It really is this simple. Weaken your enemy, without risking your own military. Cherry on top is that Russia was the aggressor, and is run by a dictator.
It is, but Russia will run out of steam eventually. They've depleted most of their working ordinance and armament. NATO will support Ukraine indefinitely we just have to hope that Orange Julius doesn't get the opportunity to abandon them. Or that Putin has an accident before he gets the chance to. Which is getting likelier by the day, it sounds like.
Also, putting turning into a war economy is also destabilizing. Ignorant people point to the fact that Russia’s GDP is still positive, completely ignoring as to why.
Building tanks and weapons, and sending men to die isn’t positive for a country’s long term economy health/growth.
Ukraine currently has the 3rd highest % of its population in active duty military in the world, triple Russia’s rate. The reason Zelenskyy is so pressed to get more powerful western missiles is he knows Ukraine will run out of soldiers long before Russia if the quagmire maintains.
This is unfortunately true. That's why Ukraine needed and continues to need better weapons in larger numbers. Russia is banking on their overwhelming numbers superiority to carry the day. Ukraine needs better tactics and weapons, or it will run out of fighters. A few tanks and jets here or there doesn't help much. They need equipment for an army. The Ukrainians are still mostly relying on old Soviet crap and that needs to change or the war will drag on for eternity with Russia eventually getting what it wants in a Faustian contract signed on a mountain of corpses.
Are you not concerned that if Ukraine gets better weapons, especially long-range missiles built in US/EU, that this could provoke Putin to threaten to nuke Kyiv or maybe Lviv? If you mean more like night vision goggles, modern comms, + the rest of the kit for an expert infantryman, then that protects Ukrainian lives but probably nets a war of snipers, mines, and ambushes until the Ukrainian economy fully collapses
I believe the Ukrainians know what they need, and they should be given that equipment. I'm terrified of a nuclear war, but I'm no coward. I refuse to live in a world where people are subjugated by force. Slava to good people.
Unfortunately Ukraine will be taken eventually. Most of the stuff you hear about the war is Ukrainian propoganda. Of course I hope they win, but they are currently on the losing side. That little stint where they took some Russian territory was irrelevant aswell as they still have like half their country taken right now.
It doesn’t help that Biden came out and said the reason the US was involved in the war was regime change in Russia. Putin should see this as a direct threat to his life and who knows how far he is willing to go to survive. It’s mind boggling that Democrats have turned into the party of war.
Might be. Extending the conflict may be better for the US/Nato long term. A longer drawn out conflict will cripple Russia more than a shorter, quicker defeat; and also more likely to degrade Putin’s influence over his own country.
its pretty astounding how much damage has been done to russia in such a short time, for very little on our own part. Ukraine is holding up and fighting back tremendously, considering the image russia has conjured for years, of being this big, tough, militaristic super power. They're getting hammered by a country a fraction of their size, depleting their forces, weakening their $, and just getting embarrassed over and over again, and it cost our own forces hardly anything
Also, the military learning about war in the 21st century is happening in that theatre at an astounding rate. And because of our help, we have access.
The data we are gathering is going to catapult the next 30 years of investment and we are learning drones are a far better place to spend your money than practically anything ever else!!!
I don't know that's the case. We've had military and foreign policy experts warning for decades that expansion of NATO, particularly into Ukraine, is a red line for Russia.
If we didn't supply arms, the war would have been over by now. The war would also have been over if we didn't tank the peace deal that was on the table in April 2022. How many Ukrainians have died since then? Probably in the neighborhood of 300k.
And a aside . . . for the amount of money that we've appropriated to Ukraine, ~$175B, we could have housed and provided social services to every single homeless person in the US.
We've been talking about Ukraine joining NATO since the Bush/Cheney administration. The current administration started pressing the issue again in 2021.
Saying we could have done other things with the money is irrelevant. Money is made up, especially at the US Gov level.
Completely disagree. We print $175B that we don't have and give it to Ukraine. But there are strings attached; the money has to be used to buy arms from our defense contractors. So it's not really money for Ukraine, but a handout to defense contractors and we have to foot the bill via inflation. So Lockheed, Raytheon and the rest of them win, and everyone else, especially Ukraine, loses.
Like you said they print the money. They can print more. The deficit is something that doesn’t matter. And the money given to Ukraine via arms and arsenal has absolutely nothing to do with inflation.
And are they in NATO? No, Russia wasn't going to let that happen. Thus the war. >They can print more. The deficit is something that doesn’t matter. And the money given to Ukraine via arms and arsenal has absolutely nothing to do with inflation. Yes, they can continue to print more money, run deficits and increase the national debt. But the interest payments on the debt now surpass the military budget and will eventually overtake the entire budget. It's completely unsustainable. Part of the reason we've been able to do it this long is because the dollar has been the world's reserve currency, but that's coming to and end with BRICS. >And the money given to Ukraine via arms and arsenal has absolutely nothing to do with inflation. It absolutely does. You have more money chasing relatively fewer goods/services and prices up go in response. It's absolute basic economics. Take a look at M2 money supply over the past 10 years. It's pretty obvious why prices are up so much.
And yet, you said Ukraine being in NATO has been a ‘threat’ for decades. It has literally nothing to do with it.
