Please define “we”. This is a international community so you can’t assume that everyone lives in the same country as you.
Well, who else in the world has been trying to a pass multibillion dollar aid package to Ukraine for the past couple months? The aid is about to get voted on this weekend.
I don’t follow every countries politics and what bills they’re trying to pass. I barely keep track of my own country’s stuff.
Why do people talks so easily about US starting war with Russia? They each have thousands of nukes and if it devolves into nuclear war then earth is fucked beyond repair for at least a few centuries. This is not WW2 anymore, a war doesn’t mean dropping with a bunch of soldiers on a beach, it means an apocalyptic destruction of earth.
I live in Germany, was a teenager in the 80s. We would have been ground zero then, and would be ground zero now.
I’ve already spent all the fear of nuclear war in the 80s. I am just not able to fear nuclear war now, anymore. The fear just dulls after nearly half a century.
The choice is to let a madman bring war to one country after another or to stop it - with the cost that stopping has a miniscule chance of me getting vaporized.
But doing nothing will keep the risk of nuclear war for another 50 years. It has to be stopped now, appeasement never did anything good.
All the west has accomplished so far is to ensure that more Ukraine is destroyed, and it’s obvious to anybody with a functioning brain that there is no chance of Ukraine winning at this point. The best chance Ukraine had was last summer during the fabled offensive that failed miserably. Ukraine is never going to be in as good position going forward. So the actual choice is to ensure more people keep dying or to negotiate with Russia. Incredible that after two years westerners still can’t get this through their skulls.
That is true but at the same time, a line has to be drawn somewhere. If we just let Russia win because they have nukes, there is nothing to stop them from invading and absorbing other neighbors. We can’t let the threat of nukes keep us from doing anything and allowing for Russia and China to just invade anywhere they want.
Only the US and Europe has the unalienable right to invade and bomb anywhere they want.
We can’t let the threat of nukes keep us from doing anything and allowing for Russia and China to just invade anywhere they want.
I’m sorry, but yes-we-fucking-can.
Jesus, people here are so fucking blood thirsty that they’re willing to entertain nuclear-fucking-holocaust just to ‘draw a line in the sand’
Friendly reminder that the US has already been ‘invading anywhere they want’ - I sure am glad the baddies aren’t as eager as the good guys are to glass half the planet.
No earth is better ? Got it! Let the great reset begins!
We haven’t even colonized a single other planet and we depleted earth ressources pretty bad,so if it’s a reset, it will be a complete hard reset that bricks earth save file forever. No more technological evolution for any future inhabitants ! The great filter might actually be the answer to the Fermi paradox after all.
We can’t let the threat of nukes keep us from doing anything and allowing for Russia and China to just invade anywhere they want.
This part gave me a nervous laugh. ‘Only us are allowed to invade anywhere we want, and if anyone else does it we’re ready to hard reset earth because we want the exclusivity rights!’
I didn’t read that comment as implying war was easy or okay. How’d you get that impression?
the NATO/EU/US may decide to become directly involved in the war
After their involvement, I doubt they’d do nothing if some of their soldiers get shredded by a Russian bomb. Let’s imagine Russia is beaten and it’s on the brink of complet defeat. Do you really not expect them to send nuclear warheads everywhere before collapsing as an ultimate fuck you ? 10% of the warheads are enough to turn earth into a post apocalyptic wasteland.
I’m by no means an expert in international relations. However, with respect to your last paragraph, I do think that China monitors the development carefully. I would even go so far and assume that they won’t act on Taiwan until the situation in the Ukraine is decided. Not because the cases are so similar, but because China and Russia seem to be important partners for each other. Right now, China is supporting Russia financially by buying resources from them (if I’m not mistaken) and also supporting them with equipment embargoed by the EU/US. China will probably know what it’s risking when they attack Taiwan and I doubt that they want to create that sort of situation while one of their most important partners (might be mistaken here) is in a war that binds their resources and weakens their support for China.
On the other hand, they could also try to start the war on Taiwan soon, hoping that NATO/US stretch their support too thin.
Tl;Dr: I don’t know either.
The number of fronts in this war seems to keep expanding.
I hate that I predicted this all the way back when the “two week” lockdown was starting, and that nobody listened to me and I got accused of “valuing the economy over Grandma”.
If my account hadn’t been deleted I could link to my comment where I predicted:
- lockdowns would extend far longer than two weeks
- it would ruin the global economy
- causing world war 3 to start
I was just laughed at basically.
I can’t follow you. Where is the connection between lockdowns (I assume you mean the Covid19 lockdowns?) and the war in Ukraine?
Russia can then ingest Ukraine, continue to seed political distrust in Western countries and then potentially start another war in Europe a few years later.
Holy shit this is the most mapgame-brained comment of all time. You mean Russia will get enough war score to annex Ukrainian territories, wait a few years for aggressive expansion to die down, spend some admin points to press the “sow discontent” button, then war when the casus belli is ready? Like a classic EU4 blob?
Stop gaming and read some books.
