Indeed. The idiot kept pushing back on security guarantees for Ukraine, because “that part is easy, that’s like 5% of the deal”. Hey dumbfuck, if it’s so easy, then just write it into the agreement right now, whydontcha?
Yes, I’ve seen a couple analyses, e.g. this one on LBC, that say the issue was Zelensky asking for security guarantees. Sooo…give up everything for nothing? Take good old Honest Don on his word?
(LBC’s coverage has generally been good, but they like to have a broad range of presenters so you always get some out there views)
Production capacity and limited stockpiles. The United States has very large stockpiles of equipment, Europe does not. The US has a much larger military-industrial complex with equal or greater production capacity than all of European NATO combined. Although things are slowly spinning up in Europe (as they are in the US) in terms of things like artillery ammunition, Europe can’t easily supply scores of planes or hundreds of tanks as the US could if it wanted from it’s large reserve fleet.
Indeed most of European NATO has been transitioning to American-built planes - the 5th generation F-35 is becoming the de facto standard combat aircraft of NATO with a number delivered and many more pending to replace planes like the European-built Tornados and Typhoons. France and Sweden are holdouts, but they can’t spit out large numbers of Rafales and Gripens. Meanwhile the US has several hundred older decommissioned F-16s sitting in storage.
What does Ukraine need right now? I heard a Ukrainian official say that by the time NATO gave them F-16s, that Ukraine didn’t really need them anymore. With the battlefield changing I’m not sure what Ukraine needs right now to win.
It seems like most of the Russian heavy materiel has been destroyed already, so I don’t know if more Javelin style weapons would help.
I was under the impression that drones and artillery shells are the big things needed right now. Ukraine supposedly has a robust domestic drone manufacturing industry now but they can’t get the shells they need.
Luckily Russia is supposedly going to run out of artillery barrels next year, which means that even if Russia produces half a million shells a year, it can’t fire them.
Also with the F-35s requiring a daily code to work, I don’t know if other NATO nations are going to be willing to use them since they can’t trust the US since US voters happily elected a Russian puppet to be president. What if war breaks out and Trump tells the military to stop sending the codes for the F-35s.
Just about everything.
That’s nonsense or at least misleading. Ukraine needs a fully functioning air force more than it needs anything else. It needed it years ago and very unfortunately the US was far too slow and cautious about committing to rebuilding one until it was “too late.” Building an air force (rebuilding in this case) takes years for a variety of reasons and nobody moved on it fast enough. As a result, and probably what that official was alluding to, the critical Ukrainian 2023 counter-offensive in the south foundered as it was a NATO-style plan pushed on Ukraine (against their own better judgement) without NATO-style air assets.
But that doesn’t mean they don’t need planes now. F-16s are useful even for more mundane tasks like intercepting cruise missiles. Remember that Ukraine survived the early years due in large part to the impressive network of mostly Soviet-era air defense systems keeping the much larger Russian air force at bay (also blessed Russian operational ineptitude). But those are running out of munitions and cannot easily be replaced by Western sources in quantity. NATO relies much more heavily on aircraft than SAMs. So Ukraine needs more aircraft, end of story.
A senior Ukrainian military official has claimed that the US-made F-16 fighter jets set to arrive later this year are “no longer relevant” against Russian forces.
Once tagged as a potential war-winner in Ukraine, the aircraft sparked prolonged debate as countries carefully weighed in on whether or not it should fly in Ukrainian skies.
Washington only gave the green light in August 2023 on the condition that Ukrainian pilots undergo rigorous training in allied countries to safely and effectively operate the jets.
However, a high-ranking military official told Politico that every weapon has its own right time in the ongoing war and that the F-16s are no longer significant in Ukraine this year.
“Often, we just don’t get the weapons systems at the time we need them – they come when they’re no longer relevant,” he said. “F-16s were needed in 2023; they won’t be right for 2024.”
A Facebook friend, a Dane with a background in history studies and a keen understanding of what’s going on in Europe, posted this, and I thought it worth tossing in here for consideration:
Hmm. Something occurs to me that I don’t think has been mentioned anywhere else. Bear with me, as I try to put it into words.
One of the first things Trump did was to initiate “peace talks” with Russia (featuring the participation of the USA and Russia, but not Ukraine or any other US allies). That predictably went nowhere, so he tried a different tack: trying to bully Ukraine into a ceasefire and handing over mineral rights, with no guarantees to show for it.
