"All of Vlad's forces and all of Vlad's men, are out to put Humpty together again." (1 Viewer)

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These are getting less and less connected with any part of reality. If this is, in fact, true, I do not see it playing out as they expect. I don't know what would happen but I cannot imagine the US and EU will just fold to Putin's demands.

How ugly it gets…that is a different story.

 
These are getting less and less connected with any part of reality. If this is, in fact, true, I do not see it playing out as they expect. I don't know what would happen but I cannot imagine the US and EU will just fold to Putin's demands.

How ugly it gets…that is a different story.


If all these letters are true and this lastest one reflects any plans that Putin and its court are developing for an inmediate future, thinking that this wouldn't trigger NATO in to action (specially given the lackluster performance of the RF) is naive for them:

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"Localized missile strikes" against Poland and the Baltics, which are NATO members is going to elevate "sanctions" to an entirely new, and more violent level, possibly involving enforcing sanctions against Russian warships' existence.
 
Brave Woman!

She is alive at the moment and out of jail. Appeared in court today and go off with a fine, so far. Brave woman:

 
It doesn't look as if the Chinese are playing ball with everything Russia needs

Valery Kudinov, an official at Russia's Federal Air Transport Agency (Rosaviatsia) responsible for maintaining airplane airworthiness, said Russia was in talks to source parts from countries including Turkey and India after a failed attempt to obtain them from China.

An industry source confirmed to Reuters that Kudinov had been sacked, adding that he lost his job because of his public statements about China. Rosaviatsia declined to comment
 
It doesn't look as if the Chinese are playing ball with everything Russia needs
China has to tread very carefully these next few weeks. Its very future and place in the world is at stake.

Too many times the leaders of the world powers underestimate the US. The British thought 1776 was going to be a cakewalk, 1812 as well. Spain didn't see its utter defeat coming in 1898. Germany disregarded the threat the US represented in 1917 and 1941, as did the Japanese in arguably the worst military miscalculation of modern times, well until Putin decided to invade Ukraine and enrage and unite the world.

As outsiders we may see a seemingly broken country, beset by civil unrest, failing infrastructure, education and healthcare, greed, vast inequalities of wealth and opportunities, racism, misogyny, mass incarceration, poverty and crime, with a failing economy, a vast in-balance of trade and buried in government debt, much of it foreign held. We see a military that failed in Vietnam, fled from Lebanon after a single terrorist strike, left Iraq unfinished and most recently ran from Afghanistan in an apparent blind panic. China sees this too and thinks their ascendancy is coming. But China, like Britain, Spain, Germany, Japan and now Russia before it may well misunderstand and underestimate the US. The country can pivot like mad from sloth to lion.

This week the US told China that they know Putin asked for aid. China denied it, but the US has essentially told China that we're reading your encrypted communications to Moscow. We know what you're up to. China also knows that once Russia is neutralized the now undistracted US and the now more united West has but one global objective, to contain China. And the world doesn't really need China, sure we'd need to find a new source for cheap consumer goods, and they are a good sink for the West's foreign debt and their cheap prices help to control inflation, but the West has reconfigured the global economy before, they can do it again.

China has a choice now, a fork in the road, be part of the solution or be yet another nation that underestimated the US and get stomped.
 
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NATO equipment definitely looks better!
You have to say that the NATO AT equipment is really effective
What the Ukrainians desperately need is counter battery defences. They need to be able to intercept incoming missiles and be able to pinpoint and destroy Russian artillery sites. What does NATO have for these two essential jobs?

In February before the war Israel prohibited the sale of its Iron Dome system to Ukraine. As an anti-missile system there can be few better. It's likely too late now to train and set up for this static system.

 
And the world doesn't really need China, sure we'd need to find a new source for cheap consumer goods

I agree with everything you wrote except for this passage. China has an enormous amount of economic leverage that, while they themselves would suffer, would discombobulate the world's economy even further than our sanctions-package already has. Rare-earth metals for the batteries that power so much of our tech, for instance; you're not going to move production to Vietnam or Bangladesh and call it a day.

Otherwise, your post is spot-on; the Chinese have a choice to make, and either way they choose, will suffer not only a loss of prestige but also an economic blow.
 
I agree with everything you wrote except for this passage. China has an enormous amount of economic leverage that, while they themselves would suffer, would discombobulate the world's economy even further than our sanctions-package already has. Rare-earth metals for the batteries that power so much of our tech, for instance; you're not going to move production to Vietnam or Bangladesh and call it a day.
True. Good points. A Bretton-Woods global economic reset is best avoided.

But here in Canada we're sitting on a pile of unexploited rare-earth minerals. In the long term, perhaps 25 years China could be replaced in part by Canadians mines, with batteries produced in the US.


There's nothing that China supplies that we cannot ultimately get elsewhere, and with less political risk and baggage.
 

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