Do we think this was the classic, “create a crisis and solve it” strategy, or are we about to find out later what unreasonable demand Ukraine had to cave to for survival?
Based on what we know about Trump, there’s no plan, never has been a plan, no actual negotiations have taken place, and narrative is post hoc. Trump’s brain, a bowl of half-melted ice cream (Neapolitan), just recently picked up on the fact that Putin doesn’t really respect him. Like, at all. Ego, he sends weapons to Ukraine.
Ego, he sends weapons to Ukraine.
I can’t decide if you meant “ergo,” or if you deliberately used “ego.”
Regardless, I feel like you somehow read my mind ahead of time since you’re just that spot on.
It’s not a typo 😉
Us Americans got gypped on Neopoloitan ice cream. It’s supposed to be chocolate, vanilla, pistachio. Those three mix much better than chocolate, vanilla, strawberry.
I think the reason is much simpler and much more selfish, Trump is simply angry Putin is doing so terribly at the war in Ukraine. It is making Trump look weak, so he has to host a UFC tournament to try to restore that rightwing toxic masculinity vibe.
I am not kidding, I think Trump is actually genuinely afraid to be seen as close to Putin based on what Trump is hearing about the strategic position Putin is placing Russian forces into from Trump’s own military staff.
The winds have changed and Trump is a coward. Why the hell would people expect Trump to come to Putin’s aid when Putin looks weak? Trump doesn’t help weak people, he is far too weak himself to do that and retain power.
I like this theory, too. Regardless, I’m on board for whatever stops the killing while maintaining national sovereignty, and I mean that for any and all nations. I hope things get better for the citizens of Russia, too, but I don’t think it should be at the expense of Ukraine either. I just hope the US isn’t just protecting the sale of military equipment and supplies by drawing out the war.
We’re in this mess precisely because things are good for the citizens of Russia though. The world embraced Putin with open arms and boosted the country’s economy, invasion after invasion. Now it’s too late for the sanctions to bear fruit. The Russians, especially the pro-Putin Russians with no direct ties to the West for the sanctions to affect them, live like it’s business as usual.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the perception from within Russia, but I also doubt it’s the case empirically and objectively. It was proobably good from 2000 to 2013 under Putin and then Medvedev, who was probably Putin’s puppet president.
But now, their GDP per capita is stagnant, if not in decline while their population is decreasing, and their GINI index is similar to that of the US and China. That’s a really bad combo. I can’t imagine how quality of life would be improving under those conditions.
Having said that, there are better metrics like median salary and median household income both adjusted for purchasing power parity, but I haven’t been able to find graphs for those. In fact it was kind of hard to find consistent economic data in general, which is another concern, but not really evidence of economic problems in and off itself.
I believe they’re living like it’s business as usual, but I’d attribute that to hypernormalization more than improvement in quality of life.
I just hope the US isn’t just protecting the sale of military equipment and supplies by drawing out the war.
I think the US military industrial complex absolutely was, 1000%, but two major things happened recently that don’t give these forces the aperture to sustain the conflict anymore.
1.) Ukraine has reached a steady domestic production of towed and armored self propelled 155mm artillery, they also have a steady supply of shells or at least steady compared to what they had before.
2.) The delivery of the first AH-64 Apaches happened to Poland from the US Military/Boeing, along with the entire process that entails. In a darkly hilarious way, I don’t think even Boeing wanted to deliver these to Poland, but rather delay them being delivered, profit off more fear mongering and sell more expensive military arms (yes, they get much more expensive than an Apache… somehow…).
Apaches and specifically the Longbow system are meant to integrate with combined arms networks of aerial, ground and littoral naval units, the impact of these weapon systems extends much farther out than just the range of the cannons and rockets on them… and Poland will in a few short years have a brutally dangerous fleet of Apache helicopters that Russia will have a much much much harder time pressuring militarily. Neither European militaries or the Russian military have any depth of similar capacity in their heavy attack helicopters if they even have any… as for Ukraine I don’t know… but I just want to emphasize… these aren’t glorified slow ground attack aircraft… that isn’t their point. They are networked sensor and target tracking heavy weapons platforms that also carry human pilots.
