Meanwhile Norway's intelligence service, quite likely better informed, takes a very different view:
Apart from the 800 non US NATO soldiers who died in Afghanistan, I wonder how much that war cost NATO countries (excluding the US)
Piers Morgan is a strange one. When Russia large scale invaded Ukraine in 2022 he was calling for the west to respond militarily. Now he’s tweeting Trump is right, why should America automatically help nato members. Pay up or pay the price. London oligarchs gave him a Christmas present?
The Mongolian empire want their land back from Russia :pac:
You'd really have to wonder about the state of mind of people who argue the Russian position in the west. I suspect they just enjoy something different happening, at what they see as a safe remove from them.
In reality the Russian soldiers have been raping women, stealing children and bombing people's homes. They are the personification of evil.
It is a monstrous campaign that the West (including Ireland) should be doing far more about. Read pages 18 and 19 here https://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/24-210-01%20ISW%20Occupation%20playbook.pdf
Unfortunately, because of the policy of expansion the country has followed, the killing of Russian troops has to be welcomed as very good news right now.
Of course it'd be better if they'd go home, but in the absence of that, them being killed is the next best thing.
No, it is not quite the only group that matters. No sign of Russia stopping right now whatever words might come out of Putin's mouth, if the Ukrainian military fails, everyone gets the joy of being occupied by the Russian military in regions they capture.
Your idea of people bravely resisting that and Russia being somehow forced out any time soon by costs imposed by an occupation, when they seem undeterred by ruinous costs they are incurring in this war is a pipedream. For someone who likes to call other people "rubes", it seems idealistic and naive to me. Even if they do get forced out, it will be long after they have done horrible damage.
Technology heavily favours the occupying power now if you have no qualms or morals at all and are willing to be as brutal as the SS, which the Russian military certainly is on evidence of their behaviour. You think it's like the US in Iraq or even Vietnam or something, it is really not.
They will use the information to have to weed out anyone remaining in regions they occupy who might resist, and extended families + they will all be cowed, end up in a Russian prison or dead. Thanks to the IT revolution, they will be very efficient at that.
It is why we are seeing so few dictatorships get toppled these days imo, they don't need many functionaries, propagandists and goons and secret police any more to keep a firm boot on the neck of a large (by comparison) population.
Oh the poor Russian army who volunteered to go Ukraine and commit war crime and atrocities in places like Bucha.
Spare me.
The death of Russian soldiers is a NECESSARY evil because they are the core driving force of Putins effort to take over UKr. There are no ifs or buts about Ru dead soldiers. These are the actual people that are advancing into UKr/shooting UKr soldiers /Ukr civilians. So the more the merrier as the saying goes. The way to reduce Ru soldiers deaths is for them to immediately move back to the Ru |Ukr boarder pre 1991 - end of.
BUT if there was a more humane way of getting Ru to move back to the pre 1991 border- I would be definately on for that
Well you clearly would not be signing up to defend your own people - so your view is understandable. Nobody is glorifying the slaughter, it would be far better for all if Mr.Putin's army retreated back behind their own internationally understood borders.
But they're not Paddi - so what would you do if you were a Ukrainian of service age and capability?
I'm not aiming my anger at you. Aiming anger on an internet forum isn't going to achieve anything. If you look at your post history you'll probably find that most of your 'thanks' include one from me. This is a place for civil discussion, not throwing around ridiculous phrases like 'orcs' and RuZZians' as was common place up to recently. Mine is just an opinion. You're the second person to bring the whataboutery argument of "what if bad things happened to your family" into the equation. It's nonsense. I'm not going to cheer the slaughter of ordinary Russian grunts just because of "whataboutery". I can accept that in war, death is an inevitability. I can also accept that if I want a Ukrainian victory, it stands to reason that more Russian soldiers will need to die. But I don't need to revel in their death on an internet forum to prove how much I love my family and what a hero I'd be if whataboutery came to pass.
Again, this isn't meant as an attack on you. It was a general comment on what I've noticed a lot on here. A sense from posters that they have to exultate in the number of daily Russian deaths, as some kind of way of proving to the internet just how committed they are to the Ukrainian cause. When in reality the majority of EU citizens, at an individual level, have made precisely zero sacrifices or contributions to the Ukrainian war effort. "It's not my war to fight" as another poster stated the other day while criticising me for defending the right of people to opt out of taking up arms.
I think most people are hoping for the minimal Ukrainian loss of life to occur, most are ambivalent about what happens to the aggressor in this case, people aren't weighing the lives equally.
