War in Ukraine

Freedom ain’t free. Ukraine is certainly adding substantially to our gas prices (and probably wheat and certain other commodities where they are big exporters). But no, it isn’t a hard decision at all despite that. You don’t cave against militant tyrants for the same reason you don’t negotiate with terrorists, if you do it just encourages them to go farther, to take more hostages (in the case of Russia, to keep invading former Soviet states that are fragile democracies, before ultimately trying to push farther into Europe).

I’m sure there are some who would support communism if it meant $1.00 gas. I suggest these people do a reverse migration to Venezuela or Cuba.

 

Agree with all except the need for ground troops. I think Ukraine can win with air and naval support, and I think we need the ground troops we have to be reinforcing our NATO allies.

 

For those looking for an explanation of Russia’s motives for invading Ukraine, read the AP article below.

In clear and concise terms, Putin is looking to expand Russia’s borders. He does not intend to stop at Ukraine.

He sees himself as a modern day Peter The Great (who founded St Petersberg from land taken from Sweden).

Now we have clarity of his purpose.

3 foreigners sentenced to death fighting for Ukraine

 

I guess this is an improvement if the Russians are actually collecting their dead now

Ukraine says so many Russians were killed that the Russian army is storing dead soldiers in a meatpacking plant turned morgue (msn.com)

 

More news on Putin Illness.

Vladimir Putin needed 'urgent' medical care after 'sharp sickness, weakness and dizziness' | National Post

Not many people I’d wish ultimate demise on, but……

 

Except we support militant tyrants all the time as well as negotiate with terrorists.

The support for Ukraine is minimal outside of our allies, to think otherwise is just a continuation of the elitist attitude that the West has held for centuries. This article gives a pretty good historical overview.

Why the World Isn’t Really United Against Russia

"The scattered calls for United Nations reform that this provoked came against the backdrop of another source of Western displeasure. After exuberant claims in Washington and European capitals that the world was united against Russia’s brutal and unprovoked invasion of its neighbor, people who paused to take more careful stock of the situation began to note that in fact, much of the world was sitting on the sidelines in the dispute.

Putting China to the side because of its special relationship with Moscow, this included large nations, such as India, and small nations—and left no continent spared. In fact, a tally of their collective population would show that governments representing a majority of the human population were not taking a position one way or another in a conflict that many of them saw as having familiar echoes of a previous era’s contests between East and West."
...
"This was not the end of the insults though. To impose their authority on the few independent African states, the league—at European direction—challenged self-rule in Liberia and Ethiopia, claiming a humanitarian obligation to do so because of alleged enslavement in those states. As political scientist Adom Getachew wrote in her recent book, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, “That the charge of slavery became the idiom through which black self-government would be undermined should strike us as deeply perverse not only because of Europe’s central role in the trans-atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas but also because of the labor practices that characterized colonial Africa in the twentieth century.” Yet at the time, and for decades to come, European powers brutally imposed forced labor on their African colonies to ensure high production rates of coveted raw materials, such as rubber and cotton."
...
"This may feel like ancient history to some, but the subordination of justice for the colonized—and especially for peoples and lands subjected to slavery—is of a piece with every other chapter of history discussed here, and this topic won’t magically go away because people wish to ignore it or find it intractable or bothersome.
In fact, the current structure of the United Nations, whose impotence in the face of a moral horror like Ukraine some bemoan today, is lodged in the special rights of a select few through the U.N. Security Council. This arrangement is little different from the arguments in the Wilsonian era that the colonized were inadequately civilized to be granted full rights."

 

Of course, we have, and do, and will again. Traditionally, though, the line that those militant tyrants don’t cross is invasion of their neighbors. One example of that is Saddam Hussein. In the context of the Cold War and the rise of the Islamic Republic, we supported Hussein to a limited degree in order to facilitate a balance of power in the Middle East. A Faustian bargain to be sure, but at the time we started giving military aid to Iraq, the Baathist regime was the only thing standing between the Iranian hordes and the much, much weaker Gulf states. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, that military and political support dried up completely. And we went to war to put it right.

 

So what about when Iraq invaded Iran, or when Saudi invaded Yemen?

 

Can’t speak to the Saudi war in Yemen, though from the little I understand it’s much more of a proxy war than an invasion for conquest. Saudi Arabia’s involvement in Yemen is more akin to Russia’s involvement in Syria; they aren’t conquering it so much as supporting an unpopular regime that is friendly to them.

On Iraq, no, we did not support their invasion of Iran (not that I think we were too upset about it). Our support for Iraq, and the support from our other Middle Eastern partners, came after Iran repelled the Iraqi invasion and began to march into Iraq. They refused to negotiate an armistice unless Iraq installed a Shia revolutionary government. That was the point where the other nations started pouring military aid into Iraq. The thinking was that Saddam is a horrible dictator, but, yeah, we can’t have the Iranian Revolution rolling into Kuwait, Saudi, Bahrain et al. As I said, a Faustian bargain. And it won’t be the last one.

