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This has been a popular talking point in media, but it appears to be based on exactly nothing. There is nothing anywhere within Russian rhetoric to suggest that they have the slightest interest in Poland. Even the archetype of launching a surprise attack on Poland, Hitler, spent years talking about the Danzig issue before invading. While it was a surprise attack, Germany's motivation was not a surprise. Russian would need to not only launch a surprise attack, but would need a surprise motivation. Likewise, Russia's invasion of Ukraine did not have a "surprise motivation," but rather a motivation that was well-known and is consistent with Russian thought. The same would not be true of a hypothetical Poland invasion.
You are saying that Russians do not consider Poland to be within the rightful Russian sphere of influence?
I think it barely matters. Even if article five isn’t invoked for some inexplicable reason, the resemblance to the interwar years is mostly superficial.
There’s a key difference; Poland would absolutely fucking shred a Russian invasion on a military level. Russia since the war began wasn’t even guaranteed on any given day to be the most powerful military in Ukraine.
Poland’s military spending and might is nowhere near the disparity that existed in the 30s when the Soviet Union was an emerging superpower.
If anything this war has revealed that the Russian military is a paper tiger riddled with incompetence and corruption. They’re laughable compared to the past, and demographics get worse for them each passing day.
They really are a third rate power at this point. If Ukraine, one of the poorest and most corrupt European nations, is giving them trouble even this deep into the third continuation war, then they don’t have a ghost of a chance at winning a war against Poland, or the Baltics, or Finland.
I’m very sympathetic to the DR in general but the Russia cope is absolutely bonkers, almost a perfect mirror image of the twitchy-eyed Ukraine boosters. That country is completely pozzed on almost every level.
It's funny how differently people see this war! I look at it and see the opposite- even with every single US-aligned nation around the world is sending Ukraine all the weapons they can spare, Ukraine is still steadily losing this war.
They've drafted basically every man they could find, sparing only the ones necessary to work the farms and keep their economy running, with patrols on the border stopping any man from leaving (but women are fleeing the country). Meanwhile, Russia has still not needed to send in the conscripts who make up the bulk of its army- it's still able to coast on just volunteers, prisoners, and foreign mercenaries, so the average Russian citizen isn't affected.
We laughed at how mighty the western GDP was- turns out GDP does not magically turn into real weapons. Instead, Russia and its allies continue to massively outproduce all the rest of us in artillery, which is what counts the most. The US makes something like 25,000 a month while Russia makes 250,000. Instead, Ukraine has to rely on what they can scavange from old Soviet nations- the big news lately was that Armenia has agreed to send them some stuff. Armenia, the arsenal of democracy! (meanwhile, North Korea is sending literally millions of shells to Russia)
We boasted about our high-tech superweapons that would make the old Soviet stuff look like a joke. It turns out that GPD-guided munitions are easy to electronically jam, long-range missiles are too expensive and few, and the wiz-bang F35 that's supposed to do everything is too precious to be risked in Ukraine. Instead, the most practical weapon seems to be cheap, simple drones manufactured in Iran.
It's not a quick, flashy war of maneuver, sure. It's a slow, grinding, war of attrition. But they're winning. It boggles my mind that people still seem to think that Ukraine is doing great and will be marching into Moscow any day now. We need to see the reality and adapt- either cut a deal that gifts Russia the donbass region, or massively increase the amount of aid going to Ukraine, and restructure the current arms industry to be suited for a serious war.
You’ve missed my point entirely and in a hilarious way sort of made my point about the discourse surrounding Russia for me.
I never said Ukraine was winning, I never even implied it. I was really talking about the supposed other targets of Russia; Poland & The Baltics. I have no doubt that Russia could win this war given enough time and bloodshed, time and numbers are on their side.
The crux of my point was that Ukraine was an embarrassingly easy target and Russia still can’t manage it without enormous difficulty. They might win, they might not. If I had to bet money I’d bet money on Russia winning.
I have basically no dog in this fight but seeing Russia get its nose bloodied by Ukraine is like seeing a tatted up security guard getting their teeth knocked out by a 90lb twink; Turns out the muscleman was hopped up on bullshido and an inflated ego. Even with material support from the west, the arc of the war reveals a lot about the state capacity; all it took was a couple thousand mercenaries to turn around to legitimately threaten the regime. You’d expect that from some tinpot African authoritarian regime, but it was shocking to see that happen in Russia.
