They could; however, I do not think they will. Missiles are expensive, and using them for no military or political gain is not a great return on investment. Also, periodic missile strikes over a long period of time is harder to keep secret than a lightning fast invasion (had that happened), and would not likely be popular in Russia. Putin needs to get out of this and then pretend it never happened. He will be very desperate to get sanctions lifted within maybe 4-6 months (?).
I absolutely agree. There is substantial rot in the Russian high command, and that does not just clear itself up. If there a sudden influx of money into rebuilding, then they’ll be salivating at stealing it.
Which is one of the reasons defensive alliance and sanctions are so important; it adds to the cost to the aggressor. I’m not saying Ukraine SHOULD give up territory, my point is merely that at some point of death an destruction it may become necessary. Or not; it depends how the war goes.
You are totally misunderstanding my point and assigning a moral position to me I did not make.
No one here is saying it’s morally cool to give up something to Vladmir Putin. It would be horrible. However, if Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his cabinet decide a few months from now that they must accept losing the Donbas region to the sake of saving hundreds of thousands of the lives of the people they are entrusted to protect, who are you or I to say they’re wrong? That may be the difficult but logical choice.
I don’t think a bank should have to give up any money to a bank robber, but even BANKS tell their employees to hand over some cash to the robber won’t shoot anyone. That doesn’t make bank robbery okay, and we have things in place to catch and punish them, but at that difficult moment we all accept giving the thief a bag of money is better than a teller dying. If Zelenskyy and his people decide to let the robber run off with some cash so more women and children aren’t blown up, I will concede that they are in a position to know the pros and cons of that way better than I am.
As much as I want to laugh, I bet there are many, many government agencies (especially at non-federal level, though I know that’s not what you were referring to) that do not have complete, up to date backups. Not anything close to complete, up to date backups for quite a lot of them.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if cost issue is as much employees as hardware.
Ukraine’s goal ought to be to get all of Ukraine back - Crimea, Donbass, the whole lot. Otherwise Russia has still come out ahead in the longer run.
Whether that’s achievable - I dunno. But that should be their starting negotiating position.
Moderating:
Both of you, please dial it back a bit.
‘[I]f we was flying any lower why we’d need sleigh bells on this thing… but we got one little budge on them Rooskies. At this height why they might harpoon us but they dang sure ain’t gonna spot us on no radar screen!’ - Major T. J. ‘King’ Kong
NB: This occurred in 2020, not during this invasion. However:
A quote attributed to a Ukrainian military source on the media outlet said, “These skills will come in handy for war pilots in the event of a large-scale enemy invasion”.
What the article and the quote show is that the Ukrainians have practiced using their aircraft in the event that their airports were damaged.
Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
–Mike Tyson
Can we give them Missouri, Alabama, Texas, and Florida, too?
Wait, strike Alabama. We gotta keep Beck.
From CNN live updates:
Blinken: US hasn’t seen signs Russia is serious in talks with Ukraine
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that he has not seen signs the talks between Ukraine and Russia are “moving forward in an effective way” because the US has not seen “signs of real seriousness” by Russia.
“There is what Russia says, and there is what Russia does. We’re focused on the latter,” said Blinken at a joint press conference with Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita.
Blinken cautioned that Russia saying it would be reducing hostilities around Kyiv could be “a means by which Russia once again is trying to deflect and deceive people into thinking it’s not doing what it is doing.”
“If they somehow believe that an effort to subjugate “only,” in quotation marks, the eastern part of Ukraine and the southern part of Ukraine can succeed, then once again they are profoundly fooling themselves,” said Blinken.
Blinken called for Russia to “end the aggression now, stop firing, pull its forces back and of course engage in talks.”
Mea culpa. Will do.
I’ll note what a difference 24 hours makes in the apparent strength of position and negotiating leverage for Ukraine. If Russian forces continue their seeming rate of implosion, giving up any territory might not be needed for Ukraine to negotiate a settlement.
I’m starting to hold out a small glimmer of hope they could get Crimea back.
