Sort of an interesting argument, I suppose. Militarily Russia is heavily outclassed by the West. But perhaps that’s why they’re engaging in information warfare: western populations are weary of war and with sufficient prodding Russia can keep the major western powers away from their conflict.
are they? for the most part, Americans haven't really noticed apart from family and friends of service members. There's been no rationing of goods, there's been no campaigns to buy war bonds, there's essentially been no burden on the citizens. In fact, we've had multiple tax cuts and gains in the financial markets. The sheep have been well fed.
I suppose I’m speaking theoretically here. But American populations tired of Afghanistan and Iraq. The war in Ukraine does not involve US boots on the ground and thus is a very different proposition.
I'm actually happy to hear that you claim people were tired of it, but I just had no direct experience with people discussing how they should end. It just was never discussed in any conversations this statistic of one person experienced. Now, something like current election campaign, it is discussed non-stop. It's not like there were protests like in Vietnam to end the war. So maybe my sensitivity settings were set to the extreme??
>there's essentially been no burden on the citizens.
Unless you watch Fox News, in which case we are "wasting" hundreds of billions on Ukraine while Americans starve!!!! What's that? A bill to feed starving Americans? Why that's socialism, which is communism!
70 million Americans voted for Trump in 2020. It doesn't matter that some of them don't live in the same reality as the rest of us, because they have isolated themselves so aggressively that they will never be snapped out of it, and millions of other people are enabling their insanity for political gain.
Check out Ryan McBeth on youtube for someone with experience refuting and examining Russian disinfo campaigns, and weep in fear as statements that could be trivially debunked with a look at a single wikipedia page, or like, a book of what different weapons systems look like, and realize in horror that the millions of people falling for this shit aren't just "media illiterate", but rather are so deep in the kool-aid that they explicitly trust information MORE if it has been labeled as "fake news".
It's insane. We aren't handling it. The truth is literally a less effective propaganda weapon than people silo'ing themselves so thoroughly that they have CHOSEN to watch Russian propaganda outlets like RT as "news"
Their problem is using their tax money for a foreign country, instead of a: lowering taxes b: using it for US citizens.
Your framing is disingenous.
If you believe that 70 million Americans live in a different reality and have isolated themselves, well, perhaps it is you who fails to emphasize why one may have different political standing than you?
The reality is, that people have different priorities when voting.
If you want to talk about propaganda weapon, the strongest in the US is the Israeli one. Both candidates take huge amounts of $$$ from Israeli donors. Both candidates simp for Israel.
Is it? The Russian jam GPS that it is useless, but their own (much newer) system can't be jammed easily. I just read an article about it. Europe has nearly no military equipment left. Russia is loosing more tanks and artillery in a month than some big countries in the EU have.
The S400 is considered superior to the Patriot system. They have hypersonic missiles. And now a battle hardened army. Don't forget, western systems are heavily overpriced. I think we pay 10 times the amount for a shell than Russia does. It will take years, possibly decades, to build up military industrial capacity. Germany has ammunition for 1 day of war. Trick question: With what will they fight on the second day?
Russia is having quite a struggle against Ukraine with like a quarter of its population and mostly old western weapons that were on the way out. NATO with stealth fighters and the like would be quite different game.
I remember the US military vs Iraq with mostly Russian gear was almost embarrassingly one sided.
All the air defense and much of the artillery aid has been state of the art. Ukraine benefits from the massive surveillance and targeting capabilities from air and space - also state of the art. The long range missiles given have been current generation.
Not to mention that cutting-edge drone based warfare has quickly become Ukraine's most effective staple.
Sure, some of the tanks and IFVs are older, but overall it's not really fair to say Ukraine is mostly using old weapons or that it's fighting Russia alone. The total financial value of external aid to Ukraine per year has been rivaling Russia's total annual defense budget.
Well fair enough it was a simplification. But two and a half years on they are yet to receive a single western jet. ATACMS were only supplied very grudgingly with instructions not to hit the Russian bases that are daily bombing and firing missiles at Ukraine as they are in Russia and doing that might upset the Russians. And were given partly because some of the ATACMS were scheduled to be destroyed due to old age and it would have looked embarrassing in America to be doin that while the Ukrainians were dying fighting. The Crimea bridge could have been taken down by Taurus but that might have annoyed Russia etc.
