With heavy weapons like first-line tanks, multiple rocket launchers, 155mm howitzers, attack helicopters and updated anti-aircraft systems flooding into Ukraine and beginning to reach the battlefield, the only thing missing from an all-out war between NATO and Russia are allied soldiers.
Pace, lying Lavrov. The truth is Russia launched a hybrid war against the U.S. years ago, attempting to disrupt and divide our country, fund candidates willing to carry their water, and generally unravel our society’s cohesion.
To toss a Russian talking point back in their faces, they have been “testing our patience” for some time. I know many Europeans who would say the same.
It’s past time to put a stop to Russia’s capacity for aggression against the world’s democracies.
Putin’s wet dream has been to return his “satellite nations” into his power/orbit. He is a tyrant, an avaricious, ruthless, selfish tyrant. This country tried to bring the Russians into world trade and raise the quality of their lives. Instead, Putin and his henchman grabbed all the wealth for themselves—and they are still grabbing. It’s pretty demeaning to say NATO is in a proxy war—they see the authoritarian threat and they are in the fight of THEIR LIVES.
DO NOT banter twisted views of military theory when the survival of a continent is at stake.
You know who IS playing a proxy war? The KKKoch billionaire club—and isn’t Charles Koch industries still operating in Russia. He should be f-cking shot for his treason, followed by the Republicans and their “Christian nationalists” who remain in support of Putin.
I doubt it. I think their hand has been in the cookie jar so much that they finally are getting caught. Perhaps the Kochs are co-owners of yachts and properties that we haven’t had the privilege of finding out about….yet.
Really TC?? I didn't hear that but am happy about it! They are responsible, as is ExxonMobil and many others, for the microplastics that are being found in our water and food. The ocean has been their garbage can.
thank you, LKTIV, for another good and informative posting.
i had thought Lloyd Austin's statement
"We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can't do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine" sounded too much like "we will fight to Ukraine's last man". i hope it doesn't cause Zelenskyy to think that.
for those who haven't read it, that Oryx website is very factual. it itemizes each destroyed/damaged/abandoned/captured piece of equipment by model number and provenance.
i don't know the etymology of Oryx, but...this proxy war is being fought on the internet websites battleground.
Russia's military budget for 2022 is estimated at $48 B., and we are giving Ukraine up to $33 B in military aid, or almost 70% of Russia's entire military budget. We can continue that amount, Russia, not so much as some Russian hardware was produced in Ukraine. I suspect that as Russian military hardware is destroyed or captured, it will very difficult to replace what is lost except numbers of soldiers, which Russia has in abundance. Think Stalingrad numbers, although the USSR had US military assistance, especially via the Persian Corridor (and Alaska). Ironic, isn't it?
And remember, Stalin is on record, during a rare and ephemeral moment of candor, admitting Russia could not have won in WW2 without US resources.
Russia’s military budget—to the extent we can even believe the numbers because I suspect as with other Russian public accounts much of the money is siphoned off by Putin’s cronies and senior brass—is dwarfed by the $350b in Russian “reserves” we have locked down. Those reserves would be a great down payment for Ukrainian reconstruction.
The last 30 years abound in policy disasters, but Putin’s sheer stupidity has to have served up the most striking example.
My favorite quote from Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges: “dictatorships foster cruelty, dictatorships foster servilism, dictatorships foster oppression; but worse, they foster idiocy.”
Stalingrad numbers? Remember, Russia was the country being invaded by the Germans.
Being invaded is very different than doing the invading. Russia was defending itself back then.
Germany thought it was retaking country that was rightfully its own when it went into Austria and Poland. Russia is similarly deluded into thinking it can just go back in to the former Soviet Union countries.
But notice that Russia did not invade a NATO country. It didn’t go into Poland, for example. It invaded what it thought was a soft target.
Stupid idiots. My ancestors, the Germans, were equally stupid for invading Poland and Austria and then getting greedy.
