Yes, that’s what I’m assuming. The only difference I can conceive of is that maybe some more hawkish minds might see “bleeding Russia dry” as a good thing. And it would be if that was the only possible way for Ukraine to win the war. But it doesn’t have to come to that. If the Ukrainian Armed Forces had the resources to kick Russia out of occupied Ukraine in the same style that we kicked Saddam out of Kuwait in 1991, it could be over quickly and with less loss of life.
ETA: The above is assuming we’re talking about those who want Ukraine to win. I understand that there are some people from The West / NATO / whatever term you want to use who want Russia to win. Obviously I’m not considering those people in my analysis.
NATO has two goals that supersede the liberation of captured Ukrainian lands. The supreme goal is to keep this conflict from expanding outside the current war zone. And after that, degrading Russian military assets, and degrading Putin’s political influence, not just abroad, but in Russia, itself. The lose-lose draw I outlined above is really a lose-lose-win with NATO as the winner.
The first goal seems to be the same as what Ukraine wants. At least I don’t see how Ukraine would benefit by expanding the war outside the current zone, which already includes Crimea** as well as Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporiizhia, and Kherson oblasts. Ukraine doesn’t have plans to march on Moscow should they manage to liberate those 5 occupied oblasts. Ukraine isn’t going to invade Belarus. They obviously aren’t going to turn the weapons we donate to them back on the west and invade Poland or anything crazy like that. Worst case is that they make a pact with Moldova to invade Transnistria from the east should Russia invade Moldova from Transnistria. Geography also limits Russia from expanding the war. Other than Moldova, they don’t have room for any “they’re next on our list to invade after we finish off Ukraine” type thinking.
That leaves the second point. In terms of Russia being bled dry and Putin losing influence, a lot of that has already been accomplished. I’m sure Ukraine would prefer to win, even if that means leaving a more intact Russia. If there are some in the west who are happy with a draw as long as Russia is being bled dry, then I think those people are assholes who deserve to be sidelined.
**. I mention that only to cover anyone who might make the argument that Crimea is not currently part of the war zone.
I can’t speak for Velocity, but in a certain sense it already is a World War. Yes, it’s a proxy war, but most of the world is involved. It doesn’t benefit either side to expand the front lines, but in terms of weapons and supplies we’re already there. We have Russians using North Korean weapons fighting against Ukrainians using South Korean weapons. Russians using Iranian weapons against Ukrainians using Turkish weapons. Russians using Chinese weapons against Ukrainians using American weapons. Not all of those are direct donations from the governments I mentioned, but the weapons are getting to the front lines from arms suppliers of one sort or another from those countries. There’s even a few foreign nationals fighting on both sides, and it wouldn’t surprise me if we und up with a situation where a Taiwanese national and a mainland Chinese national end up shooting at each other in the trenches of Bakhmut.
How old are you? I hear a lot of this sentiment - though rarely if ever expressed in such a direct way - from Boomers my parents’ age who have some kind of weird nostalgia for the Cold War or a bitterness that it was not decisively won by the US. Sometimes I see actual Cold Warriors on Facebook, older family friends or former teachers that I know who actually served in Vietnam or during that era, outright stating that they wish the US and NATO would directly attack Russia to end this Ukraine conflict. And every time I see this, I just think, “you’ve already lived most of your life, so I guess you don’t care what happens.” But I do! And I NEVER hear this sentiment expressed by people MY OWN AGE, because you know what? We’re in our 30s, we have our whole lives ahead of us, we JUST made it through COVID, we’re JUST now starting to figure out our financial situations, our career paths, our own mental well-being, and WE DON’T WANT A FUCKING WAR! Not to mention that we lived through the entire “war on terror” that dragged on forever, and I had to witness friends of mine come back from that war with horrible PTSD, in some cases leading to life-destroying self-abuse. Fuck that!
Helping Ukraine with munitions and training is one thing. World War III? NO. NO. NO.
That would be a catastrophic loss for NATO and is never going to happen. Barring a seismic shift in the situation, Ukraine isn’t getting into NATO anytime soon after this war ends, for the same reason Ukraine becoming a NATO member wasn’t going to happen anytime between 2014 and 2022; NATO won’t take on new members who have ongoing border disputes. The only way Ukraine joins NATO is for both Ukraine and Russia to agree on where the border is, which would mean either Russia leaving Crimea and the four oblasts it ‘annexed’ and accepting what was the de facto border pre-2014 and is still the current de jure internationally recognized border between the two, or Ukraine accepting the annexation of Crimea and the four oblasts Russia ‘annexed’, including surrendering the parts of those four oblasts that Russia doesn’t and has never occupied.