Now, we’ve been looking at this as signs of Trump’s greed and his servility to Putin — and it definitely is. He serves his master in Moscow.
But hold on a minute…
If Putin, through Trump, were operating from a position of strength, wouldn’t he just rely on Trump cutting off US aid to Ukraine, and wait for that to take effect? Sure, the European nations would pick up some of the slack, but there’s no question that losing US arms deliveries would be a major blow to Ukraine’s war effort.
Why is Putin in such a hurry to press for a ceasefire? Because, make no mistake, when Trump tries to pressure Zelenskyy into a ceasefire, that is Putin speaking.
If we see this in the broader context, which also involves Putin having to rely on North Korean auxiliaries and ammunition deliveries, a picture begins to emerge of a Russia that can no longer sustain a war effort. A Russia desperate for a ceasefire that can give them a breather to recover in.
It’s quite possible that Ukraine is closer to winning the war than we might think, and victory might come in the form of a sudden collapse of the Russian Federation.
Just a thought.
That would be nice, but its hard to tell. Russia is pulling tanks and artillery out of storage that was build in the 1950s and putting that into Ukraine. Supposedly Russia will be out of tanks and artillery barrels by 2026 or so. And Russia doesn’t have the capacity of manufacture new ones at anywhere near the rate that they’ve been losing them.
I have no idea what happens in 1-2 years if Russia runs out of artillery barrels. Supposedly Russia’s military is heavily artillery based and new barrels require manufacturing technology that they don’t really possess due to sanctions.
Wishful thinking. Putin isn’t in any hurry for a ceasefire. He doesn’t want one and doesn’t care about one. If he did, his starting position wouldn’t include Ukraine conceding the four oblasts that Russia ‘annexed’ in 2022, two of which, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, they don’t even fully occupy. Putin is happy as a pig in shit that TFG is in power and intent upon wrecking opposition to Russia’s war, but he is most certainly not looking for an actual ceasefire. Also, I’d disagree with the use of the word ‘servility’ in the relationship between TFG and Putin in anything more substantial that mocking TFG. TFG isn’t Putin’s servant. He’s just an idiot who admires and is easily played by Putin. It’s disgusting, but very different from being a literal servant of Putin.
And again, while Ukraine does - or at least did - have long-term sustainability advantages over Russia in the war, Russia is still the one on the offensive in this war. They own 20% of Ukraine, are slowly taking over more and more of it and have been for most of the past three years.
There isn’t going to be any sudden collapse of the Russians militarily. There could be one politically, as could have happened if Wagner hadn’t stopped its march on Moscow. But there will not be a sudden collapse on the battlefield. As Russia steadily depletes its stockpiles, it is going to become steadily less and less capable of continuing offensive operations. There isn’t going to be a day when suddenly every tank, AFV, and artillery piece Russia has in storage is gone and thus Russia has no more tanks, AFVs and artillery. It is still going to have all the tanks, AFVs and artillery that is deployed on the field, and the continued production of more. What it won’t have is a reserve inventory of equipment from which to pull replacements from to continue offensive operations at the scale it is currently able to. They are going to have to slow the tempo of their operations as the stockpiles get smaller and smaller, but there isn’t going to be a day when Russia suddenly has no tanks or artillery.
I am happy to be proven wrong on this, but has Trump ever said anything negative about Putin?
Because I’ve seen him lots of times do every conceivable dodge to avoid criticising Putin and Russia, and even speaking up for Putin against intelligence agencies and what other Republicans were saying at the time.
It goes way beyond the standard admiration Trump has of authoritarians. Most of them get some criticism, or even threats, at one time or another. The only other exception may be Orban, but he’s rarely discussed so it doesn’t mean much.
You don’t know this. Collapses can be gradual but they can also be sudden. If morale is very low, it may not take much. We really don’t know (and probably can’t know) and there’s a good chance Putin doesn’t either.
Disagree; Putin is putting enormous resources into this war that has essentially been brought to a stalemate, and is now effectively dependent upon foreign aid for a lot of munitions and even manpower. Even if sanctions against Russia are lifted (which would have a multitude of benefits including bringing in expertise to help them keep oilfields producing and maybe rebuild some refinery capacity) they’ve lost upwards of 800k men in a society that is already top heavy with current and impending retirees, and for which birthrates are catastrophically low. Beating Ukraine to a ‘ceasefire’ which gains even notional control ver Kherson and Zaporizhzhia gives him a ‘win’ that he can sell to his domestic crowd which is really the entire reason he was fighting this war to begin with. I don’t know that Russia is impending upon collapse (and Putin will never give up political control, and has thoroughly sieved the government of anyone who might credibly challenge him) but it is in bad shape, and Putin would really benefit from a chance to renew stockpiles and fortify his positions within Ukraine.
