Q: Do you know what’s missing from the comments to this article ?
A: The Russian guy who was using 100+ different names to comment on last week’s Ukraine poll question with repetitive shoutouts to Putin and saying that the purpose of the “invasion” was to free the child sex slaves.
He must be out buying more tinfoil.
Stan d. Upnow
2 years ago
A mess of A-10’s in Ukraine before, or shortly after, the Russians invaded would have likely devastated their forces and the invasion would’ve collapsed. My idea was backed-up by the same recommendation by Defense News. The spineless are so afraid of provoking Putin by establishing a no-fly zone. It’s the same squishy reaction that the Europeans had as the Nazis started their aggression. Historians have said that if they had stopped them at that point, WW2 would not have occurred. As things stand, Putin will take Ukraine, then march on the other former Soviet states. Where is the red line laid??
PaulE
2 years ago
Many western European countries have been strengthening their economic ties with Russia for decades, while at the same time intentionally under-funding their respective military obligations to NATO designed to maintain any sort of credible military deterrence towards Russia or any other potentially hostile geopolitical source (China as an example). The notion among many political leaders in Europe being that while most western European countries talked about Russia being a potential adversary, that they had to maintain a strong, credible military deterrence against, they could, in many cases, completely ignore the actual military readiness part. Instead, they could rely solely on the United States, with its troops and weapons, to bail out western European NATO countries should the need ever arise. This is how things ran from the early 1970s though late 2016 in most of Europe.
The European funding that would normally go to military preparedness instead was spent on propping up their ever-expanding social welfare states. With the Biden administration taking over in 2021, things returned to this status quo in much of Europe and the United States. Europe did more and more deals with Russia, making themselves more and more dependent on Russian oil and natural gas, along with some agricultural exports from Russia. President Biden essentially hobbled the American fossil fuel industry via a series of executive orders and regulatory changes.
If you look at all this from Putin’s long-term perspective, your main opposition, Europe’s NATO, is critically reliant on Russian exports and they have badly under-funded their military preparedness for decades. Europe is led by talkers, not doers. People easy to intimidate and push around. The United States is now headed by a dementia patient with dreams of being the second coming of FDR. Thus providing Putin with an appealingly weak and dependent set of adversaries that will likely not be a credible deterrent to any future military actions he may be considering. While at the same time, Putin has used the hundreds of billions of dollars he has collected from Russian exports to Europe over the years to fund the rebuilding and modernization of Russia’s war machine.
Putin doesn’t want to obliterate Ukraine, merely take it over and gain access and control over all the valuable natural resources it has. So Putin is slowly but surely doing just that. Confident that the west will not truly enact the sort of crushing economic sanctions that could cripple the Russian economy and his ability to fight over night.
So here are some lessons the west should take away from this whole experience:
The first two important lessons so far are that trade is good, but you should always know who you’re trading with and NEVER, EVER assume that just because they trade with you that they are your friend. Neither Russia nor China are friends of the West and they will both leverage any opening or weakness they see for their own benefit.
The third lesson is, if you’re going to trade with someone who has expressed an open interest, for almost 20 years now, in reconstituting the former Soviet empire, it is crucial you maintain a credible military deterrent to cause your potential adversary pause. Putin has only depplyed a small portion of his total military power against Ukraine, because we doesn’t want to destroy it rather just enslave it. He also probably correctly assessed that looking across the table NATO, without the troops and weapons of the United States, doesn’t really pose any sort of credible deterrent to Russia in any event. So that threat was off the board and not a consideration before one Russian was given orders to march into Ukraine.
Ukraine is NOT a part of NATO and, as such, is not going to get any sort of direct support, beyond defensive weapons that many nations agreed far too late to provide. The Ukrainians never expected either NATO or the United States to actively intervene on their behalf on the ground in Ukraine. So this isn’t about some fear mongering going on in the media that the United States or NATO is going to get sucked into saving Ukraine at the last minute. As long as Putin confines himself to non-NATO countries, neither NATO nor the United States is going to do much beyond half-hearted economic sanctions. What this is about is how both most of the leaders of western Europe and the Biden administration essentially provided an open door invitation to Putin to carry out a military operation that he has long sought to do.
The cherry on top of the sh*t dessert is of course having a weak and mentally challenged leader in the White House. President Xi is no doubt paying very, very close attention to how the West is acting or more importantly NOT acting right now. Sizing up the actions of what western leaders are willing and unwilling to do. This is the truly important part of what is going on right now, because China has both the economic and military power to do a lot more than Russia can around the world.
Bob E.
2 years ago
Having us entangled in Europe gives China opportunity to move in Asia. I suspect China will cover Putin at the UN Security Council and Putin will do the same for Xi. Also oil to China and rubles to China banks.