Yes, understood. I was just using your post to rant. I’m really not happy with this war, nor am I happy with what my ancestors in Germany did, so there’s a lot of pent-up feeling. Thanks for listening. I appreciated your comparison of the Russian military budget, that was very interesting and helpful.
I so hope the destruction of the Russian military materiel is crippling their efforts, but meanwhile, Russia has caused immense damage to the whole of Ukraine. I worry that this blow to Putin's huge ego will cause him to bring out the nuclear arsenal. Fingers crossed that doesn't happen. Thanks, Lucian.
Putin I with one awful miscalculation has set in motion both the erosion of his front line military capability PLUS awakening the once sleeping giant of the combined NATO nations.
The Ukrainians with NATO aid will bleed him white and in doing so reduce the probability his grand strategy of creating a new Russia from Eastern European countries never comes to pass.
The way I see it Putin handed Biden A once in a millennia gift. I hope Both Biden and Congress have the wisdom to follow Austin’s advice.
Every Russian tank and soldier the Ukrainians take out reduces the chance of Putinbeing a longer term threat to bothEurope and the world order.
This war reminds me of another one the Russians fought-longbefore WWII-The Russo-Japanese war, the one that humiliated the Czar and his entire military for the enormity of the losses they suffered-which in turn led to a decline of Russian influence in Eastern Europe.
It led to the 1905 Russian Revolution, and then after that, the toppling of the Russian Czar and the Russian autocracy, along with the aristocracy, and then the real big Russian Revolution of 1918, after an disastrous incursion into the First World War as Germany's ally.
Nicholas II made a very grievous assumption about Japan and it cost him his life and throne in the end.
Putin should be reading the history books about misbegotten and ill-advised wars.
War is probably the worst evil on this planet. It is obviously one of the top scourges of humanity.
There is no such thing as a moral war, because every war is carte blanche for committing atrocities. I am completely opposed to war.
That said, people and nations continue to indulge in it, so it’s a reality that must be faced and fought.
If a nation is attacked, it must defend itself. If a nation or nations are attacked, then their friends must come to their defense. If you pretend that nations are individual people, or neighboring houses in a neighborhood, it’s easier to discuss. If you see your friend attacked, or if you see your neighbor’s house attacked, you intervene and you call the police, and you do what you must to protect against the attacker.
Don’t be the attacker.
So the US as a nation has been on the wrong side of most wars since World War II. The CIA has interfered maliciously in governments all over the planet, which is like being a burglar nation. Dick Cheney and the Bush family and their cozy partnership with the Saudis completely took advantage of 9/11 for their own purposes. The United States has engaged in a lot of scummy, seedy behavior since World War II.
This war is not one of those occasions. The generations of Europeans (and other people in the world) who have grown up since World War II are learning some tough lessons right now. The menace of Russia has been bubbling under the surface for quite a while, and now it’s in full view. That naked aggression has opened eyes everywhere, and irrevocably changed policy in Europe. Naïveté is on the decline.
Then there’s China.
Vietnam and Korea were proxy wars between the US and China. Remember, in Vietnam, the Vietnam War is called “the American War.“ You could argue that Vietnam was what Ukraine is now.
Democracy is in a dog fight, a cat fight, with dictatorship. It was true in the 1930s and 1940s, and it’s true now. Between nations, it appears war is how that rivalry is expressed.
I am acutely aware that I am probably not in the majority on this site, and that my views will probably not endear me to many of you. But that is how I feel.
For anyone worried about the consequences of our support, is there an alternative? If we let Putin take Ukraine, he will continue. Moldova looks to be next.
Yes of course it's a proxy war. As someone else pointed out in these comments, Putin has been waging war on democracy for years. That must stop.
Of course Russia will rattle the nuclear saber. It's their hole card. It's also their guaranteed destruction.
Biden has played his hand brilliantly. NATO and the EU are allied more strongly than since WWII. And now the EU has announced an eventual embargo of Russian oil. Perhaps not game over, but Putin has fewer and fewer moves remaining in this global chess game.
