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Zelensky and Trump's arm twisting competition
Ukraine is bombing Russian refineries. Good for them but maybe not so good for the price of diesel and thus for Trump. Trump has been very vocal about how Zelensky needs to stop using the targeting data that the US supplies them. Recently he's stepped up his threats, proclaiming a diesel deal with Russia just a couple months after the Lindsey Graham Memorial Sanctions Bill, and announcing an energy ceasefire that Russia doesn't seem to know about.
Republican congressfolk have been fairly supportive of the Iran conflict but Russia is much more polarizing. Zelensky seems confident we won't see a repeat of the early administration snafu - no need for groveling and thank yous - due to this pressure. On the other hand, another winter without sufficient air defense will prove extremely painful, though we said that last year too.
I'm guessing there is an evident question to be asked here.
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It could also be a realization that this doesn't work. Trump only respects strength. Submission is taken as a sign of weakness meaning he gets to walk all over you. So it might be a calculated gamble that the show of force is more likely to result in support than rolling over for Trump.
On the other hand, Trump also hates it when people try to get shit from him for free. The posture of Zelensky that says "you can't afford to stop giving Ukraine free aid" might work on the EU bureaucracy, but Trump can easily go "yes I can lol" if he thinks Z is willing to undermine the GOP in the midterms.
The EU only provides aid because they believe Ukraine stands a chance at not losing. A show of force is necessary to show the European population that their resources are being used well.
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Just as a coincidence there some absolutely unverified claims by pro-UA accounts in twitter that starlink has imposed speed limits that had disrupted some Ukraine drone strikes.
Fog of war, grain of salt, etc. etc., but it seems worse than that at this point. No just "claims by pro-UA accounts", but e.g. the Wall Street Journal quoting Ukraine officials. Not just ordinary Starlink (which isn't supposed to be used for military weapons, or with terminals in-motion on any standard plans) but rather Starshield (the military-grade hardware with dedicated satellites, etc., which is supposed to already be disabled inside Russia but which was donated to Ukraine by the Pentagon for military use there, including in Russian-captured areas). Cut off with no warning while missions were in-flight.
Could be a misunderstanding, an attempt to cut off Russian use of captured terminals that accidentally impacted Ukrainian terminals as well ... but given the lack of warning and the timing, I highly doubt it.
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I don't get why Zelensky doesn't just go easy on the refineries for a few weeks to get some Trump brownie points. It can also get some moral high ground of like "we held the ceasefire but Russia kept attacking" for a renewed massive strike in November or December. I just don't see holding back on energy for a couple weeks making much of a difference for the war effort, the economic shocks will have a delayed effect on putin and the front line, and he has plenty of non-energy targets to hit like datacenters and warehouses.
On another note, I do like how Ukraine is gloves off - many of their attacks on bridges and powerplants and other economic targets would be screeched of as WAR CRIMES if Trump did it. (by the same people who simp for Zelensky of course) I'm sure if Trump really went scorched earth and maximally targeted these types of targets, Iran would actually be brought to its knees, but instead all we get is a bunch of cope strikes on insignificant targets.
We did bomb a bunch of Iranian bridges but bombing power plants wasn’t done because it was understood that that would cause the Iranians to bomb Gulf power plants which they didn’t have enough interceptors to stop, and which would starve or kill via heat huge numbers of people.
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He is going easy on them, he's mad Putin is not going easy on the power plants in return and wants Trump to take his side. And Trump doesn't care as long as no attacks on the refineries are happening.
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There is no conspiracy against Trump. He is just a retard who makes retarded decisions based on retarded information and retarded mental models.
If Trump blows up a bridge or a powerplant because some foreign leader "insulted" him by not cowing to some retarded demand for some trade deal or because he didn't like the fact that the existing diplomatic solution was negotiated under Obama, then yes, that would be a war crime.
If Trump was fighting an existential defensive war and completely within all rules of war bombed enemy infrastructure to degrade their war fighting ability then no, nobody would "screech" about these actions.
Be polite.
As a significant fraction of your comments appear to be picking fights, one day ban.
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A retard who makes retarded decisions does not become the most consequential President in 50 years.
Tell that to the Germans. Or Argentinians. And their guy was Austrian to add insult to injury. Trump may be consequential in many ways. Doesn't mean that future historians won't judge him harshly if the processed he accelerated turn out to be detrimental to the USA.
Trump will be remembered for single-handedly inaugurating a new era of American politics, expanding American power (including over Greenland, Venezuela, Iran / the Middle East, etc.), a fundamental shift in the Western Hemisphere / Munroe Doctrine, a fundamental shift in the power of the Presidency and the Executive branch, inaugurating a new American military-industrial build-out that includes presiding over SpaceX / AI / Golden Dome, initiating the largest crackdown on immigration in a Western country in 50 years and possibly heralding the beginning of Remigration, and, ultimately, will enter historical memory as a great hero of America and the West. It's too late now, this stuff is all baked in, whatever you're reading in the newspaper is going to be forgotten. Trump's impact on the English Language alone will be the most consequential contribution since Shakespeare. History is not going to remember even things that feel very consequential to you. Who won the 1942 midterm elections? How does the war in Nicaragua affect public perception of President Taft?
Hitler is a good comparison for these purposes. If you were talking to someone and they said, "Hitler was just a retard who made retarded decisions based on retarded mental models," does that tell you more about Hitler, or about your friend? History is quite unfavorable to Hitler, but it's not as unfavorable as that. If someone tried passing this off as a serious opinion about Hitler in a serious historical discussion, you would roll your eyes. It's a waste of everyone's time.
Note that when I call Trump "a hero to the West," you don't have to actually like Trump, you don't have to accept Trump uncritically. But history is a lot bigger than whatever people are talking about today. It's far likelier in fact that future history will judge you (us) more harshly than it will judge Trump.
