Comments by "Heads Full Of Eyeballs" (@HeadsFullOfEyeballs) on "Anders Puck Nielsen" channel.

  1. I mean, NATO is a defensive alliance.
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  2.  @unduloid  They're supposed to defend NATO members, none of which have been attacked. I'm all in favour of helping Ukraine defeat Russia, but NATO as an organisation is really the wrong address for that.
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  3.  @theo3030  The reason Russia's neighbours keep joining NATO should be pretty obvious, no? Russia is not a nice neighbour. It's taken chunks out of Ukraine and Georgia, while little Latvia with its huge Russian minority is still intact thanks to NATO membership. I wouldn't call seeking safety from an aggressor a "provocation".
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  4.  @stevenobrien557  What do suits have to do with anything? There's no dress code, they let Musk in there without a suit. Zelenskyy hasn't worn a suit since the beginning of the war. The idea that Trump ought to get to tell him how to dress is just another attempt at petty bullying.
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  5.  @NativeAuslander  "If it wasn't for X, you'd be speaking German/Russian right now" is also a common phrase in the US, who are the single largest NATO country. It's hardly a uniquely Dutch quip.
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  6.  @qltcn  So what? He said the equivalent of "oh, for fuck's sake" because the person he was talking to was being a moron. That shows he was frustrated, but I don't see "impressed" or "intimidated".
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  7.  @Princip666  Only Ukraine used to have to do this. Now the Russians have to do it too. Russia used to have an advantage in this regard, being able to concentrate their forces wherever they wanted. Now it's even. That's the point.
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  8.  @ДанилПоздняков-в8т  Autocracies are good at mobilizing resources at their rulers' whims. That's kind of what autocracies are for, after all: to let the ruler do whatever he wants whenever he wants it. Democracy has a lot of advantages, but rapid decision-making isn't one of them.
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  9. Dictators are much worse than hungry crocodiles, if anything. If you keep feeding a crocodile, it will in fact leave you alone. Well-fed crocodiles are pretty chill. But dictators tend to have have infinite appetites -- if you give them what they demand, they just take it as a sign that they can grab even more.
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  10.  @robderich8533  Having two different leaders named Chamenei and Chomeini isn't quite as bad as electing two guys called "George W. Bush", but it's still pretty inconsiderate.
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  11. Moldova isn't in NATO, so that wouldn't work if the goal is to challenge Article 5.
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  12.  @BarrySlisk  Because then it wouldn't serve to weaken NATO solidarity. Did you watch the video?
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  13.  @u2beuser714  I'm not arguing that NATO is nice or peace-loving or whatever. Just that it isn't designed to fight the conflicts of non-NATO states. NATO has never fought a "real" war, just short-lived interventions, peacekeeping operations, no-fly zones etc., precisely because no NATO member has been attacked.
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  14.  @svenT16  Russia is only "the biggest country in the world" in terms of land mass. It's mostly an empty wasteland. Russia has a smaller economy than Italy and fewer inhabitants than Bangladesh. It's perfectly sensible for the Russian government to be concerned about its country's geopolitical position, in principle. Putin just happens to be irrationally paranoid about NATO, because he mistakes it for a territorial empire when in reality it's a defensive military alliance.
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  15. It depends on how many people they're prepared to mobilize. Russia has so far avoided a big draft campaign because that would cause a lot of discontent, and Ukraine is still preferentially drafting older men to avoid pulling young people out of education and training, and is keeping existing troops at the front instead of rotating in fresh conscripts. If either country switches to World War-style mass conscription, they'll have bodies for many years at the current casualty rates.
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  16. I'm actually glad that I was too edgy and antisocial to engage with social media when it first became mainstream. Means I never got addicted to it, so I haven't had to wean myself off it as it's gone to shit.
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  17. Why do people keep saying this whenever Germany delays the supply of some particular weapon to Ukraine? This has happened a dozen times now, with everything from RPGs to tanks to missiles, and no information harmful to Scholz ever surfaced after Germany got around to supplying those weapons after all.
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  18. What's your best example of NATO threatening Russia prior to the war in Ukraine? Please note that I mean an actual threat of military action. Not simply doing stuff that Russia finds inconvenient to its imperialist project, like allowing Russia's neighbours to join NATO. Keep in mind that Russian state media are currently threatening to nuke NATO capital cities on a weekly basis. Just to set a standard for threatening the other side in this discussion.
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  19. Hitler got quite lucky, to be fair. He narrowly survived or avoided a number of assassination attempts (mostly by military officers during the later years of the war, but Georg Elser's bomb could have got him in 1939 already).
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  20. "The people" in the sense of "the populace, the nation" can be used with singular agreement. It's just a little unusual nowadays because modern English shows the opposite trend, always using plural agreement for words that describe groups even when the word is grammatically singular. Like in "the staff (sg) here are (pl) very polite".
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  21. He's an officer in the Danish military and a professional military analyst.
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  22. Did you quit the US military because of its constant violations of the rule of national sovereignty?
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  23.  @bigglesharrumpher4139  If they're supported by the US Air Force, NATO's European ground forces shouldn't have much trouble driving back any Russian attack. They wouldn't need to sustain the war effort for very long.
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  24. That sentence doesn't make sense. Zelenskiy is the president, so of course it's "illegal" for other Ukrainians to negotiate with Putin over his head. He doesn't have to "make" it illegal, that's just how the chain of command works. In any case, Putin has told us his conditions for "peace", and it's "pretend we won the war and give us everything we wanted out of it", which is obviously unacceptable. So what is there to talk about?
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  25. "but Russia made the case for the demilitarization of Ukraine as their reason for the operation" Why on earth would you believe them, though?
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  26.  @seancidy6008  I don't follow. Military supplies for Ukraine are social spending?
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  27.  @Shoelessjoe78  Except the US didn't do any of that out of the goodness of their hearts, or to do any European country a favour. They did it to maintain their empire. And the Cold War got within inches of turning Europe into a nuclear battlefield multiple times, so it's purely dumb luck that we're even around to "thank" the US for their role in it.
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  28. "No matter how you look at it, NATO's eastward enlargement poses a threat to the Russians." Nope, sorry. Russia's neighbours joining NATO only poses a threat to Russia if Russia is planning to start a war with them. You are confusing Russia's imperialist interests (maintaining a "sphere of influence" of weak neighbours they can push around) with Russia's actual material security. Also note that your best example of NATO "threatening Russia" involves no actual threats of any kind being made, whereas Russian state media are currently threatening to nuke NATO capital cities on a weekly basis. "Deploying nuclear weapons in Ukraine, as Zelensky proposed, would have meant that Moscow could be reached within 5 minutes. Turning the situation around, how would the US react if Russia were to deploy nuclear weapons within 5 minutes flying time of Washington?" Has anybody in NATO shown the slightest inclination to take Zelensky up on this idea? Not as far as I'm aware. Certainly nobody even considered the idea before Russia invaded. So again your "threat" is a 100% hypothetical future issue (NATO could choose to do something to threaten Russia), and again it's only a threat if Russia intends to start a war with a NATO country, because otherwise why would NATO nuke them?
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  29.  @Princip666  Which of his arguments' premises do you take issue with? You do understand the difference between making an argument, as Nielsen did, and making a bald claim, as this commenter did, right?
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  30. But a total absence of "censorship" will lead to a platform becoming unusuable for actual communication due to bots, spam, scams, trolls, shock images, etc. etc. It's much quicker and easier to automatically churn out bad content than to create good, thoughtful content, so without "censorship" the bad content will drown out the good.
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  31. It favours Ukraine if Ukraine continues to receive Western support, because the West has the industrial and economic capacity to keep it up longer than Russia. Russia's economy is the size of Italy's. They can ramp up production, sure, but they can't possibly replace the Soviet stockpiles they're burning though. Russia doesn't have the industrial capacity of the Soviet Union. So they'll have a very hard time maintaining pressure on the front and building up for a big offensive as the war continues.
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  32. Russia's economy is the size of Italy's. The only reason they have any chance at all in this confrontation is because NATO would prefer not to spend too much money or get directly involved.
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  33. That doesn't make sense to me. The conditions you describe are exactly what Russia had before they started the war. There were no NATO missile in Ukraine and NATO had repeatedly made it clear to Ukraine that they wouldn't be accepted as a member because it wasn't worth a confrontation with Russia. Russia's objective in starting the war wasn't to achieve what they already had. So why would they accept that offer?
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  34. If you'd read as far as the video thumbnail, you would have seen that Anders agrees with you that Trump has no plan.
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  35. He does work for the Danish government (as a military officer and analyst), so I imagine that saying very...undiplomatic... things in these videos could land him in hot water even if he's technically speaking as a private citizen.