Yes, and why is Moldova next? Because they already have Belarus, they’re working on Ukraine, and Finland, the other non-NATO nation, would be very tricky.
They’re just bullies. They are picking the non-NATO nations because they’re gutless cowards and they don’t have the cojones to take on a NATO nation. They could go after Finland, I suppose, the only other non-NATO nation on their western border, but they picked Ukraine because it has a small army, it’s unprepared, and politically it’s been waffling back-and-forth between democratic and Russia-leaning.
I have some profanity and pejoratives to apply to Russia and its leadership, but I will restrain myself.
Thank you for superb analysis: been meshing your exemplary work w/@MarkHertling and @DrMikeMartin and feeling far less adrift ;) I'm xCBCTV investigative journo turned technologist with 8yrs documenting Balkans war crimes and intell/counterintell interactivities w/FSB org crime nexus in Russia. I was in Russia--St Petersburg/Yaroslavl during the apartment bombings terror attacks that brought Putin to power, a lesson in horror.
This looks to become "The Ukraine Long War" much like Afghanistan or Vietnam. It's seems a bit much to think Russia will tolerate such a thing. Nuclear war is suicide, the money men who back Putin will not sacrifice their children for Ukraine. The war will end, but Russia's bitterness and rage at the west will last decades and generations.
A great piece as usual, and wow, amazing amount of losses of Russian equipment not to mention manpower. When you compare that to what Putin had in mind, a complete victory in a few days and probably without any losses to speak of, he must be livid with anger.. However we need to think about what he might do when all this new firepower starts to really turn the tide and he suffers even heavier losses to the point of certain defeat. I just wrote a tweet on this that according to a message just received from Twitter is getting a lot of views "If Putin decides the only way to win is to nuke Kyiv and wipe out the entire Ukrainian government there in one blow we had better be ready to react, and fast."
Of course as I think about it, what happens after putin drops a nuclear device? What do we do then? If we wipe out whats left of his ragged army in Ukraine with conventional forces, what would be his next step? Too frightening to think about...,
Why do all the mainstream journalists make this assumption? Is it because it sells more clicks and makes more money for the news agency? They are projecting whatever they want on him, with no evidence.
What if Putin is scared shitless because he realizes he has absolutely totally screwed himself. How many billionaires are there in Russia? A billionaire has a lot of money and that money can buy a lot of services. His society is melting down, and one of his greatest fears is a social revolution against him. NATO is not shrinking, it is expanding as a result of his stupid and careless activity. His situation is becoming dire.
Over on Greg Olear we are doing an amateur psychological profile on this turkey, and it doesn’t paint him in a flattering light.
What I don't get is why is zelensky and team are willing to watch major parts of their country be destroyed? Another 60 days of this and Ukraine will start to look like the bad parts of Syria and Iraq... It looks like no compromise will happen to end this so the U.s. will happily fund this to the bitter end... Meanwhile the Europeans are just along for the wild ride
If the Russians have nothing of value to claim in Ukraine, there is no reason for them to 'conquer' it, except as a route to the Black Sea. The reason that everyone is willing (and I'm even talking about the citizens) to have a scorched earth war is to give nothing of value to the Russians and to make them pay dearly for their aggression.
Yep the land bridge that is one of their major goals... I think they wanted to try and take out Kyev if they could but that has failed so far... So its the donbas and the black sea coast that they are gonna try and hold... But what about these long range missiles that they have been peppering around the other areas.... Wondering when the first attack against these inside the Russian border happens
Pace, lying Lavrov. The truth is Russia launched a hybrid war against the U.S. years ago, attempting to disrupt and divide our country, fund candidates willing to carry their water, and generally unravel our society’s cohesion.
To toss a Russian talking point back in their faces, they have been “testing our patience” for some time. I know many Europeans who would say the same.
It’s past time to put a stop to Russia’s capacity for aggression against the world’s democracies.
It’s not just the facts that keep me coming back. It’s also the power of your prose.
No.
