There is no requirement. The 2% is a guideline.
European countries have made commitments, and failed to meet them for various political reasons, but to say they are “required” to spend a certain amount is semantically incorrect.
IMO the concern is NOT that they could conquer Poland
It’s that they could trash a decent fraction of Poland and create another anarchic frozen conflict with lots of space for gangsterism within their occupied fraction of what had been Poland’s pre-war borders.
Russia is not playing to conquer. They’re playing to vandalize / destroy. Which is a vastly lower bar and one they can still clear. If they can freeze the Ukraine ground situation about as it is and thereby reduce their attrition, 5-10 years to rebuild enough to do the same crap in Poland to the same miserable standoff result is quite plausible.
Lather rinse repeat as long as Putin or a like-minded successor rules.
Interesting thread. I’ve read a lot, but not all of it.
My view of NATO very generally is that it’s an alliance that says America will come to your aid if you NATO member are attacked. I understand it says it’s all equal (and the only time it’s been invoked was on behalf of the US), but that’s the implicit teeth of NATO - the US will be there with it’s huge military might. If Russia attacks, Estonia, they attack America. If they attack Poland, they attack America. That’s what NATO is.
I’m sure we could find a good cite, but I’m guessing America’s military is bigger and strong than all the other NATO members combined. If not, it’s obviously overwhelmingly the strongest. The point is, America = why NATO is so strong. The teeth, the country that makes Russia think there is no point to trying.
With the upcoming election, that might be in doubt. The teeth of NATO might not bite when called upon.
So what is my point. Russia has shown they are willing to go all in. Unlike the West, they don’t care about the loss of their own soldiers or how long it takes - that’s how Russia has always been. Russia would never invade an Estonia, Latvia, or the like, because a committed US would guarantee that is a 100% losing gamble.
It’s the reason police send 100 cops/Swat to the scene. You make the criminal realize there is 0% chance at success and the only option is to give up/kill yourself. If you send 20 cops, the criminal might, even irrationally, think they have a chance. Now they would probably lose the shootout, but there will probably be a fight/people will die.
That’s now in doubt with the US election upcoming and Trump making strong hints at not helping/weakening our commitment to NATO. I’d guess that’s why Western European countries are suddenly riled up for a possible conflict and showing they are very much still committed.
*To be clear, none of this is meant to demean any country nor their military or anything like that. It’s just to make clear that NATO with a committed US is like the 100’s cops/Swat showing up; without a committed US, you might have a fight on your hands and the West, rightfully, cares about their soldiers and whether they die; Russia does not; and so you might actually get a fight.
Russia wants to play to conquer. Unfortunately for them, their 72-hour spree to occupy Ukraine with minimal resistance has turned into over two years of the largest war Europe has seen since WWII. Russia freezing the situation and reducing their attrition is arguing that if your grandmother had wheels, she’d be a bicycle. The conflict has been locked into attrition with battles for small locations like Bakhmut and Avdiivka lasting the better part of a year and consuming manpower, material and ammunition at an extremely prodigious rate. The current rate of attrition for Russia is extremely bad. Far from recovering in 5-10 years’ time, at the current rate of consumption Russia will have entirely depleted their stockpiles of tanks and artillery in 3-5 years’ time. If there were to be a ceasefire right now, it would take Russian production 5-10 years just to partially replace what they have lost.
It’s hard to imagine a Russia that is depleting its military at an alarming rate being able or willing to directly attack Poland and NATO, particularly since unlike the Ukraine NATO has nuclear weapons. Moreso when considering the scale of Poland’s current military expansion. Not only has Poland placed orders and already started receiving Korean tanks and SPGs, but they are also building the facilities for domestically producing the large majority of them, something South Korea was more than happy to do because it opens the door to further sales in Europe.
However, there is another planned tank production line in Europe. South Korea’s Hyundai Rotem and Hanwha Defense won immense arms contracts with Poland in 2022, which included a deal for 1,000 K2 main battle tanks and 672 K9 self-propelled howitzers. Of the total number of tanks, 180 will be built in South Korea between 2022 and 2025, with domestic production capability coming online in Poland by 2026 for the remaining 820. These will be built to Polish specification under the designation K2PL, with the first 180 tanks to be later upgraded to the K2PL standard. For Warsaw, the Korean deal meant getting tanks much faster than Germany’s Rheinmetall would be able to supply, and at a competitive price point, but it also delivered on Polish desires for technology transfer to enhance its own domestic defense industry.
Just to add, the stockpiles left over from the collapse of the USSR are the only reason Russia is still able to continue fighting. Visually confirmed losses of tanks, IFVs, APCs, and artillery in the two years of war are close to, equal, or exceed the amount in service in the Russian military at the start of the war, for example 2,803 visually confirmed tank losses vs 2,840 active tanks per The Military Balance 2021.
I’m imagining a scenario where Ukraine is running out of capacity to fight and inflict attrition on the Russians. And Moscow knows it.
