Poland`s aid to Ukraine if Russia invades - part 10

I'm not sure there will be a Trump doctrine - those polls are getting tighter

When is the North Nigerian breakthrough going to come ? Advika fell 2 months ago and since then they managed to move their drinks cabinet just 15km closer to Kyiv at a loss if hundreds of tanks and thousands of men.

I agree that it doesn't look good for Ukraine either but I can't see it capitulating unless the North Nigerians start using their Air Force.

Reward russia give them time to rearm and signal that he doesn't care what happens to American allies.... great policy.....

The fact that a superpower like Russia can't liberate its own territory in over two years doesn't look good for Russia, either...
This is bordering on ridiculous. 10,000 dead men per kilometer?

He may well be in jail.


Ukraine should do it more.


That's for them to address, not for you to worry about. In any case, President Zelenskiy has recently signed the mobilisation order into law.

Someone today (either the Secretary of State for Defence Grant Shapps or the Armed Forces Minister James Heappey) said that they expect the conflict to last into 2026.

And as Lord Cameron is now brokering the deal for £220 billion of seized orc 'assets' to be used for Ukraine, they will have a much stronger war chest

telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/04/16/frozen-russian-assets-help-fund-ukraine-g7-deal/

And meanwhile r*SSia is massively expanding their cemeteries to cope with the corpses of the men they have thrown into their pointless met grinder. May they fvck off out of Ukraine and stop the killing.

bbc.com/news/world-europe-68833833

Brazen murder of civilians in Chernihiv this morning.

All the guilty will be in The Hague one day

You overlooked this one, cymes:

bbc.com/news/world-europe-68778338

The former commander of the UK's Joint Forces Command has warned that Ukraine could face defeat by Russia in 2024.

General Sir Richard Barrons has told the BBC there is "a serious risk" of Ukraine losing the war this year.

The reason, he says, is "because Ukraine may come to feel it can't win".

I think that it is highly foolish to assume that a war's progress can only take place in linear fashion.

Most conflicts from history teach us that wars can shift from a seeming stalemate to an unexpected collapse - with astonishing speed. A careful observer might have been able to identify the cracks in the edifice, but for most other observers it nearly always comes as a surprise.

No need to go far back in history, let's look instead at the 20th and 21st century.

1) Russia had a rough start in WW1, but by the Fall of 1916, had largely regained its strength. Then, it staged the Brusilov Offensive. According to historian John Keegan, "the Brusilov Offensive was, on the scale by which success was measured in the foot-by-foot fighting of the First World War, the greatest victory seen on any front since the trench lines had been dug on the Aisne two years before". In that offensive Russia liberated all of Eastern Galicia and Northern Bukovina.

None of it mattered, because a few months later the February Revolution happened, and everything went to sh*t. Imagine the surprise of people tracking events that year.

2) America spent years convincing everyone with weekly "kill counts" that soon there would not be any NVA left to fight for Communism in Vietnam. America had essentially not lost a single critical battle of that war - emerging largely unscathed even from the Tet Offensive. However, when it pulled its support, things collapsed so quickly that people had to be lifted by helicopter from the roof of the US embassy.

3) Even as American forces prepared to depart Afghanistan, the Taliban were still being contained to peripheral provinces, and their advances were claimed as "gradual" and "not operationally threatening". Fast forward a few weeks, and people are grabbing onto the chassises of US cargo planes as they take off.

War is not a computer game. It's more like building a house. It may take some time to pour the concrete, and then more time to let it settle. But once the foundation is in place, then work can begin in earnest.

That was a comment from a retired guy to remind people of the importance of continuing to support the right side.

When the US told a sovereign USSR that it could not bring military hardware to a sovereign Cuba or else was the US on the "right side" or was the US a bully?

The USA was in the wrong of course, as they have been in pretty well everything related to Cuba.

Wars are like taking down a brick house - brick by brick. First, nothing... Then it collapses like it was made of cards.
The main goal in the final moments is not to be the last victim. It will feel really stupid...Or to waste the last 50 billion bucks the day before the end...


Since 1946, when was the US in the right?

A few times. Not many.

This war is in Europe though, and it's clear from the way things are going politically that the three major European countries, the UK, France and Germany will need to handle this ourselves. The UK is already taking the lead. As a member of Five Eyes and AUKUS and still a member of NATO, your country will have a role, however the current bolki-lolki in your parliament suggest that it will not be a leading one.

Without the US warmongering MICC, U would be undamaged and 500,000 Ukrainians would be alive. U gov would have a guy Putin likes and the rest would be like nothing ever happened.

I would be a Nobel Prize winner for my Z-P=0.

Instead, Z moron followed J azhole who obeyed B idiot and now we have this hell...

But it is North Nigeria that is more likely to collapse gradually and then all at once - just like in 1989. The corruption, sanctions, despair at the tighter tyranny will all get to boiling point - probably in August when the rest of us are enjoying the Olympics

Same in Iran - people who are getting sick of their living conditions will overthrow the Mad Mullahs this year

Can decide for themselves about their own country, their own borders and their own sovereignty.

I like your analogy more. Very nice.


Small problem... you cannot stand each other's guts.

France was engaged in full on Russophilia about a year ago (seems like an eternity), when it felt blindsided by the UK and US' sneaky maneuver with Australian nuclear submarines. Not being invited into AUKUS, despite being a Pacific country in its own right, further added to the ill feeling.

