I'm not sure. It might just be related to the US (and by extension American companies) being seen as less reliable in light of recent political developments.
Nobody wants to be addicted to this and vulnerable to being coerced and manipulated by threats of having service revoked at catastrophic times unless they do exactly whatever Musk and his puppetmasters say.
Sharing profits from your natural resources in exchange for military resources seems like a great deal to me. Nothing in life is ever free, someone is always paying for it, usually through taxes. If you think this logic is flawed, argument me why.
When your bank balance is zero or negative and rent and bills are due, do you care about your own today or do you care about the tomorrow of another country hundreds/thousands of KM away?
Because that's how most people think in private. Only the privileged with a warm home and a full stomach can afford to think about other countries. Everyone is rooting for Ukraine if you ask them, but not many are willing to sacrifice their own welfare for it.
Do you think Putin given his ego, after all he's put his country and reputation through, is just gonna walk back and admit defeat if you throw enough EU money and Ukrainian bodies at him?
How naive can you be?
Russia is almost certainly not going to deploy nukes over Ukraine. The cost/benefit is just not there: they won't help take or hold territory, and they invite strategic retaliation from more actors than just Ukraine.
So. Putin's political position is not unassailable (remember how touch-and-go things were with Prigozhin? How hardly anyone stood up to him?). If holding Ukraine becomes genuinely untenable, he'll have to make some excuse to leave, or fall. It's even possible he'll die of old age or pneumonia and be replaced by a more reasonable psychopath.
Putin is not a God, he is a man. The circumstances of that are extremely unpredictable.
See what Ukraine is doing right now, and add more weapons and money.
They won't 'defeat' Russia in the sense of Ukrainian soldiers marching down Red Square in Moscow. But they will make Russia lose the war.
> Do you think Putin given his ego, after all he's put his country and reputation through, is just gonna walk back and admit defeat if you throw enough EU money and Ukrainian bodies at him?
If the alternative is being deposed at home, yes.
They're fighting to uphold this order, to show that it's not simply yet-another-treaty that a warring nation can break and take territory from another country with few consequences, where allying to countries doing that will be met with absolute resistance to hold to this ideal.
That's what we are paying for in Europe, if that doesn't have any value to you and you prefer to see it as a purely transactional interaction then go ahead to hold this opinion, other people believe in something further than simply tit-for-tat transactions. Morally speaking is a better way of living.
Just because I don't want my tax money going to aid another country's war any further, doesn't mean I want Russia to win. I want Ukraine to win, just not with my tax money, especially knowing how corrupt Ukraine is and how luxury car sales have boomed in Ukraine in 2023-2025, maybe they should look internally for war revenue instead. I'm already doing my part housing Ukrainian refugees in my country on my tax Euros, even though a lot of them are military aged males and come with cars worth more than I make in a year.
I have two follow up questions.
How much do you want Ukraine to win?
Are you concerned more tax Euros may be spent if Russia wins?
I'm fairly sure, if Russia wins less tax Euros will be spent. That's because the European economies will be doing worse, and less GDP also means lower taxes.
I'd like some trustworthy sources on the luxury car sales since whatever search I do return results from absolutely sketchy websites with similar naming to real news outlets ("globaleuronews.com" instead of the real "euronews.com", "news-pravda.com" [which is very much a Russian propaganda site]), or stuff named using extremely generic terms (such as "automotivelogistics.media", "good-times-invest.com", etc.).
I believe you were victim of propaganda but would like to check what sources you have to challenge my assumption.
Which such blatant accusations it seems you've already made up your mind, and it would be a waste of time to entertain this further and go nowhere. I have already expressed all my arguments above. If you don't believe them, that's fine with me, I don't have to make you change your mind, I'm OK with you expressing a different opinion than mine, I'm not OK with you making accusations about me when you don't know me and expecting me to disprove your accusations as if I owe you that.
Please, share your sources and we can further the discussion, no need for the defensiveness.
Edit: also even if it's the case you have fallen victim to propaganda in no way I put any sense of judgment in that, anyone can be victim of disinformation, what is a failure of character is digging deeper into that belief after being shown one was bamboozled. Up to that point anyone is just another victim.
> I have already expressed all my arguments above.
