Actually we just want the war in Ukraine to end. Hope that helps.
There's a lot of bloviating from the chattering class about cozying up to Russia, but I've yet to hear a cogent alternative. And no, I don't think "endlessly funding Ukraine to a forever stalemate" qualifies.
It may surprise you but Russia is not winning. It has been exhausting itself for no measurable benefit, at the cost for US taxpayers of roughly a coffee per day.
Up to now, Ukraine has never received the support it would need to win, just enough not to lose. Weapons deliveries been too little, too late, making the war longer and bloodier than it needs to be. In the meantime domestic production has increased to the point Ukraine covers 30% of its needs.
Russia has lost other wars, it can and should lose this one.
How many billions is it worth spending to stop the new hitler from overrunning Europe? The answer naturally depends on who you ask (and how positively they view hitler).
This isn't the US's first go-round with nazis, obviously.
Back in WWII, just as now, there were capitulation proponents.
Then, just as now, they espoused the supremacy of bettering their own position over helping others.
Then, just as now, they advocated for leaving Europe to fall to invaders.
Then, just as now, they allied themselves with American fascists.
Then, just as now, they campaigned on the slogan, "America First" [0].
There's nothing new here, and personally, I'm glad hitler lost. That dude sucked.
> How many more billions do we need to send to ensure Russia loses? Any how many more years will it take?
You have to compare with how much will it cost if the war continues to grow in scale or intensity. Russia is dedicating more and more resources to its war machine. And I have no reason to think it will stop if Ukraine. In 2022 Putin already said he wanted NATO back to 1991, IOW he wants Eastern Europe defenseless.
Russia's economy is just the size of Spain or Italy: not negligible, but not formidable either. Europe should do more, much more, if only for its own sake.
> And what does "loss" even look like? Are you genuinely proposing they will simply pack up and head home from all captured territory?
Territorial issues are somewhat secondary. What matters is that the defeat is clear and Russia's leaders discouraged from attempting to go to war again. It happened to Russia against Japan in 1905, and to the USSR in Afghanistan. It can happen again.
Does it sound strange to anyone that during Iraq war there were many embedded journalists covering the war. I don't see that now in Russia-Ukraine war. What could be reasons?
There are some. But my guess is that there's so few because nobody wants to pay for journalism anymore. Reporters want to get paid, especially if they're going to work in a warzone.
The best plan to prevent Russia from winning would be to cut off Russia's oil revenue. Fossil fuel exports are the only way that Russia can sustain their war effort. First, other European countries need to get serious and stop buying from Russia. Second, give Ukraine enough long range missiles to wreck Russia's fossil fuel infrastructure: pipelines, tank farms, refineries, ports, etc. Russia was heavily dependent on foreign technical experts to maintain that infrastructure and has little capacity to do so on their own.
This can be done with very little US funding. And sharing intelligence with Ukraine literally costs us nothing.
Turning oil into cryptocurrency requires electrical power plants and related infrastructure. Russia has very limited industrial capacity to build this stuff anymore. They're still heavily dependent on pre-1991 industrial infrastructure. I think most people don't realize how weak Russia really is.
You're right. How can any state with nuke-backed right to issue ultimatums slowly get weakened like that? If Russia states limits, and convinces U.S. that they will launch if the limits are crossed, and these limits are within the threat budget of Russia, can they not make U.S. agree to things (and vice versa)?
just because it hasnt worked so far doesnt mean it won't work. the time horizon matters. is russia gonna give up in 10 years? this is a bad plan. in 1 year? maybe not so much.
why do you want the war to end? is it just a moral calculus of lives lost? how can you be sure that ukraine capitulating to russia will lead to less lives lost than one more year of war? 100,000-600,000 people died in the occupation of iraq, why do you think that a russian occupation of Ukraine will be less bloody?
I don't think it is wise or ethical to spend billions of dollars prolonging a forever-war thousands of miles away.
I also don't think it's wise or rational to presume that every aggressive action necessarily means that the aggressor is Hitler or bent on world domination. Or even that opposing them by sending resources to their enemy is the most effective way to stop it.
