The atacms strikes will help in kursk, but less so in the east imo. Maybe this will mess up those logistics as well, but it seems too little too late.
Just politically, It isn't parity to ten thousand soldiers and 60% of their shells being North Korean. North Korea is at war in Europe, and this is not a commensurate response.
Lifting the restrictions now after Russia's logistics have already retreated also took the bite out of their potential. It should have been a surprise, overnight, when the Russian airforce was still relatively concentrated and unconcerned.
Better than nothing; I hope it changes something, for a time at least.
Abandoning Ukraine risks emboldening Russia to continue their conquest of Eastern Europe - which, ultimately, increases the risk of nuclear war anyway, only with a stronger Russia with even more leverage. Being nuclear armed should not give a country license to seize any territory they wish.
You think letting Russia harass and invade their former vazal states is without risk? They've occupied eastern Europe until 1989. With the invasion of Crimea in 2014 they've basically only not harassed and not occupied eastern European countries for only 25 years. The only thing which provokes Russia is weakness.
It's for security: It's less risky now to fight Russia then later, after they've conquered more people and territory, and have political momentum.
It's for security again: If Russia wins, it greatly damages the international order which has prevented wide-scale war for generations. Remember the world before 1945.
It's for people: The lives, freedom, rights, and prosperity of tens of millions of people are at stake.
With fairness to these "emotional lunatics", their assumption that Russia would be too afraid to attack NATO territories has thus far been proven right.
As long as we are able to quibble about on the internets, ye, we haven't come to lobbing those around yet. Correct. Always a correct argument if it makes ot to the servers. At this point it hasn't happened...
Unfortunately for Russia, the "Final Warning" strategy has since been translated into English and is therefore ineffective against modern NATO regiments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China's_final_warning
America doesn't negotiate with terrorism, only strategic arms reduction. Russia cannot desire for nuclear war because it cannot be used as a bartering tool; ICBMs are merely an expensive pen for signing their own death warrant.
Better to be dead then to be a slave in russia- which almost always means you will become a slave dragged against your will to the trenches to die in another enslavement campaign. So the choice boils down russia or not russia - and beeing dead either way.
I think it reduces the risk of a nuclear war. The thing to understand about Russia is that all their "red lines" are empty talk, and what they really respect is force. Ukraine appeared weak to Putin, and that's why he invaded. Only way to peacefully coexist with Russia is by either becoming their puppet, or having enough strength to make an invasion seem obviously bad idea.
IMO the best way to prevent a nuclear war with Russia would be supplying all its neighbours with big pile of nuclear weapons. Then they would have nowhere to invade without risking their own destruction.
I think that Russia (Putin) thought that ukraine would collapse within days and it would be a walkover.
But it wasn’t and Zelensky bound his people together to resist the Russian army. The Russian army showed its capabilities and more surprisingly it’s huge limitations.
The oligarchy in Russia may well determine that getting rid of Putin might be less risky than letting him escalate the situation, especially if he starts talking about using even battlefield nukes.
they need to capture as much Russian soil as they can, and when the orange man and the other clown tell them to freeze the border, Ukraine can say sure, if you insist!
whatever they're going to do, they have two months. I really hope they manage to get a reasonable deal out of this. I personally think giving up land should come with full NATO membership or at least the kind of mutual defence that the UK signed with Finland and Sweden on their way into NATO.
You really think people who are dragged to the trenches by press gangs [1] will "capture soil"? The video is by RFERL, BTW, as Western as it gets. Not "FSB propaganda".
It is quite logical. Budapest Memorandum signed in 1994 where UK, USA and Russia guaranteed sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine in exchange for nuclear weapons on Ukrainian soil which remained there after dissolution of USSR. If Russia wants to renege on Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine should get their nukes back.
Also you can see another side of the coin - Iran and DPRK would need to be insane to get rid of their nukes because only reason why big powers won't touch them is the nuclear poison pill, which Ukrainians gave up and look where they are.
Control is very relevant here. The hardest part of nuclear weapon - plutonium core - was there. The fact that you don't have access keys from electronics which controls explosives around the plutonium core is kind of non-issue for a state actor.
Trump wants everyone to get nuclear weapons. He wants a world of transactional big players and unreliable alliances with shakedowns. That is a world were everyone scrambles for a nuke, naturally. And pakistan is broke- you can get one there relatively cheap.
The USA and Israel regard Iran as enough of a threat that they won't allow it to obtain nuclear weapons. Strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities are one of the primary missions that B-2 bomber crews train for. There's no intent to seize Iranian territory, they'll just wreck everything and leave.
