And it ****ing sucks that it could.
Yes. Think of the memes.World War 3?
Cut Russia off. Off and off. No SWIFT, no trade WHATSOEVER. Put a ****ing sweater on and let them choke on their natural gas. Nationalize ALL Russian nationals' money in western banks. Lend and Lease to Ukraine everything you can possibly spare.I am not sure what the alternative is though. World War 3?
InshallahJudging by the open source info, I'm surprised the Ukrainian army can organize and stage counter-attacks. If they manage to establish defensive positions, this may turn into Russia's Schlieffen plan.
My two coins.
Fog of War issues for now, but Wiki pins both forces at around 200k at the moment. And several of those fronts are difficult terrain for ground units at the moment.The Russians are far superior, attacking on multiple fronts with the entire military arsenal.
Governments move, and the largest cities are worst thing you can attack.It's a big country but they only need to conquer the largest cities and take over parliament.
This might've worked 20 years ago, but since the West has spent the last 30 years propping up crackpot Chinese communists, sanctions are largely a meme at this point. Russia and China signed a pact a few weeks ago saying they'd back each other up, and while this won't amount to a catastrophic global war, it means that Russia can't truly be cut off from international commodity and capital streams, since nobody wants to do anything about China. Mass sanctions with Russia will probably just lead to them accelerating their pivot to China, and Russia is less dependent on everyone else than Europe is on Russia's oil and natural gas. Putin is clearly willing to sacrifice short term revenues for long term goals, and he knew the sanctions were coming, and yet acted anyway. So I don't know how effective they would be, honestly.Cut Russia off. Off and off. No SWIFT, no trade WHATSOEVER. Put a ****ing sweater on and let them choke on their natural gas. Nationalize ALL Russian nationals' money in western banks. Lend and Lease to Ukraine everything you can possibly spare.
The Russian state understands force and force only. Every sign of weakness only encourages it to go further.
Jack Watling, of the Royal United Services Institute estimate the Ukrainian forces at 125,600.Such a defeatist, the Ukrainian army isn't completely incapable. I suppose we'll see how it turns out though. Russia is a big country and, large as their army is, they've been suffering from economic instability for a while and, from a strategic perspective, they can only commit a small portion of their forces to the Ukraine. There's a ton of misinformation out there right now but some of the reports seem to suggest not all things are going according to plan straight out of the gate.
Ukrainians may actually do two things surrender or bleed out. When it will move to guerilla in the cities this will be a bloody mess but may end up inflicting heavy casualties on Russians as well. I wish them all to stay safe and pity the victims, but on the other hand, part of me wishes they could resist a little longer. The longer it takes - Putin will have a bigger headache.I doubt the Ukrainian military can do much. The Russians are far superior, attacking on multiple fronts with the entire military arsenal.
It's a big country but they only need to conquer the largest cities and take over parliament.
Couldn't agree more but self-preservation is exactly what's at stake here and if that is not enough - I don't know what is.I can understand if Americans or somesuch don't want to get involved in another conflict far away they don't understand. But especially for us Eastern Euros, this is not only a matter of self preservation, but dignity and soul. If we let Ukraine fall without doing all that is in our power to prevent it, then maybe we deserve the Moscow knout.
This doesn't seem realistic to me. I have seen varying estimates but at most Russia has 200k troops in Ukraine right now. That's comparable to how many troops the US had in Iraq, which has a population comparable to Ukraine but is smaller (around 2/3rds of the territory that Ukraine has). I think Russia will have a hard time keeping hold of Ukraine, let alone move forward to invade other countries.If they get away with Ukraine, they will just keep going west until they hit resistance or the Atlantic, whichever happens first.