Russia-Ukraine War (continuing)

This is not the first time I heard this theory

Ukraine is currently in the position of having to fight on with whatever they have and can get. If they don't Russia will take what they want, kill and colonize most of Ukraine and be hungry for more. They have been offered nothing. No guarantees by US or Russia no reparations no territories returned no NATO or NATO boots in Ukraine no return of children stolen no control of their resources. Probably a worse 'deal' that Hitler offered Britain in 1940.

Amazing how the actual life-long dictators in these autocratic hellholes always seem to score uptopia-like approval scores and votes on a scale unheard of in a western democracy, even in "landslide" victories.

Remarkable as well that the one candidate that had a decent backing against Putin in the 2024 election was deemed ineligible, all the signatures he gathered wittled down via "irregularities" to just under the threshold needed to run.

Just as remarkable, all exit polls from actual free and independent democracies in which Russian's could vote remotely, showed overwhelmingly support for candidates that were not Putin.

“Boris is just an unhappy person my age who apparently decided, in his old age, to make some money on anything whatsoever. I feel bad for Boris. The fool didn’t realize that he’s not being set up to run for president but for a criminal case on charges of betraying the Motherland,” said Vladimir Solovyov, calling Nadezhdin the candidate of the “Ukrainian Nazis.”

Let's not forget that little slice of paradise, Belarus, where Russia had to intervene to keep life-long dictator Lukashenko in power, who then managed to rally and achieve an astonishing 90% of the vote.

But of course, Zelensky is the true dictator, with his low, low approval rate of 55-65% depending where you look. Higher than Donald Trumps own approval rating, which ranges from 45-55 despite only being back in power a few weeks.

OK? There's a gulf of difference between reducing aid to Ukraine or even walking away, and publicly decrying Ukraine as being led by a dictator who started the war, and heralding Putin as a reasonable guy who just wants peace.

He has already indicated a world conference with those parties Russia and China. That's it.

But what's the alternative for Ukraine at this exact moment given Trumps idea of peace seems to be to reward Russia with everything it wanted by invading, including lifting sanctions, and publicly signalling as much before any negotiations even took place?

This isn't a murky dispute over contested territory. This is Russia thinking it can roll into a neighbouring and completely soverign country and seize all its richest lands, commit ethnic cleansing, and WW2 style "purging" of those it deems potential enemies of the new state.

Notwithstanding that Trumps idea of "peace" lets Russia achieve all that and allow it to busy itself rearming for another slice of the pie a few years down the line.

Hardly a cosmic shock that Ukraine is saying we're not signing up to that. We saw how that worked out in 1938.

Despite what is made out Russia cannot wage war forever, it has a terrible demograph problem, its economy is under immense strain, and ultimately the economy of Russia isn't even that big, relatively speaking, it simply cannot keep going indefinitely like this.

Neither can Ukraine fight forever, obviously, but only one country is under complete and total existenial threat. Putin can withdraw at any time or even try and settle for a negotiated peace that falls far, far short of his stated goals without him having to publicly accept it as being a complete defeat.

Putin's already said his minimum (in terms of land) is Ukraine handing over all four of the annexed regions, even though they don't fully control a single one and would take countless years at the current rate to control all, if they ever could, and that's even assuming they could maintain the level of military spending and losses indefinitely as the invading force.

I don't think anyone has a problem with "real" negotiations. But sham negotiations preceeded by Trump denouncing Zelensky as a dictator and responsible for the war, describing Ukraine's situation as hopeless, Putin as a good and peace-loving guy, suggestions that sanctions could be lifted, aren't even worth talking about and Zelensky called it out for exactly what it is, as did most of Europe.

Completely agree, it would take a number of years to equip, grow, and train our defence forces, but we need to invest immediately in a larger professional defence force and reserve defence force. I was shocked to find that we spend only 0.2% of GDP on defence (around 0.33% of GNI which is more representative for us due to MNCs). Compare this to other states our size. Our full time army is 7500, with a reserve of just 1700. We will never have a navy of dozens of battleships, or an airforce of hundreds of fighters and so on, but we are so far away from even doing the absolute bare minimum now (ie. ~1% of GDP) that its alarming.

If we refuse to do so we deserve to be treated as pariahs as we are expecting to leach off of other EU taxpayers. We should make TDs aware of this as their primary concern would be being slated on Joe Duffy if they were to do so. The EU needs to ramp up defence and integration and unification as things outside of our control are in motion that are distracting from us right now, but will very quickly take aim Europe.

Is that an elaborate way of saying “Russians just haven’t tried genocide Ukrainians hard enough”

Without article 5 guarantees all this “deal” does is ensure things get worse for Ukraine quite possibly without someone as capable as zelensky

Boris Johnson has been memory holed as a scapegoat cos he makes the right noises about Trump.

The about turns are completely discrediting. But the then when you peddle fake news, lies and disinformation without any anchor to the truth anything goes for vatniks.

I'm starting to think total surrender to Putin and allowing him to annex whatever bits of Ukraine he fancies. With America effectively on Russia's side looks like we're heading that way anyway…

All stock market gains since Trump came in wiped out, we now at where Biden left it

Incredible who knew **** about and uncertainty leads to negative investment performance

Who could possibly have foretold that taking a dump on Europe and Ukraine, launching scathing attacks and threats against your nearest neighbours, threatening to destroy century-old alliances and fluttering your eyelashes at one of world's most notorious dictators could lead to this.

Few more weeks of this unhinged and illogical lunacy that offer no tangible benefits and endless downsides for the US and Trump will probably face a serious internal pushback. Republicans have backed their man thus far, but in a matter of days we're already seeing cracks.

When someone like Mike Pence is publicly telling you that you're wrong, as well as a large amount of old-hand, die-hard republicans, you're on dangerous ground.

We are also forgetting about Italy and the numerous bases they have there.

I bet Naples would love nothing more but to tell the Americans to leave Italian waters.

For all this talk about how much we need America, we seem to overlook how much America actually needs us.

They can **** right off then.

Yes surrender to putin is the only sensible thing to do seeing as you can trust his terrorists to look after everyone.

I'm talking about an evolving scenario where all options facing Zelensky are terrible. If he came to the conclusion that without American support Russia was overwhelmingly likely to overrun Ukraine in short order no matter what he and his armed forces did he might conclude that standing back and letting the Russians take what they want would be the least damaging approach for Ukraine's civilians. Perhaps some kind of international monitoring of this 'peaceful, orderly' Russian takeover could be negotiated.