Germany loathes the current France, because of its constant grandstanding at German expense. Macron's rapid about-turn on Russia, where he went from being a dove to a hawk, is causing serious frustration in Berlin. Despite contributing only a pittance towards Ukraine's defense, France now wants to take on the mantle of the leader, and even muses out loud on the subject of Western troops in Ukraine. I can't imagine what Scholz thinks about him.

Finally - Britain itself. Your country is an absolute joke, in both Brussels and Washington. The recent publishing of Liz Truss' memoir, has made fresh again all the recent foibles of your government. People have lost count of how many times your government has collapsed in the last few years. Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak - am I forgetting anyone? What a parade of wunderkinds that was!

The main water utility company in your country is bankrupt (Thames Water). You've spent a decade trying to build 140 miles of high speed rail, and have now all but abandoned the project (HS2). Your economy is in a recession (among the worst performers in the whole developed world).

You are telling me you're going to go and pour half a trillion dollars into ensuring Ukraine wins?

They can but didn't.

B and J told Z to ignore P. The rest is history...That was very bad advice...

Say what you want but Putin's plan is brilliant. It's like giving AIDS to a woman and telling everybody about it. There will be very few takers...And so it is with Ukraine...

Now even Slovakia says no to U in NATO. Smart Slovakia.


How can they "pour" what they don't have? I doubt that half a trillion dollars are just sitting there pretty...

I also doubt that half a trillion dollars is anywhere close to enough for Ukraine to win this war.

One of your Senators, this guy named JD Vance - recently wrote an Op Ed on the subject for the NYTimes.

A quote from the essay:

"The most fundamental question: How much does Ukraine need and how much can we actually provide? Mr. Biden suggests that a $60 billion supplemental means the difference between victory and defeat in a major war between Russia and Ukraine. That is also wrong. This $60 billion is a fraction of what it would take to turn the tide in Ukraine's favor. But this is not just a matter of dollars. Fundamentally, we lack the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war."

Smart guy, this Vance. I enjoyed reading his book, A Hillbilly Elegy, and now I enjoy reading his essays and listening to him on the Senate floor.

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His problem in DC is the same as yours here:
Both of you are maddeningly correct and that's why few read what you write.
They made an investment in stupid so it's hard to stop dumping good money after bad. See gamblers in casinos...

The hardest thing to do, sometimes, is to admit that you were wrong.

Something Putler needs to do.

That and stand trial for multiple crimes against humanity.

New and interesting Peter Zeihan video....

takeaways:

Europe (apart from Germany) has woken up to the fact that russia does not intend to stop in Ukraine. The recent double tap policy targeting aid workers shows just how psychotic the russian leadership is (he puts it a bit more diplomatically).

For the last 9 months Europe has provided more aid than the US.

US concerns about hitting oil infrastructure are misplaced.... increased energy is baked in now no matter what happens.

Ukrainians are better at targetting russian infrastructure than russians are at repairing it and have no reason to hold back...

youtube.com/watch?v=lZ4ZXeQ4-V0

Putin has been proven right, time and time again. Putin has your number. He read you like school children.

The man is a genius when it comes to seeing through the West's glitzy facade, and into its rotten core.

Even I can admit, that I thought he had a few screws loose... but now he seems like one of the few sane people around.


Ehrm... what?!

No reason to hold back, except that they seem to lose a huge power plant for every little drone they crash into a refinery. Lloyd Austin and Antony Blinken said as much.

They explicitly said "Ukraine would be better served by focusing on purely military targets, in part due to potential Russian retaliation against critical infrastructure".

Ukraine leaves Russia with 15% less diesel fuel, but now has 50% less power generating capacity. How is that supposed to work?

You know as well as I do, that we never hit their power plants until they started hitting our refineries. This is despite the fact that America begins every bombing campaign by turning off the lights in a country. For two years we were patient and... dare I say it - merciful.

your own pelmeni faced little godking!


good thing he had the presence of mind not to waste resources on things like flood prevention.....

Those in military uniform?

Russia is a federation, you know, like Canada, like the United States...

In the US, the federal government sometimes comes in and assists with disaster relief. However, most times it's up to the states to deal with the aftermath of a natural disaster.

There's also the US Army Corp of Engineers, which can come to the assistance of states, but not always.

It's the same in Russia.

I think it's you that treats Putin like a god king, who has eyes everywhere, and is responsible for each and every soul.

Do you expect Biden personal intervention into clogger sewer somewhere in Wisconsin?

@mafketis
In case you forgot, the US has not signed any "Alliance" with Ukraine. The US owes Ukraine nothing. And as someone who just paid an outrageous amount of income tax to the IRS, I and others like me have every right to demand that our money be spent on Americans.

That said. If the US wanted to end any war it has been in at any time, they could have. We all know that if massive bombing would have been used everywhere, there would be no one left to fight. The problem is the US fights by the "rules" and the enemy never does. Imagine the US being as non law abiding as Russia has been. Nothing would be left standing in most cases. My point being that in war, the idea of "rules" is rather stupid. In a fight to the death, I would follow no rules against the other person trying to kill me. I imagine every Russian and Ukrainian man fighting now does not GAF about rules when facing the enemy. And they shouldnt.

So the message is DO NOT GIVE UP NUKES FOR ANY REASON!!!!!!

Ukraine is the number one exhibit why any country that gets nukes will keep them.

And I still say it.... if the US abandons Ukraine it will abandon Poland.... on what basis do you think it won't?

I don't think Belarus, or Kazakhstan, or South Africa... want nukes today. All three countries also had nukes.

Kazakhstan had the fourth largest nuclear arsenal in the world, after Russia, US, and Ukraine.