4 ms·

It may be a Kremlin talking point, but that doesn't make it baseless. It's a pretty well-known (and I should actually think uncontroversial) fact that Washingto

by valvar 5y ago

It may be a Kremlin talking point, but that doesn't make it baseless. It's a pretty well-known (and I should actually think uncontroversial) fact that Washington and its allies have been bolstering Ukrainian military capabilities in various ways for several years now. How else do you think Europe's poorest country has been able to withstand an invasion from Europe's strongest army so well?

mcv 5y ago
And a good thing they did. Without it, Russia might have easily conquered Ukraine. Every argument against NATO, US or EU supporting eastern European countries is easily disproven by the current situation in Ukraine. Russia under Putin clearly is an expansionist aggressor.
nicoburns 5y ago
The idea that NATO would actually invade Russia seems pretty baseless. They aren’t even prepared to defend Ukraine directly.
- ridiculous_leke 5y ago
  With Ukraine under the hood, it wouldn't have been that difficult. I know that NATO is a defensive alliance but it can go an offensive if members agree. Not saying that this is a valid argument for Russia invading Ukraine.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > With Ukraine under the hood, it wouldn't have been that difficult. Yes, it would have. Ukraine joining NATO doesn't neutralize Russia’s nuclear arsenal. > I know that NATO is a defensive alliance but it can go an offensive if members agree. Sure, and it has, twice; it's also participated in an reactive invasion based on its defensive mission. NATO’s official defensive purpose isn’t why a NATO design on invading Russia is implausible, but it remains implausible.
smcl 5y ago
> Europe's strongest army The conflict has been horrific and bloody and I do not want to make light of this. But I think what we have seen over the last month or so should dispel any notion that Russia had anything close to the strongest military of the European countries.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  If you take into account their nuclear capability they obviously do.
  - smcl 5y ago
    Ukraine thankfully haven’t had to defend themselves against Russian nuclear weapons though. But if you go down that road, it would’ve made no difference whether the EU gave them absolutely nothing, or even twice the amount of military aid they have already given. Use of nuclear weapons would have been catastrophic against Ukraine circa 2014 (poorly equipped), Ukraine circa 2022 (well equipped) and basically any non-nuclear country whether they're rich or poor.
    - mcv 5y ago
      It would have been even more catastrophic against a nuclear-capable country.
      - smcl 5y ago
        I guess we should be glad that the military aid was in the forms of anti-aircraft and anti-tank systems and such then
  - mcv 5y ago
    It's not immediately obvious to me that Russian nukes are still in perfect working order. From what I understand, they require quite a bit of maintenance, and even the US had to relearn how to maintain their nuclear weapons at some point. It's not a chance I would want to take, but I think it's entirely possible that much of the Russian nuclear stockpile might not work anymore.
Swenrekcah 5y ago
It is baseless. The West isn't thrusting these weapons into the unwilling hands of Ukranians. Ukrainians want these weapons to defend themselves against the expansionist Putin regime. Ukranians (the regular people) have in the past 10 years overthrown a Kremlin puppet government, elected a pro-Nato, pro-EU government and have now joined their armed forces to literally fight the Russian army off its lands. It is the regular people of the old Soviet block that want to join Nato.
mschuster91 5y ago
> How else do you think Europe's poorest country has been able to withstand an invasion from Europe's strongest army so well? Russia is not the strongest army of Europe. And it never has been for the last decades, as the war currently shows: - Most of the command chain, not just in the military but especially in the intelligence services has been replaced by yes-men too afraid to report the actual truth to their superiors. Had Putin had decent intel, I highly doubt he'd have gone through with invading Ukraine in the first place, or at the very least with a different tactic. Russian leaders clearly thought they would be welcomed by Ukrainians as liberators, so the Russians didn't start off with embedding special-ops teams weeks if not months before to liquidate the Ukrainian leadership or to destroy critical defensive infrastructure. - ETA: Russia additionally lost a huge amount of intel in the last years after the Western countries yeeted a lot of their embassy staff for being spies as a consequence of the various sometimes extremely dangerous murders and murder attempts (Litvinenko, Skripal, Navalny, Gluschkow and a lot of others). - Their equipment is aged - just look at the various OSINT Twitter accounts, most of what is destroyed or taken over by the Ukrainian Tractor Army is old Soviet-era shit. The sightings of any modern heavy tanks or other weaponry are very very low. - Their equipment is extremely shoddily maintained. The stuff hasn't been moved around for years, parts were taken to repair other equipment and replacement parts been replaced by inferior quality parts (e.g. tires). The result is that stuff breaks down left and right. - The soldiers sometimes aren't even soldiers. A big part of why the invasion went so sideways so quickly was that the second and third waves were not soldiers - they were OMON or SOBR units, glorified riot cops. Or conscripts being forced to fight in Ukraine. Or ordinary people being press-ganged [1]. - The soldiers are paid shit. No matter where you gather reports from - from Russia over Belarus to Ukraine, there is a common pattern of soldiers selling fuel, weapons, ammo and spare parts for vodka and food, of lootings, of rape. - The soldiers are completely untrained or severely undertrained. There are videos circulating that show just how much difficulty the soldiers have in driving a tank - obviously they are going to run into difficulties, and they did so when they had to go off the street and into the treacherous half-frozen, half muddy ground. Not to mention the discipline issues from above. - The soldiers are badly equipped. Partially because vital equipment like encrypted radios or navigation systems have never been bought (because the order got reduced somewhere along the chain and someone bought a nice new car instead), partially because it has been stolen and "privatized", partially because no one gave a damn (many years expired MREs). All together, that makes for pretty low morale and fighting efficiency. And a good laugh if every highway sign points to The Hague! - There is a massive lack of infantry as it is in every other army of the world. Sending in a column of tanks undefended is a clear suicide mission, and yet Russia didn't have another choice - the result was that Ukrainians, sometimes equipped with literal WW2 panzerfausts or over 100 years old machine guns [1] had it as easy as shooting on clay practice targets... the tanks couldn't fight back, they couldn't move, they were prime targets. Add to that that the equipment is in a bad condition which means in addition to tanks shot down by the Ukrainian Army, the tank columns were constantly stopped by one of their tanks breaking down, meaning that the following tanks were even easier for the Ukrainian Army to blast to pieces. - Only God knows what's up with Russian anti-aircraft defense. Really. There is no explanation why the Russian Army fails to defend itself against the Turkish-made Bayraktar drones... a fact that Ukrainian soldiers quickly turned into a war song. - The Russian Army seems to have been a lot more posturing and grand-standing than actual fighting experience. There were regular bloodbaths caused by them over the last decades, yes, but if you look at where the Russians and their goons fought it's no surprise: some backwater piss poor countries with hardly any men and weapons to fight against. Now that they are fighting in Ukraine, which propped up its army and its militia (such as the infamous Azov batallion) since 2014, the Russian Army sees a real conflict for the first time. And finally, Ukrainians have something worth fighting for, and every war crime the Russians commit only incentivizes them more: their lives and freedom. Nothing what Russia does can even closely match that. The Ukrainians will be fighting until their last breath with every bit of power they have - and their leadership is symbolizing that every single day. [1] https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/03/some-really-old-weapons-are-making-a-comeback-in-ukraine/ https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/03/some-really-old-weapons-... [2] https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-crisis-officials-in-russian-backed-regions-press-gang-older-men-into-their-militias-12548345 https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-crisis-officials-in-russi...
drran 5y ago
Military help sent from West to Ukraine is at about 1/30 of military equipment sold by Germany and France to RF. Ukraine (literary "Area of Defense") has better morality and better men because of huigh numbers of wars fought in last thousand+ years.

