NATO needs to send advisors to Ukraine. Special Ops willing to take the risks. The Ukrainians are willing to fight. They just need training and weapons.
Russia may never leave. The Soviets dominated them after WWII. The occupying German forces left and Russians took their place.
Somehow the Ukraine government and military needs to be supported.
Now we know he’s going to take a cyanide pill. What else is left to him?
Steven Seagal?
I gotta be honest that I don’t want to find out either. But in this case it doesn’t appear as though equipment is the problem with the Russian army right now it’s the people using it. They’re not doing so hot against an army with old Soviet gear so I’m not sure how well they’d do against a more modern western army. I’d rather not find out though.
Probably not very long. The question is whether or not they could make it from the Polish border to the convoy without being shot down. I’m guessing that they probably wouldn’t make it.
Dude, they are after 4 days knocking on the door of Kyiv and about to trap most of the Ukrainian armed forces in a pocket in the south.
They have had logistical problems. The US had big ones during the 2003 invasion.
The ‘52 had an unsustainable loss rate against SA2 in Linebacker II. In 1972. Wonder what it’s survival time will be here.
It’s not been a bomb truck in any but the most permissive environment for half a century.
It’s a missile carrier.
Yeah, anyone who thinks the Russians have failed and Ukraine is heading toward liberation is deluded.
That said, it’s also true that the Russian plan has not gone as well as expected.
Many hard days ahead and lots of ways Russia can escalate. It’s going to get ugly.
I still hold out hope for Ukrainian resistance. The difference to Iraq is that Ukraine are more united, they enjoy a more unified global support, and they face an enemy that’s less organized, professional, and well-equipped. And of course Russia isn’t as wealthy or stable as the US. Lots of wildcards on the table.
But If I’m a terrible, petty person like Putin, I’m thinking “US invaded and occupied Iraq for 10 years without us interfering, so we should be allowed to do the same in Ukraine.” There seem to be a lot of parallels to Iraq… leadership hoped for a quick government-toppling PR gain, but is willing to pour bodies into the grinder if necessary.
Looked like the USAF C-17 staged from Germany and the RAF from England.
I like this idea. Why not go all the way and reassign the seat to Ukraine?
That would have been nice, had Putin realized that. The problem is he’s backed himself into a corner, and even that scenario would now be considered a major defeat for him, which he probably wouldn’t survive.
Only if the next ex-Soviet country is one of the Stans in Central Asia.
Given how it seems the sanctions are actually hurting Russia, I’ve started to think that there’s only two likely outcomes out of the following scenarios.
Putin is overthrown in a coup.
We end up in a nuclear war.
A long term occupation of Ukraine, which I see as being extremely unlikely the way Russia is doing now economically.
Ukraine wins, in which case we’re back to one of the first two scenarios.
Putin comes to his senses and decides to retreat back to Russia. Sadly I see this as the least likely outcome.
I see the main parallel is deluded thinking at the top. There is no dictatorship to topple, Ukraine is not a mono-resource desert, and the Iraq war did not threaten to open Europe to attack by one of the largest military forces in the world. It was Bush’s imbecile vanity war.
This may turn out to be Putin’s stupid vanity war but if so, it will be for very different reasons.
The biggest one being that Russia doesn’t have the economy to support a multi year, let alone a decades long, occupation, especially when the west will be providing supplies to the insurgents, along with likely having an official Ukrainian government in exile, which the Iraqis never had. I’m not seeing a long term occupation as being a stable situation, which is a big problem for all involved because the alternatives aren’t pretty.
I was getting ahead of myself… This is a very remote possibility in future, but highly unlikely.
Very powerful speech by Ursula von der Leyen:
Yet more evidence that we really buggered up the 1990s, and the end of the cold war.
We really should have put a lot more effort into rebuilding the former USSR, and not just watched while it fell apart and fell into the hands of kleptocrats.
on a similar note … google also knew before anyone else that the invasion was starting …
when the google-traffic-layer on google maps reported traffic jams at 3a.m. in small russian border villages
We put a significant amount in. Whether it was the right help, that’s harder to say.
Yeltsin wasn’t the right pick, for sure. But we did give them billions of dollars to rebuild, brought them in to work with NATO, brought them in to G8.
Preach it. We’re six minutes into the first quarter and the score’s 3 - 0
that is probably the key issue here
… and at the same time also the solution to the problem ;o)