I’m always more petty and vindictive than I should be were I in charge, but I’d drive the Russians back to the pre-invasion border, then one more mile just for spite.
(slightly edited by me for brevity)
The problem Putin has with his military is that he has been constantly splitting it up and decentralising it in order to prevent the possibility of a military-backed coup. It’s an organisational mess, configured purely to protect one man and his neurosis.
Wonder if their word’s any more trustworthy about that than about anything else.
I think I’ve kept right on thinking of Russia as the USSR of the 50’s or 60’s, or at least what we were presented as being the USSR of the 50’s and 60’s: the juggernaut with the huge highly functional conventional armies backed up with nukes, which took half of Europe, was only stopped from taking the other half by the threat of the USA’s nukes via NATO, and put down for instance the Hungarian rebellion as if Hungary were a toddler who didn’t want to go to bed.
And it turns out that, whether or not that’s ever who they were . . . now they’re just Russia. Just another country, which may indeed want to rule the planet, but which hasn’t got the resources or the skills to even take over the next door neighbor.
It’s exactly that, I suspect, that’s sticking in Putin’s craw.
We won’t agree on which one, though.
– actually, nah. I’m not even giving them Mar-a-Lago. (Though I do think we should take it back ourselves.)
If they ditch Putin and come up with somebody willing to behave better, I’d be quite willing to reward them immediately for that by ending at least most sanctions.
Preferably with some reparations required, though.
The problem’s not just the moral issue. It’s the practical one.
Giving up the Donbas, at least absent a genuinely fair vote that includes a third choice of autonomy, would reward the very behavior that’s destroying all those lives, and thereby encourage it to happen again. And it would make the rest of Ukraine less able to resist the next attempt.
That’s in large part because a) there really is a significant chance that the bankers will later be caught and sent to jail and most of the money recovered and b) all the bank thinks it’s risking is losing whatever was in the vaults that day; not the existence of the bank itself, or the long-term freedom of many of its employees and shareholders.
That part I agree with: this is most certainly up to the Ukrainians and not up to me.
Didn’t Hitler do something similar with his leadership, keeping them too busy infighting and jockeying for political gain to actually get anything useful done?
It’s the essential problem of being a despot: the things you have to do in order to keep yourself in power are also things that risk destroying your power.
And for that same purpose he has allowed corruption and sef-dealing among the leadership to keep going on.
The biggest issue here is that we must presume that (unlike was the case with Finland 80 years earlier) Putin and his supporters will never give up on the idea of one day punishing Ukraine for having dared to fight.
Yeah. Ukraine needs to think of not only this fight, but the next one.
I’m sure that they know this, though.
Before the invasion I thought that Putin was bluffing, simply because I couldn’t see any possibility of an invasion succeeding. It seemed like a crazy thing for him to do, to start a war that never had any chance of ending well for him.
It was clear that Europe and the US could never, ever tolerate a naked war of conquest against a democratic country on the borders of NATO, or a new Russian empire. Ukraine had already shown in Donbas that they were prepared to fight for their territory.
I admit that I thought at first it would be more like an Afghanistan situation, dragging on for a couple of years before Russia would be forced to give up. It took a week or so before I realized that the Russians were going to lose militarily. The fact that they were unable to gain air superiority in the first week was the crucial indication.
Russia is not the Soviet Union. That’s what misled many people. Russian has nukes and a lot of hardware, but even before sanctions it had an economy smaller and far less developed than Italy.
I’m not super well informed but I’m shocked at how this has gone. I fully expected Russia to roll right over Ukraine similar to how the US rolled over Iraq both times: Couple weeks and done with the conquest, but then a decades long slog dealing with insurgency would begin if they intended to occupy.
The spectacular failure of the Russian forces to date has been as satisfying as it has been unexpected, at least to me.
For the past month, I keep thinking of that Seinfeld scene over and over again, when Kramer and Newman are playing Risk on the subway and talking about invading Ukraine because Ukraine is weak. Then a Ukrainian guy in the subway turns around, smashes the board with his fist and yells “Ukraine is strong!”
Fuck yeah, my man. You tell them. Ukraine is strong.