by valvar 5y ago

mcv 5y ago

And a good thing they did. Without it, Russia might have easily conquered Ukraine. Every argument against NATO, US or EU supporting eastern European countries is easily disproven by the current situation in Ukraine. Russia under Putin clearly is an expansionist aggressor.

nicoburns 5y ago

The idea that NATO would actually invade Russia seems pretty baseless. They aren’t even prepared to defend Ukraine directly.

ridiculous_leke 5y ago
With Ukraine under the hood, it wouldn't have been that difficult. I know that NATO is a defensive alliance but it can go an offensive if members agree. Not saying that this is a valid argument for Russia invading Ukraine.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > With Ukraine under the hood, it wouldn't have been that difficult. Yes, it would have. Ukraine joining NATO doesn't neutralize Russia’s nuclear arsenal. > I know that NATO is a defensive alliance but it can go an offensive if members agree. Sure, and it has, twice; it's also participated in an reactive invasion based on its defensive mission. NATO’s official defensive purpose isn’t why a NATO design on invading Russia is implausible, but it remains implausible.

smcl 5y ago

> Europe's strongest army The conflict has been horrific and bloody and I do not want to make light of this. But I think what we have seen over the last month or so should dispel any notion that Russia had anything close to the strongest military of the European countries.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
If you take into account their nuclear capability they obviously do.
- smcl 5y ago
  Ukraine thankfully haven’t had to defend themselves against Russian nuclear weapons though. But if you go down that road, it would’ve made no difference whether the EU gave them absolutely nothing, or even twice the amount of military aid they have already given. Use of nuclear weapons would have been catastrophic against Ukraine circa 2014 (poorly equipped), Ukraine circa 2022 (well equipped) and basically any non-nuclear country whether they're rich or poor.
  - mcv 5y ago
    It would have been even more catastrophic against a nuclear-capable country.
    - smcl 5y ago
      I guess we should be glad that the military aid was in the forms of anti-aircraft and anti-tank systems and such then
- mcv 5y ago
  It's not immediately obvious to me that Russian nukes are still in perfect working order. From what I understand, they require quite a bit of maintenance, and even the US had to relearn how to maintain their nuclear weapons at some point. It's not a chance I would want to take, but I think it's entirely possible that much of the Russian nuclear stockpile might not work anymore.