[edited for brevity]
Although Russia is certainly depleting stocks of modern weapon systems and materiel, their bigger problem is just getting this stuff to where it is needed. The original plan of the “special military operation” was clearly a blitz to grab Kyiv, get control over rail lines, and use that to distribute armor and artillery. Instead, they got stalled at the very beginning of their operation through a combination of their own lack of readiness (aided by corruption and the use of untrained conscripts to bulk out their forces), being restricted to roads due to bad timing of invading just at the start of the Rasputitsa, and the Ukrainians being really good at crippling their advances. Ukraine maintained the advantage for a long time by striking at supply lines and depots, forestalling mass advances and even forcing retreat of troops that ran out of fuel, ammunition, and even food, and has still been really effective at attacking the Russian military logistics while Russia is ineffectually bombing hospitals, markets, and apartment buildings (which generates a horrible human cost but does effectively nothing to undermine Ukraine’s military response capability).
Quite frankly, if the US had been providing the weapon systems that Ukraine has been asking for, this war would almost certainly have been over at this point and Putin would be nursing the bloody nub that remains of the Russian army and air force. Ukraine has been fighting at massive disadvantage of troops and weapons and has still beat Russia almost completely to a draw while so disrupting supply lines that Yevgeny Prigozhin made that insane speed run toward Moskva with what remained of the Wagner forces (infantry and light armor) because Wagner was taking the brunt of the beating the in East and being denied resources. Russia is basically doing everything it can just to hold onto the territory it has taken, even using untrained ‘conscripts’ from North Korea essentially as cannon fodder to preserve its own troops.
I cannot recall any instance where Trump has ever been even mildly critical of Putin. His adoration is practically fanboy-ish if not outright homoerotic. It would be nauseating even if Putin were a staunch ally, and as an autocrat who has gone on a campaign of imprisoning, torturing, and openly assassinating critics or just innocent citizens of other sovereign nations (including Americans) it is grotesque.
Stranger
You could say the same thing about Ukraine. Russia has been going at this for three years. There’s been no sign of morale being bad enough to refuse offensive operations, much less a complete collapse of morale causing the entire army to up and surrender. Sudden collapses of morale don’t just happen.
Something that might be of interest is where those 800k men come from. Oddly for a war, they are predominantly coming from older age brackets. Much older than one might expect, this isn’t a war being fought by 18-year-olds, on either side. Over half of the identified Russian KIA in 2024 were over the age of 45. As you might expect, Perun has a video on this, the relevant section on the demographics of the Russian military starts at ~25:48
Entirely agree. The restrictions on what would be provided and how what was provided could be used should never have been in place. Again, if there is one thing I will praise countries like the UK and France for, it is breaking the taboos placed upon providing ‘escalatory’ weapons from Western made tanks and AFVs to long range attack missiles to allowing the use of such weaponry on soil that is universally recognized as being Russian.
The war would be in an entirely different position if the decision were made in February 2022 to immediately provide Ukraine with HIMARS, ATACMS, cluster munitions, F-16s, Abrams and Bradleys and not restrict their use to occupied Ukrainian territory. Every ‘red line’ that Russia has drawn regarding Western aid to Ukraine has been a chimera, and obviously so. Russia has been all in on the war from day one, there is nothing that Russia can do to escalate the situation short of the use of nuclear weapons, which it isn’t going to do.
Only it’s not. That’s not what’s been happening over the past three years, or what is happening today. Russia isn’t ‘just holding onto the territory it has taken’, it has been almost constantly on the offensive somewhere, eating away at more Ukrainian territory. At a glacial pace, and at a horrific cost in lives, to be sure. It will take them hundreds of years to occupy Ukraine at the rate that they are going. But they are still going, taking more and more Ukrainian territory every day for the past three years. Would that things were different, but they’re not.
Russia doesn’t have hundreds of years. I frankly doubt they have more than a few decades before the former nation of breakaway ethnic republics, ungoverned nomad lands, and whatever pieces of Outer Manchuria and perhaps even parts of Siberia that China takes off Russia’s hands ‘for a favorable price’ or just by force (assuming China can endure their own impending demographic and economic catastrophes). Grinding Russia to the point of taking Ukrainian land “at a glacial pace” is effectively a favorable stalemate for Ukraine.