Most (bar the putin loons, example just before these posts) would prefer russia to retreat back to russia and for no more russian lives to be lost (something they can do at any time). In the absence of that, every aggressor dying (or injured in a way they can't continue fighting) before 1 more Ukrainian die defending their country, would be the next best option.
It saddens me to hear that kind of rhetoric. We all hope for a Ukrainian victory as soon as possible. But also hopefully with as little loss of life as possible. Those Russian imperialists you refer to are likely the exact same people as you, me and the men/ women they're facing off against in Ukraine. Ordinary people, dragged into a war, compelled to 'answer' 'their' nation's 'call'. Conscripted, poor, uneducated. Going by the rhetoric on here, if we were all Russian, sitting in Moscow, half of ye would be queuing to sign up for the war effort. I doubt very much that the grunts on the frontline in Ukraine have any imperialistic dreams. They most likely just want to stay alive, not be beaten or shot in the back by their commanding officers, get some food, try to stay warm, do as little as possible, keep their heads down and get home to their families.
This war, of one man's making, is a pure and utter tragedy. It's good to discuss it, good to keep up to date on developments, great to hope for positive news from the Ukrainian side. But lets not glorify the slaughter of fellow human beings.
might well be, but "frozen" is good enough, Putin will be out of the picture in less than 10 years probably and international relations will move on to god knows where. I dont know about the 3rd time lucky, "Western Ukraine" would be a trap/poison pill for Russia. Here and elsewhere there is a whole new asymmetry in favour of the defender, where the invader/occupier pays an increasing cost to be there. If Ukraine had the tech it has now back in 22 , the Russian columns wouldnt have made it far past the border without being picked off and the cost of occupation would be unsustainable.
A lot of cloak and dagger stuff going on, so one wouldnt have full clarity , but a 155 shell is a 155 shell, as it is not every new shell made in Europe is going to Ukraine, they have to fulfill contracts for other countries, the US is most likely recycle shells from 3rd countries back to Israel
wars tend to go on longer than they need to because rationality goes out the door , what would a survey of males aged 18 to 50 have to say? morally that the only group who's opinion matters as they are ones paying the price, if an honest survey came back with 70%-90% support, I'd say fair enough but I'd imagine its lower.. Going by the rhetoric of the yanks, their main motivation is to hurt Russia, in that context Ukrainian men are expendable, the yanks lack the motivation to give Ukraine a tap on the shoulder to seek peace while no doubt only seeing Ukraine now in terms of Biden's electoral chances this year. its all very grubby.
I'd be wary of trying to portray that the Russians are going to run out of stuff, in some shape or another thats been used since a few months after the war started but you could roll it up into the scenario that the lines dont move much from here. This is a war of attrition where one country has 4 or 5 times the population of the other. Ukraine need to minimise their own attrition by being fully in a fully defensive mode. The summer offensive was a waste and their stubbornness by trying to hold on to salients is likewise wasteful. They should round out their lines, fall back to better positions where appropriate and maximise the cost to the Russians of trying to advance, essentially try to ensure a stalemate
Have either the UK or Germany actually supplied Israel with shells?
Apart from UK and Germany
When Avdiivka falls I really hope the new frontline includes the coke plant fortress. Would be a shame to lose such a powerful fortification on the frontline.
You are just ignoring what I have posted and repeating nonsense that numbers of dumb artillery shells is what will decide the outcome of putin's attempt to seize parts of Ukraine. putin's forces since the more widespread invasion of Ukraine two years ago are down nearly ten thousand artillery systems and large numbers of other weapon systems and huge numbers of their trained troops so increasingly they wont be able to do anything other than send waves of poorly trained new recruits to provide fertiliser for Ukrainian soils. Increasingly Ukraine is now also able to strike at putin's empire with their own longer range weapons making his empire building more costly and even more clearly a huge mistake that the people of the russian federation will take decades to recover from and could bring it as an individual economic area to an end.
Ideally yeah, but for some reason all the value of the weapons supplied to Ukraine, the used ones etc... was the book value. They don't seem to take into account depreciation! Maybe they could pay Ukraine to dispose of them in the most economical way possible!
I wouldn't think another aid package would be needed for these cluster shells to be sent to Ukraine. I read somewhere that the USA has decided they will not be using them anyway. They could just be sold to Ukraine for a nominal fee for disposal.
If the US Congress pass another aid package for Ukraine, they can keep giving Ukraine the cluster shells. There's no way they will be giving them to Israel. The US has a stockpile of them, so they can help bridge the gap until European manufacturing increases. And again, I can't see European countries selling shells to Israel no matter the price.
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