Imho Kyiv should be protected by Patriot missile systems. That would require a few hundred American crews. They would only be there training and providing defensive protection to Ukraine’s capital.
I wake up every morning wondering if Kyiv has been obliterated by 50 cruise missiles (not nukes).
And I wake up wondering if today’s the day Czar Dobby decides to start slinging nukes.
It’s not. But no one wants to poke the Russian bear too hard.
Why would a defensive Patriot missle shield on a single city provoke war?
It wouldn’t stop Russian aggression in Donbas. Putin could still get his corridor.
You missed my point regarding anxiety about just how far this could escalate if Putin’s as deranged as he seems. You’re thinking rationally, we can’t be sure he is.
I agree and this is something I worry about a lot. He’s already making lots of noises about western materiel support to Ukraine. At what point will he issue an ultimatum about that? And if he does? What then? Do we just roll over and let Ukraine and its population be disappeared by Russia, or do we step up? And, sadly, I don’t even know what the right answer is to this question.
So far, the Russians have avoided an International incident. Various Leaders recently visited Kyiv and it wasn’t attacked by missiles during their visit.
They understand risking United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres life would not be a wise decision.
The Russians did bomb the train after US officials left. Probably a warning that they could have done much worse.
Don’t know if medias talk about it but several Russian oligarchs died by suicide…with their family…
One of them was living in France, another was in England. And our others have disappeared in Russia.
Dissensions ? preemptive strike? vengeance? or just 6 millionaires that decided independently to kill themselves and their wife and children?
What this also shows is that Putin and Russia are more than capable and willing to engage in nasty asymmetric warfare, except that the scope has been extremely limited so far. What would stop them from, instead of poisoning or irradiating one person every couple of years, doing it to a shopping mall or office tower or children’s play area at random intervals? And then what, from the west?
It has been covered by mainstream media. This story includes the odd passage
Apparently Russian police cede their authority to corporate security (not sure how American police would act in a similar situation).
But do they have the crews? They’ve surely had their own losses and training a tank crew takes months not weeks.
This is a really bad idea and has no chance of happening. You really can’t picture the US needing those in the near future? What about if this war spreads to NATO countries and all our stuff is in Ukraine? US ground forces would love that.
If Ukraine is running out of Javelins and similar weapons, it’s because they are using them on any vehicle they get their sights on rather than just tanks. APCs and light vehicles can be engaged with the much cheaper and more abundant RPGs. There must be millions of those laying around in former Soviet Union countries.
I read about this awhile back but hadn’t seen any updates. Still not all that much info, but it seems to be getting dangerous to be a rich Russian these days.
Newsweek story.
Shakes fist at @eschereal !
China is also aware of the fact that if hit by the same sanctions that Russia has they would lose half a billion people in under six months.
To be fair, so was I, in that the “falling population” reference was to military losses.
I’m no expert on likely scenarios for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, but I do believe that the decisive phase of a putative battle for Taiwan will happen in the Taiwan Strait, which would be a battle that Javelins will help not a whit in.
I imagine they would lose a shitload worse than that. If China were subjected to serious cordon sanctions, much of the rest of the world would struggle for a bit, but the entire global economy would ultimately be reshaped to signifcantly reduce our dependence on their peon labor force. Which could result in major cultural upheaval within China itself. The side effects of an attempt on Taiwan would be tumultuos and far-reaching.
I’ve seen no signs they care.
And hopefully this war in Ukraine isn’t just the beginning of some spectacular (in a bad way) and awful series of “turning points in history”.
Can someone explain in practical terms to me how Lend-Lease works? There was already relatively little opposition to weapons deliveries to Ukraine to begin with. What red tape does it cut through?
Can Biden now essentially executive-order any sort of weaponry to Ukraine that he wants?
This explains it better than I can:
On the other hand, if any army can be trusted to use weapons incompetently, it’s probably the Russians.