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577 points mooreds | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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rdtsc ◴[] No.42176747[source]
> "it’s obvious this wasn’t an accidental anchor drop.”

If it's "he who shall not be named", gotta admit, that's a clever strategy: ramp up sabotage and see how NATO/EU will feel about their "red lines", and how well does that article 5 really work in practice. Is it worth more than the paper it's printed on? Let's find out!

People have been laughing at the West crossing multiple Russian "red lines" and the Russians not doing anything. So the Russians can follow a similar route: a cable torn here, a warehouse blows up there, maybe a bank website is hacked, water supply or power station company blows up "randomly". Is anyone going to launch nuclear bombs because of that? That's absurd, of course not, yet NATO/EU just looks weak and pathetic in the process.

Ideally, these countries should ramp up similar acts of sabotage on the Russian territory if they confirmed that's exactly who it is. A dam fails in Siberia, maybe the payment system goes down for a week, a submarine catches on fire while in port for repairs. Honestly I don't think they have the guts to do that.

Some regimes only speak the language of power. They have to be believably threatened; calling them on phone to chat and beg for them to behave, is just showing more weakness. Scholz just called Putin. Anyone remember Macron talking with Putin for tens of hours at the start of the war? A lot of good that did. When they see a credible fist in front of their nose, that's the only way they'll stop.

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JumpCrisscross ◴[] No.42177038[source]
> yet NATO/EU just looks weak and pathetic in the process

Really? Russia, with the 6th largest army in the world, had to pull in Iran and Pyongyang to not get invaded by the 13th largest [1][2].

Moscow is being a nuisance. That doesn't make NATO or Europe look weak, it makes Russia look pathetic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/13/world/europe/ukraine-russ...

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fuoqi ◴[] No.42177140[source]
13th largest backed by the whole NATO and other US-aligned countries. They send almost everything they can outside of nuclear weapons, the most cutting edge military tech, and people (well, outside of a limited contingent of "advisors"). Let's be honest, without this backing the war would've ended in the first month as was drafted in Istanbul.
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JumpCrisscross ◴[] No.42177178[source]
> Let's be honest, without this backing the war would've ended in the first month as was drafted in Istanbul

The West didn't really help Ukraine in the first month [1]. We thought the Russian army was competent and would ride into Ukraine like we did in Iraq. It wasn't until after the weakness was made apparent that aid started dripping in.

Ukraine repelled a Russian invasion on its own. Our generations-old anti-air systems are downing their latest weapons. Meanwhile, our generations-old missiles are taking out their state-of-the-art systems.

To the degree Russia has been able to claim any victory, it's in not being demolished. That's the standard. Not winning. Simply surviving.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_aid_to_Ukrain...

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fuoqi ◴[] No.42177281[source]
The West was actively supplying Ukraine since 2014, especially after the Debaltsevo embarrassment. Yes, it pales in comparison to the post 2022 levels, but it still was far from insignificant. Even your Wikipedia link lists a lot of pre-2022 aid and I am pretty sure this page is far from being comprehensive.

And it's even without mentioning the direct role of Boris Johnson in tanking the Istanbul accords.

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JumpCrisscross ◴[] No.42177394{3}[source]
> it still was far from insignificant

Stil far from closing the gap between the 6th and 13th largest armies. Russia invaded an inferior force and got stymied. This would be like America's Vietnam being Cuba, where we fully committed the U.S. military and economy to the task and still continued to fail. The fact that Russia has never even established air superiority knocks it out of the category of running a modern military.

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fuoqi ◴[] No.42177526{4}[source]
The Russian military doctrine is quite different from the US one. It places far more importance on artillery and anti-air forces than on air superiority. The Russian army clearly sucks at maneuver warfare and together with the unrealistically optimistic views which were prevalent in the Russian government (read Putin), it explains perfectly well the extremely poor performance in the first months. The performance in the recent months shows results of a more "comfortable" for the Russian army mode of warfare.

Also note that the Russian army was not "fully committed", it was not using conscripts (there was a small scale deployment of conscripts, but after the public scandal they were quickly removed from Ukraine) and did not fully pull forces from all its military districts.

Meanwhile Ukraine was fighting in the total war mode from the first days (they do not pull "recruits" from streets in the broad daylight into military buses just for the fun of it) with huge external support. And having the well trained by the West ideologically charged army backbone with 8 years of practical warfare experience has helped immensely in the first months.

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1. Wytwwww ◴[] No.42178886{5}[source]
> Meanwhile Ukraine was fighting in the total war mode from the first days (they do not pull "recruits" from streets in the broad daylight into military buses just for the fun of it) with huge external support

Did they do that during the first few months of the war? I recall them having more volunteers than they could use in the early days.