Comment by dralley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dralley | Hacker News Reader

> In mid-April 2022, about two weeks before the Wiesbaden meeting, American and Ukrainian naval officers were on a routine intelligence-sharing call when something unexpected popped up on their radar screens. According to a former senior U.S. military officer, “The Americans go: ‘Oh, that’s the Moskva!’ The Ukrainians go: ‘Oh my God. Thanks a lot. Bye.’”

> The Moskva was the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. The Ukrainians sank it.

> The sinking was a signal triumph — a display of Ukrainian skill and Russian ineptitude. But the episode also reflected the disjointed state of the Ukrainian-American relationship in the first weeks of the war.

> For the Americans, there was anger, because the Ukrainians hadn’t given so much as a heads-up; surprise, that Ukraine possessed missiles capable of reaching the ship; and panic, because the Biden administration hadn’t intended to enable the Ukrainians to attack such a potent symbol of Russian power.

And this is my biggest problem with the last administration's policies on Ukraine, despite the fact that they were vastly better than the current administration's. They acted like the goal was to step on Putin's toes without pissing him off too much, not enable Ukrainians to successfully fight a defensive war after 10 years of Russian aggression. The response to the greatest Ukrainian successes was dismay and pullback. After 2022, there was very little forwards thinking, only reactions that came months late and at the expense of thousands of lives.

I'm not saying that Ukrainians were perfect, they have a TON of problems and mistakes of their own. But they were also put under ludicrous constraints. It's totally absurd that ATACMS was only provided after Congress forced their hand (despite Congressional stonewalling otherwise!). Imagine if Ukraine had been able to hit Russian airfields on Ukrainian soil with cluster ATACMS in spring 2023 before the offensive instead of after it had fallen apart, partially due to those same airfields. Or if cluster shells were provided before Bakhmut fell rather than after.

There was no coherent strategy, only endless handwringing and over-intellectualization and Kremlinology.

I think it has everything to do with US strategy: What do you want to get out from this war?

I guess different interest groups have different answers. And sometimes they don't want to share the answers for apparent reasons.

> US strategy: What do you want to get out from this war?

Kill as many Russians as possible and use up as many Russian munitions as possible - with the inevitable consequence being the death of a lot of Ukrainians in the process.

So we nuke them?

Obviously we don't want to be the ones that do anything. It's not a proxy war if you are doing the shooting.

How would that work?

Badly for everyone.

- dump old weapon systems to justify procuring new ones

- put a fig leaf over Victoria Nuland’s hubris and ineptitude

- create a political football

- make a productive peace with Russia impossible for another century

Who knows. Victory is not a goal. I don’t think it’s possible if it were.

Rounded to the nearest whole number there has never been anything more than a 0% chance of the Ukraine "winning" a war with Russia. Even the dumbest generals in Washington know this.

> Kill as many Russians as possible and use up as many Russian munitions as possible - with the inevitable consequence being the death of a lot of Ukrainians in the process

Pretty much. I see you got downvoted because somehow there are still people that believe it's two more weeks and Russia will collapse.

Initially the plan was a rehash of 2014 when the Obama admin encouraged Ukrainians not to fight. It was going to be a media storm and very harsh pronouncements, sanctions and so on. However, from a geo-strategic point of view when Zelensky refused to take the ride offered to him by the Biden admin, it opened this new opportunity, and Americans and Europeans allies took it. Never let a crisis go to waste! They helped Ukraine stay afloat and saved Ukrainian lives as well, no doubt, but that's a bonus for the magazine stories. If we pretend their only goal was grinding down Russia without also letting it collapse or trigger WW3, the playbook would have looked exactly as it did for the last 4 years. So I think it's silly to pretend it was something other than that.

> with the inevitable consequence being the death of a lot of Ukrainians in the process.

With the inevitable consequence being many Ukrainian lives being saved.

Do you somehow think that less Ukrainians would die without our support?

> Do you somehow think that less Ukrainians would die without our support?

1000% yes. Without our support the war would have been over, even with Russian incompetence, in a few weeks.

Best estimates place the number of dead in the 100's of thousands, that would have been in the thousands.

How can people look at the human rights catastrophe in occupied territory and be delusional enough to think everything would have been fine had Russia "won". It's crazy.

By 2015 1 million people had fled the occupied territory and taken refuge in Russia.

The key thing to successfully take refuge in Russia is to be mentally Russian. Ukraine has plenty of such people, at least because 20% of population are ethnical Russians who migrated here at different times in our history. For somebody like me, whose Russian skills are on lower intermediate side, posting comments like this in social networks occupation is effectively a death sentence, there's no way around that.

