Wasn't the time for that 3 years ago (or 11)? I'm not pro Russia, but a war of attrition has always seemed a bad play and half-assed. Especially when Europe is still buying gas from Russia...

Eastern Europe contains many NATO countries, and many European countries feel an increased rather than decreased need for nuclear weapons. Compensation for losses due to sanctions would also effectively legitimize the war, as if though Russia were in the right.

Lifting sanctions could maybe be done, if Russia actually left Ukraine entirely, including Crimea.

I think what's really interesting at the moment, at least to me as a European, is a proper war where we simply go in and pound the Russian positions in Ukraine with bombers, strike all sorts of factories, plants, gas conduits, electrical infrastructure etc., in Russia so as to ensure a reasonable outcome.

This is a very large and difficult to defend country, relative to its population. The Russians are incredibly vulnerable and increasing the violence level to something more appropriate is the going to be the only alternative.

We're planning to borrow money to get weapons. This will be interesting, considering today's interest rates. I think it might be we who must be given something that we can agree is some kind of 'win', rather than the Russians, if the world is to be orderly.

Russia is a bully. What do you think will happen if we have to pay the bully off each time they start smashing up their neighbors stuff up or just making threats?

And as for withdrawing NATO forces - NATO is a purely defensive organization. Its purpose is to defend against just the sort of shit Russia has pulled with Ukraine. If Ukraine was part of NATO the war would not have happened.

NATO is not a threat to Russia. Never has been, never will be. This is equivalent to a local crime lord complaining about being threatened by the police station down the road and demanding that the police station shuts down.

European troops in Ukraine, adding them to a new European nuclear umbrella, and giving them a pathway towards EU membership and a "Marshal Plan" to rebuild are the kinds of things Ukraine needs to feel any kind of confidence in a ceasefire or peace agreement.

Logistics (Ukraine shares a large border with Russia) and people - the people in currently occupied Ukraine aren't as against Russia as those in Afghanistan may be. Even now, we don't really see much of sabotage.

> All the more reason to help Ukraine finish the job and force Russia to leave.

And how are you going to do that? Russia has been gaining land. Currently, Russia is winning.

> Ultimately, worst case scenario Ukraine can simply keep Russian in a war of attrition while eating away at it's economic base.

While losing hundred of thousands of young men and decimating their population. Russia has more men. They can stand a war of attrition a lot longer - and they value soldier's lives less than we do in the west.

> Russia is already sending it's soldiers with crutches riding donkeys into battle. They are scraping the bottom of the barrel for resources.

Similarly, Ukraine is kidnapping people on the streets to send them to the front lines.

What would you use to transport items through the forest for example?

Source?

Ukraine is steppe and swamp, very flat. Afghanistan .. is not.

I protest: donkeys are NOT terrible!

In fact donkeys are absolutely one of the best means of transport in the Ukraine conflict: donkeys maintain themselves, are loyal to their trainers and are reliable. If you allow them to guide themselves, they will almost always move you away from regions of conflict (i.e., they are self-guided and smart).

Furthermore donkeys are by their nature not instruments of war: there are no "attack donkeys" in this or other conflicts. Donkeys are animals of peace.

Free a donkey today: send cash to

Free the Donkeys

123-rt45 Doskilvi via

Kyiv, UKRAINE 79013

(just kidding, but wish I weren't)

Becasue Putin has openly talked about how Latvia and Moldova, for example, are part of Russia.

The Russia-Ukraine War is exposing significant vulnerabilities in the Army’s strategic personnel depth and ability to withstand and replace casualties. Army theater medical planners may anticipate a sustained rate of roughly 3,600 casualties per day, ranging from those killed in action to those wounded in action or suffering disease or other non-battle injuries. With a 25 percent predicted replacement rate, the personnel system will require 800 new personnel each day. For context, the United States sustained about 50,000 casualties in two decades of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In large-scale combat operations, the United States could experience that same number of casualties in two weeks.

[1] https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

The Russia-Ukraine War makes it clear that the electromagnetic signature emitted from the command posts of the past 20 years cannot survive against the pace and precision of an adversary who possesses sensor-based technologies, electronic warfare, and unmanned aerial systems or has access to satellite imagery; this includes nearly every state or nonstate actor the United States might find itself fighting in the near future. The Army must focus on developing command-and-control systems and mobile command posts that enable continuous movement, allow distributed collaboration, and synchronize across all warfighting functions to minimize electronic signature. Ukrainian battalion command posts reportedly consist of seven soldiers who dig in and jump twice daily; while that standard will be hard for the US Army to achieve, it points in a very different direction than the one we have been following for two decades of hardened command posts

This is something that is unique to the administration and those who deeply agree with what it’s done.

Not that it matters… clearly people don’t care enough to vote for it. My heart goes out to the people of Ukraine.

0: https://thehill.com/policy/international/5153611-quinnipiac-...

Yes, in Russia it happened largely in the same way, and it started much earlier than in 2011 (in 2012 we already had literal Putin cultists marching down the streets). Some people blamed an external enemy for their troubles (both troubles and the enemy were usually imaginary, with the enemy usually being the US), others who rejected the idea blamed the other half and generally had their heads in the sand, but neither wanted to admit their issues or do anything substantial, leaving the Kremlin do what they wanted to do.

As someone who lives in the EU and has the same kind of relatives, what I find frustrating is how little actual engagement with the Russian narratives there is from official sides. There is presented "evidence" for US influence in Ukraine long before the war, like the Victoria Nuland video, yet there seems to be no attempts at debunking those arguments, short of a catch-all labeling of all of it as disinformation (which, I can testify from personal experience, does absolutely nothing to dissuade people who already believe it).

The Selinskyji/Trump spat felt like an extreme version of this, where Selinskyji essentially argued with the Western/Ukrainian narrative of the war and Trump argued with the Russian narrative.

The strategy of "ignore the Russian narrative and hope not many people will latch on to it" evidently failed, so I think if we want to have a hope of solving this conflict and countering Trump (and maybe get back the parts of the population that follow the narrative), we at least have to engage with it and provide counterarguments.

So where did he get that from?

There are concentric circles of giving a fuck: first in the center is yourself, then your family, then your friends, then your community, then your city, then your country, then other countries on the planet.

It's impossible to get people to care about the outermost circle when their inner circles are not satisfied, so they won't be happy to see their elected officials being generous to foreigners with their own tax money.

You need unions and Universal Healthcare like the rest of the developed world to fix those problems.

This is purely about Trump helping Putin.

Nevermind that the reason Ukraine can't defend itself is because the US guaranteed their security in exchange for them giving up their nukes. I mean, that was so 30 years ago.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-American_loan

Instead they send it to Ukraine on inflated price and all money goes to the US manufactures to make a modern weapons instead.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/once%20bitten%2C%...

I think the idea that the Budapest memorandum is a US security guarantee here's another comparable lie.

It was the half dozen other adventures in the sandbox with nothing to show for it that made people put down their foot and say no more and stick to it even when it's a cause they may support (Ukraine for some, Israel for others). That's how fed up with it the American public is.

On a related note, a lot of the morons who gave GWB a second term seem to be populists now. They would be more helpful to America if they stopped trying to understand the world around them, and instead just voluntarily stopped voting.