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  36.  @StPiter111  None of those wars were NATO operations, so you're 0 out of 8 so far. And Cuba was never even attacked outside of some silly American commando operations, so I don't know what that's about.
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  37. Of course they'll have elections. Putin will probably even get the majority of the vote, because no credible opposition candidate has been allowed to run. And to make extra sure, they're going to fake ballots and intimidate voters.
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  38. Because the first offensive, which was intended to overrun the entire country, managed to cling on to about 20% of it after it failed and got pushed back.
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  39. The Lapland scenario isn't about acquiring territory in Lapland, it's about making Finland invoke Article 5. The Russian hope would be that other NATO countries will decide that a bit of Lapland isn't worth starting a war with Russia over. Leaving Finland in the lurch and destroying NATO solidarity.
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  40.  @antred11  But responding to a war in Ukraine or Moldova isn't NATO's job (beyond shoring up its defensive capabilities in case the aggressor decides to attack NATO later). NATO's job is to co-ordinate the mutual defense of NATO member states. if Romania declared war on Russia over an attack on Moldova, other NATO states would be under no obligation to join in.
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  41.  @ruznaupozorneni  You're a bit slow, aren't you.
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  42. He's a military analyst for the Danish government, it's his job to understand this stuff. He's also an officer in the Navy.
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  43. He's a military analyst in the Danish navy. Surely it would be Danish propaganda, if anything.
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  44. At the current intensity it can go on pretty much indefinitely, it's just a matter of mobilising the political will. If that happens -- if both sides keep investing resources into the war -- then it'll end for social reasons, not material ones. Because one side loses political control, or because too many soldiers mutiny/desert, not because they've run out of weapons or bodies.
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  45. I think the saying goes "it's a large, modern army, but the large part isn't modern and the modern part isn't large".
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  46.  @Princip666  I'm sorry, in what universe do you see Ukrainians voting to join the Russian Federation? They hate Russia's guts. That suggestion would be received about as warmly as the idea that Poland should become part of Russia. The majority of Ukrainians aren't even on board with a peace deal where Russia gets to keep its currently occupied territories, and that's after years of fighting and suffering. Why on earth would they voluntarily hand over the entire country?
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  47. I would argue that in terms of being a revolution, i.e. a rapid and dramatic overthrow of an established order, drone warfare is actually more revolutionary than gunpowder. It took a long time for gunpowder weaponry to become reliable and widespread enough to make a big difference in how battles and sieges were fought. There must be centuries between the introduction of firearms and the point where two thirds of battlefield casualties were from gunpowder weapons. With drones in Ukraine, this happened within a few years.
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  48. NATO isn't fighting in Ukraine. There are no NATO troops there. NATO countries are just giving some military supplies to the Ukrainian forces.
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  49. A nitpick, but: I know the prototypical European pogrom is an attack against Jews, and so that's a word that comes to mind. But a pogrom is specifically when the majority gangs up on a minority group living among them, with the tacit support of the authorities. This wasn't the case with the Hamas massacres. Those were regular old terrorist attacks. For pogroms in Israel, you have to look at radical settlers in the West Bank attacking Palestinians.
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  50. Do enlighten us.
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  51. The bulk of the US arms going to Ukraine have been decommissioned old gear that the US military already paid for and had just sitting around, waiting to be dismantled and recycled. So the profits for US industry have been relatively minor. (This is also why the official price tag put on these arms shipments doesn't tell you much: The stuff was paid for decades ago and would have been thrown away if Russia hadn't invaded Ukraine. The only added cost was shipping.)
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  52. You keep saying NATO. There are no NATO troops in Ukraine. If NATO entered this war with its own forces, Russia would be toast within two weeks.
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  53. Nitpick, but Henry Ford wasn't an appeaser, he was an enthusiastic collaborator. His factories in Germany produced military vehicles for the Nazis even during the war, staffed by POWs and forced labourers from concentration camps.
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  54. Turns out he was wrong about that and NATO worked great for decades after his death.
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  55. That's kind of a big missing thing, though. Also, Russia's neighbours started joining NATO because they wanted to be safe from Russia. It worked, too: Georgia and Ukraine have had chunks taken out of them, while little Latvia with its huge Russian minority is still in one piece thanks to its NATO membership. Russian belligerence is the cause of NATO expansion in Europe, not a reaction to it.
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  56. That isn't a military issue, so it doesn't fit this channel.
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  57.  @uninstaller2860  If Russian forces occupied Finland all the way up to the land border with Sweden, NATO absolutely would intervene though. That's a whole other level of escalation from occupying a strip of wasteland as a "security zone" or whatever.
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  58. Grody chan meme avatars continue to be a reliable red flag.
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  59. NATO isn't fighting in Ukraine. If it was, Russian forces there would be crushed in a week. Putin knows this, that's why he hasn't touched a hair on a NATO country's head despite constant Russian propaganda claiming that the war is really against NATO.
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  60.  @BarrySlisk  Other European countries, who can't just retreat into geographical isolation when Russia starts a war in Europe.
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  61. Conflict Intelligence Team looked over satellite images of the dam from throughout the Russian occupation period. They conclude that the dam probably failed due to neglect: They say that the sluice gates were badly damaged already and hadn't been moved since November. The water breached the gates, and that sudden burst caused the turbine hall to collapse. Then the mines the Russians had placed on the dam got swept away and blew up.
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  62. Every day Ukraine loses men 5x faster than Russia? That's disinfo.
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  63.  @nichevo1  Trump isn't nearly sophisticated enough for any of that, though. He just thinks Putin is a cool strong dude who gives him lots of compliments and must therefore be correct in his views.
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  64. Turkey chose not to invoke article 5, so the question never came up.
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  65. The right-wing intellectual tradition has historically been openly in favour of a powerful state, and still is in most of the world. The idea that the right stands for "small government" is pretty much exclusive to American right-wing propaganda. And they're lying obviously -- government spending, debt and use of power don't decrease under Republican governments. They're just reallocated from benefiting ordinary people to benefiting their cronies and the military-industrial complex. And nationalism and imperialism go hand in hand, of course. If you believe that your nation is inherently great and virtuous, it's natural that it should get to impose its great and virtuous will on other, lesser nations.
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  66. Of course being there sucked for the troops, especially on the retreat. Being on a battlefield sucks. That doesn't mean it wasn't strategically useful.
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  67. When did he say that? I've watched all his videos and I don't remember that at all. Maybe you could look it up and post a timestamp for us?
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  68. Ukraine had """open borders""" with Russia because it was part of the Soviet Union. They were one country, there was no border. That's how Russians got to Ukraine, as with every other country that used to be part of the Soviet Union and/or the Russian Empire. There was no Russian immigration to Ukraine post-Soviet Union. In fact (again, as in the rest of the former Soviet Union) the Russian population declined sharply because many of them moved back to Russia. In summary, you were talking out of your entire ass in an attempt to wedge your pet culture war issue into this conversation.
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  69. Elite: "Of high birth or social position; aristocratic or patrician." You may believe that these people don't deserve to be in the elite, but that's where they currently are.
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  70. I've seen a lot of people argue that Ukraine couldn't possibly hope to win a war against Russia because they have a much smaller population and economy, and so they should just capitulate and do whatever Russia wants. Strangely those same people never seem to apply that argument to a conflict between the EU and Russia. Given the overwhelming population and economic advantages of the EU, shouldn't Russia do whatever the EU wants, no questions asked, lest they get crushed in a short, victorious war?
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  71. There isn't a single NATO soldier fighting in Ukraine.
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  72. NATO doesn't "push". Countries voluntarily apply for membership because they find NATO attractive. As for why Russia's neighbours keep joining NATO...well, look at what happens to the ones that don't, like Georgia and Ukraine.
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  73.  @StPiter111  So you concede that NATO didn't "do it around the world for decades" like you originally claimed?
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  74. You're talking about Donald Trump, I assume?
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  75. Counterpoint: European countries didn't need NATO at all after the Cold War, until Russia started getting belligerent again. The US meanwhile needed, and still needs, its NATO allies for its network of military bases around the globe. The logistics of the American military empire would be a nightmare without NATO.
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  76. Only if you mistake "quiet" for "peaceful". Occupation and subjugation aren't peace for the victims.
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  77. Because Wagner isn't enough of a threat to warrant an unambiguous act of war against Belarus just on the chance they might be planning something.
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  78. It's not the "thought police", it's YouTube's brainless content moderation algorithm. They would never spend the money on an actual human thought police. It deletes comments that have too high a density of "advertiser-unfriendly" words, regardless of context. Doesn't matter if you're for or against [bad thing], as long as you describe it in explicit terms, the comment gets removed. Talking about war is always risky in that regard.