Sad to say but the only way to be taken seriously and avoid military incursions/invasions is to hold nuclear weapons.
I do wonder how nuclear disarmament will continue when it looks like obtaining nuclear arms is one of the few ways to truly achieve sovereignty and not rely on the benefactors of your neighbors.
Curious if anyone has reading materials about this.
Nuclear disarmament is over because, otherwise, you’re putting your nation’s sovereignty in the hands of the US electorate. Would you trust them with your life and future? I certainly wouldn’t.
If you can’t trust superpowers (including the US), you have to protect and defend yourself. That’s the nuclear way (and perhaps a bit more percentage of GDP towards defense for everyone).
In a civil world, it wouldn’t be necessary, but based on who keeps floating to the top of the power hierarchy, it’s mandatory. Maybe a nation worth trusting will rise again, but I’m not hopeful.
My guess is, that if USA will keep playing around and pretend that Ukraine is somebody else's problem to solve, they will find out that Eastern Europe can make a nuke too. Then what is USA going to do? Sanction Europeans? Then there is no reason to continue sanctioning Iran from Europeans perspective for exactly same thing.
Which Eastern European country do you mean? Most are already NATO members. Of those that aren't, Belarus is already a Russian client state, Serbia is too far away, and Moldova is too poor to do anything.
I am sure that Poland would be eager to develop a nuclear arsenal. Countries like Germany, Italy and Turkey could also easily develop one if they thought that the NATO nuclear umbrella was unreliable.
What's the point of NATO membership, when chief elect is openly saying that he is not going to help if Russia will make move into Baltics.
Personally I would expect that Poland with cooperation with Czech Republic (they have whole nuclear research facility north of Prague) would be able to do it in short amount of time - less than 5 years.
France has nukes... And my semi-educated guess would be, a NATO where a Putin-puppet leaves a US-shaped hole might get France exporting its nukes to the east quickly, in exchange for some clout.
What deterrent? Putin doesn't care about that and would use those warheads (largest stockpile of warheads) if necessary even as soon as Ukraine tries to attempt to get a deterrent.
It is bad enough that the US is already in a proxy war and that does not help at all and arming Ukraine with nuclear warheads just further escalates the risk into another world war.
The US is in a proxy war akin to the French role in the US's founding war, the revolution. But different, in that the fear is that one defeated country dominoes into a wider European and cross Atlantic war, i.e. ww3. Not protecting Ukrainian sovereignity is seen as not protecting polish or Romanian independence. It isn't seen like Vietnam; it is seen as China after the mukden incident or Czechoslovakia had they fought a Nazi invasion.
Elements of the Ukranian government have apparently sort of quietly hinted that if they don't receive sufficient conventional military aid then they'll be forced to develop nuclear weapons as a last resort. Ukraine has officially denied this, but it's impossible to know how they'll react as Russia conquers more and more territory. Ukrainian leaders are quite aware that the only meaningful guarantees of continued sovereignty would be NATO membership or having their own nukes. Otherwise even if the current war is settled with some sort of truce, Russia could just rearm and attack again in a few years.
Given the state of post-collapse Soviet bookkeeping I also wouldn't be surprised if Ukraine actually does still have some warheads kept in secret. The problem though is those may not be enough against a country which spent the last half-century preparing for a war involving thousands of warheads.
Lets not forget that russias "subversion" of europes politics and culture is also relentless. The fifth column would continue the attack from inside, even if a treaty was signed. AFD and BS in germany come to mind, Front National in France, etc. They have so many useful idiots, with anit-imperial ideas useful for the last empire standing.
The OP seems to be new here and wasn't aware about the HN guidelines. After looking at this article, it can be found that its neither a phenomenon and is already covered on TV, just like the election was.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Likely response is bombing whatever is left of Ukrainian power generation and potentially arming the Houthis.
The analysis I’ve seen indicates that these weapons will not fundamentally alter the course of the war.
Kursk was a gamble to improve Ukraine’s negotiating position, which has gotten consistently worse.
Maybe I'm wrong, but with the river north of the Ukrainian border, it seemed like they wanted that as new easier to maintain defensive line.
The defenses in the north were affected by incompetence or corruption, so the push north came across a little like shoring up their positions to need fewer men in the long run.
Just politically, It isn't parity to ten thousand soldiers and 60% of their shells being North Korean. North Korea is at war in Europe, and this is not a commensurate response.
Lifting the restrictions now after Russia's logistics have already retreated also took the bite out of their potential. It should have been a surprise, overnight, when the Russian airforce was still relatively concentrated and unconcerned.
Better than nothing; I hope it changes something, for a time at least.
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