Even if I was to concede this last point to you, at the end of the day, you're asking me to be okay with sending $100 billion more in U.S. taxpayer dollars to something that you: #1 don't know (by your own admission) is going to work out; #2 involves the slaughter of tens of thousands more soldiers; #3 against a threat you regularly belittle as woefully ineffective on the battlefield (ie what's the big concern?) Hope is not a strategy. That's why @uftaipan's position confounds me greatly. In order for it to work out, we have to hope Russia will give up. That's not an actual military strategy we will see play out in real life on the battlefield. It's more like something you would see in a propaganda film.
1. we don’t necessarily need Ukraine to “win” for the money to be well spent. We just need Russia to “not win”. Either way, it leads to the continued destruction of the Russian conventional military and continues to strengthen nato and the western worlds commitment to defense among a myriad of other benefits. 2. people are dying if we spend the money or not. It’s sort of a silly point. If we spend the money it certainly means more of the dead are Russian which is better than the alternative. It’s war, sorry, people die. 3. It’s a threat we like to make fun of as being much less effective than we thought, but that’s like laughing at Georgia for almost losing to Missouri a couple years ago in football (apologize for the dumb analogy). The last thing we want is an aggressive experienced and motivated adversary who’s industrial base is picking up speed to have a resounding victory and suddenly be right on the doorstep of NATO. 4. so yeah, we have to hope, just like the Russians did in Vietnam and we did in Afghanistan when Russia invaded, that with enough military support the larger aggressor will suffer enough losses to decide it isn’t worth it anymore. That’s how war works. You have to break the will of your enemy. Humans don’t do “total war”. We don’t usually fight till one side has zero people. War is about breaking the enemies will to fight. So you can call it hope, but it’s pretty much how most wars are fought. You either remove the other sides capability to fight which we can’t or won’t do here or you remove their will to fight.
When are we going to see this great turn-around ? As it stands, NATO is getting weaker and Russia is getting stronger.
One story I like is told by Nassim Taleb about the start of the Lebanese civil war. His uncle was the chauffeur of a high up Lebanese state official. They were in the car when the conflict started. His uncle said, who knows when this fighting will end? The official in the back said, oh we know. It will be over within 6 months tops. The war of course raged for 15 years. Taleb’s takeaway was that neither man knew anything about what was going to happen, but at least his uncle admitted that.
The war is working JUST FINE when Ukraine has plenty of ammunition. Russia can't advance, and Ukraine is killing off several times as many Russians as they are losing. A third of Russia's Black Sea navy has gone to the bottom, and a huge number of Russian military aircraft have bitten the dust. Russia has lost several thousand tanks, a massive number of armored personnel carriers, tons of SAM equipment, and other hardware. All of that hardware can not be used against other potential opponents, or to threaten other nations. Russia has also lost a large number of its military specialists, like their special forces soldiers. In the grand scheme of things, $100 billion is nothing. We spend about eight times that much every year on something called National Defense. And, guess what? Russia is one of the MAIN REASONS we spend money on something called National Defense. And yes, I have already demonstrated in this thread that the U.S. will save $2.55 trillion over the next decade if we continue supporting Ukraine. That is a 25:1 return on investment for this $100 billion. If you were to ask an investor if he would take a 25:1 return on investment that paid out over the next decade, he'd knock you down to get to his broker. There are several big concerns with the possibility of Russia winning this war. 1) They'll learn from their mistakes and gain experience. 2) They will profit greatly ($12 trillion from mineral wealth alone) from this war. 3) They will weaponize food production from the world's breadbasket, and starving third world nations will do whatever Russia asks (including making trouble for the U.S.) to survive. We certainly can't feed the entire world from U.S. agriculture. 4) They may have other nations lined up for an invasion (Moldova, etc.). 5) We will be having an arms race with two nations instead of one, now that China has discovered nationalism. You seem very concerned about the slaughter of tens of thousands of soldiers. If Ukraine continues to fight with dwindling ammunition supplies, they may lose hundreds of thousands of soldiers. And when Russia takes over Ukraine, they may execute hundreds of thousands of people. Russia has certainly demonstrated that the Geneva Conventions mean nothing to them. They are more than willing to kill to get cooperation. How does a humanitarian like you feel about that? No, we don't have to "hope" Russia will give up. They will, of course, give up eventually (or someone will put a bullet in the back of Putin's head and end the source of the problem). But just by fighting Russia (with actual ammunition), Ukraine is already weakening Russia, and that is a win for us (and the rest of civilization). No country can continue fighting indefinitely without a major sponsorship from an outside country, and we have not seen that happen with Russia. North Korea is dumping older artillery shells on Russia, and China is keeping a lid on the few things they are smuggling into Russia. And neither is donating things without receiving payment in return. Ukraine is continuing to fight with support from Europe (and formerly from the U.S.), and neither Europe nor the U.S. is expecting to be paid for the assistance. Russia's economy is much smaller than Europe's or the U.S., so there is no doubt that they can't continue fighting many more years, especially if Ukraine is provided with enough weapons to defeat Russia. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to easily defeat a major rival/enemy with no cost to the U.S. in terms of U.S. lives, and the immature/treasonous republicans in Congress are blowing it because they are worried about nickels and dimes. So, to summarize: 1) You don't understand numbers or investments, and why it is wise to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to save trillions of dollars. 2) You don't understand Russian policies toward slaughtering of people and your numbers problem continues with a willingness to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of people to save tens of thousands of soldiers (who will probably be the first to be executed after Russia wins). Any questions?
I think we now know who you are. You and your brother, Duggar's Dad, are Georg and Yortuk Festrunk, a.k.a. two Wild and Crazy Guys, except from Russia. You post lies and propaganda to get your hands on a few rubles, and go to the Swingers Bar to chase the foxes (hence your name). Are you chasing the American foxes, or the Russian foxes this week?
Russian troops have been caught executing prisoners of war, something our more mentally disturbed posters seem to find amusing. The Russians were nice enough to share footage of the carnage on-line. Russian Troops Caught Executing POWs as Kyiv Marks Grim Anniversary
More Russian troll farm propaganda: https://www.reuters.com/world/europ...-ground-down-by-relentless-russia-2024-02-21/ KRAMATORSK, Ukraine, Feb 21 (Reuters) - As the Ukraine war enters its third year, the infantry of 59th Brigade are confronting a bleak reality: they're running out of soldiers and ammunition to resist their Russian invaders. One platoon commander who goes by his call sign "Tygr" estimated that just 60-70% of the several thousand men in the brigade at the start of the conflict were still serving. The rest had been killed, wounded or signed off for reasons such as old age or illness. Heavy casualties at the hands of Russian forces have been compounded by dreadful conditions on the eastern front, with frozen soil turning into thick mud in unseasonably warm temperatures, playing havoc with soldiers' health. "The weather is rain, snow, rain, snow. People get ill with simple flu or angina as a result. They're out of action for some time, and there is nobody to replace them," said a company commander in the brigade with the call sign "Limuzyn". "The most immediate problem in every unit is lack of people."
Ukraine is struggling against a larger more powerful adversary? You don’t say… but eff us for helping right? Jeeeeeez
Chem, the treasonous Republicans ARE NOT withholding funds to save nickels and dimes, they are doing it for political reasons, and of course at the whim of their maniac leader. The Republicans are not "fiscal conservatives" that myth went out the window years ago, they are simply traitors.
yep, I'm sooooo glad my moral compass drives me to want to stand-up to a country that uses state-sponsored human atrocities as a instrument of war in an invasion into another country. And I want to stand up to stopping kidnapping of Ukrainian children by the thousands.