All your points on the desiccation of the western arms capability I fully agree with. But that has precedent; nothing reveals what technology is cost effective and practical like field testing in combat. And military spending in Poland and the Baltics are ramping up and have been for a while. Russia’s military capability or lack thereof has been largely revealed, and countries other than the USA and its satrapies and Russia have agency as well.
I think Russia winning the war might not actually improve the Russian position all that much. It’s not cope, I couldn’t give a fuck about the GAE. But every other country on Russia’s border are hardening against them, both politically and militarily. Aside from maybe Moldova, there are no easy targets left. Every other country that Russia wants to fuck with is much more dangerous than Ukraine.
Ukraine is not Liechtenstein! It is not Monaco! They have an army of 1.2 million men and women. When you figure in the aid they have something like a two trillion dollar military budget. They have a territorial area that’s equivalent to France and Germany combined, giving them significant ability to use defense in depth. They have been fighting Russia since 2014, which has given them a significant amount of combat experience that most NATO countries do not have. And those years allowed them to build up a fearsome network of fortifications and bunker systems all along the DPR/LPR border. There’s a reason they got picked to be the buffer state over Poland, and it’s not because they’re an easy nut to crack. To assume that Ukraine is the “easy mode” before having to take on the NATO final boss is foolishness.
Is it? Russia is almost five times the population of Ukraine and militarily supposedly one of the mightiest nations on earth. Russia is noticeably richer and more advanced than Ukraine, and incredibly it’s less corrupt which is absolutely wild.
Lots of smart people thought the Russians would crush Ukraine in a matter of weeks, it’s incredibly impressive on Ukraine’s part that they didn’t. And equally embarrassing for Russia.
Ukraine is largely flat and featureless. Afghanistan it is not. Yes it’s a buffer state but historically buffer states come in many flavors; Ukraine’s particular brew is the easily traversed crossroads type.
A lot has happened between now and then of course, but this whole excercise is, on my end, indicative of the relative weakness of Russia.
Poland, even without NATO protection, is obviously a huge problem for Russia. This whole thread stated with me basically saying that the idea of Russia throwing its weight against Poland is absurd, so I’ll spell it out.
Poland is roughly the same population as Ukraine, with tougher and more diverse terrain, and has had greatly heightened peace-time military spending for years. It’s much richer, more advanced, less riddled by corruption, more homogeneous, and has a much higher state capacity.
And there’s no reason to believe that the ramp up that Poland could achieve would be any less spectacular than Ukraine’s. In fact there seems to be sufficient evidence for the opposite conclusion.
While Russia is clearly not on the ropes and it appears to me that they’re winning, it also appears clear that their regime is pretty brittle and couldn’t sustain the heightened war state to even look seriously at directly messing with Poland or the Baltic countries, or even Finland.
Even in its current fake and gay state, NATO would absolutely eat Russia alive. I can’t believe this is even remotely controversial to stay.
I feel like this is a case where you just have to keep an open mind and be willing to update your views. The smart people who thought that were wrong, on both counts. Russia badly botched it's attempt at a fast, combined arms inivasion, yes. But Ukraine also hung on with much more tenacity and organization than anyone expected, and that counts for a lot. And now they've had 2 years worth of western aid and training, in a fairly large country that is all-out mobilized for war. At this point, like @ABigGuy4U said, Ukraine is not a soft target, and yet Russia continues to advance.
Now, if there were some hypothetical future war between all of NATO and Russia then, sure, Nato wins easy. Except that would never happen, because of nuclear weapons. I also don't see any particular reason why Russia would want to start such a war- there's no area of Poland that's like the Donbass, which has lots of ethnic Russians and a direct land connection to Crimea.
Only the ones in Europe. They're closer than ever now to China, North Korea, and Iran. Not sure about the former Soviet states in central Asia but I don't think there's any real tension there, either.
That said, I agree with your initial point that Russia isn't particularly a threat to Poland, even on its own. So I guess I'm cautiously arguing in favor of a peace deal where Russia gets to keep the Donbass, the other European countries stay vigilent and increase defense, and hopefully there's no more war after that.
Im not cuddles but i think i have. Have you? What if my "updated" view is that the russian military is substantially less capable than initially estemated.
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