Give it 72 hours. The news cycle is leading the announcements tomorrow and the announcements that will inevitably come next week. If the news is already talking WW3 (and yes, they are) then it won't be long before the UN deploys it's own "peacekeeping forces" and the world goes hot.
I think right now in the west in general the appetite for getting hands-on in Ukraine is just not there.
As sad as it may be for Ukraine, they're going to have to do what they can to defend themselves with aid and supplies.
The one thought I have around this is Canada. Spitballing: There's a huge Ukrainian population there and the deputy PM has personal ties to the region. It's entirely possible, especially given recent events, that Trudeau decides it's politically expedient to get involved directly in some meaningful way. They'd also have to try to convince the other parties helping them maintain government. Even if that happens though, I suspect that won't make a difference to the outcome and the rest of NATO would look at it as a Canadian solo operation. I'd give this about a 0.001% chance of happening, maybe less. Any politician who got boots on the ground (barring some unforeseen change in circumstance) would probably be skewered public opinion-wise and be essentially kissing re-election goodbye.
> I think right now in the west in general the appetite for getting hands-on in Ukraine is just not there.
I hate to say it, but I agree. Germany sent Ukraine a few thousand hats to help them resist Russian aggression, for Christ's sake.
Western powers will drop a strongly worded letter in the mail and implement economic sanctions that'll do diddly squat to the Russian authorities, besides maybe push them into a closer alliance with China.
Honestly, the least they could have done is massed NATO troops in Poland, the Baltics, etc. and kept strategic ambiguity about whether they planned to actually use them (instead of explicitly announcing, like dumbasses, they weren't going to get involved in any way that would bother Putin).
> It's entirely possible, especially given recent events, that Trudeau decides it's politically expedient to get involved directly in some meaningful way....I'd give this about a 0.001% chance of happening, maybe less.
Definitely less. IMHO, if they were going to have to get involved, they would have needed to have been moving troops and equipment for quite some time. I don't think they've done that.
Tangentially: Russian Federation and PRC never should have gotten the P5 seats. The USSR's P5 veto should require unanimous consent of former Soviet republics, and ROC's P5 veto should still be with ROC.
Wasn't that the intel estimate on how long it'd take Russia to take over? I saw Biden's statement that he was sending thoughts & prayers while he watched this and would talk it over with world leaders tomorrow. Since the last few rounds of sanctions did nothing after Crimea, I don't see this changing things.
The territory is relatively easy to overrun with speed - the defensible choke point is on the wrong side of Ukraine (for the Ukrainians). It is only occupation that can prove to be difficult, or even intractable.
It's been 1 day, they're already in Kyiv and discussing surrender. I don't know the future, but it looks like the rest of the world had their pants down on this one so far, which seems surprising given the repeated warnings something was going down.
By the time there is a real response, it's looking like this may be over. Given that their urgency was "I'll talk to world leaders about what to do tomorrow" rather than "let's enact the plan we already prepared during the weeks of warnings" I think we know which way things are headed.