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  79. The EU has passed 17 cumulative sanction packages against Russia since the start of the war. I see no reason why they wouldn't go for number 18 over this.
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  80. Of course Ukraine was shelling Doneck, they were fighting Russian-backed separatist forces and Russian "little green men" there.
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  81. Re 2): NATO doesn't endanger Russia's security though. It has never shown any interest in attacking Russia. When Russia talks about "security concerns" in its neighbourhood, what they mean is that they want to be able to invade smaller neighbours when it suits them. And if those neighbours join NATO, that's no longer possible. NATO is the reason little Latvia and Lithuania are still in one piece, while Georgia and Ukraine have had chunks taken out of them by Russia. Russia's other neighbours see this, and naturally seek the protection of NATO.
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  82. When we're comparing the Ukrainian and Russian manpower pool, it's also worth keeping in mind that Russia has to keep troops around for other purposes. They have other unfriendly neighbours, and internal factions, who might take advantage if the state throws everything it has into Ukraine and leaves the rest of the country unsecured. Ukraine's military meanwhile has only one job, fighting Russia and its allies/proxies.
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  83. But they absolutely did gut washing machines for their missiles. Just because it's embarrassing for Russia, and thus good propaganda for the West, doesn't mean it's not true.
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  84.  @НиколайПостников-у2м  It's called conscription, it's what you do in a large-scale war that threatens the existence of your country.
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  85. A couple reasons (besides outright Russian blunders like the terrible planning of the initial invasion): 1. Ukraine's military was designed specifically to fight off a Russian invasion and nothing else. 2. Ukrainian troops are more motivated. 3. Russia maintains a lot of expensive gear it can't use in this war (like its navy), while Ukraine doesn't, see point 1.
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  86. The Belarussian military is pretty pathetic, as far as I'm aware. Poland surrendering without a fight is the only way Belarus would ever win that war.
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  87. 1. Why on earth would an American law restraining the actions of the US government apply to the comments section of a video uploaded by a Danish guy to a privately-owned international internet platform? The 1st Amendment absolutely does not exist here, nor should it. 2. Comments get removed by YouTube's brainless filters if they contain too many "advertiser-unfriendly" keywords, regardless of context. Talking about war and violence or currently hot political topics is always risky in that regard.
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  88. He's Danish.
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  89. America and allies killed loads of innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan. That was very bad and they should never have done it. Russia is currently killing loads of innocent people in Ukraine. That is also very bad and they should stop doing it immediately.
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  90. Or...Putin didn't kill him then because he didn't want to make him a martyr, and killed him now because he figured that danger had passed.
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  91. Plural verb agreement for words referring to a group of people is absolutely standard English. You can say "the staff (sg.) at this restaurant are (pl.) very friendly", for example.
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  92. Germany has given more aid to Ukraine than the rest of the EU combined. France has spent like one seventeenth as much as Germany. And this isn't factoring in that Germany has exposed itself to huge economic damage by going cold turkey on Russian gas and by sanctioning an important long-term trading partner, triggering a recession. It's time the others did some stepping up.
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  93. Austria and Switzerland aren't in NATO.
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  94. YouTube wasn't demonetising his videos to please Putin. YouTube just has extremely dumb automated filters that respond to combinations of "advertiser-unfriendly" keywords and images regardless of context. So if you have tanks and explosions in your intro and talk about war and violence, as Anders does, you're likely to get demonetised and have to wait for a manual review (which they're usually too cheap to do, because humans want wages). It's a capitalism thing.
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  95. I mean, let's compare the combined GDP of everybody who sided against Putin, the GDP of Putin's allies (which would be, uh, North Korea I guess?) and the GDP of the countries that are trying to stay out of it and play both sides, like China and India.
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  96. Ukraine has plenty of manpower, in theory. They're just reluctant to draft more people because of the economic and social consequences. They're still preferentially conscripting older men, for example, to avoid pulling the young out of education and training. If they (or Russia, for that matter) switched to total World War-style conscription, they would have bodies to throw into the war for many years at current casualty rates.
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  97. No, "people" in the sense of "populace, nation" can be used with singular agreement.
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  98. NATO hasn't "expanded eastwards", Russia's neighbours have moved westwards. They've joined NATO of their own free will in order to be protected from Russian aggression. And it worked! Ukraine and Georgia have both had chunks taken out of them by Putin, while little Latvia with its huge Russian minority is still in one piece thanks to NATO membership. If Russia doesn't want NATO on its doorstep, it should try being a better neighbour.
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  99. Because they win either way: If Russia wins it weakens their NATO rivals, and if Russia loses they can turn it into a client state. So they don't need to pick a side.
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  100. Could you stop copy-pasting your conspiracy manifesto in these comments?
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  101.  @nvmffs  "so why is NATO supporting Ukraine to such a degree, as you rightfully point out?" Because if Russia conquered Ukraine, that would be geopolitically disadvantageous for NATO. I don't see the mystery. It's not like NATO is pouring huge resources into this war. It's costing them a couple billion a year, total. It's a blip on the budget, the main issue is logistics (scrounging up enough artillery shells on short notice, that sort of thing). Putin expected Ukraine to collapse instantly, in which case NATO wouldn't have bothered confronting Russia over it. But that didn't happen, so now they've got an opportunity to make Russia pay for its mistake.
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  102.  @Princip666  Nah, I agree, Anders seems pissed.
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  103. Fortunately we don't rely on official Russian statements to figure out what Russia wants. They also said they had no intention of invading Ukraine about a week before they attacked.
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  104. Anders Puck Nielsen is an officer in the Danish navy, not an "Anglo-American".
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  105. Europe has to prioritise defense (as in, actually physically defending its own territory) a lot more than the US because of its geography. The nearest country that might realistically want to attack the US at some point is on the other side of a vast ocean, whereas the EU has a long land border with its nearest realistic enemy (Russia/Belarus). So Europe is never going to be as "strong" as the US in terms of the ability to inflict damage on their enemies unless they spend a lot more than the US.
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  106.  @abrakadavra3193  Anders Puck Nielsen is an officer in the Danish navy. He's a military analyst for the Danish government. Not some random influencer. There's no mystery as to who is paying his wages, it's the Danish government.
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  107.  @toto-yf8tc  You don't have to wedge your gross culture war obsessions into every conversation, you know.
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  108. You really should have googled the man before writing this comment, Joel.
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  109. "happy merchants like you" Antisemitism is an interesting bigotry in that antisemites will just straight up invent a Jew to blame if they can't find a real one.
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  110. That one's easy and not very interesting though: Israel doesn't want to risk its own troops in ground assaults. So they blow up their targets from afar instead, which kills a lot of civilians as well because Gaza is densely populated and they have nowhere to go. They aren't deliberately targeting civilians as a strategy, they just don't care about (Palestinian) civilian lives.
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  111.  misarthim6538  Israel's own propaganda says that Hamas is preventing civilians from leaving for safe areas. So even under their own framework they know for a fact that they will kill large numbers of helplessly trapped civilians with their attacks. They could avoid most of those deaths by going in on the ground, but that would expose their own troops to much higher casualties. So they are choosing to trade Palestinian civilian lives for Israeli soldiers' lives.
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  112. Great idea, I agree. Russia can end it in a day by withdrawing its troops to its own territory and then declaring a ceasefire.
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  113.  @murphy7801  Your talking point is about 2 years out of date. Germany (which is in Central Europe, not Western Europe, for the record) has committed far more resources to the confrontation with Russia than France or Spain or Italy.
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  114. There is no realistic outcome to this war where Ukraine gets "wiped off the map". That just isn't in the cards. A realistic comprehensive Ukrainian defeat means Russia gets to keep roughly the territory it currently occupies, while Ukraine gets no credible security guarantees from the West.
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  115.  @Princip666  Oh come on. I'm trying to have a serious conversation here and you come out with "the lurkers support me in e-mail". The majority of Ukrainians have an extremely negative view of Russia by this point. If you really don't believe that, you're either delusional or a shameless liar. If you can find me a poll conducted in free Ukraine that shows majority positive sentiment towards Russia, I'll personally pack my bags and move to the glorious Donetsk People's Republic.
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  116. ​ @Princip666  "at least explain how it's possible that people voted to join RF in those 4 regions if they hate Russia so much?" 1. We have no idea what the actual outcomes of those referenda were, because they were obviously, blatantly faked and manipulated. It's entirely possible that a majority voted to join Russia, but Russia would have claimed that even if the vote had come out 90% against. So this is just you choosing to believe what you want to be true. 2. Those were the regions with the largest ethnically Russian population, the rest of Ukraine is far more Ukrainian. 3. Many people who didn't want to be Russian had already fled. 4. Many more were frightened to vote the "wrong" way, for good reasons, so they either abstained or voted in favour to be safe. And you want me to present evidence that Russia is unpopular in free Ukraine? Seriously? I mean, pick your poll. YouTube eats comments with links in them, but you can google "Ukraine public sentiment towards Russia", right? You won't find a single poll that looks at all favourable for Russia. "Russia is unpopular in Ukraine" should be a completely uncontroversial claim for anybody who's in contact with reality. In any case you've made the opposite claim, that only a tiny elite in Ukraine dislikes Russia. I'd love to see your sources for that.
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  117. But how does a psychopath decide what "suits" them? They decide based on their beliefs.
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  118.  @Finnishguy777  YouTube's content moderation algorithm is entirely brainless, from what I can tell. If your comment contains too many "advertiser-unfriendly" words, regardless of context, it'll be deleted. Doesn't even matter if you're advocating for [bad thing] or speaking out against [bad thing], if you describe it in explicit terms the hammer comes down. When there's some sort of big controversy or crisis going on they turn it up higher, so it gets even more false positives. Talking about war is always risky in that regard.
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  119. I'm not any sort of expert, but I was surprised by the invasion because I thought Putin understood that he had a good thing going. I'm disappointed with him, in a sense. I thought he was more cunning and pragmatic than that (much like Mearsheimer did). He had good (lucrative) relations with the West, where governments were tolerating a significant amount of Russian espionage and propaganda on social media etc. as long as business was good. He got to nibble at smaller neighbours like Georgia and Ukraine while undermining Western democracies, with Western countries only lodging lukewarm protests. He was rich and in-demand and his power was secure. I didn't expect him to risk all of that for some nostalgic vision of national grandeur, even on the assumption that Ukraine would be a pushover.
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  120. I mean, plain GDP figures tell you very little in a war economy. When the government pays companies to produce weapons, this increases GDP because funds that would otherwise be saved up or spent on infrastructure and public services are instead being turned into profits for weapons manufacturers. But it doesn't do anything to improve the material basis of the economy. It's the equivalent of paying people to dig ditches and then fill them in again.
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  121. I mean, Russia never was a superpower. The Soviet Union together with its Warsaw Pact clients was a superpower, but that empire was much bigger than just Russia.
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  122. If NATO was fighting in Ukraine, the war would be over in two weeks. Putin knows this, that's why he has been careful not to touch a hair on NATO's head even though Ukrainian military equipment is being repaired on NATO territory, Ukrainian soldiers are being trained there, and so on.
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  123. Absolutely nobody in the EU has even the slightest interest in "conquering Russia". That's an insane notion. European countries bent over backwards for decades to ensure peaceful and profitable relations with Russia, even as Putin kept invading his neighbours in Ukraine and Georgia and running propaganda and disinformation campaigns during our elections. But that relationship became unsustainable when Putin finally snapped and tried to grab all of Ukraine.
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  124. There have been loads of decisive major wars where the victor did not conquer the loser's territory and capture their leadership. It's actually very rare for wars to result in the complete collapse of one party like that. Even WWI didn't end with a big invasion and the capture of the Central Power leaders, they came to the negotiating table.
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  125. ​ @tiefensucht  "You know that Ukraine already has collapsed and relies 100% on western money? Russia has a lot more time." The West can bankroll Ukraine indefinitely if it wants to. Russia has a smaller GDP than Italy, the collective West has infinitely deeper pockets. So it's purely a question of the political will.
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  126. If you announce it, then politicians and the public in other countries will know about it and can pressure the government accordingly. That's important when you're trying to manage an alliance of democratic countries. For example, Chancellor Scholz was being criticized for now allowing Ukraine to strike Russian territory with German weapons. He wants to be able to say publicly that he is now allowing it, but that would have been really awkward if the Americans had kept it secret.
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  127. No he didn't.
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  128. That was true at the start of the war, but surely they've gathered up-to-date intelligence by this point? I mean, they have their own spy satellites, they just have to sit some guys down at a computer to evaluate the pictures.
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  129. You're not very good at this.
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  130. "Ludacris" is a rapper, the word you're looking for is "ludicrous". And the US have never lifted a finger in Europe or anywhere else in the world unless it was in their own material interest. They aren't supporting Ukraine out of the kindness of their hearts, they're doing it because Russia conquering Ukraine would be strategically disadvantageous for the American empire.
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  131. "They are waging war in Ukraine to halt further NATO encroachment." That's a very silly strategy then. Considering NATO had repeatedly made it clear to Ukraine that they would never be allowed to join, precisely because it wasn't worth a confrontation with Russia. Seeing as European countries had been bending over backwards for decades to maintain friendly (=profitable) relations with Putin's Russia. NATO was perfectly happy with Ukraine as a buffer state, they just wanted the government to be generally pro-Western, the same way Russia wanted it to be generally pro-Russian. But Putin always conceived of NATO as a territorial empire rather than a defensive military alliance. He himself runs Russia as a land-grabbing territorial empire because that's the only mental model he has of international relations. So he couldn't imagine that NATO wouldn't "annex" more territory if given the chance, and got increasingly paranoid about it when Russia's neighbours started joining NATO to be safe from Russian land grabs like in Georgia and Ukrine.
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  132. I mean, yeah, probably? That's what soldiers do 99% of the time, sit around waiting for something to happen.
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  133. Hard to think of a period in human history where that wouldn't have been the case, to be fair. 100 years ago today the world was also a clown show sliding towards disaster.
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  134. Russia has also always been pretty clear that when it talks about its "security interests", what it means is the ability to coerce and invade its smaller neighbours. NATO has at no point been aggressive towards Russia. But everybody could see that little Latvia with its big Russian minority was still safe and intact thanks to NATO and the EU, while Georgia and Ukraine have had chunks taken out of them. If Russia is so worried about NATO "expansion" (which is a misnomer really, NATO isn't a territorial empire, it's a voluntary defensive alliance), it should have tried being a better neighbour.
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  135.  @PVTParts-eu3zl  My dude, that would only be a valid security concern if anybody in Europe had ever shown the slightest interest in fighting Russia post Cold War. That was never the case. To the contrary, European countries bent over backwards for decades to maintain good (=profitable) relations with Russia even as Putin took chunks out of Ukraine and Georgia and interfered in European elections. And of course there was no NATO infrastructure in Ukraine, ever. No missiles, no troops, nothing. So your comparison to the Cuban missile crisis falls completely flat. You're trying to justify a blatant war of conquest with a far-fetched hypothetical ("what if NATO suddenly decided it wanted to start a land war with Russia for no reason").
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  136. I wish YouTube had some sort of "reminder" feature. Then I could reply to this dumbshit comment two years from now and rub in your face that Ukraine does, in fact, still exist.
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  137. "Germany's Scholz is already pretty much in Putlers pockets, that arse vetoes everything he can while smiling and pretending he is pro-Ukraine." Germany has given more military aid to Ukraine than the rest of the EU combined. Your narrative is two years out of date, minimum.
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  138. Nah, Trump is evil, being told what to do, and stupid. It's not like any of the shit he's doing is clever or subtle, it's just shameless. Sociopaths often confuse that with cleverness: they think everyone else is just too dumb and timid to grasp every possible personal advantage, because they can't fathom the idea of having moral standards.
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  139. NATO didn't want Ukraine before the war either. Paranoid Putin just didn't believe them because he mistakes NATO, a military alliance, for a territorial empire like Russia. And from that perspective you always grab more territory if you can get it, so he assumed NATO was trying to trick him by feigning disinterest in Ukrainian membership.
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  140. Ukraine has plenty of troops, they just need to draft them. They have so far been preferentially drafting older men to avoid pulling the young out of education and training.
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  141. I mean, even if Russia somehow manages to conquer all of Ukraine, it'll just turn into another Afghanistan for them. Ukraine is too big and the population is too large, Russia can't permanently spare enough troops to keep them pacified. And after all that has happened, Ukrainians will never accept the occupation. Russia lost this war on a strategic level when their initial invasion plan failed. They can do a lot of damage to Ukraine, but it'll never be "theirs" in a meaningful way now.
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  142. If the USA bailed out of NATO, the European Union would probably set up some sort of joint European nuclear deterrence programme. Since the member states that already have nukes ((just one now I guess, since Britain is out) wouldn't want to hand them over to EU control, but it would also be crazy inefficient for each member state to build its own nukes.
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  143. I'm pretty sure Putin created the "disaster in Ukraine" by invading the goddamn country in an attempt to overthrow its government. We had good, profitable relations with Russia before then.
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  144. Except Trump obviously doesn't want the Europeans to use their militaries to fight Russia. Since his goal is to end the war quickly and to Russia's advantage. Which raises the question, what are the Europeans supposed to do with their brand-new military might, in his mind? Star a war with China, on the other side of Eurasia? Russia is the only realistic threat at the moment. No, Trump had no geopolitical agenda behind his belly-aching about NATO spending. Somebody on Fox News said that the USA were getting a """bad deal""" on NATO, and Mr. Big Beautiful Deals's ego couldn't handle the notion of getting a """bad deal""", so he started obsessing about it. That's all. Same way he's now obsessing about trade deficits because the term includes the word "deficit", even though all they mean is that Americans have money to buy shit they want from other countries.
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  145. So is Trump simply lying when he says that he wants to cut aid to Ukraine and not support European NATO members in a war against Russia?
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  146. I would imagine that a Trump presidency will make co-ordination with the US much harder? You know, since he can't be trusted to keep his mouth shut or to safeguard secret documents. The informational security of any plans involving the US government, whether directly or as part of NATO, will be compromised.
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  147. I mean, Poland is committed to its own security. They aren't opposing Russia to do other Europeans a favour, they just happen to be physically located between Russia and the rest of Europe.
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  148. Loads. If we're talking a total war with full mobilization of the entire population, they have millions of soldiers in reserve. The bottleneck isn't manpower as such (a country the size of Ukraine can potentially absorb millions of casualties and keep fighting), it's training up replacements quickly enough.
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  149. If Ukraine had been created by doing to Russians what was done to Palestinians to create Israel, Russia would have a perfectly legitimate claim to it.
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  150. So you're a mind reader, then? Since you know what he thinks about Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
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  151. Russia does not have an especially advanced army. It's unable to produce its most advanced equipment in sufficient numbers to make a difference in the war. They've been fielding old materiel because that's what they actually have on hand. I believe the saying goes "Russia has a large and modern military, but the large part isn't modern and the modern part isn't large".
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  152. They were shot down over Russian territory, weren't they? Hard to get photos of that.
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  153.  @Jole30  I have no idea how many jets they shot down. My point is that it would be very hard for them to get photographic evidence of it either way. So the absence of photos isn't in itself evidence that they're lying about it.
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  154.  @JanDahl  Yes, it is also bad that the US don't recognize The Hague. So, since you agree that it is very bad for a country not to recognize The Hague, you also agree that Russia should recognize The Hague and its war criminals should be prosecuted there, correct?
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  155. Surely Putin can just claim some sort of victory in his New Year's speech, whether there has been one or not. The target audience for that speech is the general Russian TV-watching public after all, not military bloggers who have some independent notion of what's happening on the battlefield.
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  156. Are you in Germany right now, or is that just an unusually German-looking bit of Danish countryside? :)
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  157. Ukraine has plenty of manpower, in theory. The problem is the cost and social effects of conscripting them. They're still preferentially drafting older men to avoid pulling the young out of education and training, for example. If Ukraine and/or Russia switch to total World War-style conscription, they'll have bodies to throw at the front for many years at the current casualty rates.
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  158. He's a military analyst for the Danish military, his entire job is to "do research" on this issue. How about you, how much time do you spend "doing research" on the war in Ukraine? Would you say it's more or less than a full-time job's worth?
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  159.  @rayzerot  Well, by "Nazi" he means anybody who believes that Ukraine is, or should be, a separate nation from Russia. Because according to Putin that idea was planted in the minds of the people of Little Russia by Nazis and Nazi collaborators. In other words, "denazification" means the cultural annihilation of Ukraine and turning it into a Russian puppet state.
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  160. Fortunately(?) the opinion of the Russian public doesn't particularly matter when it comes to Russian policy, since Russia is a dictatorship. And it's not like current public opinion is some sort of organic outgrowth of Russian civil society, it's been carefully shaped by constant state propaganda on all channels. Putin isn't obeying the will of the Russian people, he does what he wants and then his propaganda convinces the public that they want it too.
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  161. NATO cohesion wasn't in question during the Cold War. Everbody agreed what the stakes were then.
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  162. Nah, there's no equivalence here. Russia chose this war, "the West" is just reacting to it. "The West", as far as the war in Ukraine is concerned, just wants to restore peace and stability to Europe. Russia meanwhile wants to grab more power for itself at everybody else's expense. Personal sympathy for Ukrainians has nothing to do with it, but "the West"'s preferred outcome is still obviously better for them.
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  163.  @NathansHVAC  If the goal is attrition, why do they keep trying to advance?
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  164. Escalation by sending conscripts to the front line.
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  165. Russia hasn't been fighting NATO, and would get wiped off the battlefield in two weeks if it did. Why do you think the Russians have been so extremely careful to manage the escalation? Why do you think they keep trying to undermine NATO solidarity? They know that if NATO actually got involved in the fighting, Russia would get crushed. But NATO has never been interested in a war with Russia, and still seeks to avoid it now, which is why we've been limited to individual countries individually providing support to Ukraine.
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  166. Sure. Putin wouldn't start a war with NATO over that either, because he would lose.
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  167. @karldubhe8619 How was 1918 the "fall of imperialism" in Europe? It was empires fighting each other, where some empires won, while other empires lost.
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  168. Idunno. While I don't see Ukraine officially handing over Crimea any time soon, I can see them accepting its current unsettled status if Russia withdraws from the rest of the country in a ceasefire. That'd be a net victory.
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  169. It's trivial for a united NATO to crush Russia, but it would still be very expensive and cost many lives. So if NATO member states feel like the conflict isn't worth it, there's a risk they won't make that commitment just to defend a bit of Lapland or whatever. The choice isn't "fight Russia together or fight Russia individually", it's "fight Russia together over something that doesn't really concern me, or hope that Russia will leave me alone because there's three more countries between me and them".
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  170. Trump isn't ignorant because he has no access to information. He's ignorant because he's intellectually lazy and too arrogant to admit ignorance.
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  171. There's a reason the US in particular choose their words very carefully when condemning stuff like this. They can't simply condemn invading a country to overthrow its government, for example, because they reserve the right to do that themselves. So they have to get real specific and condemn "changing internationally recognised borders by military force" or whatever. The US don't do that, because they don't steal chunks of territory from their neigbours, they steal whole countries overseas.
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  172. Nah, there's just a faction in the government that still has cold feet about getting "more involved" in attacks on Russia. They worry that Ukraine will use Taurus's long range to attack Russian territory. Also, any targeting data for the missiles would have to be supplied by Germany, for technical reasons. This is mostly coming from the SPD. The two other coalition partners (Greens and FDP) are open to sending the missiles.
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  173. It really doesn't. Both sides are taking turns going on the offensive and then, when the resources for that offensive are exhausted, going back on the defensive. The question is how much they accomplish on each offensive vs. how much it costs them. The latest Ukrainian offensive was a bust, as was this Russian offensive.
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  174.  @docmike8601  You're right, if Ukraine keeps losing ground at the current rate, Russian forces will arrive at Kyiv in a mere 200 years!
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  175. But the war in Ukraine has cost the US very little. They've been providing old disused equipment that would otherwise have had to be scrapped. That would have been more expensive than just shipping it over to Ukraine.
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  176. It isn't applicable to the Ukrainians. The Ukrainian economy is pretty much ruined, but this doesn't matter much because they're being bankrolled by their Western allies. The Russian government meanwhile has to fund the war out of its own pocket.
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  177. I have never heard him say that Ukraine will definitely win. But Ukraine is certainly in a position to win this war unless Western support dries up, and his videos reflect that perspective.
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  178. There is no scenario in which Russia "overruns Eastern Europe". Poland, just for a start, has a far more capable military than Ukraine ever did. And they hate Russia's guts, so they would fight fiercely. Any Russian pushes further west would be at least as much of a slow bloody grind as their Ukrainian campaign so far.
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  179. The Danish military pays him, he's an officer and professional military analyst.
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  180. The EU doesn't collect any taxes.
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  181. They miscalculated and didn't use most of their military in the initial invasion, thinking they could pull off a quick coup with a couple ten thousand troops. So then they got stuck in a war of attrition against a military that was designed specifically to fight off a Russian invasion and nothing else.
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  182.  @Princip666  Of course not. That would mean unilaterally kicking out countries which applied to join NATO of their own free will. You would never find a majority for it, and why would we betray our allies like that? NATO isn't a territorial empire, it's a voluntary alliance. If a country's government feels that it no longer benefits from membership, it can leave any time.
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  183. It's making the front line a tiny bit longer for Ukraine, because they now have to protect the area where it bulges into Kursk. It's making the front line MUCH longer for Russia, because they previously only needed troops in areas where they were occupying Ukrainian territory, on the assumption that Ukraine wouldn't enter Russian territory. Whereas now they have to protect the entire length of the border to prevent Ukrainian incursions.
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  184.  @evgeniya7853  Russia has never in its history been a great power. The Soviet Union, consisting of Russia and a bunch of other countries, was a great power for a couple decades. That's it.
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  185.  @philpphilp2731  NATO hasn't "expanded east", Russia's neighbours have turned to the West for protection against Russian expansionism. NATO doesn't conquer countries, they apply for membership. And it worked! Ukraine and Georgia have had chunks taken out of them by Putin, while little Latvia is still in one piece despite its huge Russian minority, thanks to NATO membership. If Russia doesn't want NATO on its doorstep, it should have tried being a better neighbour.
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  186. As the video explains, both sides are reasonably satisfied with it. The Russians are slooowly gaining ground, which is all their leadership cares about, and the Ukrainians are dealing heavy casualties to them, which is their priority until they can gather enough resources for an offensive of their own.
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  187.  @ragingmonk6080  "Tell me how Ukraine started this mess and I may take you seriously." "As long as your story doesn't match the lies I've been getting from my other propaganda sources, I won't take you seriously." Yup, congratulations, they've got you locked in. I believe in America you call this a "bubble"?
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  188. If it's that easy for Putin to increase his army and take all of Ukraine, why hasn't he done it yet? Because he's big on fair play and wants to give the Ukrainians a fighting chance?
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  189. Don't instrumentalize this war for your religious propaganda. The "Immaculate Heart of Mary" isn't going to do shit. If we want peace and justice, we have to create them ourselves.
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  190. By this logic shouldn't Russia be closer to giving up? They asked to "bargain" first, after all.
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  191.  @alexbort3082  This isn't their first winter with power outages, though.
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  192. This is a video about the war in Ukraine, it doesn't mention American wars at all, either positively or negatively. So I'm not sure where you are detecting a "double standard".
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  193. "Putin doesn’t want all of Ukraine - why lie? The peace plan he offered was only to keep the Oblasts who voted to join Russia." Anders explains this. Putin wants to annex some of Ukraine, and turn the rest of it into a Russian puppet state -- that's what "denazification" means, the removal of anybody from the government who thinks that Ukraine is a separate nation from Russia. Because according to Putin, that idea was planted in the impressionable minds of the people of Little Russia by Nazis and Nazi collaborators. "Why shouldn’t the Oblasts be able to vote?" Even if those elections had been free, fair and secret (which they obviously weren't), you don't get to invade another country and then hold an "election" in the occupied territories to legitimize your land grab. Like, if the US dropped paratroopers in the North Caucasus or Siberia and polled the ethnic minorities there if they wanted their own separate states, do you think Russia should be forced to abide by the outcome? "They should just sit back and accept genocide?" Casualties in the fighting between 2014 and the full Russian invasion were very low. There was occasional low-intensity shelling from both sides, and sometimes somebody got hit by a stray shell. Calling that a "genocide" is ridiculous.
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  194. What "security concerns", though? NATO has never shown any interest whatsoever in a war with Russia. In fact both NATO and the EU bent over backwards in recent decades to avoid a confrontation with Russia, because they were much more interested in continuing to do business. No, Russia's "security concern" is simply that if its neighbours join NATO, it can no longer get away with invading and occupying their territory, like it's done in Georgia and Ukraine. And since Russia keeps doing this, naturally its neighbours want to join NATO for protection. NATO is the reason reason little Latvia with its huge Russian minority is still intact, unlike Georgia and Ukraine.
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  195. If Mexico was a neighbour of both the US and China, would Mexico not be entitled to join a miltiary alliance with China? And would the US be entitled to invade Mexico just on the hypothetical future possibility that Mexico might join a military alliance with China in the future?
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  196. Not very catchy, is it
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  197. What you do not understand is that if the Russians lose a million men and all their Soviet-era stock fighting this """EU proxy army""", that's a huge win for the EU, who are left unscathed while Russia has expended enormous resources. We're spending like 2-3% of GDP on this war, while Russia can only keep up by going into full war economy mode and burning its economy.
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  198. I'm sorry, how does some beardy dead man's opinion affect Russia's great power status? If the Pope declared Luxembourg "the 4th Rome", would that make it a great power?
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  199. Did you watch the video? His conclusion is that we don't have to worry about Wagner attacking Poland. Nothing to be scared of.
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  200. That is what Trump initially wanted, it's not what ended up in the agreement. US companies have to pay market prices for Ukrainian natural resources from ventures covered by the new fund. Since the purpose of the arrangement is to ensure US access to these minerals, it's mostly just a case of trying to keep money within the US economy instead of flowing out of it. If an American company buys minerals from a Ukrainian-American joint venture, that reduces the trade deficit, but it doesn't give "half the profits" tax-free to the US economy. You know, since the buyer is also American. "PS: Can Ukraine (and basically no one else) also exploit the USA and keep half the profits, tax-free? If the answer is no, then clearly Ukraine is simply not an equal, but the junior colonial partner." This doesn't track. Ukraine is making this deal in exchange for continued US support in their defense against Russia. They're getting something they badly want in return. We can argue about how balanced or beneficial the deal is, but the US aren't simply unilaterally helping themselves to Ukraine's wealth and then justifying it post-hoc (which is how a colonial arrangement would work). That's what Trump wanted, but he didn't get it. In the context of the war with Russia, Ukraine is a client of the US (and of the EU), not a "colony".
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  201. NATO and the EU bent over backwards for decades to avoid a confrontation with Russia. They repeatedly told Ukraine that they wouldn't be accepted as a NATO member for precisely that reason. They had zero interest in it, they were happy to be doing business with Russia. And they assumed that Putin understood he had a good thing going and wouldn't want to spoil it. But Putin is by nature a paranoid imperialist, so he never believed them and always saw NATO as a territorial empire.
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  202. So you're in favour of massively increasing military support to Ukraine, so that they can drive back the Russians with minimal casualties, right?
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  203.  @stevenobrien557  Except everybody knew in advance that Zelenskyy would not be wearing a suit. He hasn't worn a suit once since the start of the war. They invited him anyway. Anybody there who pretended to be surprised or offended by his clothing after the fact is bullshitting you.
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  204. I can't speak for Western leaders, but I didn't expect Putin to attempt a full-on conquest of Ukraine either. Not because I thought he was morally above it, but because I thought he was smarter than that. He had a good thing going! Cordial, profitable relations with the West meant that we would let smaller aggressions against non-NATO neighbours or reasonably deniable propaganda operations slide. He was making money, he had strategic security and his sphere of influence. I didn't think he'd throw all that away on an ill-conceived imperialist adventure.
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  205. "Blackrock and Citadel's gender dogma" XD Listen, not everybody you dislike is in one big conspiracy together. Your enemies aren't all buddies, they hate each other too.
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  206. I'm hoping that after the disaster in Ukraine, Russia has learned not to mistake Western calm for weakness. Russia thought the West would fold instantly because it had been non-confrontational in the previous years. Instead Western countries came together to support Ukraine and cripple Russia.
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  207. Yeah, no.
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  208. He's an officer in the Danish navy. He goes to the frontline if Denmark decides to fight Russia.
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  209. You understand that the geopolitical situation today is different than it was in the 18th century, right? The point isn't that the US relies on a free Ukraine, it's that Russia's position would be greatly strengthened if it conquered Ukraine, and that would be very disadvantageous for the American empire's influence. Also, leave it to an American to talk about the year 1783 like it's ancient history.
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  210. Russia's demands are so outrageous, and so destructive to the future of Ukraine, that Ukraine would only accept them at gunpoint, after a comprehensive defeat. As long as they can hold Russia at bay, they're better off fighting than conceding. And Russia seems unable to comprehensively defeat Ukraine, so that isn't about to happen.
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  211. "Europe" doesn't have a strategy because "Europe" consists of 27 countries each with its own agenda. Some of those countries are currently run by pro-Russian authoritarians. They can't be included in strategic planning against Russia because they'd just leak the information, and can't be relied upon to support measures that require a unanimous vote. So material military support has to be done by individual countries, while the strongest measures that can realistically pass on an EU level are sanctions.
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  212.  @e3498-v7l  ...because it was Russia who stole the territory from Ukraine, not the other way around? And yeah, contempt seems like the appropriate attitude towards the Russian state right now. It's contemptible.
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  213. That's about the quality of political analysis I would expect from a vaccination conspiracy guy, yeah.
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  214. This isn't about you guys.
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  215. The average age of Ukrainian conscripts has been 40-something since the start of the war. The reason the average age is high is because they've been preferentially drafting older men to avoid pulling the young out of education and training. Not because all the young men are dead.
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  216. Except if Russia gains influence over Ukraine, that brings its influence right up to "the West"'s borders, doesn't it? Would this justify "the West" in turn invading and annexing the country?
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  217. Sure, I guess, but "strongman leader" is hardly a role unique to Hitler. There are dozens and dozens of countries run that way at any given time.
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  218. NATO threatening war over something comparatively minor wouldn't be credible. Individual member states might, but NATO is a defensive alliance. You couldn't get the member states on board for a war against Russia unless it's a serious threat. Wagner stirring shit in Africa doesn't count, it'd have to be a serious attack on a NATO member.
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  219.  @jmg5281986  I don't see how. He was rude and arrogant and confrontational, he didn't say anything clever.
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  220. We hate the US when they use their power for evil, and we also hate them when they refuse to use it for good. Yes.
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  221. To be fair, those Russian numbers are worthless. People in a dictatorship aren't going to give honest answers to politically dangerous survey questions like "do you support the Great Leader?". I know if I lived in Russia and some guy on the phone asked me what I think about Putin, I'd say "I love him".
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  222. ​ @89RASMUS  "Well, I just go by the logic 'if they want us to use their numbers when it makes them look good, we should use their numbers when it makes them look bad as well'." But this isn't about getting a "gotcha" by turning Russian propaganda numbers back on them. That can be amusing, but right now we're trying to determine the truth. And the surveys are worthless in that regard.
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  223. Money isn't the big obstacle right now, it's physically getting our hands on enough ammunition etc. That's why we're investing heavily in arms production now.
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  224. But Russia was in no way "lured" into this war. Like, European governments in the decades leading up to it were bending over backwards to maintain friendly (=profitable) relations with Russia, even in the face of repeated Russian aggression against Ukraine and Georgia. And it was repeatedly made clear to Ukraine that they would not be admitted to NATO precisely because it wasn't worth a confrontation with Russia. That's also why Western leaders were surprised by the Russian invasion: they figured Putin understood that he had a good thing going, economically, and that he wouldn't want to jeopardize it.
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  225. Finland has a much, much smaller army than Ukraine.
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  226. I can't find any attestation of that supposed Stoltenberg quote online. Where'd you get it from? Is it from a Norwegian interview or something?
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  227. The sword itself incites to violence. Having a tool at hand makes you prone to using it above other options.
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  228. He's going to face a lot of resistance on that policy domestically. Oil producers don't want oil prices to go down. They aim for the highest possible oil price that buyers will still pay. They're basically always throttling extraction on their existing wells precisely to keep supply limited and prices high.
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  229. They don't have such a law, no. It's illegal for random Ukrainian politicians or military leaders to negotiate with Russia on behalf of Ukraine, because that's the president's job. Same as in any other country.
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  230.  @guidobolke5618  What Germany had back then, and Russia today doesn't, is manpower. Germany in 1939 had a young and growing population. They were gaining 500,000 people per year. Russia is shrinking and aging. They can't afford to throw millions of their young men into the meat grinder, because there wouldn't be any young men left.
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  231. Russia can respond to it as an escalation without verbally acknowledging that they consider it an escalation. Since when are they concerned about consistency between their words and their actions?
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  232. "Supporting Ukraine isn't that urgent because the Russian military turned out to be pathetic and the Ukrainians can probably handle them" is a narrative that's been around ever since the failure of the original invasion. You must not read very widely if you've never come across it.
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  233. Militarisation does come with its own risks for a democracy. Militaries are in the habit of overthrowing governments, military service inculcates young people with an authoritarian mindset, and having a powerful military creates the temptation to use it. It's a balancing act.
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  234.  @andrzejbarcelonafrlk6416  Pretty sure that's Filipino with English phrases sprinkled in.
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  235. But Russia isn't "steadily" advancing. They lost most of the gains they made in the initial full-scale invasion. Ukraine is bigger now than it was in 2022, because the Ukrainians pushed the Russians back.
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  236. Trump is a moron, if you grab a random person off the street they'll likely be smarter than that particular "player".
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  237. Realistically, if there isn't some dramatic development inside Russia? The fighting will decrease in intensity as both sides run low on manpower and resources, turn into a frozen conflict, and the war officially ends many years from now when some new Russian leader decides to cut his losses and blame the mess on his predecessor Putin.
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  238. Trump is dogshit at making deals. If you do the maths, it turns out he would be richer today if he'd just put his inherited millions in an index fund and never touched it. His attempts at "deals" have actively lost him money compared to doing nothing.
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  239. American taxpayers don't get shit under Trump's plan either, it's American corporations that benefit.
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  240. If Putin uses nuclear weapons, then the question of what Ukraine's Western allies will permit Ukraine to do becomes irrelevant, because NATO itself will declare war on Russia.
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  241. Ukraine was effectively a neutral buffer zone before the war. They were never in a million years going to be accepted into NATO, precisely because it wasn't worth a confrontation with Russia. If a buffer zone was all Putin wanted, he wouldn't have tried to conquer it.
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  242. "Meat wave" describes a specific sort of attrition tactic, where you basically make the enemy exhaust themselves (physically, psychologically and in terms of materiel) killing wave after wave of your troops. Your attempt at sounding wise and jaded with a generic "war is hell" take just shows that you don't understand the specifics.
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  243. I understand that this is what Russian propaganda has to claim in order to explain why they haven't been able to defeat Ukraine, but it's bullshit. There are no NATO troops in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians are fighting using a couple billion dollars worth of old NATO hand-me-down equipment. The fighting is not in any way comparable to a direct confrontation with NATO.
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  244. Two dead people and a couple million in costs is a rounding error on the scale that's relevant here (i.e. war between states). We absolutely can afford to ignore that if it's convenient.
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  245. I don't recall the EU or Ukraine saying that they "can't do anything without the USA". They've been saying that the US are an extremely important ally and that things will be much harder without their support.
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  246. If things had gone according to plan for Russia and they'd installed a puppet government in Ukraine, then any concessions for mining those minerals would have gone to Russian companies anyway. Trying to control the territory directly is Plan C, at best.
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  247. This narrative is years out of date, both regarding Germany's role in Europe and Germany's attitude towards the war in Ukraine.
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  248. NATO isn't "forcing expansion". NATO isn't a territorial empire that conquers land, countries apply for membership of their own free will. And the reason Russia's neighbours keep joining NATO should be obvious, right? Russia keeps fucking invading them. They've taken chunks out of Georgia and Ukraine, while little Latvia with its huge Russian minority is still intact thanks to its NATO membership.
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  249. "Note Russian side has bigger advantage over NATO than allies had over Nazi. Huge population advantage, more than 2 to 1 and huge economic advantage, more than 2 to 1." Did you mean to write that sentence the other way around? The EU alone has three times as many citizens as Russia, and Italy alone has a bigger economy.
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  250. Russia isn't the Soviet Union. It has neither the resources nor the manpower the Soviet Union did. Hell, Russia it hadn't inherited a massive stockpile of Soviet equipment, they would have lost this war long ago just through attrition.
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  251. Eh, from a strategic perspective it would be advantageous to support Ukraine over Russia in this war even if Ukraine was just as bad as Russia.
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  252. Got a timeline on that? Russian victory has been juuuust around the corner ever since they started this dumbass war.
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  253. Sunk cost fallacy. The US invested a lot into destroying Afghanistan and Iraq, so they kept throwing good money after bad, trying to extract some benefit and preserve national prestige. Supporting Ukraine has been comparatively cheap and low-intensity for the US, so they're less invested in getting something out of it, and it's easier for Russia to offer something of comparable value, like good trade relations or whatever.
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  254. Elon Musk isn't an engineer, he just owns companies that employ engineers. His own technical qualifications wouldn't get him hired to program the entertainment system in a Tesla.
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  255. NATO didn't "move into Ukraine" at any point before the war. There was no NATO infrastructure in Ukraine, and they'd repeatedly made it clear that they didn't want Ukraine to join precisely because it would cause unnecessary conflict with Russia. Hell, they still don't want Ukraine in NATO for the most part. Then Putin's brains fell out and he decided to unilaterally start that exact conflict.
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  256.  @Princip666  NATO did not send any instructors to train AFU to NATO standards before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that is correct. If somebody told you that NATO officials have claimed this, that person lied to you.
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  257. Well yeah, there are lots of stupid and harmful ways to easily end the war. We need a good way to end it, though.
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  258. Prosecuting a politician for brazenly committing a bunch of big stupid crimes is good, actually. That's what you want to happen in a democracy. Since Republicans would let Trump get away with anything up to and including a coup, a prosecution could only ever be initiated by his political opponents. So, please stop trying to wedge your pet American issue into every conversation.
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  259. He's Danish, so I'm pretty confident that he isn't a member of an American political party. Unless you mean that he's in favour of liberty and democracy. Yeah, probably.
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  260. What do you envision NATO doing about it, though? It's not like Wagner is air-dropping troops into random African countries and overthrowing the government. They're working with local military juntas who did coups of their own. They're being invited. Sending in Western forces to kick them out again would mean war with the new government. That doesn't seem worth it.