For the US, this is an extremely cheap [1] way to counter Russia. Ukraine is doing 99% of the work. We give them money which they immediately give back to us to buy hardware. Or we give mothballed hardware slated for destruction. Most prefer this to a future with dead Americans and US boots on the ground in Europe when NATO countries are invaded by Russia, emboldened by a world that gave up on Ukraine.
[1] as a percentage of the US$850,000,000,000 _annual_ Pentagon budget
Chamberlain tried to bargain peace for Britain at the sacrifice of the Czechs and other nations and in the end his country got bombed to shit anyway. You guys make it seem like Russia has no agency here
I honestly don't know what else Putin would need to say or do to convince you that he is, in fact, a fascist bent on world domination. He's not exactly been shy about it.
If Ukraine stops the fight they cease to be a sovereign nation. If Russia stops they loose face. The former is existential, the latter is not. Why is this so hard to understand?
Any ceasefire or peace without security guarantees will be used by Russia to rearm and try again in a few years time. It will be a continuation of the conflict that started in 2014. That, too, isn't hard to understand.
Giving Ukraine all the weapons it needed and asked for, instead of destroying them soon, would be a good start. Also, you know, not forbidding Ukraine to use its long-range drones to damage Russia's oil industry would also be helpful. This is to get started. I can continue.
Winning the attrition war. They have most likely less than a year left before their economy crumbles. 21% interest rates, capital controls, official 10% inflation, annihilated non military sectors (fe cars), forcing their banks to give loans to anything military adjacent while forbidding them to call them in.......
I am sure the Europeans would be willing to shoulder more of the cost but the US has been cutting Ukraine off from intelligence sources and now also support. There is no cost argument for that.
Also do you really think that these decisions will not cost the US in lost sales, reassurances for everything because of lost trust....
Absolutely. With Russia disintegrating China can get it's lost territories back and dominate Russia's former pacific region.
Right now China is pressuring Russia into lots of one sided deals and is taking over large parts of the economy but that holds no candle to taking over the Vladivostok region.
The real story here, contrary to the framing, is that Rubio admits that a reverse Kissinger - splitting Russia and China - is NOT achievable.
He says that the US will "[never] be successful completely at peeling [the Russians] off of a relationship with the Chinese,” and that the best outcome the US could hope for is "to have a relationship" with Russia so they don't exclusively deal with China.
That's actually realistic and indeed probably the best outcome the US can possibly hope for.
I see many people commenting that the US is trying to pull a reverse Kissinger, wooing Russia away from China, completely missing the obvious truth right before their eyes: if there's a split happening, it's a Euro-US split.
That's a common flaw in human nature, we're often incapable to conceive that the status quo we've lived with our entire lives has fundamentally changed. We look to patterns from the past, seek to refight the previous war; it's far easier and more comforting to believe you're still in the box even when the box has disappeared.
Russia isn't going to split again from China, there is not a single chance in hell, it learned that lesson the hard way... Putin, as a famously keen student of history, understands how much damage that did.
And why would he? What benefit would Russia possibly derive from this? The world has changed: as we've seen during the Ukraine war the West unleashed its entire economic arsenal against Russia, only to demonstrate its own impotence. Russia last year was Europe's fastest-growing economy even when completely cut off from Western markets. So if the West's maximum pressure amounts to so little, its maximum friendship isn't worth much more.
It's utterly delusional to think that the two torch bearers of the Global South would split just as the emergence of the long sought multipolar order is finally coming true, all in exchange for a return of Western trade which they now know is dispensable, and an end to sanctions which they now know don't hurt much.
Also, kind reminder that Kissinger didn't actually split Russia and China: he took advantage of an already existing split. Geopolitically speaking, it's incredibly hard to split powers - especially great powers, but it's much easier to leverage an existing split. And looking at the landscape, those that are already split - or rather splitting - aren't Russia and China, but very much the U.S. and Europe.
A Euro-US split was bound to happen sooner or later, as the cost of the alliance increasingly outweighed the benefits on both sides. Especially with the rise of the Global South, China in particular, which initiated a profound identity crisis: suddenly you had countries "not like us" being far more successful, taking over an unsurmountable lead in manufacturing, and increasingly science and technology.
At some point there are three choices in front of you: join them, beat them, or isolate yourself from them and slowly decay into irrelevance. The West has been trying the "beat them" approach for the better part of the past 10 years and we've seen the results: an increasingly desperate series of failed strategies that only accelerated Western decline while strengthening the very powers they meant to weaken.