Putin’s wet dream has been to return his “satellite nations” into his power/orbit. He is a tyrant, an avaricious, ruthless, selfish tyrant. This country tried to bring the Russians into world trade and raise the quality of their lives. Instead, Putin and his henchman grabbed all the wealth for themselves—and they are still grabbing. It’s pretty demeaning to say NATO is in a proxy war—they see the authoritarian threat and they are in the fight of THEIR LIVES.
DO NOT banter twisted views of military theory when the survival of a continent is at stake.
You know who IS playing a proxy war? The KKKoch billionaire club—and isn’t Charles Koch industries still operating in Russia. He should be f-cking shot for his treason, followed by the Republicans and their “Christian nationalists” who remain in support of Putin.
I am with you, Dawna
I heard that. First thought: They must be losing money.
I doubt it. I think their hand has been in the cookie jar so much that they finally are getting caught. Perhaps the Kochs are co-owners of yachts and properties that we haven’t had the privilege of finding out about….yet.
let's hope.
Or they may realize that Russia's oil & gas industry is in serious trouble, and it's the most significant industry Russia's got.
Maybe but I think it’s much deeper than that.
Really TC?? I didn't hear that but am happy about it! They are responsible, as is ExxonMobil and many others, for the microplastics that are being found in our water and food. The ocean has been their garbage can.
Ty TC
thank you, LKTIV, for another good and informative posting.
i had thought Lloyd Austin's statement
"We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can't do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine" sounded too much like "we will fight to Ukraine's last man". i hope it doesn't cause Zelenskyy to think that.
for those who haven't read it, that Oryx website is very factual. it itemizes each destroyed/damaged/abandoned/captured piece of equipment by model number and provenance.
i don't know the etymology of Oryx, but...this proxy war is being fought on the internet websites battleground.
Thank you so much for that info about Oryx
Russia's military budget for 2022 is estimated at $48 B., and we are giving Ukraine up to $33 B in military aid, or almost 70% of Russia's entire military budget. We can continue that amount, Russia, not so much as some Russian hardware was produced in Ukraine. I suspect that as Russian military hardware is destroyed or captured, it will very difficult to replace what is lost except numbers of soldiers, which Russia has in abundance. Think Stalingrad numbers, although the USSR had US military assistance, especially via the Persian Corridor (and Alaska). Ironic, isn't it?
And remember, Stalin is on record, during a rare and ephemeral moment of candor, admitting Russia could not have won in WW2 without US resources.
Russia’s military budget—to the extent we can even believe the numbers because I suspect as with other Russian public accounts much of the money is siphoned off by Putin’s cronies and senior brass—is dwarfed by the $350b in Russian “reserves” we have locked down. Those reserves would be a great down payment for Ukrainian reconstruction.
The last 30 years abound in policy disasters, but Putin’s sheer stupidity has to have served up the most striking example.
My favorite quote from Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges: “dictatorships foster cruelty, dictatorships foster servilism, dictatorships foster oppression; but worse, they foster idiocy.”
“[Dictatorships] foster idiocy.”
Stalingrad numbers? Remember, Russia was the country being invaded by the Germans.
Being invaded is very different than doing the invading. Russia was defending itself back then.
Germany thought it was retaking country that was rightfully its own when it went into Austria and Poland. Russia is similarly deluded into thinking it can just go back in to the former Soviet Union countries.
But notice that Russia did not invade a NATO country. It didn’t go into Poland, for example. It invaded what it thought was a soft target.
Stupid idiots. My ancestors, the Germans, were equally stupid for invading Poland and Austria and then getting greedy.
Fair enough, but you missed my point. Defense in depth and offense in depth, as when the Russians invaded Germany, that's all!
Yes, understood. I was just using your post to rant. I’m really not happy with this war, nor am I happy with what my ancestors in Germany did, so there’s a lot of pent-up feeling. Thanks for listening. I appreciated your comparison of the Russian military budget, that was very interesting and helpful.
I so hope the destruction of the Russian military materiel is crippling their efforts, but meanwhile, Russia has caused immense damage to the whole of Ukraine. I worry that this blow to Putin's huge ego will cause him to bring out the nuclear arsenal. Fingers crossed that doesn't happen. Thanks, Lucian.