Stranger
Except that Ukraine is fighting for their existence. Russia is fighting for Putin’s delusions. That’s an utterly massive difference in what is driving morale. And fundamentally speaking, war is a contest of just two things – logistics and morale.
Only again, it’s not. If the current borders were the 2014 borders between Russia and Ukraine, a glacial pace of Russian advance into Ukraine would be an effective Ukrainian win. But that’s not the situation. Russia owns 20% of Ukraine, and as it stands Ukraine has no visible prospects of taking any of it back. That’s an effective Russian win. If TFG cuts all aid and access to US stockpiles to Ukraine, Ukraine’s long-term advantages in a lengthy war of attrition with Russia suddenly go away. And if TFG eases sanctions on Russia, a lot of the pressure on the Russian economy goes away too. And he’s enough of a petty, narcissistic, vindictive asshole to do just that. Note this part of his rant at Zelensky:
President Trump: Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia. You ever hear of that deal? That was a phony, that was a phony Hunter Biden, Joe Biden scam, Hillary Clinton, shifty Adam Schiff, who was a Democrat scam, and he had to go through that. And he did go through it. We didn’t end up in a war. And he went through it. He was accused of all that stuff – he had nothing to do with. It came out of Hunter Biden’s bathroom. It came out of Hunter Biden’s bedroom. It was disgusting.
In a very TFG-like fashion, he’s more concerned with his impeachment than the war in Ukraine.
And Zelensky wouldn’t bend over for him in 2019 to manufacture something on Hunter Biden. Getting even with Zelensky for that is more important to him than the lives of any number of Urainians or Russians.
I hate to break it to you, but every country that ever lost its existence in a war was fighting for their existence. Wars aren’t won by the good guys. Poland was fighting for its very existence in 1939, Germany was fighting Hitler’s delusions. I assume I don’t have to tell you how that one ended.
And again, there are no visible signs of flagging Russian morale. They are still going on grinding, expensive offensives instead of refusing orders to do so. They are still able to recruit enough warm bodies to continue to throw at the front lines, and these are Russians who willingly sign military contracts, not conscripts. They’ve spent their lives under a barrage of Russia state propaganda. These ‘delusions’ of Putin aren’t delusions to them. The same way that the lies spewed by TFG about Zelensky and the war aren’t lies to the MAGA core. To them, the fact that the US hasn’t supplied Ukraine with $350 billion in aid and Zelensky isn’t a dictator don’t matter. TFG said it, so to them it’s the truth.
And logistics? Yeah, that’s about to become a hell of a lot worse for Ukraine when if and when TFG cuts off US aid, and a hell of a lot easier for Russia when he lifts sanctions.
So, I suppose that’s why we see repeated videos of people on crutches being forced to go on one last attack, huh? That and using North Korean troops really doesn’t seem to back up this assertion.
Also, Russia has been losing ground in Tortesk over recent days. They may have hit their high water mark already. I haven’t heard of any recent advances by them, not even the small ones they had through most of 2024,
Have you seen videos of people on crutches refusing to go on one last attack? North Korean troops refusing to carry out offensive operations? Regular Russian formations refusing to be sent back into the meatgrinder again? Because those are signs of flagging morale. The Volksstorm was throwing 60-year-olds in the way of the advancing Soviets at the end of WWII. That was a sign of how desperate Nazi Germany had become. It was not a sign of flagging morale; they didn’t refuse to fight or break and run at the first contact with the enemy.
And I hate to have to point this out, but Ukraine has been using foreign volunteers since day one, for the entire length of this now three-year long war. Would you point to that as an example of Ukraine’s flagging morale? So why is Russia using North Korean troops a sign of this?
Ukraine has been making local counterattacks all the time over the past three years. Tortesk is absolutely nothing new in this regard. The net is still a Russian advance. If you aren’t hearing about any recent advances, even small ones, its either because 1) you haven’t been looking or 2) they’re small and undramatic, and don’t make headlines. Have a look at the DeepState Map:
DeepStateMAP | День 1104 | Map of the war in Ukraine
See all those red arrows pointing from Russian held territory into Ukrainian held territory? Along the entire length of the frontline from the border of what is actually Russia and Donetsk all the way down the front lines to the middle of the Zaporizhya oblast? Those are all areas that Russia is conducting offensive operations at right at this very minute.