The Chinese ended a 25 year old ban on the import of Russian wheat. This morning.
Totally co-incidental.
Putin threatened “consequences you have never faced in your history” for “anyone who tries to interfere with us.”' He added, Russia “remains one of the most powerful nuclear states” with “a certain advantage in several cutting edge weapons.”’
In other words, he is threatening nuclear annihilation against anyone that interferes. I am frightened.
Your answer is another question: do the people in charge care? The answer to that is “of course not”.
Cannon don’t always eat the cannon fodder.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Ukrainians are getting some pretty heavy duty NATO intelligence from satellites, sigint, etc… as to what the Russians are doing, that they otherwise wouldn’t have.
That’s one way that NATO/the West can (and probably is, IMO) definitely help Ukraine in a meaningful, immediate military way without actually committing troops or doing anything active within Ukraine.
It’s still a functioning (sort of) power plant would be my guess.
Yeah… a complete coincidence.
How about when they destroy nuclear waste storage sites?
I think we’ve been sharing intel with them for a while now. Given the public statements from Ukraine, I’m unsure how much they have been paying attention to it, however. But, sure, we will certainly continue to do that.
We have also given them shipments of weapons, though most have been of the handheld variety. No advanced missile systems, no heavy weapons, nothing that would really help bring some parity to the battlefield. What Ukraine really needs is interlocking SAM systems to push back Russian air incursions as well as something to really hurt the Russian’s armored forces on the ground. Short of that, they need a lot of grit to fight at such a disparity.
China’s chip manufacturing is pretty poor wrt the highest levels of chips for military purposes, so Russia isn’t going to be able to just go with them. But you are right…China isn’t going to sanction Russia, so whatever they do have would be available (for a hefty price) to Russia. In the short term, I doubt lack of chips will be a real issue for Russia, and they have probably stockpiled quite a bit in anticipation of all this. Unless there are still some that believe this was a last-minute whim of Putin’s because the west was being mean or something.
Today the country with the largest land mass in the world sent troops to capture the uninhabitable, radiation-contaminated exclusion zone at Chernobyl.
I’m not sure that’s confirmed yet:
“Advisor to Ukrainian interior ministry says Russian forces entered Chernobyl and that fighting there destroyed a nuclear waste storage facility,” NBC 's Richard Engel tweeted this afternoon.
This was initially reported, but was later clarified due to a mistranslation. “Clarifying: advisor says heaving fighting MAY disturb nuclear waste,” he added shortly after that.
That story is pretty light on details. Your local hospital probably has a “nuclear waste storage facility” that looks a lot like a trash dumpster.
While Ukraine isn’t part of NATO, nothing stops western countries from providing all the aid to Ukraine they want, including military aid. If the US flies a supply plane to Kyiv, and Russia shoots it down, are all the other NATO countries not obliged to respond in some way? Is that how we end this thing or how WWIII starts?
We have been supplying Ukraine with military aid. So have several other countries.
As for shooting down one of our planes, I doubt that would be enough to invoke article 5. The Russians could and probably would simply point out it’s a combat zone and mistakes happen. No, it would take Russia attacking, say, into Poland for some reason, to invoke the charter. A direct attack on a NATO signatory.
Yeah, I don’t think that would trigger Article 5. That would be interpreted as the USA doing a proactive thing.
It would have to be something reactive, like Russia launching missiles at a NATO nation.
Here’s a story, I don’t know if it’s true but it would be pretty awesome if it was.
Ukraine’s US Embassy in Washington claimed a group of Russian soldiers had surrendered to Ukrainian forces. Russia launched a “special operation” into Ukraine on Thursday morning, sparking fears Vladimir Putin will seek to inglobate the whole country into Russia. Ambassador Oksana Markarova said: "We’ve had confirmation from our Chief Commander one of the platoons of the 74th Motorised Brigade from Kemerovo has surrendered.
"Also noting they didn’t know they were brought in to Ukraine to kill Ukrainians.
“They thought they were doing something else there.”
Well, IIRC, about half of the current Russian military is still conscripts, so it’s possible something like this could or would happen. I wouldn’t be surprised, but my WAG is the majority of Russians will fight.
It would be nice if a large percentage of them turned on their officers or surrendered, but I would say the chances of that are slim to none, sadly. Cool story though and it will be interesting if it checks out down the road.
I’m pretty sure the reason is because man-portable/hand-held missiles require very little training or maintenance, while larger systems like say… a Patriot AAA battery takes a fair degree of specialized training and maintenance that Ukrainian troops wouldn’t have, and wouldn’t be likely to get in the middle of a war like this.
I get the impression that the ground war is probably where the Ukrainians have the most parity. They’re still outnumbered, but the conventional military wisdom is that all else being mostly equal, attackers need to outnumber defenders by a 3:1 ratio to be assured of victory. That’s a local ratio of 3:1, not an overall one. But the Russians only outnumber the Ukrainians at about 2:1 overall, which means that if they concentrate locally to get that 3:1, they’re leaving somewhere else relatively undefended, and with NATO intelligence, it’s possible that the Ukrainians could either counterattack where the Russians are weak, or they can counter Russian thrusts through maneuver and/or simply denying them the local 3:1 ratio.
Russia’s Troops and weapons are basically untested in combat. The Soviets fought their last real war in Afghanistan.
Maybe The Ukraine’s army can hold them off for awhile. They do have some advanced weapons. Give UN pressure and Sanctions time to work.
I’m not real optimistic but what other options does Ukraine have?
I’m sickened by the senseless loss of life and suffering. I had hoped invasions on this scale were a thing of the past.
Well, the Russian’s equipment is more modern, while the Ukrainians are all Soviet-era stuff and they haven’t been as successful at modernizing it. No real mystery, they simply haven’t had the money for it. I think Ukraine’s best tanks are the T-64 variants, but they don’t have that many of them, especially not upgraded ones. But the real issue is that Russia’s airforce far outstrips what Ukraine has, and without good SAM defenses it means a lot of their ground force is really vulnerable to air attack. Couple that with Russia’s massive superiority in missiles and cruise missiles and it’s grim for the Ukrainians.
All that said, I don’t know if Russia really can accept a lot of losses. They don’t have that much modern equipment, and like I said earlier (in one of these threads) they also have a very limited pipeline for new equipment. Even new old stuff is pretty limited wrt replacement, so every piece of equipment they lose is going to hurt them a lot more than it would, say, the US. Ukraine, of course, is in the same boat as Russia wrt replacing things like tanks and APCs.
Then you have the training issues and still a large number of conscripts on the Russian side…plus, how hungry are the Russian troops, really, to attack and take Ukraine? There are a lot of unknowns, though Putin obviously thinks he knows the answer to those. Personally, this could be very, very bloody for Russia if the Ukrainians fight hard and don’t just give up. I don’t think this will be another Afghanistan, but that could happen wrt the Ukrainians just give up and surrendering. I just don’t think that is what will happen. We shall see…sadly. This really, really sucks.