Putin I with one awful miscalculation has set in motion both the erosion of his front line military capability PLUS awakening the once sleeping giant of the combined NATO nations.
The Ukrainians with NATO aid will bleed him white and in doing so reduce the probability his grand strategy of creating a new Russia from Eastern European countries never comes to pass.
The way I see it Putin handed Biden A once in a millennia gift. I hope Both Biden and Congress have the wisdom to follow Austin’s advice.
Every Russian tank and soldier the Ukrainians take out reduces the chance of Putinbeing a longer term threat to bothEurope and the world order.
This war reminds me of another one the Russians fought-longbefore WWII-The Russo-Japanese war, the one that humiliated the Czar and his entire military for the enormity of the losses they suffered-which in turn led to a decline of Russian influence in Eastern Europe.
It led to the 1905 Russian Revolution, and then after that, the toppling of the Russian Czar and the Russian autocracy, along with the aristocracy, and then the real big Russian Revolution of 1918, after an disastrous incursion into the First World War as Germany's ally.
Nicholas II made a very grievous assumption about Japan and it cost him his life and throne in the end.
Putin should be reading the history books about misbegotten and ill-advised wars.
They tend to lead to revolutions.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Japanese_War
Point of interest: Teddy Roosevelt helped craft the treaty ending the war, and received a Nobel Peace Prize for his diplomatic efforts.
Let me be clear:
War is probably the worst evil on this planet. It is obviously one of the top scourges of humanity.
There is no such thing as a moral war, because every war is carte blanche for committing atrocities. I am completely opposed to war.
That said, people and nations continue to indulge in it, so it’s a reality that must be faced and fought.
If a nation is attacked, it must defend itself. If a nation or nations are attacked, then their friends must come to their defense. If you pretend that nations are individual people, or neighboring houses in a neighborhood, it’s easier to discuss. If you see your friend attacked, or if you see your neighbor’s house attacked, you intervene and you call the police, and you do what you must to protect against the attacker.
Don’t be the attacker.
So the US as a nation has been on the wrong side of most wars since World War II. The CIA has interfered maliciously in governments all over the planet, which is like being a burglar nation. Dick Cheney and the Bush family and their cozy partnership with the Saudis completely took advantage of 9/11 for their own purposes. The United States has engaged in a lot of scummy, seedy behavior since World War II.
This war is not one of those occasions. The generations of Europeans (and other people in the world) who have grown up since World War II are learning some tough lessons right now. The menace of Russia has been bubbling under the surface for quite a while, and now it’s in full view. That naked aggression has opened eyes everywhere, and irrevocably changed policy in Europe. Naïveté is on the decline.
Then there’s China.
Vietnam and Korea were proxy wars between the US and China. Remember, in Vietnam, the Vietnam War is called “the American War.“ You could argue that Vietnam was what Ukraine is now.
Democracy is in a dog fight, a cat fight, with dictatorship. It was true in the 1930s and 1940s, and it’s true now. Between nations, it appears war is how that rivalry is expressed.
I am acutely aware that I am probably not in the majority on this site, and that my views will probably not endear me to many of you. But that is how I feel.
For anyone worried about the consequences of our support, is there an alternative? If we let Putin take Ukraine, he will continue. Moldova looks to be next.
Yes of course it's a proxy war. As someone else pointed out in these comments, Putin has been waging war on democracy for years. That must stop.
Of course Russia will rattle the nuclear saber. It's their hole card. It's also their guaranteed destruction.
Biden has played his hand brilliantly. NATO and the EU are allied more strongly than since WWII. And now the EU has announced an eventual embargo of Russian oil. Perhaps not game over, but Putin has fewer and fewer moves remaining in this global chess game.
Yes, and why is Moldova next? Because they already have Belarus, they’re working on Ukraine, and Finland, the other non-NATO nation, would be very tricky.
