Quote:
Originally Posted by kato13
I feel Putin is first and foremost a survivor and I don't see him betting his life again on the capabilities of the Russian armed forces.
Thinking that Putin will feel emboldened to risk invoking Article 5 after: - The absolutely pitiful attempt to defeat a force literally 10 times less capable than NATO would be
- Using his own force that is, at a minimum, 50% less capable than when the war started
is folly IMHO. |
I totally agree with this assessment. The point that I've been trying to make (not well, apparently), is that if the West had
not supplied Ukraine with significant military aid in the first six months or so after the 2022 invasion, and Putin had been able to engineer the conquest of Ukraine in the next year or two, that Europe would be much less safe than it is now because Putin would have been emboldened by his success, and NATO would have painted itself as timid and weak. My second main argument is that providing Ukraine with the weapons it needs is the right call, as far as US foreign interests are concerned. From the recent uptick in European defense spending and the expansion of NATO to include two nations that had maintained non-aligned status throughout the entirety of the first Cold War, it would seem that said policy is widely seen in Europe as being in its constituents' best interests as well. To put it another way, I think failure/refusal to provide Ukraine with military aid would
not have been in NATO's interests.
@Targan: That's interesting. It's really difficult, IMHO, to get an accurate sense of Russian public opinion re Putin and/or the war. In the early days of the conflict, the Western media were rather sanguine in their assessments of opposition to the regime and its military adventurism. In the last year or so, I've read a couple of credible news pieces* that suggest that public support for the war in Russia is much broader and stronger than we'd been led to believe.
*One in particular that I really wish I'd shared here at the time, and that I can't find now.
The war in Ukraine is pretty much the only ongoing news story that I follow closely any more (I find American politics to be too frustrating/depressing). Apart from my fascination with various historical military conflicts, I've never been so invested in a war [occurring during my lifetime] that doesn't directly involve US forces. Russia is clearly the bad guy here. I'm pulling for the white hats, and I think the US gov't should too (regardless of which party predominates at any given time).
Slava Ukraini!
-