The ATACMS missiles that Ukraine is getting are soon to be expired because they are reaching their end of life (of course they are still in production but it shows these are not the current generation)
The current generation missiles "PrSMs" have not been given to Ukraine
The M777 howitzers are from 40 years ago
The stinger missiles have been used in the Afghanistan war
Even the F-16 planes are from 30 years ago
And Patriot air defense systems are several decades old
So it is fair to say that Ukraine has been using mostly older weapons
The one caveat here is that the Patriot missile system was originally made in the 80s. Like most of the US arsenal, it has seen significant improvement since then. Ukraine got fairly modern and capable Patriot systems and missiles.
The M777 also included fairly modern fire control hardware and counter battery radar.
Everything else has been purposely downgraded to ancient specs, like removing armor from the Abrams, and sending ancient F-16s. The stingers we sent Ukraine have been out of production for decades, and the US has not fielded them in mentionable capacity since the early 90s.
The table scraps of the US desert storm military is providing Russia a stalemate in Ukraine vs an army barely trained to use their new equipment, that had several high level traitors in it during the invasion.
Meanwhile, ignore that Russia cannot keep tiny kit-built aircraft out of it's airspace, which has always been a problem for Russia despite supposedly being the Premier anti-air missile system maker since the 50s. One of these kit built cruise missiles killed several important people in a Naval Command post in Crimea, despite immense investment in S400s to protect it.
The Russian Navy has been shown to be not just non-threatening, but jaw droppingly incompetent. I'm sure they blame whoever runs Russian air defense systems, but the flagship of the black sea fleet was sunk by the same intensity of threat as the damn Houthis taking pot shots at tankers. This wasn't a "occasionally the missile gets through" situation either. The Moskva had multiple redundant and cooperating missile defense systems that on paper, and even in foreign military knowledge, would have defeated a couple incoming missiles. Either they weren't turned on, in which case why not, or worse, they are inoperable or ineffective, in which case WHY
There are notable unfortunate outcomes however. The small diameter bomb, as I understand, did not perform well. Russia's GPS jamming is powerful and effective, though this isn't as dire as it seems. In a GPS denied warfighting environment, the US still builds significantly better ordinance guidance systems than Russia. The Krasnopol laser guided artillery shell is pretty good, and gets you the outcome of an Excalibur shell for significantly less money, and is harder to defeat electronically. The Lancet is way more cost-effective and useful than anything the Switchblade company has shat out, and we should be copying it as hard as possible cough Anduril cough. Russia now has a production quantity JDAM style system, which is effective.
You're referencing a small fraction of cherry-picked American weapons Ukraine is receiving. Other nations are giving other weapons, many of which are current generation. Patriots are current generation, and are continuously updated with new missiles and software. If you consider any weapon system that was not initially designed a few years ago to be old, then almost every weapon system the US and Europe is currently fielding would be "old".
To name a few current generation systems given to Ukraine: IRIS-T AA missile systems, StormShadow / SCALP cruise missiles, AGM-88 HARM missiles, AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles, NLAW anti-tank missiles, Martlet missiles, Starstreak AA missiles, Aster AA missiles, Krab artillery systems, CEASAR artillery systems, Excalibur guided artillery, ECV90 IFVs, and on and on the list goes.
Does she? How many people has she lost in the war?
She lost nearly a 1000 in the second world war. Per hour. So in 2-3 days she sustained the losses that the US had in Vietnam in a 10 years war.
Well, since March 2022 when the Russians occupied 24.4% of Ukrainian territory, the Ukrainians have now pushed them back to about 16% in return for about 400k Russian casualties. It doesn't seem a spectacular success.
Although I'll give you Putin doesn't seem bothered by Russian casualties so I guess from that point of view all's good.
Patriots have intercepted the hypersonic missiles (Kinzhal) before [1][2]. The S-400 is not as invincible as was touted -- there's plenty of evidence of successful drone and missile strikes against Russia by Ukraine. And Ukraine is still flying aircraft.
Russia's production isn't almighty either. They purchased millions of artillery rounds from North Korea for a reason [3].
And I think a big thing to remember is that NATO has tons of weapons, they just don't have tons of the weapons that are being used in the Ukraine war.