I mean.
It’s not like Russia has never done any of those things individually.
So doing them again in that sequence seems right.
Russia has been seeding discontent in Europe for decades. (1)
Russia has invaded Checnya, Abkhazia, Southern Ossetia, Transnistria, Krim, Ukraine (2). Baltics stand next in line, in a few years, if West fails.
It’s literally a sick war game for Putin’s Kreml.
Ok, I’ll bite
- How has Russia invaded Transnistria? Transnistria was a breakaway region during the collapse of the Soviet union, similar to Gagauzia
- No one disputes that Chechnya is Russian territory. Russia cannot invade its own territory.
- Georgian military intended to genocide ethnic minorities. Russia supported the autonomy of said minorities.
- Crimea was given to Ukraine by Kruschev very recently. It is almost entirely ethnically Russian, and those ethnic Russians voted overwhelmingly to secede during a coup/constitutional crisis as the alternative was staying in a country where there culture and language are banned, or worse become the target of hate crimes from neo-nazi battalions as many cases are well-documented
If the US doesn’t pass aid for Ukraine Russia will have the ability to attrition a win eventually.
More importantly for the US, China will see the lack of support as a sign of weakness increasing the timeline for a active conflict over Taiwan.
Ukraine is a test case for Taiwan that the Chinese government is paying extreme attention to
If the US passes aid for Ukraine Russia will have the ability to attrition a win eventually. You don’t have to take my word for it either https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/attritional-art-war-lessons-russian-war-ukraine
At this point, an Ukrainian military victory is extremely unlikely. But equally, it would be expensive for Russia to capture western Ukraine, and even more expensive to hold it. So the most likely outcome is some sort of negotiated peace. At that point, wouldn’t Ukraine get a better deal if they are in a position of at least some strength?
Russia doesn’t need to capture western Ukraine, and I think it’s highly unlikely they would try to do that. A far more likely scenario is that Russia will continue attrition of the Ukrainian army until it collapses. Then it will take over most of Ukraine, dictate terms to whatever rump state is left in western Ukraine.
There is no scenario where Ukraine is going to be in a position of any strength here. The longer the war continues the more manpower Ukraine loses and ultimately the worse the terms are going to be in the end.
It’s also worth mentioning that whatever is left of west Ukraine will become entirely dependent on the west creating a huge economic drain on Europe at the threat of a huge refugee crisis if this state collapses. This is a nightmare scenario for Europe where the economy is already going into a recession.
Lets look at the conditions inside of russia. Russia’s air defenses are stretched very thin right now. And if you don’t believe me, look at the amount of oil refineries destroyed, and the fact ukraine can strike 600 miles into russia.
Not to also mention, the only warfare russia seems to be able to do is meat wave tactics. For those who don’t know, its sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers to get mowed down by machine guns.
And don’t forget what’s happening around belgorod inside of russia, russia is using border guards as if they were trained army.
Yes, let’s look at the conditions inside Russia. The economy is growing faster than the G7, and Russia is outproducing the west 3x in terms of stuff like artillery shells. Meanwhile, there is zero evidence that Ukrainian attacks on refineries have actually achieved anything. Last I checked Russian oil exports are still going strong.
There’s also zero actual evidence for the claims of meatwave tactics, this is just the racist asiatic hordes narrative westerners keep clinging to.
And not sure how Russian border guards repelling attacks at the border is misuse of border guards in your mind.
Maybe read and try to learn from what people with a clue have to say, as explained by an actual professional in the article I linked instead of clinging to your delusional fantasies.
The US’s own war games indicate they cannot hold Taiwan.
China’s calculus for whether they need to invade Taiwan is based around whether there will be a peaceful reunification in the future or if it will be used as a springboard for military action against mainland China.
I do still have at least a little hope Ukraine is going to win. A territory does not typically successfully invade another territory a second time. However, I continue to be outspoken for Ukraine. Without aid, Ukraine will probably do what Chechnya is doing and just resort to dirtier tactics, which I’m glad Ukraine is not doing yet.
What about that time they sneaked bombs onto a civilian lorry and blew him up with his family as he was crossing the bridge out of Crimea?
Unless my memory is just bad, this is the first I heard about that, though even that is much less dirty than the worst done by Chechnya (or Russia), whose national values I wonder about at this point.
Ukraine alone won’t be the cause for a dystopian scenario with Russia as the world government, but I don’t like where it would be going if Ukraine fell. Russia surely wouldn’t stop afterwards. I’d rather see a world where trade connects people than a world where governments forcefully connect people via ideologies. The latter never worked out for anyone.
It’s incredible how western propagandists managed to convince people that world’s biggest country with low aging population is on a mission of territorial conquest.
Putin himself likened himself to Peter the Great, speaking of returning and strengthening once-held territories. Unless you agree with his premise that this land was always Russia, despite the current rulers and wishes of the populations living there, territorial expansion is the only conclusion to his statements.
Maybe should read what Putin actually said instead of linking to a US propaganda outlet.