same effective results.

Your country is going to be invaded and reoccupied by Russia if Putin gets his way in Ukraine and Trump delays article 5 just long enough for it to be "not worth it".

Because why should we waste hundreds of thousands of lives on protecting "just some land".

Let us care for ourselves, we did just fine before (we actually fought the Soviets/Russians on their home turf before, unlike the majority of the Western countries), and use those troops you mention for the defense of your own realms, we don’t need them here.

If I was your neighboring countries, I would absolutely not let you “care for yourselves”. That puts my border at risk. Nothing is in a vacuum.

> That puts my border at risk. Nothing is in a vacuum.

Ah, yes, when it is a Western border at risk it is totally fine, it's not fine if that is a Russian border.

Hypocrisy.

The russian border was last challenged by hitler and before that by napoleon. Anything after that is just been being pissy about everything.

> Beginning with the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, Russia managed to expand at an average rate of 50 square miles per day for hundreds of years, eventually covering one-sixth of the earth’s landmass.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2016-04-18/r...

I was speaking in general terms. It’s bad strategy to ignore what happens 1-2 borders away. I don’t think that’s controversial?

>Under what theory is EU supposed to sit back and watch a bordering country get invaded and not pass that country intelligence?

Has EU, or more aptly the comprising countries thereof, declared war?

The only thing I hate more than warmongering are proxy wars.

I'm all for Ukraine winning, because if they lose then Putin and Russia are vindicated in warmongering as a proper form of diplomacy, but I'm sick and tired of proxy wars.

As an aside: Yes, as an American I stand with the Republicans in denying further aid to Ukraine if we're going to continue doing the same thing. If we're going to lend more aid, either we punt the money figures up a few orders of magnitudes or we send in American boots to settle it ourselves. No more halfassed "aid" that only prolongs the war indefinitely and enlarges the suffering of civilians.

Has China, Iran, Belarus, etc decleared war? All of them help Russia. Are those doing proxy wars?

> I am against help, because we do not help enough.

And he is using a website made for the smarter kids. This election is going to be golden.

> And he is using a website made for the smarter kids

Being in a group that accepts people that say "this group is smart" annoys me to no end as the lowest form of circle jerk. Specially when it's not even true.

There's no IQ test to access this site, there's no merit on the part of the users, the merit is on the part of the moderation, since the user pool is the same as any public website written in english.

The definition of "proxy war" is "a war instigated by a major power which does not itself become involved".

Regardless of the scale or nature of the aid, since Russia is directly involved, the Ukraine war can only be a "proxy war" if you believe it was instigated by the EU/NATO/the US, which is essentially assuming the Russian talking point that it was somehow forced to invade Ukraine because it felt threatened.

I disagree with that position and if you do to please do not describe it as a "proxy war" even if you think that other countries providing a limited amount of aid rather than getting actively involved will cause the war to be prolonged.

Who made that definition? There can be proxy wars in some regions between nations that are at the same time involved in open wars against each other in other regions. This happened a lot in WWII.

That looks like the Oxford Dictionary's definition. That checks out, the poster is correct.

It makes sense, helping an ally who is attacked doesn't sound like a proxy war to me.

This is not a proxy war, neither EU or US are interested in Russian territory. They made it clear that no Western weapons are to be used outside Ukraine. This is defensive support for a sovereign state, not a scheme to topple Putin (who is the sole aggressor in this conflict without any formal declaration of war).

Furthermore, I’m having a hard time understanding your reasoning regarding US aid.

Currently, Russia is paying an enormous price while the US risks no lifes and gets to send its old weapons to Ukraine. This might not be a winning strategy for Ukraine, but it sure sounds better than an open war between 2 major nuclear powers which puts billions of lifes at risk or draconian Russian occupation of large parts of Ukraine.

>neither EU or US are interested in Russian territory.

But the west is interested in depleting and weakening Russia, which we can accomplish by prolonging this war as long as we can by supplying just enough aid to keep Ukraine from losing but not so much that Ukraine would win.

>Furthermore, I’m having a hard time understanding your reasoning regarding US aid.

You know what is worse than war? An unnecessarily protracted war. The longer a war goes on, the exponentially worse the civilians caught in the crossfire suffer.

I want Ukraine to win for reasons already stated, but I also do not want to see this war go on any longer than it has to. The west is more than opulent enough to supply enough equipment to end this war sooner, and if we go as far as to send in our own boots we can end this war overnight.

But we don't. Instead we provide just enough aid to keep Ukraine afloat. It's now over 2 years since Russia began its invasion.

As an aside, the military industrial complex is making a killing (pun intended) selling new gear to replace the ones donated to Ukraine.

What the fuck.

So no, no more aid unless enough is provided to end this war in Ukraine's favor as soon as fucking possible. I do not agree to aid that is any less and would keep prolonging this war at great cost to civilians.

I'm not so sure that your theory is a fact. There are a lot of plausible explanations for the course of this war. I follow this conflict closely and personally I think the West never had a coherent strategy and there would have been better ways to decimate the Russians.

I still don't see how letting Russia conquer half of Ukraine minimizes civilian cost. Russia has a long history of deadly deportations and it has already established systematic torture in occupied Ukranian territory. A landlocked Ukraine will be very hard to stabilize. And will Russia stop or will it continue in Moldova, Georgia or Kazakhstan?

There's also the question if the link between Western aid and warmongering holds up. All aggression comes from Russia and it alone is responsible for this destruction. As long as the victims, the Ukraine people, ask for help to defend themselves the West should deliver. The current aid is not enough but it surely is better than fighting Russia alone.

The US is not trying to prolong the war; quite the opposite, actually.

The US has consistently advocated for a different strategy than what Zelensky is doing. If anything, it is Zelensky who is still trying to figure out how to fight this war.

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/08/us/politics/ukraine-war-u...

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/22/us/politics/ukraine-count...

[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/22/us/politics/zelensky-bide...

[3]https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/us/politics/us-ukraine-wa...

[4]https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/us/politics/ukraine-us-mi...

A proxy war is when you have two countries who are not otherwise affected by a particular war, sponsoring opposing sides for geopolitical advantage.

Syria was a proxy war. Ukraine is not. Invading a neighboring country is a direct threat to the EU’s security, as evidenced by the large number of Ukrainian refugees that the EU now has to support. Had Putin succeeded in installing a figurehead regime in Kyiv, what is to say he wouldn’t have started marching on Moldova as well? Europe has seen this before.

Declaring war is a bit passé nowadays anyway.

> I stand with the Republicans in denying further aid to Ukraine

Meanwhile, the UK has opened to Ukrainian refugees (3 families in our street have accommodated refugees) and has pledged unconditional support.

We learnt our lesson that appeasing dictators, like Putin, does not work.

You should be ashamed of yourself.

That. Plus the fact that everyone (Russia included) gave Ukraine security guarantees when in the 90s we convinced them to give their nuclear missiles to the country that had occupied them just before.

At the time everyone was very nervous about proliferation of nuclear weapons and it seemed a sensible promise. But when push comes to shove it seems more complicated.

Well, in some countries the chancellor acknowledging that is publicly ostracised for "disturbing the opinion". Which is very fun, because apparently that's not something people want to have put into the remaining mainstream media. All that in countries which a) claim not to be at war (and crucially not doing an inch of the economic adjustments), b) are the good democracies and c) are trying to play this down to things like "satellite" and internet comms. Noone is putting this out: https://en.defence-ua.com/events/what_awacs_see_as_they_tran... . If you would go into a debate and say: "hey, we are fighting this war already and without our direct involvement Ukraine would be gone from the map" - I guess that would be called fakenews.

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