 

Ukraine is running out of ammunition as prospects dim on the battlefield

Ukraine has now almost completely run out of ammunition for the Soviet-era weapons systems that were the mainstay of its arsenal, and the Eastern European countries that maintained the same systems have run out of surplus supplies to donate, Danylyuk said. Ukraine urgently needs to shift to longer-range and more sophisticated Western systems, but those have only recently been committed, and in insufficient quantities to match Russia’s immense firepower, he said.

Russia is firing as many as 50,000 artillery rounds a day into Ukrainian positions, and the Ukrainians can hit back with only around 5,000 to 6,000 rounds a day, he said. The United States has committed to deliver 220,000 rounds of ammunition — enough to match Russian firepower for around four days.​

 

The Saudis are certainly directly involved, and they aim to set up a puppet government in Yemen. Presumably you wouldn't like it any more if Russia sets up puppet governments in eastern Ukraine instead of annexing that territory. And yes, Faustian bargain, we make those. What it means is that the bottom line we draw is at our self interest, not at dictators invading other countries or whatever.

Now, applying that to the Ukraine situation, is it in our self-interest to support Ukraine? Absolutely. But how much should we support it and in what ways? Well, that depends on how to maximize our own self-interest. I think we should be sending more arms, but doing less sanctions. Sending arms hurt us very little, the money funnels back to us anyway as it's our MIC who makes the arms. Sanctions hurt us a lot. While no single country or bloc within our alliance will hurt nearly as much as Russia, in aggregate we hurt heck a lot more. Moreover, we'll be hurting heck a lot more due to this war than our current greatest competitor in China, and our possible future competitor in India.

 

And this is quite demoralizing, as mentioned in many outlets. Here's an article with interviews with footsoldiers:

'In this war, the ordinary infantryman is nothing': Ukrainian soldiers in the east feel abandoned, outgunned | CBC News

"In this war, the ordinary infantryman is nothing," said Nikita. "Now it's all artillery and heavy weapons. The average soldier, he can't do anything."

"We are just cannon fodder," Mikhail interjects.
...
"[Kyiv] has not sent us any new weapons — and they're not going to," said Nikita.

"Everything new and fancy has been reserved for those other places: Kyiv, Kharkiv, the big cities. Headquarters thinks, 'Well, you [in the east] have been fighting the Russians for eight years already. You'll be fine.'"

Nikita shakes his head, before turning to even harsher words for his superiors.

"You have to understand that there are two castes in this country," he said. "There's the upper caste, and then there's us: the lower caste. We are just pawns. Nothing more. The upper caste gets the money, and we get the command: 'Forward!'

"That's how it's always worked here [in Ukraine]," he said, before emphasizing that he doesn't expect anyone to believe him.

"No one here wants to hear the truth," said Nikita. "They just want the beautiful story of how Ukraine is united. But here, we're f--ked."

 

Agreed it was always a numbers game.

 

I mentioned this earlier in thread and posted what it takes to train just one Marine in the US. And that was for basic training boot camp. From there a Marine goes on to train in his psecific MOS be infantry, communications, etc... That training can take months to complete as well. All of this happens before a Marine gets assigned to the field and even then there is training within the unit before that Marine becomes capable.

Arm a boat load of citizens and all you have is armed citizens without direction or purpose.

 

It isn’t just numbers. Existing artillery on both sides is terribly inaccurate. 20 shells, maybe one hit on target. New artillery has multtipayload warheads that are precision guided. 1 shell, 10 kills. Raw numbers do not begin to tell the story of what is coming as they implement precision artillery

And these guys being trained have battlefield experience already. They will never be as cohesive or effective as the US army but russia isnt either


Precision Guided Artillery Could Shake Up Ukraine’s War with Russia


While it may be unreasonable to expect that Ukraine would receive the most cutting-edge Excalibur weapons, such as “shaped trajectory” rounds or laser-guided Excalibur S rounds, the Ukrainians may receive standard Excalibur rounds which offer GPS-guided precision targeting to Howitzers from ranges of 30 km or more. Precision rounds would be a vast improvement for Ukraine’s artillery forces, which could then more easily destroy harder-to-reach, high-value Russian targets and specific systems and platforms identified by surveillance systems, drones, and other command and control technologies.

Yet, according to the Defense Department, Ukraine does appear to be getting laser-guided, precision rocket systems, which could have a big impact in pinpointing and destroying some of Russia’s mobile command and control systems, launchers, and even moving vehicles. Should a drone or forward-operating ground unit have the opportunity to “paint,” or light up, a Russian target with a laser designator, then rockets can be specifically sent to precisely destroy targets that are otherwise difficult to reach. Precision weapons also introduce the possibility of so-called decapitation strikes, wherein enemy “leadership” can be accurately targeted should commanders receive new intelligence about the movements and whereabouts of Russian military leaders and other decisionmakers.

 

Originally, when Iraq invaded, US policy was that it was committed to an independent Iran. That shifted, as you note.

 

Russia has guided artillery rounds as well, but the issue for both sides is quantity. There's also the issue of kill chain with any precision munitions at range. As mentioned above, for laser guided munitions you need something to paint the target. You also need the mobility to avoid counterbattery fire. In real life it's not gonna be nearly as effective as it is on paper. With the numbers we're supplying Ukraine, it probably won't make a big difference, especially if they're not being deployed to where the fiercest fighting is taking place.