Re: Ukraine's Curve Ball

On Wed, 14 Aug 2024, Retrograde wrote:

On 2024-08-10, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:

But this confirms me in my suspicion that russia, apart from the
front, is ridiculously ill defended.  The wagner rebellion almost
reached Moscow before they persuaded them to stop. And now this.  I am
convinced, that if Nato and/or Europe decided on a blitz in the early
spring, Moscow and Putin would quickly fall and the war will be over.
But it seems like the world wants to torture Ukraine by giving them
just enough military help and resources to allow them to barely
survive, but definitely not enough to win the war, thus ensuring the
maximum amount of pain and death.

>
I agree with you on all points.  Not arming Ukraine properly in the
beginning of the conflict is a tragedy. This could have been reduced to
a week's fighting if Western Europe and the USA had the stones to simply
jump in throwing punches.  Poor Ukraine.
>
As for Russia, I agree some day we'll pull back the curtain and find out
just how much of it was smoke and mirrors.  That said, Putin gets points
for being a hell of a better strategist than just about anyone.
>

Yes! But Putin has the advantage of not having to care about human lives or votes. A weakness that democracies have. So democracies are slow to start, but once they get rolling they quickly pick up speed.
Let's hope now that the western world has given fighter jets to ukraine _and_ given them permission to attack targets in russia, that the last barrier has been broken and they will start to send troops as well.
Remember that Putin threatened with total war and nukes if the world helped, then it was if the world gave fighter jets, that didn't happen either.
So something I'd like to see is Ukraine buying the help of american "security consulting companies" like the ones that were in kuwait and iraq, to help them. If russia can have mercenaries, so can ukraine, and using russian frozen assets in the EU to buy those mercenaries would be icing on the cake! =)