Swenrekcah 5y ago

It is baseless. The West isn't thrusting these weapons into the unwilling hands of Ukranians. Ukrainians want these weapons to defend themselves against the expansionist Putin regime. Ukranians (the regular people) have in the past 10 years overthrown a Kremlin puppet government, elected a pro-Nato, pro-EU government and have now joined their armed forces to literally fight the Russian army off its lands. It is the regular people of the old Soviet block that want to join Nato.

mschuster91 5y ago

> How else do you think Europe's poorest country has been able to withstand an invasion from Europe's strongest army so well? Russia is not the strongest army of Europe. And it never has been for the last decades, as the war currently shows: - Most of the command chain, not just in the military but especially in the intelligence services has been replaced by yes-men too afraid to report the actual truth to their superiors. Had Putin had decent intel, I highly doubt he'd have gone through with invading Ukraine in the first place, or at the very least with a different tactic. Russian leaders clearly thought they would be welcomed by Ukrainians as liberators, so the Russians didn't start off with embedding special-ops teams weeks if not months before to liquidate the Ukrainian leadership or to destroy critical defensive infrastructure. - ETA: Russia additionally lost a huge amount of intel in the last years after the Western countries yeeted a lot of their embassy staff for being spies as a consequence of the various sometimes extremely dangerous murders and murder attempts (Litvinenko, Skripal, Navalny, Gluschkow and a lot of others). - Their equipment is aged - just look at the various OSINT Twitter accounts, most of what is destroyed or taken over by the Ukrainian Tractor Army is old Soviet-era shit. The sightings of any modern heavy tanks or other weaponry are very very low. - Their equipment is extremely shoddily maintained. The stuff hasn't been moved around for years, parts were taken to repair other equipment and replacement parts been replaced by inferior quality parts (e.g. tires). The result is that stuff breaks down left and right. - The soldiers sometimes aren't even soldiers. A big part of why the invasion went so sideways so quickly was that the second and third waves were not soldiers - they were OMON or SOBR units, glorified riot cops. Or conscripts being forced to fight in Ukraine. Or ordinary people being press-ganged [1]. - The soldiers are paid shit. No matter where you gather reports from - from Russia over Belarus to Ukraine, there is a common pattern of soldiers selling fuel, weapons, ammo and spare parts for vodka and food, of lootings, of rape. - The soldiers are completely untrained or severely undertrained. There are videos circulating that show just how much difficulty the soldiers have in driving a tank - obviously they are going to run into difficulties, and they did so when they had to go off the street and into the treacherous half-frozen, half muddy ground. Not to mention the discipline issues from above. - The soldiers are badly equipped. Partially because vital equipment like encrypted radios or navigation systems have never been bought (because the order got reduced somewhere along the chain and someone bought a nice new car instead), partially because it has been stolen and "privatized", partially because no one gave a damn (many years expired MREs). All together, that makes for pretty low morale and fighting efficiency. And a good laugh if every highway sign points to The Hague! - There is a massive lack of infantry as it is in every other army of the world. Sending in a column of tanks undefended is a clear suicide mission, and yet Russia didn't have another choice - the result was that Ukrainians, sometimes equipped with literal WW2 panzerfausts or over 100 years old machine guns [1] had it as easy as shooting on clay practice targets... the tanks couldn't fight back, they couldn't move, they were prime targets. Add to that that the equipment is in a bad condition which means in addition to tanks shot down by the Ukrainian Army, the tank columns were constantly stopped by one of their tanks breaking down, meaning that the following tanks were even easier for the Ukrainian Army to blast to pieces. - Only God knows what's up with Russian anti-aircraft defense. Really. There is no explanation why the Russian Army fails to defend itself against the Turkish-made Bayraktar drones... a fact that Ukrainian soldiers quickly turned into a war song. - The Russian Army seems to have been a lot more posturing and grand-standing than actual fighting experience. There were regular bloodbaths caused by them over the last decades, yes, but if you look at where the Russians and their goons fought it's no surprise: some backwater piss poor countries with hardly any men and weapons to fight against. Now that they are fighting in Ukraine, which propped up its army and its militia (such as the infamous Azov batallion) since 2014, the Russian Army sees a real conflict for the first time. And finally, Ukrainians have something worth fighting for, and every war crime the Russians commit only incentivizes them more: their lives and freedom. Nothing what Russia does can even closely match that. The Ukrainians will be fighting until their last breath with every bit of power they have - and their leadership is symbolizing that every single day. [1] https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/03/some-really-old-weapons-are-making-a-comeback-in-ukraine/ https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/03/some-really-old-weapons-... [2] https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-crisis-officials-in-russian-backed-regions-press-gang-older-men-into-their-militias-12548345 https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-crisis-officials-in-russi...

drran 5y ago

Military help sent from West to Ukraine is at about 1/30 of military equipment sold by Germany and France to RF. Ukraine (literary "Area of Defense") has better morality and better men because of huigh numbers of wars fought in last thousand+ years.