Almost any big decision Hitler took after the fall of France was retarded and backfired quite well.
I like Trump. He is amazing at identifying problems and terrible at actually solving them. He lacks the willpower, consistency and persistence to use any of the crises he has started to something fruitful for the usa.
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International law of armed conflicts (LoAC) does not expand the list of permitted targets to belligerent being victims of aggression, compared to aggressors themselves. If belligerents crafting a narrative that makes them the victim, would be allowed to override prohibition of attacks on certain targets, such prohibitions would be more difficult to enforce and thus less discouraging.
If merely targeting a maternity ward is illegal, prohibition against it is stronger, than if it must also be proven belligerent targeting it was not the aggressor for it to be illegal.
Yes, but a bridge or a power plant isn't a maternity ward. Targeting enemy infrastructure is lawful to the extent that it is necessary for accomplishing military goals and is proportional to the value of those goals as long as the war itself is lawful.
If you bomb a country just because you woke up on the wrong side of the bed, strikes against any target is a war crime.
Aggressive war is a crime under international law (indeed, according to the Nuremburg prosecutors it is the "supreme international crime"), but it isn't a war crime in the technical legal sense. The technical meaning of "war crime" only extends to waging a war in a criminal fashion (for example by attacking hospitals). And @gradation is correct that ius in bello is the same for aggressors and defenders, at least under the OG Hague and Geneva conventions. (There are some modern protocols to the Geneva conventions which the US has not signed which would give irregular resistance movements more leeway than invaders get).
Criminal wars not being war crimes is admittedly a particularly silly quibble.
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What about using a maternity ward as a spillover ward for trauma surgery?
War crime. You are not allowed to attack purely medical staff/facilities.
Now if you are like Hamas and figure out this one weird trick to hide your C&C and munitions depots under or inside hospital - it is fair game.
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Bombing a trauma center for wounded soldiers is almost certainly an economic net positive for the bombed nation and mostly just serves to terrorise.
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Ukraine is fighting an existential, defensive war. The country is being actively invaded and occupied. He gets more leeway than someone fighting an unpopular war halfway around the globe, and he refrained from attacking Russia directly for a long time.
Defensive yes, existential - they made it one. Russian demands while onerous - mostly veto over Ukraine security were not unbearable.
Zelensky didn't refrain from anything. He just lacked the capacity. And still lacks - the fabled Flamingos are underperforming for example. The moment they could strike russia - they did. Or invade. They pulled every long strike they could do. They started attacking the Crimean bridge years before Russia decided to start Kiev bridges (which also could be matter of capacity, russian munitions became precise last year). The two sides have been going all in since the beginning.
They are the same people. Only Ukrainian nationalists that think sincerely that there is even a shred of difference culturally or genetically between the Russians and Ukrainans. The two sides are equally smart, equally matched and equally indifferent towards the suffering of theirs or others' side populations.
Russian veto over Ukrainian security policy = Ukraine is a sitting duck when (not if - Putin has consistently said that Russia's long-term policy goal is the forcible incorporation of Ukraine into the Russian sphere of influence and the forcible Russification of the Ukrainian people) Russia restarts the conflict, hence existential. Even if you think I am wrong about Russian long-term goals and that Putin was grandstanding for a domestic audience, the Ukrainians don't, and have good reasons not to.
Assuming that the Ukrainians are correct in not wanting to be genocided and that the Russians want to genocide them, they are better off fighting against the odds now than making concessions that will force them to fight against even worse odds later.
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I don't claim to be especially informed here but on the face of it, and from the beginning, it still seems to me like fighting the war is likely to result in vastly worse outcomes than simply accepting Russian rulership.
You go and find two people in a brawl who have already battered and bloodied each other, and tell the smaller one to just lie down and let the bigger one do as he sees fit it because it's rational.
Even literal dogs are rational enough to show their belly instead of fighting to the bitter end.
Dogs don't know what life as a Russian vassal state conquered after a gruelling war is like.
Depends on who lives to negotiate peace. Could be pretty sweet to the point where Russian natives regularly make grumbling sounds in the general direction of "who's supposed to be the vassal state here".
It's not a society I would like to live in, but on the metrics of their traditions being unmolested by the imperial center and their coffers being filled from the Tsar's treasury, they rank quite high.
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dogs have 1 life, nation and state can reborn from ash, fighting to the bitter end tell other parties that fighting you is not profitable so future invaders need to calculate with that all out fight, instead of assuming you will be pushover in a snap
If Putin knows how crazy and hard the Russo-Ukrainian war becomes, he likely choose a different target instead
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"To every man upon this earth
death will come soon or late.
And how can a man die better
than facing fearful odds
for the ashes of his fathers
and the temples of his gods?"
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Maybe, maybe not. But people are not so dispassionate about their homes as that. At some point, yes, the damage from war gets to be so bad that people will accept foreign occupation rather than continue the war (otherwise wars would never end other than annihilation), but it takes time for the losses to get to be painful enough that people will accept losing their home to the foreign invaders.
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I’d take the deal the Ukrainians are being offered. The young get to 10x their income and a chunk of the boomers die off fighting it.
Ukraines war fighting ability seems to prove that being in the Russian sphere has greatly retarted economic development plus Polish are Slovaks and have already achieved close to prime Euorpe incomes.
If the war ended today then the fight would have been worth it. But who knows how it ends.
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Though, isn't everything Trump does a war crime? I think some UN commission or tribunal accused him of war crimes in Iran with the status quo a couple weeks ago.
It's one of those terms (like genocide) that's been diluted to the point of uselessness.
What? Iran invaded the US, Trump bombed their infrastructure and people still called him a war criminal?
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