so basically a month from now we’re like 95% looking at one of these two possibilities:
- putin deposed by a coup
- we’re all dead or wandering a postapocalyptic glass parking lot wasteland
right?
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Calling it now:
- Ukraine in NATO/EU
- Russia out of Donbas with no conditions
- Crimea to Russia
Both parties walk away very unhappy = very good deal.
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Wenceslas Square today
A closer view
https://twitter.com/ResidesIn/status/1497930733603672069/photo/1
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I don’t know where you are getting your numbers. Military reserves and defense budgets are equal.
Russian move does not signal intent to use nuclear weapons
Gordon Corera
Security correspondent, BBC News
President Putin has ordered his military command to put nuclear forces on a "special’ state of alert.
This is after what Moscow calls “aggressive statements” by Nato countries.
Russia’s leader had already issued a coded warning that he was willing to use nuclear weapons as he began his invasion of Ukraine.
Last week, he warned that “whoever tries to hinder us” would see consequences “you have never seen in your history”.
These words were widely interpreted as signalling a threat to use nuclear weapons if the West stood in his way.
The very public shift to high alert status is a way for Moscow to send a warning. Moving to alert status is likely to make it easier to launch weapons more quickly. But it does not mean there is a current intent to use them.
Russia has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world but also knows that Nato also has enough to destroy Russia if they were used.
But the aim is likely to try and deter Nato support for Ukraine by creating fears over how far he is willing to go and creating ambiguity over what kind of support for Ukraine he will consider to be too much.
Probably gonna have to give Russia part of Donbas to give him a “win” so he can accept. Meanwhile sanctions will probably continue to stay in place.
Crimea’s the win, everything else is an L. I don’t see how Ukraine could ever accept some kind of Minsk III deal.
Incidentally, shouldn’t India or China or somebody be trying to broker peace here? Get on the stage guys!
According to wikipedia active personnel is
Ukraine 245000
Finland 21500
Big military takeaway so far seems to be that tanks have no place on a modern battlefield full of javelins and UAVs with anti tank missiles. Video after video after video of burning tanks and other armored vehicles all destroyed in a line
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Military reserves are the numbers you should compare.
Yea it’s starting to seem like that. I don’t see a way for Putin to save face at this point, shy of flattening Kyiv. Best hope is Ukraine holds on long enough, and sanctions hit hard enough to cripple Russian economy, causing a revolt at home for Putin.
They’re waiting to see which way the wind blows before taking a stance.
China would love to see Russia annex territory with no repercussions.
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Tank designer: spends years and years and billions of dollars to design some exotic reactive armor to defeat the newest warheads
Missile designer: reprograms the missile to hit the tank from a slightly different angle
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Norway, Sweden and Denmark also closes airspace for Russian aircraft!
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Official wartime strength of the Finnish Defense forces is 280000, only slightly more than Ukraine’s fulltime force.
The reserves are all former conscripts up to 50 years old (60 for officers). How good of a fighter do you expect a middle-age store manager from Turku to be?
I wonder if those US predictions of Kyiv falling in 1-4 days were thrown out there as a way of embarrassing the Russians if they took 4 days or longer to do it when the US knew it could be much longer or not happen at all.
That can only happen if there is no resistance.
Given how things look now, you might be right. But the hard part is knowing that at the time. And it’s a matter of degree. It’s not as if nothing was done: Biden threatened “sweeping” sanctions in early December. He was talking about personal sanctions on Putin in late January. I’m as ignorant of finance as it’s possible to be but I started hearing about SWIFT weeks ago. Weapons, including Javelin anti-tank missiles, had been at least planned to go to Ukraine since the Trump administration. Highly publicized shipments of weapons arrived in January.
As it is now, this is starting to look like a life-or-death struggle for the Putin regime, which should scare the hell out of everyone.
I agree with this but I’m not sure if more and earlier pressure wouldn’t have made it worse. He was already complaining about feeling threatened by NATO and the US and using it to justify his own threats. More pacificist people were saying Biden was going too far, that Putin was justified in feeling threatened, that Putin should be given assurances that Ukraine would not join NATO. There’s no way to know but early sanctions and more weapons delivered might have just increased his resolve and given him more propaganda ammo for invasion.
We may have been destined to end up here by some route, if not the one we took. In Putin’s mind, his stack was being whittled away. I think he’s right about that and I’d prefer he accept it and go away to allow Russia to gracefully reach a peaceful equilibrium with the West but lol me. No doubt he’s thinking about going all-in if things don’t go his way in Ukraine. Let’s hope there are talks and they produce something.
I also think, barring of course the nuclear war scenario, that China is perfectly happy to have the US and Russia entangled in a crisis in Europe while China goes about improving their status and power in the global economy. The more time countries other than China keep resurrecting old grievances, the better it is for China so they can focus on their own priorities unopposed. For example, they are relatively quietly taking over the economy of Africa.
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