# Going back to February 2022 - trying to deter the Russian invasion **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Tags:** ukraine-invasion\ **Created:** [May 19, 2023, 7:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/going-back-to-february-2022-trying-to-deter-the-russian-invasion/984295 "2023-05-19T19:37:20Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Al128](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/al128/32/16541_2.png) [@Al128](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Al128)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2023, 2:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/going-back-to-february-2022-trying-to-deter-the-russian-invasion/984295/21 "2023-06-11T02:31:05Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > If your big NATO exercise ran from, say, 1 Feb to 15 Feb, the Russians would have delayed their attack until 1 Mar after the NATO forces had gone home and were busy restocking & repairing their gear. > > IOW, it would have accomplished exactly zero. I disagree … you could easily do a cascaded approach … in nato maneuvers (schematically speaking) Jan: air based / focused troops Mar: land based / focused troops May: sea based july: cyber based the months in between (feb/apr) would be ramping up / winding down the next cascade I sincerely doubt the russians had bombed airfields and army camps with international war assets stationed there … as they did in the first week of the war. of course the Russians would probably have spun this into NATO is preparing to invade russia … but then again, if you publish an agenda with the dates ahead of time and play it through UN instances and diplomatic channels this coud preempt this bogus-russian-reasoning, just like the joint US-Taiwan maneuvers did. IIRC it was the olympics in Bejing that delayed the invasion, as the russians did not want to shit onto china’s porch for the whole world to see… ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2023, 12:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/going-back-to-february-2022-trying-to-deter-the-russian-invasion/984295/22 "2023-06-11T12:07:59Z")
_Au contraire mon ami_ … IMO … What you are suggesting is that NATO goes on a more or less continuous high tempo exercise posture inside Ukraine. That is enormously expensive. It’s also unsustainable. Just like a real shooting war would be for NATO and has been, albeit more slowly, for the USA over the ~20 years of Iraq / Afghanistan. However long NATO keeps this tiring charade going, Russia just waits until the public tires of paying for it and the allies cry “uncle” as their logistically inadequate forces chew through their back stock of spare parts & some kinds of ammo. Then they attack a tired and demoralized NATO with nothing left in the cupboard to give Ukraine. Given the susceptibility of a sizeable fraction of the US’s (and NATO’s?) public to Russian propaganda, they will come away believing we totally provoked this stupid useless war once it does go hot. Far better what we did than this exercise idea. Better yet that US/NATO had reached agreement in principle ahead of the invasion to support Ukraine full-bore with large and lethal aid packages from the git-go. Of course given the widespread pessimism that the Ukrainian government would prove feckless and the Ukrainian military prove cowardly or useless, any pre-war commitment had to have a caveat: “If Ukraine lasts long enough to bother helping.” ---
**Author:** ![TokyoBayer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tokyobayer/32/13989_2.png) [@TokyoBayer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TokyoBayer)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2023, 4:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/going-back-to-february-2022-trying-to-deter-the-russian-invasion/984295/23 "2023-06-13T16:18:02Z")
I’ve studied a lot about the Pacific War in WWII, and things are never clearer than in hindsight. The problem with most what if scenerios is that they require perfect knowledge of the real life outcome to know exactly what would be required to change the outcome to the desired solution, and things just aren’t the clear in real life. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/going-back-to-february-2022-trying-to-deter-the-russian-invasion/984295.md?page=1)