I’m just trying to guess how much time has Ukraine before being absorbed by authoritarian Russia.
OK, a bit melodramatic, but if Russia keeps advancing, even if it’s meters per day, even if it takes them 10 years to reach Kyiv, they are still advancing and Putin can throw as many bodies as he wants, a luxury Ukraine does not have. It pays being a larger country, both in terms of demographics and surface.
Now that it’s clear that neither trump nor vance like Zelenskyy and want his head to divide the country and stir things up to find somebody more amenable to sell out the country to both the US and Russia, it’s up to Canada, UK, the EU and hopefully Australia, South Korea and Turkey to help Ukraine navigate the next 4 years. What I want to know is what military capabilities these countries can spare to help Ukraine.
I’d also like some kind of probabilities scale: for example, it is plain stupid to suggest Greece and Turkey have so many tanks they could lend some to Ukraine. This ignores political realities between both countries, as they hate each other and were accepted simultaneously into NATO so they wouldn’t veto or kill each other.
Also, do you know if any reputable source has a timetable the EU would need to substitute America’s capabilities? Not even to match America’s 2.8K American nuclear warheads and nuclear carrying missiles, their 6 fleets, 11 carriers…, but to simply defend the EU’s territory win a conflict with Russia with no American involvement and no territorial loss and eventually defend Ukraine and help them reclaim their lost territories.
Just 2 days ago I though talking about NATO being dead was being melodramatic but now I really believe in 6 months this organization won’t exist anymore. Europe has to go back to cold war levels of military spending.
The utube “military summary” done by a Finn called Tuomas is decent, but more focused on Scandinavia and Northern Europe.
The only source with even remotely accurate information of such thing are the major intelligence agencies and they’re not going to hand out that information for obvious reasons. No government in the world releases exact numbers of their military strenght.
Europe is already ramping up spending, and several countries have had it explicitly clear that they will be taking up the burden trump is running away from.
it’s nice for then that Russia has more bodies, but it hasn’t helped them so far in any capacity that has been bandied about for the past three years.
i was making this same point three years ago, that on paper everyone was terrified of the Russian military until Russia showed themselves militarily incapable of planning for or executing a campaign against a happy smaller country with badly inferior numbers and equipment.
same point 2 years ago, then 1, same conclusion today.
the however many years it takes Russia to “win”(by this point they’ve lost no matter what in practical terms), the EU will be fully ready to defend itself.
the 1 week it was supposed to take Russia to conquer ukraine has turned into what, 160 weeks and counting?
without making significant progress?
in those three years, multiple EU powers have already changed their policies and now spend record numbers on defense and military equipment production, specifically to deal with Russia if they ever become a threat to the larger European continent.
Russia has used up 20% of their active military personnel and a lot of their equipment fighting one of the weakest European countries to barely a stalemate, even losing sovereign ground to Ukraine.
so it doesn’t really matter how long ukraine can resist Russia; Russia far overplayed its hand and doesn’t seem to have much of a chance of “conquering” any further by letting everyone know how weak Russia is militarily and giving everyone else years to prepare for any more bullshit Russia tries to pull
To be fair, over time, Ukraine has received a ton of funding and supplies to help it’s defense. However that doesn’t explain how Russia wasn’t able to just roll over Ukraine in a few months, had they actually planned and maintained their millitary.
regardless of any amount of resources given to Ukraine, The length of time Russia has been militarily unable to successfully campaign against one of the weakest European countries was astonishing and extremely enlightening as to the state of their military readiness.
before Russia exposed itself, this sort of matchup very much seemed like if the US decided to invade Colombia, made very little progress for 3 years, and then lost territory to Colombia(imagining they bordered Colombia).
Russia losing to Ukraine would have seemed absurd until all of the weaknesses and false pretenses of Russian military power were exposed.
now it turns out Europe had a paper tiger for 40 years that world leaders were wrongly extolling the military virtues and dangers of.
it’s not to say that Russia is harmless, because they’re willing to sacrifice millions of soldiers, but they simply do not pose the legacy world-power conquering danger that everybody assumed they did for over a generation.
and to belabor the point, they are failing against a single, relatively and especially at the time, unprepared and militarily weak country the Russia had literally signed a treaty not to invade.
Comparing national militaries is a complicated and tricky business. I would like to recommend Perun on YouTube. Usually pretty good defense economic analysis in digestible one-hour PowerPoint presentations. Some comparative material.