Comments by "Louis Giokas" (@louisgiokas2206) on "Ukraine Opens Up on Belgorod || Peter Zeihan" video.

  1. The comments on Europe are spot on. Frankly, Europe, to be taken as a serious strategic player, especially independent of the US, needs to step up. That is going to cost them. Will they spend what is needed? The EU+UK has an economy that is ten times bigger than Russia's. It has about three times the population. It has a much more advanced defense industry, although this is in part because they are part of NATO. They should not need the US. That said, I support US aid to Ukraine and believe that the US should do more. The UK was a signatory to the Budapest Memorandum (as were Russia and the US) and later France joined in, sort of. This is reminiscent of the situation prior to WWI where the UK "guaranteed" the neutrality of Belgium, then couldn't, or didn't, do enough to stop the Germans. The same pattern was repeated in WWII with the French and British threatening to go to war if the Germans invaded Poland. They, again, had no way to make that work, unless they aggressively attacked Germany from the west. Remember the "phony war"? Frankly, Europe is no different today than it has been for about 2,000 years. A battlefield.
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  2. Just an addendum on Russian casualty issue. The latest reports I have seen, and these are from MSM sources, not YouTubers, is that the UK Ministry of Defense (MoD) is now validating Ukraine's death toll figures. We hear all the time that both sides are involved in "information warfare". Well, that is easy to do in a totalitarian state, but not so much in an open one. Not only is Ukraine more open than Russia, but for a nation in the midst of an existential war, they are surprisingly frank with information. There are also lots of outsiders in Ukraine reporting. So, I have a problem with the sort of moral equivalence argument we often hear.
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  3. Peter, a casualty is defined as wounded, captured, missing or killed. In other words, anyone no longer able to fight. In the case of all but the last, there is some chance of the individual getting back into the fight later. So, when you distinguish between casualty and killed, that is not correct. There is a reason for the terminology. I am also seeing more sources giving the number killed on the Russian side as much closer to what the Ukranian Army has been reporting. Ukraine reports killed, not just casualties. The visual and anectodical evidence seems to point that way. Some, like yourself assume that Ukraine is actually reporting the number of casualties as defined above. This war stuff is very dynamic, unlike demographics, and economics in general. Just saying (got that from my younger son).
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