It would be pretty unhelpful for the US to transfer our own aircraft to Ukraine, as it would be for the Europeans to transfer theirs. The only really useful transfer would be if one of the former Warsaw Pact nations that still is using old Soviet-era planes would transfer those, and that possibility is still being explored. Poland, specifically, is looking into this, but the hold up is they want F-16s in exchange, and it’s my understanding that the batch of F-16s available was earmarked for Taiwan…which the US feels is still the priority.
It has been mentioned a few times. The main problems are as follows:
- Any unfamiliar aircraft, such as the A-10, takes such a long time to get Ukrainian pilots trained on that the war would already be over by the time they could fly it effectively.
- The A-10 is highly vulnerable to SAMs, and that Russian convoy has lots of SAMs.
Plus their flight crews aren’t trained on it, there aren’t any tools or spare parts in the pipeline for them and reloads. It would be a huge, complicated mess to try and transfer the US or any other aircraft Ukraine isn’t already familiar with, has the tools to troubleshoot and fix or repair, and has reloads for…and can manufacture more themselves if needs be. All of that means it just makes more sense to get them what they know already.
A lot. The Russians are going to keep this up for months. Kyiv, Kharkiv and almost every large city from Odessa east will be blockaded and will be starved or pounded into rubble.
That reminds me of this Frankie Boyle line on Mock The Week, under the topic “Bad things to say when leading troops into battle”
Not without some form of Lend Lease, it won’t … (China perks up its ears)
If the US or NATO is going to intervene, the sooner the better.
Right now, the Russians aren’t in Kyiv yet. Trying to evict them from Kyiv, once in there, would be far harder than preventing them from getting in.
NATO official says Russia not expected “make any gains in the next few days” in Ukraine
From CNN staff
Despite using all of the forces it had concentrated in and around Ukraine, Russia is still making very little progress, with NATO’s current intelligence assessment suggesting Moscow is unlikely to make much progress in the foreseeable future, a NATO military official told CNN.
"We see very little change,” the official said, citing the alliance’s latest intelligence assessment. “For the first time, we don’t expect them to make any gains in the next few days.”
They are putting in everything they have and are still making very little progress,” the official explained. “No one thought they would face these simple problems. After two weeks, they still haven’t been able to solve their logistics issues.”
for the first time I really get the feeling the Ukr. will be pulling this off!!!
I think that if Russia continues committing atrocities and war crimes, then NATO should definitely step in and put a stop to it. (Assuming that they actually have committed any… news reports during a war can be sketchy.)
Next time Putin threatens to use nuclear weapons, Biden should just say, “Hey man, we’ve got those, too,” and utterly dismiss the son of a bitch.
Some things can’t be tolerated, no matter what the blowback might be.
I’d be satisfied with Putin simply dropping dead of a stroke, like his heroes Lenin and Stalin. I mean I’d rather see him suffer first (and this is coming from a lifelong pacifist who has protested pretty much every U.S. military action in my adult life), but I’d take it.
Months? The Russians have been in Syria for 7 years. The Soviet Union was in Afghanistan for a decade. We (USA) just got out of Afghanistan after 20 years. Vietnam lasted almost as long.
I just looked it up - Russia and Chechnya have been fighting for centuries.
Countries can spend a long time fighting unwinnable wars and Russians are stubborn people.
I don’t think too many people are morally opposed to several NATO armored divisions backed by A-10s and Apache helicopters tear apart the Russians in Ukraine, that doesn’t change the fact that a direct conflict between the world’s largest nuclear powers is a huge risk of escalating into a global thermonuclear war.
So unfortunately, Ukraine has a good chance of being a proxy war for at least several years.
Good article in Foreign Affairs by Alexander Vindman and Dominic Cruz Bustillos.
They argue for a vastly stepped-up level of lethal aid for Ukraine – more drones, air defense systems, artillery, and fighter jets.
They criticize the defeatism and hesitation seen in the West at the outset of the war.
“It is still well within the West’s ability to influence the outcome of this war; Western leaders must realize the agency they hold.”
They also argue that if the U.S. and NATO don’t try to turn the tide of this war now by sending weapons, we are more likely to be sucked into it later. By that point, they say, our options will be much worse.
“Ending this conflict as quickly as possible by directing massive resources to Ukraine is more likely to preclude a NATO-Russian confrontation than to hasten nuclear war.”
The concept of “a stitch in time saves nine” really applies here.
Either decisive action can be taken to change the tide of the war now, or we can have a much longer, protracted problem for years to come.
