That’s where the poor strategic vision of Putin has been revealed. He underestimated the situation in Ukraine because he is stuck in his XIV century ways and cannot fully understand the realities of the XXI century.
Anyone with a brain knew that Ukraine will not bend over for Putin, after fighting for eight years against his insurgency in the East, and having had Crimea stolen by him. All his previous actions burnt all the goodwill that Russia enjoyed in Ukriane, so there was no going back to the times of Yanukovych.
He miscalculated and has put Russia in a very bad situation, and he has no way out of it.
Let me correct that for you:
Anyone with a brain knew that Ukraine hasn't YET bent over for Putin, after fighting for eight years against his insurgency in the East, and having had Crimea stolen by him.
I must concur, Putin underestimated the will of Ukrainians early in the war. But there's some good news. From the look of it, Ukrainians are losing the grit to fight exponentially after their summer failure last year. We're seeing more and more footage of Ukrainian men either:
- Dead from trying to cross the river to Romania
- Getting dragged forcefully, slavery-style, inside vans to be sent to the front
This all led me to believe that they're giving up on whatever belief in victory they had and Russia only needs to keep constant pressure to further collapse their determination. The mentality of winners against odds that the likes of Viet Cong and the Taliban displayed before their victory against all odds is simply not there in the AFU.
He won’t be able to tilt the balance on his favor by military force. His best chance was by playing the economic game and developing Russia into an advanced and powerful economy, but again, his XIV century mentality was holding him back from being a competent leader in the XXI century.
It clearly will, the defeat of Ukraine and the integration of the country into a Russian province will severely degrade the trust in the very order that the world (I mean West) relied upon for the last 30 years. We will see more wars, China invading Taiwan, India v Pakistan, EU broken up etc.
And all this is to Putin's advantage as he is what I would call the "challenger" to the American-led world order.
There have been previous failures on the U.S. side to keep their allies afloat. Think Afghanistan. But never are those defeats against an established state and never are those states a critical part of the White West. A defeat of Ukraine will send the EU's trust on the US into the gutter. We'll likely see infighting in side the EU on where should the organization head towards. France will pursue the hard power, but Germany as usual will detest this. Eastern European country like Poland, Estonia, Romania, Lithuania will be increasingly at odds with the likes of Spain and Italy, because simply put, the biggest threat for those countries are not foreign invasions but illegal immigrations coming from the instability in MENA.
In the long run this rift will destroy the cohesion of Europe, so you could kiss goodbye to the 'whatever it takes' mentality of the EU which doesn't exist in the first place. And Russia will still own much of Ukrainian lands.
This is getting comical. When the US is able to destroy the Russian military by simply arming a former Soviet country with old weapons that were ready to expire, you don’t see that as a position of strength?
The Russian army is 15% larger than it once was at the start of the military operation.
What the US is doing right now is humiliating for Russia. The Russians are being butchered by US weapons while the US doesn’t even have to put its troops at risk. The Russians are dying in trenches while Americans are debating in Congress how many moe they should kill in the next few months.
I concur, it must be hard for Russia to be constantly getting hit by Western-supplied weaponry. But again this will be paid off handsomely once Ukraine capitulates.
Mind to tell you, that before its ascendancy to a superpower after WW2, Russia lost a humiliating war against the Yellow peoples of newly established Imperial Japan, getting gobsmacked by Imperial Germany and even at one point had the presence of foreign troops intervention in its territory. The victory of Moscow at the end of WW2 erased those memories from the public consciousness.
This is why the US wants to take care of Putin while using the minimum resources. This is why they drip feed the help for Ukraine while putting pressure on their European allies to contribute more and do the heavy lifting.
The US wants to let Europe deal with Putin, so they don’t have to waste their own resources for dealing him.
Every politician from either side of the Atlantic would want to finish this as soon as possible. So there's no such thing as the U.S. is feed dripping weapons delivery to force the EU to contribute more, had the US able to, they will surely deliver the weapons. The thing is the U.S. is in no position to give up so many weapons to save Ukraine so freely.
The U.S. simply understands that Ukraine is just one problem from the many problems Washington is facing now and there's clearly a hierarchy on where Ukraine's urgency fits in. You might be thinking that the list goes on (from top priority to lower priority) like this :
- Ukraine
- Taiwan
- Middle East
Based on the aggregate power of US opposition.
But this is simply not the case. AIPAC control in Washington meant that whatever happens, US politicians will prioritize Israel, no matter how unimportant it is. This is why you saw Ukrainian shells getting diverted to Israel at times when arguably Ukraine is the more befitting recipient.
So it's actually like this
- Middle East
- Taiwan
- Ukraine
Yes, Ukraine is in the lowest spot of military assistance priority right now and it will continue that way.
You might be thinking that once the U.S doubled down on munitions production they will be able to satisfy Ukraine's need for ammo, fill up their arsenal for a China fight and continue to support Israel. Anyone who follows the munitions expenditure from the last major conflict (the war against ISIS) would've tell you otherwise.
When the U.S goes to war with IS, at the peak of the war (2016) they dropped so many munitions that CENTCOM must scavenge munitions from all around the world to fight IS troops of around at max 80-100K.
The U.S. military is raiding its smart-bomb stockpiles around the world to continue its nearly two-year-old airstrike campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Pentagon officials said.
Defense Department officials are trying to figure out “how we balance the weapons we have,” U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Brown, the man overseeing the airstrikes, said Thursday.
“What I mean by that is: where do we pull some weapons from that we were saving for other contingencies,” he said. “And do we use them now or do we save them for later?”
The coalition has conducted 12,453 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria since August 2014, according to
Operation Inherent Resolve, the task force overseeing the counter-ISIS campaign. More than 8,500 of the strikes have occurred in Iraq and nearly 4,000 in Syria. American warplanes and drones alone have conducted 9,495 of the strikes, with allies accounting for the remaining 2,958. More than 41,697 bombs
have been dropped in those strikes. And the U.S. has
loaned bombs to allies participating in the strikes.
The anti-ISIS coalition has dropped more than 41,500 bombs, leading the Pentagon to borrow from stockpiles in other regions.
www.defenseone.com
Think about it, if the US suffers such a problem fighting a single state, with no outside support, with limited manpower like IS. Then what would it be like for the US to actually fight a peer state like China ? They are all aware of this and not any amount of bullshitting the public on how they're ramping up production could actually satisfy the need of PACOM for a China fight, every single munition they send to Ukraine (and Israel) is one less munition to throw at China.
Then there's the problem of Israel Hamas which will lead to an increasingly radicalized Middle East. Which in turn will compel the U.S to stick to the region trying the futile attempt to stop jihadism in the region.
Islam is by far the biggest threat to Washington and if they were given the choice between directing resources to help Ukraine win fight against Russia OR instead direct it to stave off jihadism in the Middle East, 10/10 they will choose the latter. Simply because they know their ally in the Middle East are not capable enough to fend off jihadists, and a state built on Islamic principles the likes of IS could become a reality if they ever left the Middle East. Just a reminder of what these Jihadists are capable of against a middle eastern state.
en.wikipedia.org
So yes, the U.S is in no position and your attempt to portray the U.S as 'drip feeding' munitions is so far from the truth, I wonder if you actually believed that
confirmed that they will provide Ukraine with 1 Billion Euros worth of military aid in 2024 and 5 Billion Euros through 2027, averaging 1.25 Billion Euros per year.