So rather than choosing to fight partisans house to house all the way to and past Kyiv, now Moscow chooses to settle for the half a loaf of eastern Ukraine along whatever is the current line of demarcation, declares ceasefire and declares victory. Leaving enough of an occupying force in the land they control to keep an angry sullen peace plus/minus the occasional partisan flareups. But not a force that is being actively ground up by Ukraine, nor is itself grinding up Ukraine.
The Russian goal becomes creating and sustaining a frozen, not a warm or hot, conflict. As an economy of force measure while they reset to do the same thing in another country, or less likely, on another axis into Ukraine, a few years hence after taking a half-time breather.
Ukraine can prevent this scenario if, and only if, the West keeps sending them weapons and intel. The feckless West, perhaps motivated largely by a feckless post-election USA, can paint Ukraine into a corner where this is the least bad outcome for them. Which might, just might, if Russia is close enough to exhaustion itself, lead to my scenario.
Is it the most likely scenario? IMO no. Is it possible / plausible? IMO yes.
I’ll grant that it’s not entirely implausible, but thus far Moscow has been hellbent on fighting attritional battles with incredibly poor exchange rates with Ukraine. Bakhmut a year ago was bad enough, but the visually confirmed equipment losses at Avdiivka were absolutely staggering. The visually confirmed equipment exchange rate even favored Ukraine during Ukrainian offensive in Zaporizhya, something that all else being equal shouldn’t have happened since Russia was on the defensive in strong positions that they had a year to prepare.
It takes two to achieve a ceasefire, and thus far there are exactly zero parties willing to even consider the possibility. As it stands the attritional war favors Ukraine in terms of who can last the longest, and even if the West were to apply pressure on Ukraine to end the war with a ceasefire in place - something that would also require Russia to desire it, which it has shown absolutely no interest in, remember it has ‘annexed’ oblasts of Ukraine that it doesn’t even occupy - that doesn’t make things any easier for Russia to actually attack Poland or any other NATO country, even in the wake of the nightmare scenario of TFG winning the election.
The Russian military has been mauled by the fighting in Ukraine, it’s going to take them 5-10 years to recover their losses. Poland alone is already more heavily armed than Ukraine, something that is only going to get worse from the prospective of a Russian invasion as the years go by and those South Korean weapons go from being imported to domestic production opening up. Add to that the fact that NATO, even without the US, has something that neither Ukraine nor Russia has, a highly capable air force. Russia’s air force has been conspicuous by its inability to achieve air superiority over Ukraine even after two years of war, and the Ukrainian air force is both vastly outnumbered by Russia’s and still only consists of post-Soviet aircraft inferior to the ones Russia has. I wouldn’t envy Russia’s chances at controlling even their own airspace in the face of modern NATO aircraft flown by pilots both better trained in general and trained in conducting proper SEAD.
And finally, even if the US ditches out of NATO, France and the UK could glass Russia. Something that Ukraine voluntarily gave up the ability to do back in 1994 when it surrendered the nuclear arsenal it inherited from the Soviet Union.
And as an added note about the scale of Poland’s rearmament, consider how much of a headache the 39 HIMARS the US has publicly supplied to Ukraine has caused Russia. Poland is buying 486 of them to supplement the 20 it already has.
The manner this is happening has a lot to with It too. If Russian had won quickly in the 2022 as the prevailing opinion thought they would. It would have still been a “oh f*uck” moment for Europe, but it would haven’t fundamentally changed the military philosophy: Russian were a military superpower, to stand up to them you either need another superpower on your side or a nuclear deterrent. And even collectively Europe are not close to being a military superpower.
On the other hand if Ukraine are losing now its because they are running out of soldiers and war material (thanks to the GOP), before the Russians run out of cannon fodder. That kind of industrial war of attrition (potentially without aid from the US) is something that everyone thought was a thing of the past. The fact it’s now happening in the 21st century is why you have all this discussion of things like drafts and building up conventional militaries
Not to mention (as has doubtlessly already been stated) because Ukraine’s survival could well depend on who wins the election for President of the United States.
Just to add to this conversation:
“Several Russian financial, economic, and military indicators suggest that Russia is preparing for a large-scale conventional conflict with NATO, not imminently but likely on a shorter timeline than what some Western analysts have initially posited,” the ISW wrote in a report on Wednesday.
The think tank cited a meeting Putin held with the Russian Duma on Tuesday, just days after the Russian leader claimed a landslide victory in his fifth presidential election on Sunday.
One thinks back to the story of WW1 which came about so unexpectedly partly due to the Germans belief that war with Russia and France was an inevitability. And because both countries were rearming for the future, the Germans reasoned that sooner was better than later. Well, NATO is currently well behind Russia in its military production capabilities, but it intends to catch up eventually. If Putin believes that a conflict with NATO is inevitable, then why would he wait?
A war with NATO (assuming it stays conventional-only) would be the best possible ending to what’s going on in Europe. Early Christmas gift.
It would be 1) much faster than the Ukraine stalemate, 2) lead to a totally unambiguous clear ending for the good guys, like how WW2 ended much better than WW1, 3) probably result in Ukraine recovering much more land than the current situation, 4) serve as clear deterrent to China and other would-be aggressors.