I do not understand why questioning where your information might have come from triggered a whole meltdown, your argument might be based in disinformation (that Ukrainians have bought luxury cars and your taxes are being wasted on that) and if that's the case then your argument has no basis to it. I would like more information...
Where do you get that from? As far as I can tell, there's no voting at all involved. Formally, any member state can unilaterally invoke article 5.
There's been an ideological shift in America that a lot of people are desperately trying to deny because it is truly terrifying.
Boots on the ground. They're fighting an excellent proxy war against Russia on behalf of NATO, severely stretching NATO's largest geopolitical ally, at the extreme cost of young Ukrainian men ending up in the ground. Sweden and Finland have been brought into the alliance, very valuable lessons have been learned, exceptional military intelligence gained, for a bit of cash and essentially no NATO causalities. By the end of the war, an exhausted Russia will have almost zero capacity to mount a conventional attack against any NATO member for a decade.
In short, why should Ukraine be paying with treasure when they're already paying so much with blood?
Blackmailing them for profit is despicable.
Fixed that for you.
Thought of another way, if those minerals in the ground are useful resources for the US, it's more in the US benefit to pay now to stabilize the situation so they can later buy the minerals from a happy and productive population - as the amount of trade going the other way will probably be vastly greater.
Same is true of Russia, if it was possible to undo the fuckup there after the fall of the USSR. It could be a huge economy. It's not a zero sum game, if Ukraine and Russia have bigger free economies then everyone else gets bigger too.
That's the idea anyway, it's worked before. It maybe didn't work with China because we forgot the free part. But Ukraine was already heading in the right direction with democracy and fighting corruption - which is pretty much the reason for the war.
That sounds rather... Stupid?
It doesn't. That's what your made up analogy means in your head. Don't put words in my mouth to twist the narrative in your corner.
I was only pointing out that today, just like 70+ years ago in WW2, individuals want to stay out of other countrys' wars out of self preservation.
It's the second time I interact with you today, it's the second time you become extremely defensive and reactionary. Do you behave like that in real life? Rather exhausting.
On that note, I would invite you to read my reply to you earlier today [0], might help to put down the armor a little, and perhaps think about engaging with more curiosity and less aggressiveness out of the bat, not everyone is out to get you.
If your neighbour was being attacked would you help them even if you never signed a contract saying you will come to his defence?
Sorry, where did you get that this deal is for _FUTURE_ military resources??? Seriously - where did you hear that?
The only way the Trump administration characterized the mineral deal is as repayment for PAST military aid, even though it was perfectly understood that those were GRANTS (i.e. there were no terms attached to the military aid). The Trump administration also accused Ukraine of cheating/tricking the US/Biden administration to get this military aid ... and also of starting the war ... and also of being a dictatorship ... and also of being an obstacle to peace.
Trump administration also made it clear that the mineral deal is NOT a security guarantee, nor is the mineral deal payment for FUTURE military aid.
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It is a common pattern that whenever Trump says X, apologists, like you, come out of the woodwork and say something like "Well, what he really meant to say is Y".
Yes, it would be different if the mineral deal was payment for future military aid .. but it isn't - so why are you saying that?
My understanding is that for the USA, sending weapons isn't the same as giving away money. The military industrial complex gains from more weapons needing to be built, for one thing.
For the free world at large, it's beneficial to oppose Putin via a proxy war for obvious reasons.
We're all getting something out of this, and I'd say if it's in return for sending weapons, that's a good deal (for us!).
That's a weird question. Most of that equipment was more or less produced in the first place for fighting Russia.
Equivalently, you could ask how the US should be paying Ukraine for the manpower they are providing.
The US is getting a huge discount here, because they only have to supply some equipment for the fight. Ukraine is supplying the manpower for free.
Small things like Tesla sales crumbling, which means less tax revenue. The US had 320B USD in arms sales 2024. Usually about 60% of that stays in country as tax revenue. Europe is upping its spending massively but a big part is developing production capacity for the most complex and expensive stuff that will be in direct competition to the US. Never mind such BS like the US vetoing Grippen to sell their planes to Colombia because of the use of US engines.
All in all the US has proven itself to be an unreliable ally. This lack of trust will result in additional costs and lost opportunities in the next decades.
US brands are more visible since they have not been affected by WWII too much, and Europeans had to rebuild things, but there are brands and tools which I enjoy using, and some of these tools are pass-downs.