As an example my friend barely left Russian checkpoint alive after they took his phone for check-up. They were beating him for hours, because they found picture where he stands near the Ukrainian flag. Twist: he was 17 at that time, would he be a bit older, I don't know what would happen. And this is just one example among countless. You can see what happened in Bucha, Izyum, Mariupol, etc. You can learn what happened during the Soviet period after we briefly regained independence. Our population shrinked by double digit percentage pre WWII.

Average homo sovieticus with no sense of identity will be sort of okay, that's true. But Russia probably will use the men for the next war similar to what they did with people occupied in 2014.

Crimea would be a counterexample, where the annexation was basically bloodless

Apart from all the dissidents being tortured in basements. But sure, it happened quickly enough that most people ran to ground quickly.

How many of them ended up as Cannon fodder in Ukraine?

The Russians invaded with exterminations lists.

People in occupied territories are not safe from the Russians. Rather they became cannon fodder.

Surrender was and is probably not an option for Ukraine. Without Western support, what might an industrialized nation do if cornered with no options -- I don't want to know.

Regardless, if Ukraine wants to fight for freedom, you really think we shouldn't enable them? Or is freedom of no value to you?

The US seems to want Russia to lose the war but not for the government (i.e. Putin's grip on power) to collapse (because nukes). That seems to be the main thing driving this 'helping but not too much' strategy, but it's not obvious that it will or can succeed.

From a realpolitik perspective, the US would like this war to go on forever. Under Biden, the war was grinding up enemy Russian troops and not-really-an-ally Ukrainian troops, weakening both strategically while costing us no troops and 0.2% of GDP. Plus we were able to expand NATO and give Russia an ongoing PR nightmare.

Obviously they can't say any of that out loud, but the underlying strategy is sound.

The underlying strategy is so sound that Russia now effectively owns 20% of what used to be Ukraine, ground which is never going back. Their military has gained extremely valuable experience in fighting a modern war. Additionally, European economy has been decimated and the second order effects (weapon proliferation, criminal syndicates, immigration, societal effects) are yet to play out.

Throw in the ever-present threat of small-yield tactical nuclear weapons being used by Russia if it ever thinks it's in danger of losing and I fail to see the logic behind all of this. Unless of course weakening Europe, utterly destroying Ukraine and strengthening Russia was the point from the get-go. Or you just need to admit that the US fucked this one up badly (as it has almost every other war it's been involved in over the last 40 years).

How is the European economy decimated? Not saying you’re wrong, but that’s a bold statement especially without receipts.

This 20% was captured before any aid was granted.

If you can believe Jeffry Sachs and RFK Jr., the expansion of NATO was a way to start the war, not a result.

And the objective was to pillage the country of Ukraine to the benefit of those in power, Europe gets to loan them money to rebuild, American corporations get to buy up the farmland.

If you can believe them.

> They acted like the goal was to step on Putin's toes without pissing him off too much...

I mean, when you're fighting a nuclear power, making sure you don't piss them off enough to make them use their nuclear weapons, or at least unleash their most powerful conventional weapons on your main cities, seems like a good strategy.

Imagine for a second that instead of Russia, it was the USA fighting a proxy war against, say, China. And that China had just provided the intelligence and maybe weapons for, say, Cuba to sink the largest US Carrier. I am very sure the USA would freaking unleash hell on Cuba, maybe also on China. The only reason the Russians didn't do the same is that they're probably not capable of doing so, at least not without losing too much for it to be a rational choice. But at the time, the USA was not entirely sure of what the Russians would do when provoked to such an extent. They were understandably worried. As they learned the Russians were not exactly doing what they might have expected, they gradually started pushing more and more up until the point the Russians launched an Oreshnic ballistic missile which could've easily been carrying a nuclear payload, but luckily didn't. Biden still pushed further a bit even after that, but in my opinion that was rather irresponsible. You can't push the Russians forever, even in their current position, before you should expect them to become desperate and start using whatever they can to start pushing back at you, and the Russians still can do that.

Nukes aren't that great a weapon to use against the country right on your border that you're trying to annex, especially if you've been busy justifying the invasion to your own population as liberation.

There are "tactical" nukes these days that can be "safely" used and in the beginning of the war, nobody was sure if the Russians were willing to use those. But even Hiroshima has recovered from a dirty nuke with relatively minor permanent losses.

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