nednobbins

They gave it to Kissinger too.

I posted evidence at the top of the thread. You're the one saying it's not good enough so I'm suggesting that you should be the one to provide better evidence to the contrary.

Tankard? Are you trying to create a portmanteau out of tankie and retard? Are you calling me a drinking vessel?

WTF?

Not going to waste my time.

Then why even reply? The whole point of this thread is to examine evidence of realistic claims about Russia and Ukraine. If you present evidence that you haven' tbothered to look at yourself why would anyone think it supports your claim?

Yes. I can't see anything in those measures to suggest that economic factors will force Russia's hand in time to be useful to Ukraine.

We have some US and EU leaders who seem to be racing Russia to try to collapse their own economies first but there's still hope that wiser policies will prevail.

I think it's a combination of factors.

There's some amount of propaganda. Governments often try to convince people to confuse fact and fiction.

There's also an institutional momentum effect. Once you get a group of people together, they tend to recruit more people who think like them, so once an idea gets hold, it's hard to get rid of.

And there's the sensationalism effect. There are many possible predictions for the future; the extreme ones are more fun to read.

OK. This would be an actual concrete plan. Now it's going beyond "stand with Ukraine" cheer leading and moving on to something we could actually do.

The obvious potential paths would be:
A) try to convince the current US administration to massively change their policies
B) replace the current US administration
C) make up the shortfall without the US

"A" seems like a total pipe dream. "B" seems likely but not soon enough for Ukraine. A quick search suggests the US has spent about $100B so far. So (back to the cocktail napkin) other sympathetic nations would need around $1T over the next 3 years for "C". Not infeasible, but it's pretty close to a total war commitment on the part of the EU and a few allies.

I don't think it's a great strategy. One of the basic principals of warfare is momentum. Russia has much more of it than Ukraine does. Countering that directly is very expensive. Breaking the momentum first and then countering can be much more effective. Russia demonstrated a very effective strategy in this conflict; defense in depth. With the help of the EU, Ukraine could create a deep DMZ with multiple lines of trenches, overlapping artillery positions, hardened communications, drone support, etc. That defensive barrier would give them the breathing room to build out a robust logistics network and even start planning for a second counteroffensive.

Part 2 would be to actually start a feasible counteroffensive towards Zaporizhzhia or Donetsk to cut the Russian forces in half. From there, Ukraine would have momentum and Russia would have to work on breaking it.

edit: formatting

It's not really a racial issue at all. It's about power and wealth. It's just that all the vast the rich and powerful nations happen to be full of white people so it's a convenient proxy. Some people prefer, "Westerner", or "Anglos".

None of them are perfectly accurate but everyone understands their meaning.

Sure. That's a very reasonable measure too. Can you find GNI data that suggests that Russia's economy will collapse soon enough for it to be useful for Ukraine?

The whole point of looking at their economies instead of the front lines in this thread is to find an alternate estimate of the trend of the war. The fronts are steadily moving west. If the hope is to end the war by waiting for Russia's economy to collapse, it has to happen before Ukraine's does.

Russia doesn't need to have a strong economy for that, just stronger than Ukraine's.

It would be more accurate to compare it to BRICS being adversarial to the US because China has more than 2x the economy of all the other BRICS nations combined and wants to use it as a counterbalance to the G7.

That would be perfectly accurate and the US is actively trying to inhibit the growth of BRICS as an organization.

I have been paying attention to Ukraines missile and drone programs.

Missiles and drones are both very effective but neither of them is a replacement for heavy bombing and Russia still makes more missiles than Ukraine does.

Unfortunately shell ratios are an important detail. That's why the serious policy publications (like FP) spend so much time trying to advocate for increased production.