They gave it to Kissinger too.

I posted evidence at the top of the thread. You’re the one saying it’s not good enough so I’m suggesting that you should be the one to provide better evidence to the contrary.

Tankard? Are you trying to create a portmanteau out of tankie and retard? Are you calling me a drinking vessel?

WTF?

Not going to waste my time.

Then why even reply? The whole point of this thread is to examine evidence of realistic claims about Russia and Ukraine. If you present evidence that you haven’ tbothered to look at yourself why would anyone think it supports your claim?

Yes. I can’t see anything in those measures to suggest that economic factors will force Russia’s hand in time to be useful to Ukraine.

We have some US and EU leaders who seem to be racing Russia to try to collapse their own economies first but there’s still hope that wiser policies will prevail.

I think it’s a combination of factors.

There’s some amount of propaganda. Governments often try to convince people to confuse fact and fiction.

There’s also an institutional momentum effect. Once you get a group of people together, they tend to recruit more people who think like them, so once an idea gets hold, it’s hard to get rid of.

And there’s the sensationalism effect. There are many possible predictions for the future; the extreme ones are more fun to read.

OK. This would be an actual concrete plan. Now it’s going beyond “stand with Ukraine” cheer leading and moving on to something we could actually do.

The obvious potential paths would be:
A) try to convince the current US administration to massively change their policies
B) replace the current US administration
C) make up the shortfall without the US

“A” seems like a total pipe dream. “B” seems likely but not soon enough for Ukraine. A quick search suggests the US has spent about $100B so far. So (back to the cocktail napkin) other sympathetic nations would need around $1T over the next 3 years for “C”. Not infeasible, but it’s pretty close to a total war commitment on the part of the EU and a few allies.

I don’t think it’s a great strategy. One of the basic principals of warfare is momentum. Russia has much more of it than Ukraine does. Countering that directly is very expensive. Breaking the momentum first and then countering can be much more effective. Russia demonstrated a very effective strategy in this conflict; defense in depth. With the help of the EU, Ukraine could create a deep DMZ with multiple lines of trenches, overlapping artillery positions, hardened communications, drone support, etc. That defensive barrier would give them the breathing room to build out a robust logistics network and even start planning for a second counteroffensive.

Part 2 would be to actually start a feasible counteroffensive towards Zaporizhzhia or Donetsk to cut the Russian forces in half. From there, Ukraine would have momentum and Russia would have to work on breaking it.

edit: formatting

It’s not really a racial issue at all. It’s about power and wealth. It’s just that all the vast the rich and powerful nations happen to be full of white people so it’s a convenient proxy. Some people prefer, “Westerner”, or “Anglos”.

None of them are perfectly accurate but everyone understands their meaning.

Sure. That’s a very reasonable measure too. Can you find GNI data that suggests that Russia’s economy will collapse soon enough for it to be useful for Ukraine?

The whole point of looking at their economies instead of the front lines in this thread is to find an alternate estimate of the trend of the war. The fronts are steadily moving west. If the hope is to end the war by waiting for Russia’s economy to collapse, it has to happen before Ukraine’s does.

Russia doesn’t need to have a strong economy for that, just stronger than Ukraine’s.

It would be more accurate to compare it to BRICS being adversarial to the US because China has more than 2x the economy of all the other BRICS nations combined and wants to use it as a counterbalance to the G7.

That would be perfectly accurate and the US is actively trying to inhibit the growth of BRICS as an organization.

I have been paying attention to Ukraines missile and drone programs.

Missiles and drones are both very effective but neither of them is a replacement for heavy bombing and Russia still makes more missiles than Ukraine does.

Unfortunately shell ratios are an important detail. That’s why the serious policy publications (like FP) spend so much time trying to advocate for increased production.

It’s a bit oversimplified but essentially accurate. You can easily find a number of sources that will show you that people is Africa, South America, India, and Asia aren’t nearly as concerned about the Ukraine war as Americans and Europeans are.