Even were one of those improbabilities to happen, that still doesn’t get Ukraine into NATO, it just clears the most immediate and obvious hurdle. It still falls to ever single member of NATO to agree that a future attack on Ukraine by Russia means a direct attack on them as well as per Article 5 and agree to Ukraine joining NATO. Every current member of NATO has veto power over accepting any new member. Turkey is still holding up Sweden’s entry into NATO.
Because a massive war - assuming it takes the form of Russia attacking NATO nations and triggering Article 5, but still staying conventional - would lance this boil and get the whole thing done much faster and more effectively.
Right now we have a slow-dragging war that’s costing immense Ukrainian life and just goes on for 1 year now and could go on for years more yet. Whereas if NATO/US were to get involved, the whole thing could be Desert Storm’d in a few days and resolved with much better outcome.
I think that could be accomplished without NATO soldiers on the ground in Ukraine. Just give Ukraine the weapons they would need to launch a Desert Storm type offensive and let them do the attacking. As I mentioned above, modern NATO weapons aren’t going to refuse to fire just because it’s a Ukrainian pulling the trigger. Give them the weapons and let them do the job. As you say, it would get the whole thing done faster, more effectively, and with fewer casualties on both sides.
I don’t think they are, really. Russia is not Iraq and it’s not just purely down to equipment. But I think it would be a hijack to argue further and beyond that I think it would be an argument that would quickly get into the weeds for me. I’d find myself nitpicking over subtle differences in Russian capabilities as I (a decently read, but very much non-expert) see them and I don’t want to cheerlead for that broken hulk of a state and military.
Suffice it to say I’m sorta generally in agreement that NATO armaments are better in most areas and we need to be supplying whatever we can. However I don’t think they’re a magic wand that would allow Ukraine to end the war in days or weeks.
I’m not sure that it is a hijack. The title is US Aid to Ukraine, with weapons and what Ukraine could accomplish with that being a big part of that.
The training, delivery of the ammunition, and such will of course take time, likely several months. But once everything is in place, it seems like the actual fighting should be over fairly quickly. For that not to be correct, the counter-argument would seemingly have to be that actual NATO forces would fail, or at least take a much longer tie to succeed, in the same way that Ukraine would.
In other words, what I’m positing is training up and equipping the Ukrainian Armed Forces to the point where they are essentially a miniature version of the US Armed Forces minus blue ocean naval capacity. They wouldn’t be able to project force halfway around the world, but they wouldn’t be trying to do that. They only need to project force for a few hundred kilometers across directly connected land. With that advantage, it seem that 200K Ukrainians, trained and equipped to the level of the 1991 coalition forces**, and the further advantage of not having to travel halfway around the globe to get to the fight, should be able to accomplish the same goal, especially since Russian power was not what we thought it was, and even less so after the losses they’ve sustained over the past year.
**. And that’s just the hypothetical. If we wanted to we could give them weapons 30 years more advanced than what was used in the 1991 Iraq war, making things even more lopsided. 1991 era M1A1 Abrams and F-16 Eagles vs. still new T72s, T80s, and MiG29s was already a blowout. New M1A2 Abrams and F-35s (why not go all out?) vs. now ancient T72s and T64s and equally aged jets should be a bigger mismatch.
The biggest difference and it is a huge one, is the total air supremacy Coalition forces had in Iraq. I don’t think that’s achievable in Ukraine, not even within sniffing distance. Building a miniature version of the USAF (never mind the naval and marine air corps) is not remotely achievable in several months. And I doubt a miniature version of the USAF could achieve those results even if it were done. Because Russia isn’t Iraq. Russian ground-based air defenses extend deep into Ukrainian air space and if there is one thing this war has shown is that those at least work pretty well (in context, granted).
Also I somewhat question whether Ukraine has the manpower reserves to pull 200,000 combat troops out of the line for comprehensive retraining and re-equipping for several months. There have some reports that the Ukrainian manpower situation on the Donbas front has already become strained as it is and my understanding is the initial training group was 15,000 to be ready by Spring (with another 15,000 to follow). Ukraine is understandably holding back their newly ready troops for a potential offensive, but I’m not sure they can re-arm far more massively on the fly that efficiently while being tightly pressed.
NATO has overwhelming firepower if fully deployed (mostly the US, which would take a lot of prep time to stage and prepare), but Ukraine on it’s own won’t compare to that. Can NATO take Russia apart? I’m sure. Can a re-armed Ukraine? Maybe, in time. But I’m just a little cautious about triumphalism. I’m just a heck of a lot less certain it can be achieved easily. I think, barring a coup/natural death of Putin leading to a pragmatist rather than a hardliner taking power, even an updated Ukraine is going to have a hard time landing a quick knockout blow. I’m not dogmatic about that - I don’t want to make any predictions and I’d be happy to be wrong . But I’m a cynical pragmatist by nature.
