-
Features
How should west respond to potential (likely) Russian invasion of Ukraine?
- Thread starter Harry Bosch
- Start date
barbos
Contributor
Piers Morgan Gets SCHOOLED Like A Child On Ukraine By Jeffrey Sachs
bilby
Fair dinkum thinkum
- Joined
- Mar 6, 2007
- Messages
- 34,768
- Gender
- He/Him
- Basic Beliefs
- Strong Atheist
DrZoidberg
Contributor
To be fair, wars have a tendency to turn nuanced debates into dichotomies. You either pick the right side or you are a bad person. Before the war Ukraine was a complete mess of a country and Ukrainians couldn't leave fast enough. They winged endlessly about how much Ukraine sucked.
After the Russian invasion Zelensky didn't suddenly turn into a prophet of goodness.
Politics is the art of the possible, and Zelensky, as a politician couldn't do a whole lot. Pre-war Ukraine was run by the oligarchs. Without greasing the corrupt wheels, nothing worked. Zelensky was little more than a figurehead. Corruption is a still a problem in Ukraine and hampers the war effort.
Ukrainians need to decide whether or not they're willing to risk their lives to defend a country, they hope, might in the future, turn into a modern western free democratic nation. That's pretty fucking far from guaranteed. I appreciate the internal conflict.
A lot of my opinion on this comes from last Christmas I spent a month in Bali which is full of Ukrainian and Russian expats trying to escape being drafted. In Bali both groups get along just fine. There are oligarchs in Bali was preposterous amounts of money, they are spreading around keeping that community afloat. There's no Russian or Ukrainian sides on Bali. They're all anti-Putin. So they seem to perceive being on the same side. Whenever you talk to a Russian, they will, at some point in the conversation bring up their one close Ukrainian friend, and that they hate Putin.
Vietnam said some nice stuff about the USA.
TV and credit cards
Contributor
Vietnam’s bamboo diplomacy: working both sides of the street.
You think you're in no danger from Russia. They haven't turned on you yet.India favors peace and not Putin or NATO. India has no danger from Russia and Modi is in firm control. To stop me from responding, do not debate with me.
I was showing that we have a substantial economic interest in arming Ukraine even if we didn't care who prevailed. We can replace expended weapons for a far lower % of GDP than Russia can, thus anything even in the ballpark of an even exchange (say, ATACMS missile vs the SAMs required to shoot it down) leaves us in a better position vs Russia.
You buy long range SAMs when the threat is a few leakers. Against peer-level combatants they can be bled for less cost than the missiles.
Deterrence is a "threat" if you intend to attack. A burglar would care that we put in security bars. The rest of the people on our block wouldn't care.
Cheerful Charlie
Contributor
Ukraine whoops the Russian Navy's ass!
.....
Ukrainian sea drones are laying mines to damage Russian ships in the Black Sea, the WSJ reported.
Four ships, including missile corvette Samum and patrol ship Pavel Derzhavin, have been hit.
Laying mines by naval drone is part of Ukraine's unconventional warfare program.
.....
Ukraine claims to have damaged or destroyed at least a third of Russia's Black Sea Fleet since the start of the full-scale invasion, a feat that has seen Russia relocate much of its naval operations from its headquarters at Sevastopol to Novorossiysk.
...
www.yahoo.com
.....
Ukrainian sea drones are laying mines to damage Russian ships in the Black Sea, the WSJ reported.
Four ships, including missile corvette Samum and patrol ship Pavel Derzhavin, have been hit.
Laying mines by naval drone is part of Ukraine's unconventional warfare program.
.....
Ukraine claims to have damaged or destroyed at least a third of Russia's Black Sea Fleet since the start of the full-scale invasion, a feat that has seen Russia relocate much of its naval operations from its headquarters at Sevastopol to Novorossiysk.
...
Russian ships are being taken out by mines covertly laid by Ukrainian sea drones: report
The man behind Ukraine's innovative naval drone program told the WSJ how Sea Baby drones are laying mines that have struck several Russian warships.
Disagree. I would be surprised if any substantial number work, but I would be surprised if none worked unless they have something in them that will age into uselessness. (Think of Sum of All Fears where the bomb didn't work very well because a bunch of the tritium had decayed to helium-3. And, yes, I know his bomb design was bogus--he deliberately made it wrong. Doesn't mean decayed tritium in a boosted-fission design wouldn't be a problem, though.)
We helped them in the hope of averting a war. That doesn't make it a proxy war.
Yeah. Your politicians aren't able to make the hard choices of war. Or of adequately funding a military.
You have it exactly backwards. We are shipping the oldest stuff, the ones closest to being retired due to age. Russia doesn't get to see our best and since most of their shelf life is gone it doesn't really cost as much as the sticker price.
T.G.G. Moogly
Traditional Atheist
At least not for the last 100 years. Russia has an advantage over Europe in that Europe has never been a single state.
And we focus too much on standardization.
What's actually more important is standardized interfaces. For an excellent example of this in action, look at the VLS system we put on most ships. Each missile goes in a cell, any cell can hold any dimensionally-compatible missile. (The X, Y and interface of all cells is the same. They come in three different lengths, you can fire a short missile (say, a SM-2 anti-air missile) form a long cell but not a long missile (say, a Tomahawk) from a short cell.)
It could happen with a working IFF system. The air defenses were trying to target a drone but who has the bigger signature, the drone or the helicopter??
Given the expected unreliability of the Russian missiles I doubt we would do a launch on warning. Launch on warning is about use-or-lose and I would expect most of our missiles to survive a first strike by Russia's current arsenal.
TV and credit cards
Contributor
ATACMS Comes Out on Top Versus Russia’s S-500 Anti-Missile System
The duel in the skies above Crimea pitted 1990s-era US weapons against the Russian air defense platform Kremlin calls “the best in the world.”
www.kyivpost.com
I'll want more info than what appears in the Kyiv Post but this is humiliating. Russia's latest and greatest system. The missiles probably come out of the tubes all soft and wrinkly.
Fucking hell.
And they seem to be doing a lot of self-bombing. I have seen it asserted that this is due to glide bomb kits coming off at launch, leaving the bomb itself to fall on whatever might happen to be below. (Both glide bombs and laser guided bombs are actually implemented as attachments to standard iron bombs. Which is how we were able to consider using laser guided concrete shapes in Desert Storm. Attach a laser guide package to a concrete replica of a bomb that has the right weight and ballistics but no boom. A very big hammer for tank-plinking in urban environments.)
The people he's made it clear he wants to genocide?
Does "Holodomor" mean anything to you?