What a disgusting scum this guy is. In his hypocrisy, he considers the West giving some excess weapons to Ukraine as being “all-in”, and this to be the equivalent of calling up all young males to die at the frontline.
If he wants Ukraine to be “all-in”, what about the West joining the war with air power and bombing all Russian positions inside Ukraine and 500 km from the border? Not even this would be all in, at it won’t include ground troops, where you get most of the losses, but at least you could say the West is also taking some risks as well.
As things stand right now, Ukraine is doing huge sacrificies to sustain the war, but it is not yet all-in. At the same time, the hypocritical West is throwing scraps at the war in form of weapons and money while not risking any soldier’s life. If someone needs to raise the ante, it is the West, not Ukraine.
What a clown!
I understand your take and empathize deeply with the Ukrainians, but I also completely understand the American position... Let's look at the facts.
1. The West has been staunch from thr outset of the war that they would not contribute manpower to the Ukrainian war effort. They'd back Ukraine with money, equipment and weapons of war, but Ukraine had to supply the manpower to save their country. That includes everything from Infantry to pilots. That isn't the position of only far away countries such as USA, Canada, France and Britain however. Ukraine's direct neighbours don't want to send soldiers to the Ukrainian front either, even know Russia posses a threat to their own safety. Countries to such as Poland, Finland, Sweden, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania, Estonia, etc could send much needed reinforcements, but they haven't because they don't deem it to be in their best interest.
2. Western aid has been at times frustrating, delayed, disjointed and underwhelming, but the fact is that it has arrived and it has been 50% of the reason (along with Ukrainian sacrifice and resolve) that the Ukrainians are still in the fight and have inflicted such an enormous toll on the Russian military.
3. Ukraine does legitimately have a manpower problem at the front right now. Artillery shell production, drone production, ammunition production both domestically (with enormous financial support from the West) and internationally (in the West itself) has ordered is on the verge of reaching levels that will require enormous manpower to use. Furthermore, many of Ukraine's best fighting brigades have faced serious attrition and required fresh soldiers to learn from veteran soldiers in order to continue to keep the Russians at bay and to stabilize the front lines.
4. Ukraine has what it needs in terms of tens of thousands of ATGMS, drones and hundreds of thousands of artillery shells and guided munitions to largely neutralize the Russian armored corps of MBTs, IFVS and APCs. Those attacking units are quickly neutralized and destroyed by the dozens. The problem Ukraine is facing is that Russia is willing to suffer horrendous losses of personnel to advance and take land and NO army can consistently waste millions of dollars worth of valuable munitions to counter endless small groups of advancing infantry. Those groups are best countered by prepared, layered defenses, manned by hundreds of thousands of soldiers on the defenses, reinforced with artillery and CAS. The West is helping Ukraine with the latter two elements, but the soldiers have to come from Ukraine.
5. The sad reality of this war has always been the same. If we're being realistic about what weapons of war the West is actually willing to provide (not nuclear weapons for example), the result was always going to be a signignificant amount of death on both sides. But we've reached a point where Ukraine is losing the manpower advantage even know it has equaled out (and in some areas surpassed) the technology advantage that Russia has. The American position, like it or not, is that when they've fought wars in their past, they've set the draft age at 18 years old. They disagree with the Ukrainian decision to set the draft age at 25 because they think that's indicative of a country stop short of doing everything in their own power to win the war. Although the 18-24 year old age group doesn't make up an enormous amount of the population of Ukraine, we're still talking about more than 1.5 million men that Ukraine could use to reinforce their military. Even if you drafted 1 in 5 from that age bracket 300,000 men, you could completely replace the attrition that Ukraine's exisiting fighting brigades have suffered along the front and you would force Russia into being willing to fight for another 3+ years, at a time when they've lost an enormous part of their army's inventory of offensive weapons. The Americans are betting that the Russians would rather negotiate than put their economy through 3 more years of this and Ukraine would be able to negotiate from a position of strength and they'd been forced to lose less land in the peace negotiations.
I see all sides on this one. I don't want to see young Ukrainian lose his life fighting a war anymore than you do. But I also people are delusional to think that this war can be won by the West's technology alone. It requires an enormous and constant manpower commitment from Ukraine, combined with both domestical and international production increases the size of which we've not seen since the Cold War.