I wouldn’t put it past Putin, but he’s got his hands full in Ukraine. How in the hell does he expect to fight the combined might of NATO on a conventional battlefield?
I agree with some of these points, but of course with Russia being a nuclear state there will be a lot more hesitancy for NATO to interfere if Russia tries something in a little-known NATO territory in the corner of an Eastern European country. If NATO doesn’t step up in unison to a relatively small aggression like that, then the alliance is in trouble. Just the sort of thing Putin would love to engineer.
WW2 ended as the Allies were closing in on Berlin - nobody will want to cross the border into Russia. That will surely be a red line for a nuclear exchange.
Hopefully Putin isn’t so crazy as to contemplate doing anything like this. It wouldn’t end well for anyone.
French military chief backs Macron over possibility of sending troops to Ukraine
As on the Russian side, recent threats (other than Russia’s against Ukraine) are probably idle. But this still is important news.
As for the thread question, the government of France obviously, and I think correctly, sees Russian expansionism as threatening its vital interests.
Because this is 100% false. NATO is far, far ahead of Russian military production capabilities. Again, were it not for the stockpiles left over from the Soviet Union, Russia would already be completely out of tanks, artillery, and IFVs. Domestic production fell through the floor after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and headline grabbing figures bury the lead with fear-mongering numbers. For example:
Russian factories claimed to have delivered 1,500 main battle tanks this year,
Sounds terrifying, right? Well, until you read the rest of the sentence:
of which 1,180 to 1,280 had been reactivated from storage, according to IISS.
So, you have an annual production of 250ish main battle tanks a year. Which is admittedly better than the 100 a year they were doing (with most of those going to the export market) during the 1990-2010s but isn’t even 1/10th of the losses they have sustained. It gets even worse when you consider that a significant part of what they are replacing with what were their best available tanks are with modernized T-62s and T-54/55s. These are literally tanks from the 1950s and 1960s, and that’s the manufacturing date, not the design date. If the West’s cabinets were so barren that the aircraft that are going to be provided to Ukraine were F-104s rather than F-16s, and a substantial part of the tanks handed over to Ukraine were M47 Pattons and Centurions, I’d be worried. However, these are tanks and aircraft so old that they don’t even exist in the reserve stockpiles of the poorest NATO countries anymore. They are contemporaries of the T-54/55 and T-62s Russia is being forced to put into service in frontline units in Ukraine, however.
As usual, Perun has extremely good hour-long videos on the topic well worth the listen (the video is power-point presentation, and you’re not missing much of anything just listening to them).
The Economic War in Ukraine a Year On - The energy war, politics & production (youtube.com)
I think the concern is that as Putin continues to lose face in Ukraine, he will seek to divert attention from that conflict by starting some new conflict.
Which is pretty nuts. If Russia is stalemated in a war with Ukraine, why would they expect to succeed in a larger war against NATO? But the problem is Putin might not be thinking rationally. Or he might be calculating that he can personally win even if Russia loses.
Speaking as a resident of Europe who would be directly impacted by your hypothetical, I am infuriated almost beyond description by the use of terminology like “Christmas gift.” It is fucking war. It is not a fucking gift. It is never a gift.
I get the thrust of your argument, that Russia deciding to take on NATO would turn out very badly for Putin and would in the long term be a net geopolitical positive. That’s fine. Make that argument. But do not gloss over the fact that the actual fighting would be a goddamn nightmare, destructive and deadly and horrifying. You can say that it would be unfortunate and terrible if Russia were to escalate the war but that the ultimate outcome would likely take the world in a positive direction. But it’s not a goddamn Christmas gift.
I have come very close to pitting you many times over your consistent rah-rah foam-finger-waving attitude toward death and devastation. I implore you to reconsider and rein yourself in, or I promise I will take you to the Pit, and you don’t want that.
I think there’s an African angle to the French and European attitude to Russia that has gone underreported.
The French have an enormous influence in Western Africa and consider most of the countries in this region as part of their sphere of influence. Even today these countries currencies are linked to the Euro and France and other EU countries enjoy favourable export rates. France is also particularly reliant on Niger for cheap sources of Uranium. Gold is another major resource in the area. However in recent years Islamist terrorism in the region has risen to a frightening level. (Did you know the country with the most terrorist deaths in 2023 was Burkina Faso?)
The French have had a lot of troops in these countries offering security but in recent years West African countries have been falling to pro-Islamist groups who are driving the French away, using anti-colonialist rhetoric to gain popularity with the people. And guess who is coming in to take up the fight against the Islamists? It’s the newly reformed Wagner group! Or, to put in another way, Russia. And this gives them access to gold and influence.
Wagner is actively trying to limit French access to resources and gain it for themselves. The French are not good guys in this situation, they’re unpopular in parts of West Africa for a reason. But the Wagner Group are certainly a medicine that is worse than the disease.
My knowledge of this situation is a bit limited, so forgive me if I’ve missed a major detail or got something wrong. Here’s a recent article here that adds a bit of colour: