Politics, politics, politics (so long and thanks for all the fish)

[Silly McSilly Face]

That’s not the story of this war. We have seen two successful offensives from Ukraine and a strong rearguard action.

What we see from Russia has been sheer brutality especially to their own men.

The elite Russian forces which you dan compare the standing British army were wiped out early on.

They’ve also been kicked out of Syria and Wagner are not so active in Africa.

Europe will annihilate any Russian advances. Push come to shove we outnumber them with men of fighting age many many times over.

I think thats really naive. Ukraine is huge. At the end of the day the Russians have successfully taken and held a territory the size of the pretty much the entire UK against a highly motivated, well equipped and trained military that numbered over 700K and had combat experience based on fighting Russian backed separatists in the east. They did it fairly rapidly too and adapted their approach after their early attack on kiev and the north stalled. They have never fully deployed their best/most advanced air or ground assets either. If you don't see a terrifying opponent militarily here then you need to wake up.

And with the Russians via Europe it comes down to as you say doctrine and tolerance. Russia has tolerance for mass casualties. Europe doesn't. As I said in a full scale war with Russia both sides would lose their best soldiers very rapidly. If there's 10K casualties on their side in the first week they barely bat an eyelid. 10K casualties on our side would be psychologically devastating and that would likely happen in days

 

[ricky2tricky4city]

No doubt Russia is still powerful and has a nut job cnut as its leader, but its nowhere near as strong as people made out, if it was this war would have been over a long time ago

Russia is traditionally a power nation....
Modern warfare isn't traditional....if it was Russia would be exactly where they wanted to be months/years ago.

The cost of eliminating a multi million dollar piece of wartime machinery is minimal.

 

[johnola]

Also having spent time in the UAE last Sept I can tell you now its full of defected Russians and from just a few conversations with a couple around the city, the sanctions on the country, both financially and otherwise demoralised their population, hence why so many have decided to go and live int he Middle East. Anecdotal maybe, but the war and actions has most def impacted on national confidence

No doubt Russia is still powerful and has a nut job cnut as its leader, but its nowhere near as strong as people made out, if it was this war would have been over a long time ago

I don't agree with the rhetoric that its not an America problem either, we have the Russia we have today in part because of US involvement since time in memoriam

I think thats really naive. Ukraine is huge. At the end of the day the Russians have successfully taken and held a territory the size of the pretty much the entire UK against a highly motivated, well equipped and trained military that numbered over 700K and had combat experience based on fighting Russian backed separatists in the east. They did it fairly rapidly too and adapted their approach after their early attack on kiev and the north stalled. They have never fully deployed their best/most advanced air or ground assets either. If you don't see a terrifying opponent militarily here then you need to wake up.

And with the Russians via Europe it comes down to as you say doctrine and tolerance. Russia has tolerance for mass casualties. Europe doesn't. As I said in a full scale war with Russia both sides would lose their best soldiers very rapidly. If there's 10K casualties on their side in the first week they barely bat an eyelid. 10K casualties on our side would be psychologically devastating and that would likely happen in days

we would only lose men at that rate on the offensive- and we would not be on the offensive we would be on defence with air superiority raising Russian rates of attrition to the extent their will be few Russians left to give a stuff about the losses.

 

[Silly McSilly Face]

we would only lose men at that rate on the offensive- and we would not be on the offensive we would be on defence with air superiority raising Russian rates of attrition to the extent their will be few Russians left to give a stuff about the losses.

How would we be on the defensive and also "overwhelming" the Russians? Also even on the defence, Ukrainian official figures (which like the Russians likely significantly downplay the actual figures), state that c. 10K Ukrainian soldiers had been killed, c. 30K wounded and c. 5K captured and c. 4k missing by June 2022. So thats 2/3 of the UK's entire army f*cked up in the space of 4 months purely on the defence, even if we accept there was no propoganda in the figures. I repeat: we dont have the resources to go into a fight with Russia. We've heavily underspent on defence over the years based on a twin leap of faith that a) nothing like this would happen again and b) if it did the yanks would bail us out. Ukraine went into 2022 with an army literally x10 larger than ours and as I've said theyve lost an area of land the size of the UK in the space of a couple of years.