These two changes fundamentally change the power balance of the region and make selfish agents far more likely to seek profit from accelerating the end of the war rather than extending it, at the very least it makes other powers far less likely to want to hitch their horses to Russia which only has a good outlook in the nearterm so long as they can sustain a massive offensive that is killing off their own population at a staggering rate… Once that fails… Ukraine has super artillery production, superior drone pilots and drones, superior armor and mechanization, superior training, superior morale…
The rest of the world is looking at the conflict in Ukraine and realizing the time to dally around and profit off the brutal stalemate is over, and if there is money to be made it is in jumping in now and decisively helping Ukraine.
Again, I am sure Trump and other people in the US military industrial complex realize this too, and that is one of the big levers that probably is exerting a fear onto Trump that he will look weak not bandwagoning with the rest of the world’s arms companies of any note in the masculine power rush that comes from being on the winning side…
Unless this is a triple fake and Trump won’t actually send arms to Ukraine (which is still very likely too) I don’t know how to interpret this as anything else. Trump and Putin’s plan (insofar as Trump “plans”) was for this to be much a scarier offensive for Ukraine, Putin has failed to deliver and Trump is mad that messes up his own plans…
ughh it is disgusting honestly, I hope I am wrong… well not about Russia being weaker than the western narrative portrays them as right now, I stand by that and am confident in that conclusion… I am talking about arms companies playing with people’s lives… which is another one of the most awful parts of war, it is a business for some like anything else…
Wow, thank you for the thoughtful and very thorough response. I would very much like for this to be the case. Also, I learned a lot.
This is a “drunk” put the brakes on the shipments. Even trump when asked didn’t know about this. Basically he has no control over the drunk idiot.
Eh, I wouldn’t say Taco Don has no control of Alcoholic. It’s just Alcoholic making a guess of what Taco Don wants and actively trying to appease him. Or the good 'ol “Taco Don lied”, just like he told once that he never met that Epstein guy.
Lol at this point I feel like there is no guessing what anyone in this admin is going to do. They’re all traitors with mountains of evil shit they’re guilty of.
The first would be the way better thing I guess, but either way Ukraine will have to work with what it gets. Enough reason to complain, but i don’t think it will get them anywhere tbh.
I feel really bad for Hegseth since this decision is really going to eat into all the Russian bribe money he’s getting.
I don’t think so, Kegsbreath did his part, it’s Trump playing tough to take attention off the Epstein affair. Normally I’m not a believer in the “it’s all distraction” theory but I think in this case he’s happy to play tough on a topic.
Probably right, what I said was wild speculation
EDIT: wild might be too strong of a word
So they are just trying to make it harder for military decision makers in Ukraine. Stoping an advance, forcing them to pull back, delaying an operation. Malice.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
At a certain point they are functionally the same thing.
More or less, but classic case of correlation ≠ causation.
Has anyone told him who stopped the shipments yet?
My money’s on “Zelensky has the Epstein files”.
I think more likely someone in Ukraine quietly asked Trump “hey, would you like to have one of our hotels?”
Or it’s just a symptom of pure chaos and random decision making, which is not uncommon in this administration.
Or that
I don’t get it. supposedly USA decided to stop delivering arms to Ukraine all together. What is this cluseterfuck of confusion
Clusterfuck of Confusion = Standard Operating Procedure for this administration.
Your first mistake was trying to use logic when attempting to understand anything involving right-wing conservative politics. You compounded that mistake further by expecting any consistency - let alone logic - from anything involving Trump & his sycophants.
It is like giving a dog a phonebook and trying to decipher the mastermind plan the dog had to tear the phonebook up with.
