Agree. I’m not sure Putin is quite as bad as Hitler, although I don’t know to what extent we knew how bad Hitler was either. We knew he was bad of course… we had first-hand accounts of Jews being stripped of their rights and in some cases disappearing. But the Allied forces didn’t know the full extent of the atrocities by any means.
Hopefully we will not be discovering concentration camps and extermination camps in the aftermath of this war, but the treatment of Ukrainian civilians by Russian soldiers is unforgivable.
Putin is a huge fan of Stalin so that says a lot about him!
The current indiscriminate Russian bombardment of Ukraine is just horrific. I think that is why I am going off on slight tangents in this discussion. What can you say about the actual fighting other than it is brutal.
I’m not sure what actions would “humiliate” Russia.
The Ukrainians stopped them in the suburbs of Kiev, leading Putin to decide that taking the city would be too expensive and there fore withdrew. Was that “humiliation”?
If so, I don’t think the Ukrainians should just give up the city to make the Russians feel better about themselves.
Seems even more likely now with a new offensive beginning after conclusion of the last. Maybe that’s why the last post is nearly a month ago. What does this mean in the context of enduring high energy prices for (the Biden admin’s words, not mine:) “as long as it takes” to maintain the “future of the liberal world order?” What’s going to happen in Europe this winter? In Africa? What happens to all the weapons we sent? Will terrorists get a hold of some?
I wonder if or when Ukraine’s supporters will start to demand it trade land for peace.
Or it could become like Afghanistan was for the Soviets where the fighting just continues with large losses on both sides and the West supplying enough military assistance to keep the fighting going. Sadly, the parts of the Ukraine that Russia takes will largely have been bombed into rubble with a lot of deaths.
It’s not our place to demand another country concede it’s own territory for peace. Ukraine may very well reach this conclusion at some point.
Gas prices have been dropping lately, but I think we’ll be stuck with higher energy prices for a while as long as Russia is a pariah nation. Europe will be in for a rough time in winter due to their dependence on Russian natural gas. Germany in particular may have to look at firing up some of those shuttered coal plants to deal with it
Rewatched Charlie Wilson’s War last night and it made me wonder how much covert support the West might be giving to Ukraine? I expect very little as nothing can be kept secret these days.
Yep. The war will continue as long as either Russia or Ukraine thinks they are better off continuing to fight than settling for whatever deal they think they could get right now.
Biden (and presumably some European nations) will continue to provide weapons as long as the Ukrainians want to keep fighting and it appears our weapons are destroying a “reasonable” amount of Russian weapons and killing/wounding Russian troops. Those are weapons and troops that won’t be used to invade the Baltics a couple years from now.
So you are advocating Biden call up Zelensky and say something like “I’m not releasing the military aid approved by Congress unless you fabricate dirt on my political opponent concede half your country to the Russians?”
There may well come a point where we decide to significantly cut back on military aid to Ukraine, which would indeed hasten an end to the conflict. It would be a mistake for us to directly demand they concede territory Russia, even though the end result will likely be exactly that. It’s not clear whether less military aid would necessarily save Ukrainian lives or give them a more favorable outcome.
It would presumably avoid the need for further aid and hopefully unwind some of negative effects of prolonged conflict. Are we not considering how costly defending Ukraine has been and will be over time? What does resistance at this point even accomplish, tangibly, other than rhetorical statements like Putin being a big bully? After all, the tangible benefits seemingly need to be quite large given the costs.