But to focus on Ukraine: This is the fruit of years of poor planning by European administrations and American bureaucrats of all all stripes. When the Soviet Union fell, there was little reason to keep NATO alive- its mission had been accomplished. But Central European countries were still afraid the Russian bear would come back for them one day. Understandable. Eastern and Western Europe had grown apart over the decades, and New European states were not viewed as equals. But Western Europe still coveted the cheap labor represented by these states, and the United States wanted to sell them aircraft, etc.
So, it was decided to keep NATO relevant, despite protests from Russia and predictions of exactly this scenario.
Putin is not a nice person, but he is the person who was picked to lead Russia, and it is largely are fault he is there.
I don’t expect this to end until the Baltic nations quit NATO. They should have had their own defense pact from the beginning. Either that is the third way (Central European Treaty Organization) or Russia will continue to drive NATO from its borders and reunite with Kaliningrad.
I hope the display of resistance by Ukraine dissuades China from launching a reunification effort, but it may be too late for that as well. They may see this as their best and last opportunity.
It is difficult for me to imagine how our military will be able to meet their enlistment targets in such an environment.
Bob E.
2 years ago
Having us entangled in Europe gives China opportunity to move in Asia. I suspect China will cover Putin at the UN Security Council and Putin will do the same for Xi. Also oil to China and rubles to China banks.
But to focus on Ukraine: This is the fruit of years of poor planning by European administrations and American bureaucrats of all all stripes. When the Soviet Union fell, there was little reason to keep NATO alive- its mission had been accomplished. But Central European countries were still afraid the Russian bear would come back for them one day. Understandable. Eastern and Western Europe had grown apart over the decades, and New European states were not viewed as equals. But Western Europe still coveted the cheap labor represented by these states, and the United States wanted to sell them aircraft, etc.
So, it was decided to keep NATO relevant, despite protests from Russia and predictions of exactly this scenario.
Putin is not a nice person, but he is the person who was picked to lead Russia, and it is largely are fault he is there.
I don’t expect this to end until the Baltic nations quit NATO. They should have had their own defense pact from the beginning. Either that is the third way (Central European Treaty Organization) or Russia will continue to drive NATO from its borders and reunite with Kaliningrad.
I hope the display of resistance by Ukraine dissuades China from launching a reunification effort, but it may be too late for that as well. They may see this as their best and last opportunity.
It is difficult for me to imagine how our military will be able to meet their enlistment targets in such an environment.
Q: Do you know what’s missing from the comments to this article ?
A: The Russian guy who was using 100+ different names to comment on last week’s Ukraine poll question with repetitive shoutouts to Putin and saying that the purpose of the “invasion” was to free the child sex slaves.
He must be out buying more tinfoil.
A mess of A-10’s in Ukraine before, or shortly after, the Russians invaded would have likely devastated their forces and the invasion would’ve collapsed. My idea was backed-up by the same recommendation by Defense News. The spineless are so afraid of provoking Putin by establishing a no-fly zone. It’s the same squishy reaction that the Europeans had as the Nazis started their aggression. Historians have said that if they had stopped them at that point, WW2 would not have occurred. As things stand, Putin will take Ukraine, then march on the other former Soviet states. Where is the red line laid??
Many western European countries have been strengthening their economic ties with Russia for decades, while at the same time intentionally under-funding their respective military obligations to NATO designed to maintain any sort of credible military deterrence towards Russia or any other potentially hostile geopolitical source (China as an example). The notion among many political leaders in Europe being that while most western European countries talked about Russia being a potential adversary, that they had to maintain a strong, credible military deterrence against, they could, in many cases, completely ignore the actual military readiness part. Instead, they could rely solely on the United States, with its troops and weapons, to bail out western European NATO countries should the need ever arise. This is how things ran from the early 1970s though late 2016 in most of Europe.
The European funding that would normally go to military preparedness instead was spent on propping up their ever-expanding social welfare states. With the Biden administration taking over in 2021, things returned to this status quo in much of Europe and the United States. Europe did more and more deals with Russia, making themselves more and more dependent on Russian oil and natural gas, along with some agricultural exports from Russia. President Biden essentially hobbled the American fossil fuel industry via a series of executive orders and regulatory changes.
If you look at all this from Putin’s long-term perspective, your main opposition, Europe’s NATO, is critically reliant on Russian exports and they have badly under-funded their military preparedness for decades. Europe is led by talkers, not doers. People easy to intimidate and push around. The United States is now headed by a dementia patient with dreams of being the second coming of FDR. Thus providing Putin with an appealingly weak and dependent set of adversaries that will likely not be a credible deterrent to any future military actions he may be considering. While at the same time, Putin has used the hundreds of billions of dollars he has collected from Russian exports to Europe over the years to fund the rebuilding and modernization of Russia’s war machine.