Can they sustain a war for years, though? Both from an economic perspective in the face of mounting sanctions and other blowbacks, but also from a military perspective? This is not the military of the Soviet Union after all. Also, their level of loss currently doesn’t seem sustainable to me. They have already committed most if not all of their pre-invasion deployed forces. They would need to bring in new troops, supplies, and equipment to continue their current level of operations. Even if Ukraine collapses tomorrow, something that seems unlikely, it’s still going to be tough to sustain the level of operations to hold things down. If Ukraine keeps fighting then I don’t see how they could sustain them. They haven’t even really started the tough part of their invasion, after all, and they have taken pretty substantial losses. When they actually try and go into these big cities in force, it’s going to be a meat grinder with all the ATGMs other goodies the west has given Ukraine to fight with.
I’m also skeptical they have the logistics to support a long-term invasion and occupation at this point. Oh, they have it to support the forward staging areas in Russia (as long as no one can hit them or the railheads in Russia), but moving from there into Ukraine seems to be a challenge the Russian military isn’t up for and doesn’t have the equipment for…and I have serious doubts they will be able to replace that stuff faster than it’s being destroyed. Especially in the face of their own economic issues.
Short answer is I don’t know really.
I’m not an expert on Russia, but they seem to place strength high on their list of values. Getting bogged down in a long term quagmire of his own making in the Ukraine does not project strength, nor does it appear to be strengthening Russia’s standing in the world.
I suppose what it will come down to is whether the Russian people believe they are being treated unfairly by the West and stubbornly cling to Putin’s message or "restoring the glory of the former Soviet Union. Or if they perceive Putin to be weakening Russia through his handling of Ukraine.
No, but only because the Ukraine is not a member of NATO.
I’m still on the fence about it. Part of me thinks Putin is enough of an idiotic fucker at this point that he’s going to move on a NATO country sooner or later, so we might as well fight him in Ukraine instead of waiting for them to move into, say, Poland.
But another part of me thinks that if that’s the case, we’re better off giving the NATO countries time to build up their forces. Going and making our move now risks dragging us into the fight before we’re actually prepared. Perhaps it serves us better to only supply material to Ukraine until then.
So yeah, still a fence sitter on that one.
The current frenzy of the war is unlikely to be the long-term pace of the war.
Ukraine was fighting with Russia since 2014, in the Southeast, and upgrading their military at a steady pace since Zelensky was elected two years ago (that’s probably why Putin decided that he needed to go for it).
After this, Russia will have the benefit of a larger population base but they’ll also be dealing with an economic crisis and, quite possibly, dealing with coming out of that crisis without becoming a vassal state of China - which is going to take a lot of focus and might require them to keep their military at the ready.
I don’t know too much about Ukraine’s production capability but I would assume that they’re going to get a pretty good influx of foreign investment once things settle down well enough and I know that they have a lot of nuclear energy - which I would usually assume means that they have good access to mineral resources and good manufacturing capability.
In general, I expect Ukraine to be able to build back faster than Russia can, and they’ll be a lot more focused.
Russia genuinely has already lost this war. Within a week of the invasion, they went from a place that might have gained a little bit more territory to being a country underwater. The longer they’re fighting, the further down they sink because they’re losing assets and personnel. When the soldiers get back home, the government’s liable to need to print rubles to pay them all - inflating the currency by a fair amount.
If Russia keeps throwing them into the meat grinder, it loses workforce. If it brings them back, a lot of angry guys with guns and the knowledge of how to coordinate and fight have just been brought back into the middle of Russia.
Most of their heavy industry, unfortunately, is in the east…exactly where Russian forces currently are or are obviously planning to go. I think the west is mainly agricultural, so there is that…but I expect that folks who rely on Ukrainian wheat are going to be hurting this summer or next winter.
Maybe. Personally, I don’t think there is a long-term pace for this thing. I think it will be over, one way or another within 6 months. Assuming the Ukrainians don’t completely collapse, which seems unlikely to me, I expect the pace to be brutal for the duration. I suppose it’s possible that Russia bulls through to take all of the east, maybe captures or surrounds and tries to starve out Kyiv and the other major cities in the east…but I don’t see how they could stop and hold that in the face of the sanctions. I guess we shall see.
I don’t know what to think about any of this, being far from a military expert. But I am remembering back to 1989 when I visited Ukraine, and in particular to a tour we took of the secret tunnel network under Odessa, led by a former Ukrainian partisan with a plate in his head, where the partisans hid out during the Nazi occupation and sniped at the German Army at night. They did this for YEARS, and 40+ years later, the guy was still grinning from ear to ear about what he did to the Germans. We are talking about a very stubborn bunch of people.
I am simply not seeing any way that this ends without huge bloodshed on both sides, because none of the parties involved are going to back down. The thought of any of this is just making me sick to my stomach.