All this talk of a wider war with Russia is irresponsible and unrealistic in the extreme.
Russia cannot be defeated conventionally. It is too dispersed and too large for anyone (including even improbably the USA, NATO, and China working together) to occupy or pacify. It can be deterred from further adventurism and it can be persuaded that its own interests are best served by abandoning this silly quest for Ukrainian territory. And its citizenry and/or security apparatus can be persuaded that Putin surviving is antithetical to their own survival. But it can’t be militarily defeated as a nation.
At least not unless you’re willing to nuke it until it glows and accept whatever retaliation it can muster before being rendered impotent. That IMO is the minimum buy-in to defeat the Russian government as a whole. The price only goes up from there.
It’s a hypothetical anyways. I doubt there’s even a one in million chance Biden would even consider giving Ukraine that level of support. I can’t think of anyone who even has a tiny chance of becoming the next POTUS who would give the idea any more consideration than Biden has. Maybe the ghost of John McCain .
Unrealistic? Yes, because NATO won’t start it, and Putin knows he would lose, so he’s not going to start it either. But in a strictly conventional war between the larger west (NATO plus Japan, South Korea, Australia, and of course Ukraine) and Russia, Russia would lose and it wouldn’t even be close. The scenario actually happening is only video game war simulation stuff, but if it actually happened Russia has too many fronts to defend. In addition to Ukraine, there’s the border with the Baltic countries, Finland, the Black Sea against Turkey, the Arctic, and the far east from Alaska, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. As long as China, India, and North Korea stay neutral, they would have no chance.
The Russians could not hold what they have, and could be pushed back a long way. But as Napoleon and Hitler discovered, Russia is a big place. If the invader(s) are not willing to simply slaughter 100% of the populace, they’ll have to control them. And they will not be happy. Anyone assuming the typical Russian villager or small-city resident will consider invaders to be liberators has been smoking the same illicit substances as the Russian propagandists who assumed eastern &(& western) Ukrainians would welcome the Russian soldiers as liberators.
Yes, we can wreck their economy. Millions might starve over a year or two.
Different topic:
Any discussion that talks about ideas like “A war, but no nukes” is like discussing a video game of a war, not a real war. Or a street fight involving Tom Cruise versus one involving the real people at your local dive bar. It’s simply so utterly unrealistic as to encourage bad thinking about dangerous situations. It’s Dunning-Kruger-y to talk about militarily defeating a nuclear power that can’t / won’t / doesn’t use all the tools at its disposal.
I should have clarified. I meant winning the war. Winning the peace would be a different matter, and I agree that would be extremely difficult at best. Probably impossible in all but the liberated areas of Ukraine or the completely unpopulated parts of Siberia.
It’s an iffy situation whether Putin would use nukes as the belligerent party in a conflict.
It’s a foregone conclusion that any nuclear power will use nukes against an invasion, IMHO.
They don’t even have to use them against the US proper to repel an invading force. Since we would be invading, they could nuke their own territory to wipe out our forces.
And if things still aren’t going well, then using them directly against our country would be entirely rational.
I agree 100% with this; the effectiveness of networked Soviet-era air defense systems absent a comprehensively equipped and trained air force designed specifically to suppress and attrit it from the outset (which NATO has, but Russia does not) has been demonstrated over the past year of the conflict by both sides. Ukraine’s possession of these systems it inherited from the Soviet Union is the reason for the remarkable absence of the Russian Air Force from the conflict to anything like the degree that was expected. One of the first signs to me that something was going very wrong for Russia from the very first days of the war was footage of columns of the Ukrainian Army moving on the road in broad daylight. That should have been suicidal had the Russian Air Force been as capable as it was presumed to be.
Instead, both sides air forces have been relegated to launching cruise missiles from inside their own airspace, or flying at extremely low altitudes which both inhibits their effectiveness and exposes them to MANPADS. This was one of the reasons Perun mentioned the admittedly politically unrealistic idea of providing Rapid Dragon, as it requires no massive crew training, is used with cargo aircraft, and can saturate and overwhelm the kinds of air defenses Russia has.
Completely agree with this as well. Any argument over who would win WWIII if nukes can’t be used isn’t based in reality; it isn’t today and it wasn’t during the Cold War.
The way to end this is to ensure Ukraine defeats Russia. Dumb as the invasion was, it’s still not nearly as dumb as attacking NATO, and thus I think Putin is very unlikely to do that. I think Ukraine might be able to defeat Russia within 1 year, given sufficient support, but we’ll see. Expanding to a wider conflict would extend, not shorten, the war, IMO.
. But I’m a cynical pragmatist by nature.
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