It also tried the "isolate yourself" approach with the various plans of "friend-shoring", "de-risking", "small yard, high fence", etc. That wasn't much more successful and the West undoubtedly sees the writing on the wall: the more you isolate yourself from a more dynamic economy, the further behind you get.
This leaves us with "join them", and here Trump's calculation seems to be that if the U.S. does so first, it undoubtedly can negotiate much better terms for the U.S., much like China did with Kissinger back in the late 1970s when it joined what was at the time still the U.S.-led international order. With Europe, like the Soviet Union back then, left with no choice but to accept whatever crumbs remain.
The situation of course isn't exactly similar. We're outside the box, remember... For one the U.S. isn't remotely in the same conditions as those of China back then and, unlike the Soviet Union, Europe lacks both the military might to resist this new arrangement and the economic autonomy to chart its own course. Which means that in many ways, geopolitically speaking, the U.S. is in better conditions and with more leverage than China had (and therefore able to get itself a better deal), and the EU ends up in worse conditions than the Soviets.
Still, the fundamental reality remains that Trump, for all his faults, seems to have understood earlier than Europeans that the world has changed and he'd better be the first to adapt. This was clear from Rubio's very first major interview in his new role as Secretary of State when he declared that we're now in a multipolar world with "multi-great powers in different parts of the planet" (https://state.gov/secretary-marco-rubio-with-megyn-kelly-of-...).
As a European though, I can only despair at the incompetence and naivety of our leaders who didn't see this coming and didn't adapt first, despite all the opportunities and incentives to do so. They foolishly preferred to cling to their role as America's junior partner, even as that partnership was increasingly against their own interests, something which I've personally warned about for years.
Turns out, strangely, that the Europeans were in fact in many ways more hubristic and more trapped in the delusions of Western supremacy than the Americans. The price for this hubris will be very steep, because instead of proactively shaping their role in the emerging multipolar order, they will now have to accept whatever terms are decided for them.
Can you point to a single thing that China did to help Russia at its own expense?
Certainly not resource deals, where China sets cut throat prices.
Talk is cheap and China holds historical grudges, like those lost territories, forever. Having strong dominance over the northern pacific areas would also be far more stable and lucrative than any geopolitical advantages that might be very fleeting.
As for Europe and the US, time will tell. The US is going to pay a high price for the lost credibility. Would you really make yourself dependent by buying US weapons and leave yourself open to such thuggish blackmail tactics we have seen the last weeks? Also the US is a consumer based society that tries to change to a more balanced system. Absolutely understandable but very hard and risky.
We are moving to a multipolar world order and its going to be a time of blood and iron. Russia was just the one making the first move and with the US no longer interested in a rule based world order the mice are coming out to play. I sincerely hope I am wrong.
I don't think that anyone can seriously predict how things will fall out.
The fact that people who are paid to predict future didn't predict China's unprecedented rise in EVs is all that you need to know how manipulated with lies our information ecosphere is.
Our experts completely misjudged China and its ability to innovate. Now they're ahead everywhere.
@China, sure they got a good thing going. We will see how long it lasts.
@Rare earths. That has been obvious from the start. There are always massive potential resources everywhere. Trillions in Afghanistan, Ukraine....and if you don't have an ambiguous enough surveying report you can always postulate a pipeline is going to be build there, like with Syria. It seemed to me that was always some kind of intentional face saving exercise to please Trumps electorate, but I might be overestimating him. That extortionist act of him is doing so much damage, it is not rational.
If you think Taiwan shouldn't cease to exist, how else can you guarantee that? It's either nukes or US protection and nobody trusts the Americans anymore.
Taiwan makes some of the most complex devices humans have ever constructed! They can figure out the almost 100 year old technology to make a gun bomb nuke.
I'm Australian and I already don't trust the US to help us.
I've literally never thought that the US wouldn't help us before Trump came to shit on everything.
Now I imagine we'd have to buy Trump off with "raw earth" or something in exchange for not being abandoned to China, and our head of state would quite possibly be berated publicly for wanting some kind of security guarantee for his people's future.
