- Ukraine destroyed columns of waiting Russian soldiers with HIMARS, a Ukrainian commander said.
- He said Ukraine targeted them as soon as it got permission to use allied weapons across the border.
- Military experts say Ukraine’s ability to use Western-supplied weapons in Russia is aiding its fightback.
I wish they didn’t have to wait for things like this. It sucks that Ukraine is at the whims of other countries while it’s trying to fight to maintain its sovereignty.
It makes me so depressed thinking about how many thousands of Ukrainian lives could’ve been saved by just giving Ukraine full and enthusiastic support immediately instead of dragging it out this long.
This was done on purpose so the crisis didn’t escalate. There’s no world police to prevent Russia from nuking everyone. It’s better for outside actors to focus on de-escalation anyway.
Also, Putin is not doing this because of Ukraine. I mean that’s part of it, but he is doing it for domestic appeal. He wants to appear tough to Russian citizens. Two situations allow that: beating Ukraine easily, and losing to NATO forces. He knows NATO will not risk invading Russia, so he’s in no real danger from the second one.
NATO is intentionally not intervening because it makes Putin look weak domestically. Russia has created their own problem and the war will not end until the people of Russia demand it.
The only thing that modern diplomacy teaches nation states today is that they need to get nukes as quickly as possible
Nukes are good, but in fact full arsenal, from home-produced small mortars to MRBMs, and a standing military. Actually, if possible, all the means of power projection the big guys have. Including even proxy militants. Because the big guys back up their words with the blood of the small guys anyway.
You’re speaking about the means of which to project military power on the ground with direct action, I’m talking about the nature of nuclear weapons as a deterrent and how that changes the way soft and hard power is applied.
Nukes make it so that no direct combat need ever take place, look at NK or the inverse where we are applying sanctions against Iran for a current parallel.
It requires very rigid discipline to threaten your enemy with MAD. The more tasks you can solve without testing your own faction’s discipline, the better. If every parking place argument gets to threats of nuking the opponent, because you can’t threaten anything else, either eventually you’ll have to use MAD for such a small cause, or you’ll step back on that and then there’ll be something a bit more important over which you’ll threaten MAD.
And so on, until MAD is in practice useless for you.
The language you are using reads like you’re discussing an RTS.
There’s no requirement for any rigid posture except maintaining control over said nuclear arms. Most of NK saber rattling is done to aquire aid and material. Merely having Nuclear arms and demonstrating that control and willingness to use them as a defensive measure is all that’s needed. Other countries and powers on the global stage will modify or attenuate their position based on the demonstration of said control
I suggest reading these to better understand my position.
https://oxfordre.com/politics/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228637-e-347
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA585975.pdf
And it’s fine when there are states behaving with the responsibility of an RTS player. Will read, thx
No it doesn’t. The US especially has spent a ton of money building up countries it has defeated in war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse_That_Roared
Yes it does, in direct reply to what you said
The only reason we’re slow rolling Ukraine is because Russia has nukes. Here’s a great study on it. https://assets.cambridge.org/97811071/06949/frontmatter/9781107106949_frontmatter.pdf
Except the Duchy won the war against the US and brought back a hydrogen bomb. They then used that threat to make the league of micro nations. The bomb didn’t work, but the threat of it allowed a tiny nation to gain leverage on the geopolitical stage.
After killing the people in charge and destroying the country.
That’s Putin’s doing. His bluff was strong and he had a big pile of material, so the West is using a Russia technique known as the salami slice method, by slowly escalating and gauging the reaction from Putin. It means no world war 3 scenario, no allies that have to come to his defense and also not letting Putin taking whatever he wants with just bluff and threatening speeches. It is costly in lives and material though.
Can’t make salami without grinding meat I guess. As dark as that sounds. I thank every soul who’s been fighting against that thugtatorship.
And we (the US) have so much support that we could be giving to them but we’re not. We’d rather enable genocide elsewhere.
The US has too many bases to defend simultaneously to engage with Russia directly. It would be the 18th Anglo-French Wars all over again but with the possibility of a spicy nuclear conclusion at any given moment.
Keeping the conflict contained to the Ukrainian theater means western states get to “bleed” Russia in a protracted conflict without drawing the rest of their assets into a firefight. But we’re already seeing the US/Russia conflict leak into the central African states, the Korean border, and recently the coast of Florida.
Americans don’t actually want this to become a full blown World War. That drives up our defensive costs significantly and skews the “Stupid Russians Lose Again” headlines with a bunch of “Brave NATO Soldiers Fucked By Insidious Russian Treachery” articles.
This is patently untrue, look to Syria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Khasham or Africa https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-extra-troops-east-africa-sudan-evacuation-rcna80678 for examples of this. The US is able to project power globally in a way that Russia has tried to and simply cannot counter. https://www.usip.org/publications/2021/02/what-russias-endgame-syria or https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/5/24/how-russia-tried-to-colonise-africa-and-failed
Even Ukraine is projecting power in Sudan and Syria as a direct belligerent in opposition to Russian interest. https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-sudan-syria-cnn-russians-1907835
The United States spends in a year, what the rest of the world spends in 1.2 years. https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison There is no historical analogue to the power of the United States military. Unfortunately, this is what we spend our money on instead of Universal Healthcare or our infrastructure, or our schools etc. etc.
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA404513.pdf
https://csbaonline.org/research/publications/toward-a-new-offset-strategy-exploiting-u-s-long-term-advantages-to-restore
Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. Please search for Battle of Khashamor in Wikipedia to check for alternative titles or spellings.
shrug
Who can forget their famously successful efforts to project power into Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen.
Listen, I know we’re all “Rah Rah Ukraine! Can’t wait till they’ve got boots on the ground in Moscow!” But you can’t seriously link to a fucking press briefing by the GUR as unbiased news.
Yes, yes. This is why we can’t afford health care. Ye-haw.
But we spend all this money on an endless parade of Wall Street executive compensation packages. Nobody in Russia is getting paid a Boeing CEO’s salary to make aerospace equipment that strands folks on the IIS. And while Lockhead and Raytheon have made a mint selling the Pentagon loot boxes, the physical hardware we’ve produced still doesn’t seem capable of winning the fucking war.
There are numerous analogs. But none of them are particularly flattering.
LOVE what you cherry picked to respond to and completely ignored any direct response to my points. Those Boeing Billionaires are making it soooooo hard for the Russians to project their will against the world at large.
lol here’s the corrected article you couldn’t find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Khasham
I’ve edited my first post.
keep on trollin’