Putin doesn’t want to obliterate Ukraine, merely take it over and gain access and control over all the valuable natural resources it has. So Putin is slowly but surely doing just that. Confident that the west will not truly enact the sort of crushing economic sanctions that could cripple the Russian economy and his ability to fight over night.
So here are some lessons the west should take away from this whole experience:
The first two important lessons so far are that trade is good, but you should always know who you’re trading with and NEVER, EVER assume that just because they trade with you that they are your friend. Neither Russia nor China are friends of the West and they will both leverage any opening or weakness they see for their own benefit.
The third lesson is, if you’re going to trade with someone who has expressed an open interest, for almost 20 years now, in reconstituting the former Soviet empire, it is crucial you maintain a credible military deterrent to cause your potential adversary pause. Putin has only depplyed a small portion of his total military power against Ukraine, because we doesn’t want to destroy it rather just enslave it. He also probably correctly assessed that looking across the table NATO, without the troops and weapons of the United States, doesn’t really pose any sort of credible deterrent to Russia in any event. So that threat was off the board and not a consideration before one Russian was given orders to march into Ukraine.
Ukraine is NOT a part of NATO and, as such, is not going to get any sort of direct support, beyond defensive weapons that many nations agreed far too late to provide. The Ukrainians never expected either NATO or the United States to actively intervene on their behalf on the ground in Ukraine. So this isn’t about some fear mongering going on in the media that the United States or NATO is going to get sucked into saving Ukraine at the last minute. As long as Putin confines himself to non-NATO countries, neither NATO nor the United States is going to do much beyond half-hearted economic sanctions. What this is about is how both most of the leaders of western Europe and the Biden administration essentially provided an open door invitation to Putin to carry out a military operation that he has long sought to do.
The cherry on top of the sh*t dessert is of course having a weak and mentally challenged leader in the White House. President Xi is no doubt paying very, very close attention to how the West is acting or more importantly NOT acting right now. Sizing up the actions of what western leaders are willing and unwilling to do. This is the truly important part of what is going on right now, because China has both the economic and military power to do a lot more than Russia can around the world.
Having us entangled in Europe gives China opportunity to move in Asia. I suspect China will cover Putin at the UN Security Council and Putin will do the same for Xi. Also oil to China and rubles to China banks.
But to focus on Ukraine: This is the fruit of years of poor planning by European administrations and American bureaucrats of all all stripes. When the Soviet Union fell, there was little reason to keep NATO alive- its mission had been accomplished. But Central European countries were still afraid the Russian bear would come back for them one day. Understandable. Eastern and Western Europe had grown apart over the decades, and New European states were not viewed as equals. But Western Europe still coveted the cheap labor represented by these states, and the United States wanted to sell them aircraft, etc.
So, it was decided to keep NATO relevant, despite protests from Russia and predictions of exactly this scenario.
Putin is not a nice person, but he is the person who was picked to lead Russia, and it is largely are fault he is there.
I don’t expect this to end until the Baltic nations quit NATO. They should have had their own defense pact from the beginning. Either that is the third way (Central European Treaty Organization) or Russia will continue to drive NATO from its borders and reunite with Kaliningrad.
I hope the display of resistance by Ukraine dissuades China from launching a reunification effort, but it may be too late for that as well. They may see this as their best and last opportunity.
It is difficult for me to imagine how our military will be able to meet their enlistment targets in such an environment.
Having us entangled in Europe gives China opportunity to move in Asia. I suspect China will cover Putin at the UN Security Council and Putin will do the same for Xi. Also oil to China and rubles to China banks.
But to focus on Ukraine: This is the fruit of years of poor planning by European administrations and American bureaucrats of all all stripes. When the Soviet Union fell, there was little reason to keep NATO alive- its mission had been accomplished. But Central European countries were still afraid the Russian bear would come back for them one day. Understandable. Eastern and Western Europe had grown apart over the decades, and New European states were not viewed as equals. But Western Europe still coveted the cheap labor represented by these states, and the United States wanted to sell them aircraft, etc.
So, it was decided to keep NATO relevant, despite protests from Russia and predictions of exactly this scenario.
Putin is not a nice person, but he is the person who was picked to lead Russia, and it is largely are fault he is there.
I don’t expect this to end until the Baltic nations quit NATO. They should have had their own defense pact from the beginning. Either that is the third way (Central European Treaty Organization) or Russia will continue to drive NATO from its borders and reunite with Kaliningrad.
I hope the display of resistance by Ukraine dissuades China from launching a reunification effort, but it may be too late for that as well. They may see this as their best and last opportunity.
It is difficult for me to imagine how our military will be able to meet their enlistment targets in such an environment.