The U.S. only fired ~34,000 155MM artillery rounds during the Iraq War (Second Persian Gulf War). [4]
And yet at the time the US had millions of cluster bombs in stockpiles [5]
The Ukraine war definitely seems to be a wakeup call on western munition production rates and how mass artillery is still important to modern warfare but I don't think that means Russia would really stand a chance against NATO.
The real reason the conflict (hopefully) will never happen is nuclear bombs.
This is the Block I ATACMS which stopped production in 1996 and is considered too old to be usable by the US Army itself. Mean while the Patriots have no issues taking out multiple "hypersonic" missiles, which are mostly just marketing bullshit.
And regarding the Ukraine war. Russia's industrial might is underestimated. And while it can not match that of the West, as a word of caution: China has more industrial capacity than the EU and US combined.
Wars have the nasty habit of taking unexpected turns...
After the wall came down, it turned out that a lot of the output of the Soviet military industry wasn't actually usable. Lots of shells of tanks, but no motors. Similar to China's empty buildings. They put so much emphasis on appearances to try to cover up their weaknesses.
Except you can see China's output on your local supermarket's shelves. Soviet Union had practically 0 exports of any manufactured goods to non Warsaw Pact countries.
China may be cooking the books to make their GDP/industrial output look a little bit better to hit party goals every year, but the ubiquitiy of Chinese goods in low to mid value added manufacturing is indisputable.
Russian industrial production was usually shit, and consumer goods made in USSR were nigh useless. Buying a Russian car etc. was folly, and the usual flow of goods went in the other direction: East German, Czechoslovak, Hungarian industrial and consumer products went to the east, while cheap raw materials flowed from the USSR to Central Europe.
Chinese industrial production started shit as well, but they have been improving by leaps, much like the Japanese once did. (Odd to think that both Made in Germany and Made in Japan were once intended as warnings, not endorsements.) This is what the Russians never achieved.
Aside from vodka and caviar, finding a Russian product in a standard European supermarket was a detective task. I am sitting now in a fully furnished house and I am almost certain that nothing here is made in Russia. While plenty of things are made in China.
Even higher value added manufacturing these days. My understanding is that Chinese EVs/batteries and some telecoms equipment are highly competitive or better than Western equivalents (yes, they got there partially due to IP theft and state subsidies but still)
The experience of WW2 left a deep psychological scar in Soviet, and later Russian statesmen, in that the lesson they took away from it was "We need to be surrounded by buffer and satellite states, so that in a war, they will bleed, instead of us." It's why they had absolutely zero patience for Georgia and Ukraine turning West-wards.
The scar it left on the population at large was "They attacked us, and we suffered a lot, but then we really showed them."
I suspect that due to the scale of destruction, WW2 left a deep psychological scar on the psyche of soviet countries, much deeper than anywhere else. And maybe that's why Russia has had such a militaristic and aggressively paranoid posture ever since.
Russia has been that way since at least the Mongols. It’s a property of their location - difficult to defend central plains, on the path of many invaders and with harsh unyielding winters.
Over time, the scar transformed into a state religion in the USSR: obsessive celebration of all kinds of anniversaries, children tortured in schools with made up stories of heroism, huge monuments everywhere, TV and cinemas filled with endless stream of most inane morally black-and-white WWII movies like the worst cowboy flicks. Instead of Sunday church, I had to sit in school listening to senile veterans who had never seen frontline action (but had their chest full of anniversary medals) tell fairy tales how they single-handedly destroyed 50 Tiger tanks and 100 planes and then threw themselves in front of a machine gun nest to save their comrades, but stepped on a mine while doing so and lost both legs and crawled for a week back to their unit, successfully avoiding German patrols.
By the 1970s, the WWII mythology (of which a lot was entirely made up) had formed the core of the identity of "Soviet people" and an excuse for everything. The narrative of "Soviet people as the victors of the WWII" acted as a God-given right to stomp over other nations, because after all, only a fascist would resist the glorious Soviet people. The way we see Zelenskyy, a Jewish comedian, branded as a Nazi, and the war against Ukraine propagandized as a "holy war against Nazism like our grandfathers fought", is an echo of that. Doesn't make any sense unless you are familiar with the warped Soviet WWII mythology.
