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Notes -
A Tone-Shift in the Ukraine War
Lately, I've noticed that the tone of the discussion regarding Ukraine both on the Motte and on X has changed considerably. Notably, it seems that people are taking a much more pessimistic view of Ukraine's chances. The default assumption now is that Ukraine will lose the war.
I think a stalemate is still quite possible, but the more optimistic assumptions that Ukraine would regain lost territory (or comically, Crimea) are now a dead letter. So what, exactly, are our leaders thinking? Recently, Macron went off-narrative a bit, suggesting that France could send troops into Ukraine. More ominously, Secretary of State Blinken said that Ukraine will join NATO.
Perhaps Western leaders view this sabre-rattling as good for their electoral chances. And, until recently, the war was seen as a relatively cost-effective way to weaken Russia. (Sadly, this seems to have failed as Russia has freely exported oil to India and China and is making armaments in great numbers).
But what of Ukrainians themselves? Will they tire of being NATO's cat's paw? It's impossible to find good numbers on how many Ukrainian men have been killed so far in this war. It's likely in the hundreds of thousands. Towns and villages throughout the country are devoid of men, as the men (hunted by conscription) either flee, hide, or are sent to the fronts.
User @Sloot shared this nuclear-grade propoganda. While Ukrainian men fight and die in some trench, an increasing number of Ukrainian women are finding new homes (and Tinder dates) in Germany. Concern about female fidelity has always been a prominent feature of wartime propaganda. But, this takes it to a new level, since the women are in a different country, making new, better lives for themselves. How many will ever even return to Ukraine?
Ukrainian men are getting a raw deal in an effort to reconquer lost territory, whose residents probably want to be part of Russia anyway. Why should Ukrainians fight and die for some abstract geopolitical goal of NATO?
The moment Israel got into any danger, Ukraine basically lost this war. Big bad brainwashed trump republicans holding off the aid is just a cope narrative to avoid discussing the real intended beneficiary of the air defense systems. Those systems will never go to Ukraine as they are needed to protect Israel.
The actual reason is that the air defense systems won’t really work well or efficiently for Ukraine. Air defense is uniquely viable in Israel because Israel is extremely small and quite rich, and so a density of systems is possible that wouldn’t even be viable somewhere like Germany or France, let alone a more sparsely populated Western country like the US, let alone a poor and sparsely populated country like Ukraine. Also, Russians aren’t firing homemade Hamas dumb rockets vaguely targeted toward Israel; defending against more modern missiles is harder and even in the recent attack a few Iranian missiles seem to have gotten through into Israel.
For Ukraine, while air defence against drones and cruise misiles is important, keeping Russian bombers away from the frontlines is absolutely crucial. It’s quite clear that Russia can’t mass produce the first in numbers big enough to really win the war. But they have a world class air force and basically infinite supply of bombs to be retrofitted as glide bombs if there is no concern for planes getting shut down.
If the Russian air force gets free rein over the frontline then the war is over. Due to a mix of inherited Soviet air defense (which was quite substantial as Soviet western armies had enormous stockpiles from what I understand), gifts systems from the west and manpads the Russian planes were essentially missing.
This is changing rapidly right now and there is big panic on the Ukrainian side. It should be visible to the leadership that the loss ratios are becoming untenable and the fortifications just can’t stand.
Itll be interesting to see if the f16s coming soon can change that.
Certainly “interesting” (I just wish they stop fighting by then so we never have to find out..)
On the one hand, the naive voice in me says if it wasn’t going to be effective (and they didn’t have a good plan for it) then western governments would surely not waste such a valuable piece of tech. But lol.
On the other hand, the other naive voice says that since it has been announced she’s ago, Russians surely took necessary countermeasures. But again, lol.
F16 valuable tech? Its going to be European Block 15 MLU, worse even than 90s block 50s which were a last gasp of GodDamn before getting bought by LockMart.
The main benefit of the F16 isnt its high technology, better than a mig29 though it may be, but just how fucking many of them there are. NATO is hurting for artillery for Ukraine because the entire NATO conops is precision air dominance, making them stuffed to the gills with excess AIM 120 and AMRAAMS to go on the hundreds of airframes slated for the boneyards. I doubt the paltry number will make a difference for ground ops, but the A2 space will be much less free for Russians .
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