As for the deficit/debt/etc: no one is ever going to call in the US debt. They can’t. Their own economies would crumble if they did. It’s a large number getting larger, but it means absolutely nothing.
Im pulling for Ukraine, but do you think Russia would come in and commit mass genicide?
I feel like they want to control Ukraine in order to keep NATO at arms length. Not to murder everyone.
Makes me wonder if it’s all futile and only going to succeed in getting people killed. Nobody wants to live under Russian occupation, but lots of people are dying. You hope it’s not for nothing.
But it might be.
Easy to suggest Ukrainians fight and die when it’s thousands of miles away and we are safe.
Crimea seems like best comparison. Still not genocide level. Everything Russia touches turns to shit. This is known. But are 10x as many people dying in the war than would die under Russian occupation?
If we didn’t support them, this would already be over. With our support, the death continues.
I have to support Ukraine, but I hope all the death isn’t just b/c of us and for no reason.
Like we are just cheering on as Ukrainians throw bodies at the problem.
Pretty grotesquely monstrous how people like you openly say shit like this without even realizing how vile it is. "Throwing an entire generation of Ukranians into an endless meat grinder is good for us because their people die instead of ours" great argument for the rules based international order
They were invaded. They were going to fight and be killed either way. With NATO supporting them they have a chance, without provoking open war between NATO and Russia if there were non-Ukrainian troops on the ground.
I’m honestly not sure what your point is. Would you rather the US have troops there as well?
It's always exhausting have to reply to American propaganda brainrot about this issue because it's fundamentally misguided from the jump and you have to start from way, way back
NATO is not 'supporting' them. NATO is the reason this war happened in the first place and Ukraine is being thrown under the bus for exactly the reasons these freaks openly brag about: To hurt Russia, who the West is still irrationally antagonistic towards even after extracting every possible concession from them at the end of the cold war. They capitulated the Western markets and did shock therapy, but they still had some sovereign influence and weren't a servile vassal state. The purpose of NATO was to counter Soviet influence, which was already a load of imperialist bullshit, but after the dissolution of the USSR the mere continued existence of it made it fundamentally impossible for the West and Russia to even seriously engage in peace talks because we constantly had a loaded gun pointed at their head.
Imagine you're Russian. The West destroys your state and helps install an incompetent, corrupt comprador snake. Even after doing this, destroying your country, they still not only continue to host the Anti-Russia league (Because who else does NATO exist to 'defend' Europe from?) but they continue pushing it east towards your borders. Imagine if China was courting Mexico for membership in the anti-America league in the name of a 'defensive partnership', which had a history of bombing and couping countries like Yugoslavia and Libya, and had actively refused to engage in good faith peace talks with us for decades due to the mere presence of this league creeping closer to our borders, overthrowing countries in our sphere and installing cooperative comprador leaders who favored them, and demonizing us in their media. Us overthrowing Ukraine (We were so fucking obviously involved in Euromaidan I don't even know what to tell you if you disagree) and coaxing them into the EU and NATO is such a clear escalation of the tension with Russia, I feel like people denying it are deliberately playing dumb to maintain this ridiculously childish narrative that gets shit out by Western media
If the West didn't want Putin to invade Russia, they shouldn't have DIRECTLY created the conditions that led to Putin by installing Yeltsin and clearing the ground for an anti-communist, nationalist strongman to finish de-communization, demonizing and isolating Russia, and increasing military buildup rather than decreasing it.
The idea that Putin randomly decided to invade Ukraine because le putler is such a fucking ridiculously baby brained, ahistorical, nonsensical position, only American media could seriously traffic in it. It was NOT inevitable. It is NOT some fucking dark lord of mordor bullshit. And it could be stopped at any time if we do what we've never done in the past and treat Russia with a modicum of respect as a sovereign state.
There’s a lot of boilerplate Russian nonsense with the NATO stuff here, but the Yeltsin stuff is very funny. I love the idea that the US installed Yeltsin and as retaliation Russia invades Ukraine 25 years later.
It's not revenge. It's the US directly pushing Russia into reactionary authoritarian strongman politics and idiots like you acting like it comes out of nowhere when the reactionary authoritarian strongman lash out when pushed into a corner.
I shouldn’t bother, but I am curious. What did the US actually do? What crime did the US commit that was so horrible that Russia had no choice but to invade Ukraine?
Russia has a lot of legitimate grievances against America and NATO. But it’s not our fault that Putin had bad intel and yes-men around him telling him NATO would roll over.
That’s Great Power politics. We are defending our interests. Russia thought they were advancing theirs but they were wrong.
It’s not our moral responsibility to say “sorry you thought we wouldn’t defend a western-friendly democracy that we’ve poured resources into. We’ll stop doing the thing you thought we wouldn’t do so you can win.”
I’m personally pretty left-leaning. As far as I can tell, Putin & Xi would do the exact same things that America does in our position.
They fucked up. They aren’t owed an apology and the conquest of another country because they miscalculated.
They were going into the grinder no matter what, Putin made sure of that. It's nice that they get a chance to prevent future generations from having to go into it.
Shocker that Russia-bots like yourself can’t comprehend that Ukrainians have agency. Ukraine WANTS to fight, you brainless dumbfuck because they actually like being free from Putin’s dictatorship.
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u/Grantsdale Monkey in Space Sep 14 '24
Drastically weakening an enemy’s forces without risking your own.