It's sad, I still feel like the US and UK people are closest to our values, but Trump only works for himself and his billionaire crony parasites.
He will end up with the loyalty he has earned.
Everyone around Trump hates him, and the US is heading in the same direction.
so your alternative of inaction involves a likely outcome of raping and murdering thousands of civilians in the name of peace for thousands of soldiers.
the us can do plenty of things without spending billions of dollars that are short of this, and yes, i have personally donated to the Ukrainian effort.
An obvious alternative is to increase support to Ukraine to give them what they need to expel Russia. The good old USA has the resources to do that but Republicans have blocked increasing aid at the orders of Donald Trump for years now. And now that he is in power he is finally blocking it altogether.
You must be being deliberately obtuse at this stage. He's not saying the Crimea incursion should have been fought again more. He's saying that allowing the annexation of Crimea to be relatively peacful didn't prevent the subsequent imvasion of Ukraine, and as such, stopping the war now and allowing Russia to keep the gains it has made may lead to a short-term peace, but will likely not prevent another war in the future.
Given Putin's stated wishes, this will only stop if Russia is unable to make such moves (for whatever reason) or states at risk of invasion are defended such that it's strategically stupid for Russia to even try.
I believe a big crux is in definition of "war ended".
You (and Donald Trump) seem to be using "Ukraine and Russia stop shooting at each other right now", while Ukraine operates more under "Russia stops shooting at us for the foreseeable future, 20 years at least." Russia has previously broken a number of ceasefires and written agreements (including the infamous Budapest memorandum) and so Ukraine is not super trusting to agreements not backed by anything.
What Ukraine will accept is entirely dependent on how much funding they will get from foreign powers to continue their war effort.
I've had a lot of responses to my comment, yet I've seen no alternative ideas presented that will result in a different outcome. What is your plan for getting Russia to lose this war?
The alternative is to destroy Russia. Destroy its economy, kill their soldiers until there isn't one left standing, ravage its cities. Set fire to its oil fields. Sink its ships. It's a good alternative. A pleasant sight and a nice thing to look forward to.
I would rather not have to live through an emboldened and desperate autocracy rolling over Europe and opening up the very real possibility of a third world war.
and while we're here, since the US is ostensibly going isolationist, maybe they should stop telling the Ukrainians they need to submit to subjugation.
I think the story is Russia becomes powerful enough to threaten Europe, one state at a time.
Ukraine has an amazing job, but they wouldn't have been able to do even that without convincing others that it was in their best interest to fund the war. That's been clear from the beginning.
The war is the genocide. Putin’s invasion would have killed thousands, maybe tens of thousands and been over in a week. Western involvement changed that into the deaths of hundreds of thousands. What more effective means of self-genocide could Europe conceive? Germany cannot exactly round up a whole class of their own for slaughter again in their current political environment. The West (England, Germany, France, etc) caused WWI and WWII not Russia. Now we (America) should trust their vision to avoid WWIII? We should be clear who the problem is and stay out of it.
This is such incredibly twisted logic. I would have honestly been aghast to see this on HN a few years ago, but now the site seems nearly as infected as Facebook or X with this.
You know buddy, I was there in Kyiv in that first week of invasion, and you know, the Western involvement was no where to be found, except for some infantry weapons (thanks for that). Again, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians joined the military with full understanding that Russia has more of everything, that foreign support may not come and so on.
Yes, the primary effect of the war has been to kill young European men, and both Russia and Ukraine… and now perhaps England and others are all too eager to see it happen.
For Ukraine to continue existing, the russians have to be driven out. Otherwise the genocide will continue. The genocide caused by russians, caused by russians invading Ukraine, caused by russians stealing Ukraine's children.
In america's right wing trump followers, there is utter, sociopathic, monstrous indifference to Ukraine's suffering.
So I'll ask you, personally: If the neighbouring state or country decided to invade and take over an area of your state, and you were told "you've been resisting too long, give in already and give up your fight", would you lay down and welcome the invaders you've been fighting? If you knew that the invaders were stealing children, and murdering whole towns?
There's a lot of bloviating from the chattering class about cozying up to Russia, but I've yet to hear a cogent alternative. And no, I don't think "endlessly funding Ukraine to a forever stalemate" qualifies.