War in Ukraine

I would add that while Trump did give Ukraine weapons during his first term whereas Obama only provided non-lethal aid Trump did do so only because he really had no other choice. In the early part of Trump's first term Congress authorized weapons for Ukraine by an overwhelming margin. Based on my recollection it was with over 90 votes (out of 100) in the Senate and by a similar margin in the House. I would also add that the only change that the Trump campaign made to the platform at the 2016 Republican National Convention was the elimination of a plank calling for military aid to Ukraine.

 

‘Nearly two million more casualties’: The numbers that show Russia is years from victory

Amen to that last part. If a deal fails here, then this is precisely the question the President should be asking.

 

Russia-philes may have forgotten one little rule of war: the longer you keep your opponent in the fight, the more likely they are to develop a new technology to beat you with. What new technology could Ukraine possibly develop that would scare the average Russian? How about a 2200-lb missile with a range of 1800 miles? Maybe Russia can shoot it down, maybe it can't. How much damage would a 2200-lb warhead do to a petroleum refinery or a weapons factory or a weapons depot? Probably quite a bit. How about a direct hit on the Kremlin? Is Putin safe in his own country anymore? Should Putin move in with Trump in RussiAlaska for protection?

A new giant Ukrainian cruise missile is rumored to carry a 1,000-kg warhead for strikes 1,800 miles deep inside Russia

 

Surprising that Congress would authorize a donation of weapons to Ukraine during Trump's first term, when Ukraine's government was far more corrupt than it is today and Ukraine did not have an immediate need for weapons, and then whine that we should not give them weapons today because Ukraine is too corrupt, even though they have an urgent need for weapons now that they are actually at war. Maybe Trump realizes he is too weak a leader to compete with Biden on the issue of Ukraine support, so all he can do is do the opposite of whatever Biden did. Or maybe Trump is just more comfortable dealing with corrupt countries.

 

The difference is that in 2016 and 2017 the Republican Party was still the party of Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and George H.W. Bush all of whom embraced NATO and America's role as leader of the Free World. Unfortunately the same party at least in name has since devolved into the party of Vladimir Putin's patsy King Donald of Mar-a-Lago,

 

Did Vlad import Hunter and give him a job at Burisma? What about Nuland? Orange revolution? Biden’s people. It’s a proxy war and Joe Biden started it. Nothing wrong with admitting this. Do you think Biden’s interest in Ukraine involved nothing to do with expanding western influence—east? C’mon man, I know you’re smarter than this. Biden started it and President Trump is cleaning up his mess.

Look, you realize our president, our own president is calling this Biden’s war? There’s no more elections against Biden. Trump doesn’t make a statement like that to get in a dig on Biden just to get in a dig. It’s a pretty big statement to say something like that about another American president. He’s calling it Biden’s war because it truly is Biden’s war. Take off the rose colored goggles for a moment.

 

Good thing the Continental Army wasn't taking such advice after Bunker Hill. " we don't stand a chance, losing lives and money in a war we can't possibly win".

 

Or go by what Putin actually said

 

What did Putin say? And why should we put credit to anything that Putin says? You do understand that he tells people whatever suits his interest, true or not? Shall we go back to the litany of denials that he was preparing to invade Ukraine between September 2021 and February 2022? Shall we examine his entire constructed biography? Pretend legitimate birth. Pretend spymaster. Pretend economics doctorate. Pretend judo champion. Pretend family man. Oh, and how could one forget this one? "Da, Yevgeny Viktorovich, if you will only kindly stop your march on Moscow, everything will be as it was and all forgotten. By the way, how would you like to represent my majesty at a conference in St. Petersburg in August?"

If what you are suggesting is Putin said he wouldn't have invaded Ukraine if Trump had remained President, then all that means it was in Putin's interest for a certain audience to believe that. And that interest and audience seems pretty obvious to me in context. Personally, I believe that Putin's primary calculation for when to initiate his long (but somehow poorly) planned invasion of Ukraine was the likelihood of foreign (especially U.S.) intervention. In the fall of 2021, he read the tea leaves and believed that foreign intervention was at the least likely it had been or would be for years. And China agreed. So anyone asserting that Putin was less likely to invade Ukraine if Trump were President is also asserting that it was more likely that Trump would have intervened with armed force, or at least that Putin believed Trump would intervene.

 

Point taken, but not a great example in context.

(Military history dork enters room)

At Bunker Hill, we traded relatively worthless terrain for disproportionate British casualties. The Brits had so many dead and wounded that they took no more offensive action around Boston until they were forced to evacuate some months later due to the guns from Fort Ticonderoga showing up unexpectedly. A better example of the point you were making would be, like, the Battle of Long Island, or any of the other battles of the New York campaign the next year, where the British just kicked our butts time after time until Washington's miraculous surprise counterattack at Trenton, crossing the Delaware, etc.

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Day 212 of Trump’s ending the war in 24 hours.

 

Nope, and I agree that was corrupt as hell and deserved a real investigation. But did it have anything to do Putin's desire to conquer Ukraine as part of his vision to restore the Russian Empire? Not even a little.

Obama was President, and if we're being honest he thought very little of Biden and gave him very little meaningful power. Certainly not the power to direct the CIA perform a coup. And exactly how did the CIA manage to get the whole nation to rise up and take the streets, protesting, rioting, boycotting, getting junior police and military officers to defect? I'd really love to know the answer to that, since every other time the CIA has been involved in actual coups it did so by giving resources to a few key people in high places, such as generals. Yanukovych, Putin's puppet, installed through Russian-sponsored electoral fraud, lost control of his own doing, not Obama's, not Biden's. And when the people rose up against him, the security apparatus around Yanukovych refused to shoot the protestors or to otherwise protect his illegitimate regime, causing him to flee to Russia. That is a situation far more similar to what happened to Ceaușescu in 1989 Romania than it is to Allende in 1973 Chile. And, once more, no one in the U.S. national security apparatus was concerned with Ukraine or anywhere else in eastern Europe in early 2014. What was happening in Ukraine was irrelevant background noise compared to the rise of ISIS (the so-called "JV team") in the Middle East. But let's just say that wasn't the case. Let's say the U.S. had a compelling interest in causing Yanukovych to fall and helped make it happen. Why wasn't the U.S. even a little prepared for success? When Yanukovych fled, the U.S. did nothing to support the fledging successor regime, because it was completely unprepared to do so. That's weird. But you know who seemed to be very prepared to act immediately in the event Yanukovych's regime fell? Putin. Everything was all in place to seize Crimea and Donbas with "little green men" almost the moment that it happened. That, too, is weird given the U.S. had all of the agency here.

Yes, you got me there. I am clearly the one who has failed to think through this.

 

It's Putin's war. Jesus. Stop drinking the haterade.

 

The " piece of paper" guarantee from the 90's wasn't worth the paper is was printed on. It may not be under the NATO umbrella, but some members of the coalition of the willing may put boots on the ground in Ukraine as a deterrent to further Russian aggression in the future.

 

Well, good. Then it's Russia who's being intransigent to a reasonable measure that would help sustain the peace. Let's get on with the war, then, since it's going so well for Russia. But in the mean time, someone please refresh that dum dum Medvedev on the many times his boy Milosevic similarly crowed that he would not allow NATO peacepeakers ...

 

Concur. Any measure that does not put international military forces on the ground -- sharing risk with Ukraine and placing Russia at risk of killing them when they try to make their next move against Ukraine -- is simply designed to give Russia time to lick its wounds before coming back.