They’re just bullies. They are picking the non-NATO nations because they’re gutless cowards and they don’t have the cojones to take on a NATO nation. They could go after Finland, I suppose, the only other non-NATO nation on their western border, but they picked Ukraine because it has a small army, it’s unprepared, and politically it’s been waffling back-and-forth between democratic and Russia-leaning.
I have some profanity and pejoratives to apply to Russia and its leadership, but I will restrain myself.
Thank you for superb analysis: been meshing your exemplary work w/@MarkHertling and @DrMikeMartin and feeling far less adrift ;) I'm xCBCTV investigative journo turned technologist with 8yrs documenting Balkans war crimes and intell/counterintell interactivities w/FSB org crime nexus in Russia. I was in Russia--St Petersburg/Yaroslavl during the apartment bombings terror attacks that brought Putin to power, a lesson in horror.
ICYMI https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html
This looks to become "The Ukraine Long War" much like Afghanistan or Vietnam. It's seems a bit much to think Russia will tolerate such a thing. Nuclear war is suicide, the money men who back Putin will not sacrifice their children for Ukraine. The war will end, but Russia's bitterness and rage at the west will last decades and generations.
More to the point, Ukraine’s bitterness and rage at Russia will last a long time.
The Russian people will have to get their head out of the sand. They are living in an Orwellian bubble of the old Soviet Union.
You are absolutely correct. Nothing changes until the Russian people make it happen.
A great piece as usual, and wow, amazing amount of losses of Russian equipment not to mention manpower. When you compare that to what Putin had in mind, a complete victory in a few days and probably without any losses to speak of, he must be livid with anger.. However we need to think about what he might do when all this new firepower starts to really turn the tide and he suffers even heavier losses to the point of certain defeat. I just wrote a tweet on this that according to a message just received from Twitter is getting a lot of views "If Putin decides the only way to win is to nuke Kyiv and wipe out the entire Ukrainian government there in one blow we had better be ready to react, and fast."
Of course as I think about it, what happens after putin drops a nuclear device? What do we do then? If we wipe out whats left of his ragged army in Ukraine with conventional forces, what would be his next step? Too frightening to think about...,
“ . . .he must be livid with anger.”
Why do all the mainstream journalists make this assumption? Is it because it sells more clicks and makes more money for the news agency? They are projecting whatever they want on him, with no evidence.
What if Putin is scared shitless because he realizes he has absolutely totally screwed himself. How many billionaires are there in Russia? A billionaire has a lot of money and that money can buy a lot of services. His society is melting down, and one of his greatest fears is a social revolution against him. NATO is not shrinking, it is expanding as a result of his stupid and careless activity. His situation is becoming dire.
Over on Greg Olear we are doing an amateur psychological profile on this turkey, and it doesn’t paint him in a flattering light.
https://gregolear.substack.com/p/strongmen-as-young-men-with-brandon?s=r
Take out the Russians and the anti Democracy Trumpsters at the same time!
Oh...yesssss...pulleeze!
What I don't get is why is zelensky and team are willing to watch major parts of their country be destroyed? Another 60 days of this and Ukraine will start to look like the bad parts of Syria and Iraq... It looks like no compromise will happen to end this so the U.s. will happily fund this to the bitter end... Meanwhile the Europeans are just along for the wild ride
If the Russians have nothing of value to claim in Ukraine, there is no reason for them to 'conquer' it, except as a route to the Black Sea. The reason that everyone is willing (and I'm even talking about the citizens) to have a scorched earth war is to give nothing of value to the Russians and to make them pay dearly for their aggression.
Yep the land bridge that is one of their major goals... I think they wanted to try and take out Kyev if they could but that has failed so far... So its the donbas and the black sea coast that they are gonna try and hold... But what about these long range missiles that they have been peppering around the other areas.... Wondering when the first attack against these inside the Russian border happens
more on 'spending russia to death', i just read this:
"1,300 missiles worth at least $7.5 billion, Forbes Ukraine reported on April 29."
it also said each Kaliber missile costs $6.5million.