I know they’re every bit as smart as I am because I’ve had many conversations with them. I find they tend to know more about the Ukraine war, and many other international topics, than most Americans seem to.

Do you have a better measure of the economy?

Both Russia and Ukraine are destroying each other’s infrastructure do you have some data that shows Russia is suffering more from it than Ukraine is?

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Even before Trump Russia was slowly grinding its way west.

You could look at the various strategic objectives and see the Russians slowly and steadily surrounding them and cutting them off. You could watch the Ukrainian counteroffensives crash against defense in depth. You could see the occasional victories slip away. The HIMARS systems that were supposed to turn the tide are twisted piles of metal.

Ignoring Ukraine would also be dumb. A much better idea would be to come up with an actual feasible plan. One would have been to follow US military advice with the above mentioned HIMARS and execute a concentrated attack to the south to cut off almost half the Russian military. An other would be to accept a ceasefire on the current front, heavily entrench the border to create defense in depth, and use that time to develop an actual counteroffensive strategy.

If “Tankie” means someone who thinks Russia’s invasion was justified, it’s the wrong word for many people.

There are many people who agree that Russia’s invasion was unjustified and also don’t believe that a simple “stand with Ukraine” strategy has a snowball’s chance in hell of working. If you look back into US history you’ll find a number of conflicts that we thought we could win by just offering advice, logistics, and support; they tend to be costly for the US and catastrophic for the country in question.

Justice doesn’t win wars and we know what happens when you keep throwing lives and resources at a war without a solid victory plan.

It’s tricky to find current numbers on artillery production. The most reliable numbers I could find are about a year old and all cite a 3:1 advantage for the Russians.

Do you have sources on what the ratio is more recently?

We like to believe that Russian air defenses are collapsing but do we even know this? We know that some facilities have been destroyed but how many did they have in the first place? What can Ukraine do to exploit a gap in air defenses? Traditionally, air defenses are there to stop enemy bombers but that only matters if the enemy has bombers.

War is difficult. It takes much more than a bunch of people standing around saying, “I support XYZ.” It takes a huge amount of resources and involves a lot of dead people.

How would you look at the Russian economy?

The best measure I can think of is GDP growth. It can be hard to estimate but it shows the change in an economy over time. The most accurate data I know of for that is the World Bank.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?end=2024&locations=US-RU-CN-JP-IN-GB-FR-DE-IT-CA&start=2019

You’ll notice that for most of that period, which includes the entire Ukraine war, Russia’s economy has been solidly on par with the other 9 largest economies in the world. They still have active trading relations with most of the world https://www.volza.com/global-trade-data/russia-export-trade-data/russia-export-trading-partners/

At the current rates, Ukraine will bleed out before Russia does.

It’s a bit narrow to just write off opposing views as “Tankies.”

The vast majority of the world sees the Ukraine war as a conflict between white people. Their big objection has nothing to do with Ukrain vs Russia, it’s about the attention paid to a European conflict vs all the others around the world. Many nations notice that while Western nations have never been willing to harm their own economies to end conflicts around the world, those same nations are now asking a bunch of 3rd world countries to support our economic sanctions.

Then there’s a whole contingent of people who believe that “supporting Ukraine” is a meaningless platitude without a realistic plan for how to do it. Every sober analysis of the war concludes that it’s essentially a war of attrition. There are very few experts who believe that there is any chance that any sort of breakthrough tactic or technology will easily get Ukraine’s territory back. We know the math behind that; the rate of movement of the front is primarily determined by the number of people and ordinance you throw at the fight. Russia does significantly more of both. That’s been the case for the entire war so far and all signs suggest that it will continue to be the case.

You can go look up the movement of the front over the course of the war. To even out the numbers, we’d have to roughly triple the number of shells we send to the front (ignoring troops for now). That would likely bring the war to a stand still. To start reversing the movement at the same rate we’d likely have to triple it again. So cocktail napkin math says that if we actually want to revert back to pre-invasion borders, we’d have to increase expenditures by around 10x and sustain that for the next 3 years.