US thinking about letting Ukraine use its weapons to strike Russia
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
With Ukraine already doing deep strikes into Russia with domestically produced weapons and certain NATO members already floating potential deployments of their troops to Ukraine, its not surprising that this step of escalation would be taken now.
And, yes, that strategy is a cold calculation, that sacrifices, in the immediate term, Ukrainian lives. The US/NATO trying to blunt conventional aggression by a major nuclear superpower without triggering a nuclear exchange is delicate; and the costs for calculating wrong on either side of the optimum are unthinkably high.
How would you differentiate leaving chips on the table from falling for Putin's tough talk? A swift, firm response early on could have given Putin room to propagandise a retreat. That's much harder to do after he's thrown hundreds of thousands of Russians into the meat grinder.
You’d differentiate them by whether escalation keeps happening. If it was just fear of Putin, there wouldn't be continuous escalation in the areas previously seen as concerns.
> A swift, firm response early on could have given Putin room to propagandise a retreat.
As someone whose position well before the 2022 invasion was that Ukraine should get expedited NATO membership with a (probably time-limited) exception added to the territorial application of Article 5 commitments for then-currently Russian-occupied parts of the country, I don’t disagree, but I will acknowledge that the people making policy decisions on this also, as well as probably being just plain better at this area than I am, also have vastly better intelligence on both the material and the human factors involved, and while its not clear just how wide the policy space is between the catastrophic failure zones on either side, it’s pretty clear those exist. My instinct is that the Administration has been less aggressive than ideal, but I’d sure be sweating bullets about whether I was going to accidentally trigger a major direct superpower conflict if I was, without further information or support, suddenly magically made the decider of policy in this area.
Maybe. Maybe not. This reminded me of Jake Sullivan's essay in November/December 2023 issue of the Foreign Affairs. His essay went to print on October 2nd, less than a week before Hamas killed 1200 Israelis. In the essay, Sullivan writes what a success the Middle Eastern de-escalation policy has been, how the region is more peaceful than it has been in decades, and how successful they have been in discouraging further Iranian aggression. It was such an embarrasing essay that Foreign Affairs scrubbed key paragraphs from the online version.
And this is only one of many spectacular failures. While he has very impressive credentials, his public track record from Syria to Myanmar, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Israel and Iran makes him indistinguishable from a total idiot. History knows many such overeducated idiots, Robert McNamara comes to mind immediately.
Certainly their baseline of experience and knowledge is higher than the average man in the street, however, as a political appointee everthing is filtered through the lens of national proaganda and partisan politics. The end result is indistinguishable from a total idiot.
There are some seasoned (life long professional) diplomats out there who are very knowledgeable, however, you wont hear from them in the media this side of their retirement.
The Putin regime has done real harm to the world and is a major threat to peace… breaking the long peace in Europe is a major tragedy. I don’t know where this goes, but I think that we have to stop Russia, otherwise it’s Carte Blanche for every shitty dictator and thug to invade their neighbors as soon as they think they can.
I wish there was more I could do to help.
In Europe at the moment, there is only one real military power and that is France plus with a little help from the Nordics. The rest is almost non existent, and I am including the current German army. It's calculated they might currently be able to provide ammunition for maybe 15 days...
"The state of the Bundeswehr is more dismal than ever" - https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/01/26/the-state-of-the...
A US president hostile to NATO or compromised, would make for very concerning scenario's within months....
On other side, you have a country of 200 million, with a GDP that is almost 20% fully invested on weapons and ammunition production, currently fully on a path of war. Putin could get 2 million soldiers in 3 months in case of a general mobilization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
Which country are you talking about?
"White House Worries Russia’s Momentum Is Changing Trajectory of Ukraine War" - https://archive.is/DchiK
People talk about this in no way like it was reasoned about in the 90s and ... it is a bit concerning.
The instruction is to hide under a table. YMMW.
if you have enough money you could build a big enough bunker. I don't think there is a plan for the general population? there are many abandoned military bunkers around the world, maybe they become fashionable again.
America and Russia aren't going to war. Leadership may be nuts, but contrary to popular reporting Putin's war in Ukraine was--at least at its outset--popular among Russia's elite. Those elite are not suicidal.
Putin is issuing China's final warnings [1]. Letting American weapons fired by the Ukrainian army hit Russian military targets inside Russia simply isn't a material escalation in proxy war terms. Even the U.S. Navy helping Ukraine with its air defence in respect of missiles and drones wouldn't be a true escalation; the history of proxy wars during the Cold War with the Russian state's predecessor showed that quite clearly.
The escalation would be American missiles fired by Americans hitting anything in Russia. That's a hard line we didn't cross in the Cold War. It's a line both sides are excruciatingly respecting today.
You don't really know this.
We sort of do, at least indirectly. No man rules alone. Moscow's elite have been enriched and empowered by the war. And it isn't their sons being sent to the frontline. To the extent there have been consequences, they've been in terms of lifestyle more than material wealth or influence.
No man rules alone, but Joseph Stalin kept updating the closest circle for decades, and recent changes in federal government show that some thought previously unassailable can suddenly move with noticeable reductions of abilities.
Sorry, but this is detached from reality. If your country were invaded, would you give up just to make other people's lives a bit more comfortable?
This may be more problematic, though, than a combination of approaches. Which we see today. The combination, though, doesn't provide results particularly fast - it still is good, though, but not enough for reducing the war in time to some relatively short periods starting from now. Well, we're in the real world. It's not perfect.
Only if you don’t know much about Russia.
The outcome of the war depends almost solely on Russian willingness to fight. We are already two years into the two-week supply of Russian rockets.
Edit: formatting
I also never heard of two-week supply of Russian rockets, though I heard economic collapse predictions which didn't materialize. But I also heard about Kiyev in three days plans.
Really, Russian military potential is greatly oversold.
And also, Putin should be considered as a moderate part of the government.
In other words, it’s amazing what you can accomplish when you don’t care about human lives.
Russia running out of missiles: https://www.google.com/search?q=rissia+running+out+of+missil...
In democracies the ultimate power belongs to people, so it's at least good to know the opinion of them. For this particular war it looks like there's an overwhelming support of Ukraine in the world, including significant portion of people in Russia, especially if corrected for propaganda bias.
In case of Ukraine losing - which frankly seems rather theoretical - it's doubtful Russia will have enough resources to immediately continue to other European territories. However, this bad case should be avoided with all seriousness, as it brings only negative results to everybody involved, including Russian people.