Aggressive militarism is common in post-war generations that grew up with the simplistic brainwashing. There was very little militarism in the generation that actually saw the war, because the Eastern front was morally an ambiguous place. One of my older relatives fought in the battle of Velikiye Luki. He always suspected that his unit had been placed on purpose into a very poor position to wipe them out with German hands for earlier insubordination. The unit got hit hard, he got wounded and was taken prisoner by Germans. Weeks or months later Soviets overran German positions and he was reunited.
As a punishment for being taken prisoner, he was moved to a penal battalion, because not fighting until your death was officially declared treason. Penal battalion was a lighter punishment. Those who had panicked were executed. Penal battalions were "dumb meat" used to dig or dismantle fortifications under enemy fire, and attack in first waves to identify machine gun nests and minefields. If they didn't attack with enough enthusiasm, then the barrier troops placed behind them would open fire. (This practice lives on, as can be seen in Ukraine.) By some miracle, he survived it all. Most didn't. You can imagine how keen he was to put on his uniform, parade around on the V-E day celebrations and listen to speeches how "the Soviet people fought united like one man against Nazi invaders".
And not only do they cosplay in wartime uniforms, but they also the adopt the language of propagandized version of history that they've only witnessed from movies, and go around yelling how Russia is fighting Nazis again and "we won't stop before Berlin".
In a way, that's even understandable. Pre-USSR history is beyond living memory, and USSR put a lot of effort into creating a cultural disconnect with pre-1917 Russia. Older history offers no strong identity, it's just too far away to be relevant, it's hard for modern urban population to identify with either the imperial nobility or with peasantry. Modern Russia offers no identity either beyond "superyacht for me and poverty for thee". So what's left? Only the militaristic propagandized USSR victory narrative that so many cling to, otherwise they'd have no identity at all, because that's the only meaningful thing in the past century of Russian history.
Russia is a country with fluid borders and could not allow NATO troops and Rockets in Ukraine in the same way, as we could not accept rockets in Cuba.
The war has gone bad for the West now. The EU has very little equipment left. Russia loses more tanks in a month than many big EU countries have. Germany had ammunition for two days of war. After giving a lot to Ukraine, they have ammunition for one day of war left.
Graham's meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv on May 26
“and the Russians are dying ...the best money we've ever spent.”
Before you downvote you may look up who Emmanuel Todd is. When he was a 25y old PhD student in 1976 he predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is not a person to be taken lightly.
This is still conflating the USSR and Russia. The Russian SFSR, AFAICT, had exactly the same borders as Russia did before it started biting off pieces of its neighbors.
No, you're wrong here. Russian SFSR initally included the whole Central Asia, Caucasus countries, Crimea and eastern parts of Ukrainian SSR. Russian SFSR border you talking about is from circa 1956.
Ukraine, Belarus, etc are significant contributors and bore some of the heavy causalities
Another part of the reason why invading Ukraine was dumb, Russia forgot what Ukraine was capable of. Attributing all of its success to itself but discounting its partners.
There is 0 compelling evidence to support such claims (that Russia won in their invasion of Ukraine) in that article
>Marc Polonsky is a retired partner of an international law firm. His practice focussed on investment in the Russian hydrocarbons and infrastructure sectors.
The author has personal investment in Russia it seems which explains the article. This is more of a wanting to see Russia win than anything else.
>Kiev’s
Inability or explicitly going out the way to not to spell Kyiv correctly and having 0 perspective or input from Ukraine shows that is nothing more than a propaganda piece.
Why are you conflating Russia with the Soviet Union?
American production is spread throughout the country. China's is pretty much located in the east. Peace time production capabilities <> war time production. There is a reason the United States is developing Rapid Dragon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Dragon_(missile_system) ). In a large scale war, the USA's ENTIRE logistics fleet can be turned into stand off attack aircraft which will overwhelm any local defenses and remove 'peace time' production from the board. I wonder why the USA chose to name the system after an old Chinese siege weapon?
> The posted article gives quite an impressive Soviet plane production. 50% of that of the US.
"From October 1, 1941, to May 31, 1945, the United States delivered to the Soviet Union 427,284 trucks, 13,303 combat vehicles, 35,170 motorcycles, 2,328 ordnance service vehicles, 2,670,371 tons of petroleum products (gasoline and oil) or 57.8 percent of the aviation fuel including nearly 90 percent of high-octane fuel used,[36] 4,478,116 tons of foodstuffs (canned meats, sugar, flour, salt, etc.), 1,911 steam locomotives, 66 diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars."