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  261. This is disingenous. You'll never accept that somebody who disagrees with you on this has done enough research, no matter how much they've done. You'll either say it isn't enough, or that they've done it wrong. The only way to prove that they've done enough research is to agree with you.
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  262. Neither of those analogies really does it for me. Russia sued for peace in WWI not because their economy failed, but because the Bolsheviks wanted to be left alone while they implemented their revolution. And in 1990 Russia wasn't fighting a war. Russia has the ability to go full North Korea and keep weapons pointed at Ukraine pretty much indefinitely. The question is just if the Ukrainians can push them back behind their own borders before we reach that state.
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  263.  @Andygb78  Oh, that's even easier. The only potential threat to Europe was Russia, and relations with Russia were quite good for decades after the end of the Cold War. NATO was practically entirely useless to Europeans during that time, while the US continued to benefit significantly from it, being able to use European territory as staging grounds for its various invasions, getting European peacekeeping troops to clean up its messes, and so on. So naturally Europeans reduced their spending.
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  264. Except Trump obviously doesn't want the Europeans to fight Russia, because he's trying to end the war as fast as possible and in a way that benefits Russia. Why, then, do European countries need to increase their military spending again? Who are they supposed to fight except the Russians? Europeans are re-arming to oppose Trump's political agenda, not in acquiescence to it. No, Trump had no geopolitical reason to demand higher NATO spending. Somebody on TV said that the US were getting a """bad deal""" in NATO, and Trump's ego couldn't handle the notion of getting a """bad deal""", so he started obsessing about it. That's all. Same way he obsesses about trade deficits because they include the word "deficit", even though all this means is "Americans have money to buy shit they want from other countries".
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  265. The reservoir gates had been badly damaged for months, they couldn't move them.
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  266. Nope, he's a military analyst and officer in the Danish navy.
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  267. Never excuse malice as mere stupidity just because the malicious act is also stupid.
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  268. To be fair to the Russians, I imagine air defense is a lot harder to do when civilian air traffic is going on as normal. You can't just shoot at any suspicious blip under those conditions, so response time is going to be slower.
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  269. The biolabs thing is a very stupid conspiracy myth. If the US were developing bioweapons for use against Russia they'd do it back home, where it's easy to keep the research safe and secret, not in Ukraine within easy reach of Russian agents and weapons. And Putin doesn't care about Nazis, there are loads of them in his own military. Hell, Wagner was founded by a neo-Nazi.
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  270. If Ukraine's Western allies had been ready day 1, the war would have been over pretty quickly. But it took people a while to understand that Russia's initial invasion was going to fail, and so they waited (thinking "what's the point of antagonizing Russia by arming Ukraine, if Ukraine is going to fall a week from now?").
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  271.  @AngloSupreme  Ah, must be a dosage issue then.
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  272. Russian military salaries are very high at the moment, for what it's worth. If you sign up now, you get the equivalent of a good middle-class Moscow salary.
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  273.  @theo3030  It would only be a "provocation" if there was any chance in hell that said alliance would ever attack you. And if you think that NATO was planning to attack Russia, you're more paranoid than Putin. European NATO states had been bending over backwards for decades after the Cold War to maintain friendly (=profitable) relations with Russia. But Putin conceives of NATO as a territorial empire looking to grab land, because that's how he would do it. So he interprets any concessions as signs of weakness.
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  274.  @NDJ1978  How about you answer the question instead of copy-pasting your conspiracy manifesto? What does Putin want?
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  275.  @algor8541  German-made tanks are in Kursk because Russia chose to invade Ukraine. Nobody in Europe had any interest whatsoever in a military confrontation with Russia, least of all Germany. Germany bent over backwards for decades trying to maintain peaceful and profitable relations with Russia, even as Russia kept getting more and more belligerent. This is 100% on Putin.
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  276.  @Princip666  "Ukraine is fighting Russia because Russia attacked Ukraine, and Germany is helping Ukraine because they don't want a dictatorship on their doorstep" is too convoluted for you? No wonder you have trouble grasping geopolitical issues.
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  277. Why are you asking a random chatbot that functions by rephrasing random shit found on the internet, when you just saw a video by an actual expert on the subject?
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  278.  @joramneumark8557  "No matter how you look at it, NATO's eastward enlargement poses a threat to the Russians." Nope, sorry. Russia's neighbours joining NATO only poses a threat to Russia if Russia is planning to start a war with them. You are confusing Russia's imperialist interests (maintaining a "sphere of influence" of weak neighbours they can push around) with Russia's actual material security. Also note that your best example of NATO "threatening Russia" involves no actual threats of any kind being made, whereas Russian state media are currently threatening to nuke NATO capital cities. "Deploying nuclear weapons in Ukraine, as Zelensky proposed, would have meant that Moscow could be reached within 5 minutes. Turning the situation around, how would the US react if Russia were to deploy nuclear weapons within 5 minutes flying time of Washington?" Has anybody in NATO shown the slightest inclination to take Zelensky up on this idea? Not as far as I'm aware. Certainly nobody even considered the idea before Russia invaded. So again your "threat" is a 100% hypothetical future issue (NATO might choose to do something to threaten Russia), and again it's only a threat if Russia intends to start a war with a NATO country, because otherwise why would NATO nuke them?
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  279. 1. This isn't about you guys. 2. Please stop shouting.
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  280. It was, but what does that have to do with anything?
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  281.  @Princip666  Their username is "Mr. V. Granfield". But more pertinently, are they really concerned because a professional military analyst looks sly? He's supposed to be sly!
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  282.  @Princip666  Ooh, a body language expert. Are you going to administer a polygraph test next? Hire a medium? And pretending to be stupid for the sake of argument isn't a good strategy. If somebody has a normal personal name as their username, of course the implication is that that's their real-life name. You know this.
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  283.  @gerryhouska2859  Nah, there isn't a collective organising things in the background according to a common agenda in Russia. There are just powerful individuals and their hangers-on. Right now Putin has them in check, but if he loses control they're all going to fight. Whether to grab more power, or just to avoid getting thrown out a window if they lose their power.
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  284. ...that's exactly what he's talking about in this video.
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  285. 8:38 The Russian government sure likes to make vague threats. It's all "we would be forced to implement appropriate strategic measures in response to this provocation" etc. etc. I wonder if it's something that has bled into their organizational culture because everybody is involved with organized crime.
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  286. Trump isn't afraid of Putin because he's a fan of Putin. Putin has him wrapped around his finger.
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  287. I understand the Russian perspective in this regard. What I don't understand is why some in the West uncritically adopt Russian terminology about, for example, its "security interests" (i.e. its ability to coerce its neighbours), when those terms mean totally different things in our context. Saying, "well, former Eastern Bloc/Soviet states joining NATO does threaten Russia's security interests, you know, so NATO isn't innocent here" as if those "security interests" are in any way reasonable or legitimate.
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  288. Trying to keep its borders "safe" from what, exactly? None of its neighbours have any interest in conquering Russian territory, and NATO sure as hell has no interest in a war with Russia. Russia meanwhile is right now militarily occupying land belonging to two of its neighbours, Georgia and Ukraine.
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  289.  @Princip666  You haven't made any arguments either, just claims.
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  290. I get along just fine with my Russian friends and colleagues here in Germany. It's the Russian government I have a problem with.
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  291. The areas Russia stole from Ukraine are also officially Russian territory, yet they haven't used conscripts there. The issue isn't a legal one, it's a domestic policy problem. Sending conscripts to the front lines will be very unpopular and cause unrest, so Putin wants to avoid it if at all possible.
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  292. But the US didn't fight in WWII "for Europe", and didn't introduce rationing domestically "for Europe". They fought in WWII for their own imperial interests, not to do us a favour. And they were rewarded with decades of political and cultural hegemony, so they really have no cause to complain.
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  293. You have to avoid combining too many "advertiser-unfriendly" words in the same comment. The opinion you're expressing doesn't matter (you could be endorsing a genocide or condeming it), it just gets triggered by explicit terminology.
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  294. Except it really isn't. NATO has no interest in a war with Russia, and neither do any of Russia's neighbours. When Moscow talks about Russia's "security concerns", what they mean is Russia's ability to coerce and attack its smaller neighbours. They can't do that if a neighbour joins NATO. Which is why little Latvia with its large Russian population is still intact while Georgia and Ukraine have had chunks taken out of them. That's the "threat" NATO poses to Russia -- it gets in the way of Russian imperialism.
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  295. Ukraine has plenty of manpower, they have millions of "spare" fighting-age men. So does Russia. They're just reluctant to throw them into the war because paying them is expensive and it means removing them from the workforce.
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