Russia and Ukraine flashpoint

[Bofferbrauer2]

Zkuq said:

Ryuu96 said:

Just feels like the West wants Ukraine to win but not too quickly out of fear of what a quick collapse would do to Russia so instead hope for a slow bleed out of Russia and the delusional hope that Putin will eventually see sense, that and some countries are unwilling to actually take hits to their military, despite the fact that nobody threatens them directly and the only one who could (Russia) is currently fighting Ukraine. We spend a gross amount of money on military and it feels like it's all just for show if the time we should actually be using it most, we aren't.

What I've been thinking is that perhaps the West doesn't want Ukraine to win. Instead, perhaps the idea is to force a stalemate by providing Ukraine just enough equipment to not seriously threatedn Russia, so both parties can claim a bit of victory (Ukraine for keeping its independence, Russia for taking land), keeping Russia stabilized. But the West can't explicitly force Ukraine to accept a stalemate, so it has to be done the hard way, i.e. via actions instead of words. I'm just not sure many decision-makers are actually interested in making Russia lose due to instability concerns.

I'm not convinced this is the case, and perhaps the West is indeed still hoping for Russia to lose. I just haven't been all that sure about it in a while.

Ryuu96 said:

So many things we could have done better, so many things we can still do better, instead we still today debate about red lines and are unwilling to put ourselves in a fraction of an uncomfortable position as Ukraine is putting themselves in for us. We then moan about being tired because the war could last years despite us not doing everything in our power to speed the conclusion of this war up, the reason it is lasting years is because of our reluctance to give Ukraine what it needs.

This is also potentially another factor. The public support for supporting Ukraine might have been there a year ago, but it feels like significant support for Ukraine is much more difficult at this point in time, and it's probably not going to get much better. A lot of the momentum for support has been lost, I think.

I think the problem is another altogether.

European countries have mostly only sent their surplus equipment to Ukraine so far. Most countries are now running very low on surplus and don't have much to send anymore that they themselves don't need right now - especially with most countries investing more into equipment and expanding their armies again, so new production will go to them first, too. At the same time the US Republicans are trying to stop any further shipments to Ukraine, so there's also less coming from that side.

In this regard, the German Ringtausch program was actually an ingenious idea: country A sends older stuff to Ukraine and country B will replace this with newly produced equipment. If this could be expanded to EU level (with the EU financing the replacement bill) Europe could both bring higher support to Ukraine and reinvigorate the armament industries across Europe, accelerating the modernization (and bringing a degree of standardization to boot) of Europe's Armies.

At the same time, they are building factories for military equipment within Ukraine now, but until those are up and running, shipments need to go on unimpeded.