this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025
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Summary

A European Parliament member claimed that the U.S. gave Europe three weeks to agree on Ukraine's "surrender" terms or risk an American withdrawal from Europe.

Mika Aaltola made the claim on X, but provided no evidence. NBC News reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested a U.S. troop reduction in Europe.

Trump reportedly plans to cut 20,000 troops and demand greater NATO contributions. He has pushed for higher NATO defense spending.

Trump may meet with Putin soon, believing Russia holds the upper hand in negotiations.

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[–] drathvedro@lemm.ee 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Those are, in fact, good points, I just didn't want to yap about them in the previous comment.

The battlefield has, indeed, got quite stale with rare opportunistic gains or those that were gained through massive bloodshed. Trench warfare is once again the reality of modern war. Still, even with all the aid Ukraine has received the tide isn't going in their favor.

So, to put it shortly - on the battlefield, technology can cancel out numerical advantages of 3.5 to 4 quite realistically.

I stand ground on my conviction that there is no 4x force multiplier, solely by the fact that whatever Ukraine deploys could be also deployed by Russia. Most definitely a somewhat shittier version, but which gets the job done, maybe giving the Ukraine's side at most 2X advantage, but most importantly, magnitudes cheaper.

Economically - Ukraine alone would not sustain production against Russia, but Ukraine happens to have EU in its back yard. The Russian economy is actually quite small compared to EU’s economy. So the economic unbalance can also be canceled out.

Considering the point above, I wouldn't be so sure about that given that we are... well, were for the past year in that position with the only difference of it being the US who's providing most of the (military) aid rather than EU... and the front line is moving westwards nonetheless

As for attrition on Russia - if you observe the footage and news, you will notice that they are low on cars, low on armor (and using a large percent of antiquated armor), and low on artillery barrels. Out of the USSR stockpile of ~13 000 tanks, estimated losses were recently standing at 9859 machines [1].

Cars are def not a problem, the streets in Russia are absolutely flooded by Chinese imports. Tanks, artillery, and warships, from what I gather from some military analysts, and this will most likely sound controversial and so we'll probably have to agree to disagree, is that those are basically entirely antiquated already by the advent of drone warfare. Armor shortages sounds surprising to me and I haven't heard about that... I don't see how it could problem for Russia, and yet it is... Corruption is the only possible answer I could see for that. But overall, even given that those are in fact necessary, as I've said, Russia still has a ton of economy not turned towards the war machine, and there's a lot of factories to tap into to ramp the military production if necessary.

And please don't take it as me praising Russia. Putin is definitely in wrong here and Zelensky has all the moral high ground there could possibly be. I just see that many news sources blow out any small Ukrainian achievements out of proportion into some kind of twisted Good vs Evil, David vs Goliath stories. And it makes my blood boil as it leaves an impression of "Why help Ukrainians even more when they're doing quite well already", while hundreds of innocent people are killed and displaced every day and it isn't stopping, and won't stop, unless a drastic measure is taken.