Everything here is written from the perspective of a person who actually wants Russian to win, which I do not, but I am capable of writing from that perspective. Plenty of pro-Russian types on Telegram have written similar things to parts of what you will read below. The tl;dr is that Russia has been fighting this war based on foolish political calculations from Putin, not based on honest military calculations from the commanders in the field. This has caused the Russian military to grossly underperform throughout the war, which continues to this day.
Russia will win, whether you like it or not.
Except Russia is losing right now, and it is losing because it has made stupid choices that are unserious about victory every step of the way:
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Russia tried an initial blitz strategy that assumed Ukraine would not seriously resist, when Russian intelligence told Putin Ukraine would resist, but he chose to believe his sycophants instead. The result was a debacle with enormous Russian losses and two embarrassing retreats from the North. My alternative warplan would have guaranteed Russian victory within months by pocketing and capturing the bulk of Ukraine's veteran forces.
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After suffering initial failures and setbacks, the Russians pivoted to "Hearts of Iron artillery-only challenge" in which they burned through decades of artillery ammunition stockpiles in mere months in order to bully the Ukrainians, and only took a tiny amount of territory in exchange for moonscaping large swaths of Ukraine. Then HIMARS showed up and blew up enough ammo caches that this strategy became unsustainable a few months earlier than otherwise since Russians became ammo-constrained.
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Sergey Surovikin was brought in and did the 1 intelligent thing Russia has done the whole war: HE WENT OVER TO THE DEFENSIVE AND STARTED TO REBUILD RUSSIAN STRENGTH. His plan was to build a strong defense, wait for the next Ukrainian offensive, crush it, then go on the counterattack with his eventual manpower advantage from mobilization, likely in late spring to summer 2023.
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Dumbass Putin, impatient and not willing to give Surovikin's plan a chance, stepped in again with fucking Wagner & Yevgeny Prigozhin strutting with a bunch of bullshit marketing claims about how they could win the war. Wager got huge favoritism in resources and was allowed to burn through tons of men's lives in order to grind down the flanks of Bahkmut. When this eventually worked in very small ways, Putin fired Surovikin & replaced him with Valery Gerasimov with marching orders to go back on the offensive.
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The Russian offensive which began in late January to presented, WASTED ALL THE RESOURCES Surovikin had built up, for NOTHING except a little more land around Bakhmut. This offensive was retarded, and wasted the 1 hope Russia had of making major gains, and instead completely reversed the situation so that Russia is wasting all its strength and opening itself up to a Ukrainian counter-attack JUST LIKE IT DID BEFORE AT KHARKIV. Russia should have been setting up for a Kursk type battle, and instead it just wasted whatever benefits it had from the 1st round of mobilization to set itself up for a Case Blue.
If things continue as they are now, and there is every reason to believe they will, Russia will keep exhausting itself until it completely loses offensive potential. Then Ukraine will counter-attack and likely will break through in at least one area. Whether this break through will be successfully exploited will depend on many factors, but the Russians have put themselves in the worst possible position, all because of emotionally driven and politically driven bungling.
You sound like a parody of a paranoid 1950s Cold Warrior.
Not only has Biden stated on multiple occasions that Biden would defend Taiwan (not just send aid), it also actually has strategic value (unlike Ukraine), so even a non-imperialist realist like John Mearsheimer supports it.
I think it's madness, because it might lead to nuclear war, but you can't trust the US to be rational.
Is that the propaganda that the regime is pushing to pro-Taiwan GOP?
The stuff I hear is pretty incredible, that it will take years to restock. Just how atrophied is military production in the US? Same for Russia, which was bragging about how it will produce 1500 tanks in one year. That's 10% of the number of T-34s that were produced each year in the 1940s. Pretty pathetic.
How atrophied? Worse than you think. Non combat units have been pencil whipping their range quals for a year because they can't get bullets. RPG training has almost completely ceased.
And sustainment is worse than the 70s. The ground military is in shambles. We're leaning heavily on our elite units and air power, and keeping fighting small and isolated because we cannot deploy for a large scale fight anymore.
If we have two combat ready divisions I'd be shocked.
He DID! And then his minders in the White House walked it back and said that Biden misspoke.
Show me the bill before congress calling for Taiwan defense aid. It does not exist. Nobody gives a shit. Nobody feels any urgency over Taiwan except for a tiny number of people in think tanks, and those people are solely using it as an argument to defund Ukraine, so nobody takes them seriously.
The Biden admin will not even approve arms sales to Taiwan if it thinks doing so might anger China. Republicans in congress recently published proof that the CCP has been making payments to the Biden family of over $1 million, and who knows how much else that was not found.
Biden is not going to do anything to help Taiwan. Taiwan's only hope will be President DeSantis in 2025.
For munitions? Very. Munitions are not needed in peace time. Large stockpiles are seen as unsexy and wasteful. DoD wants platforms, not ammo. DoD thinks when war breaks out, it can scream WE ONLY HAVE ENOUGH AMMO FOR A TWO WEEK WAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and the whole United States will leap into action and magically fix the problem for them overnight.
DoD would rather have 500 shiny new fighters and no ammo for them, than 480 shiny new fighters and effectively unlimited ammo. These are the games that political appointee grassfuckers play in order to game the budgeting system.
to make it plain: the DoD intentionally underfunds munitions and ammunition because it expects the taxpayer to fix the problem with massive new emergency spending if and when a crisis breaks out. This way the DoD gets to make more room in its budget for personnel spending and new toys. This is a great strategy for budget maximization purposes, but a very poor strategy for actual readiness purposes.
AFAIK the USMC spends far more on ammo than the other services proportional to its size. The USMC is spending $1.2B versus the navy $3B. USMC total budget is $50B versus Navy $180B. So Navy is 3.5x bigger but only spends about twice as much on ammo. The USMC should probably spend more, but it is far more budget constrained than the other services and can barely afford to get the platforms it needs.
He said it twice. And then his 'minders' returned the US to strategic ambiguity, which is quite smart. You think this means that the US will not only not intervene militarily, but literally do nothing? That is pretty crazy. Taiwan is far more strategically important than the shithole you are defending now.
US Taiwan policy is literally controlled by Taiwanese lobbyists.
Incorrect. In my experience, people who hyperventilate about Taiwan are generally neocons who want wars everywhere, all the time. Mearsheimer is an exception, and I cited him because he's the only one with an intellect worth respecting.
And you know why that is? Because arming Taiwan right now will make it more likely that China will attack sooner rather than later. States attack when the balance of forces is moving against them, like Germany attacking Russia in 1914 and 1941, Russia attacking Ukraine last year.
You might make an argument that it's better for the US if China attacked this year rather than 10 years from now, but if you don't want an attack to come sooner, don't arm Taiwan (or at least keep the arms shipments at the same level).
And yet he's been tougher on China than Trump. American presidents do what the elites tell them to do. Same reason why Trump started sending lethal weapons to that shithole you love so much.
This is quite smart if you regard it from the perspective of the department. The DoD is not interested in defense or military readiness, it is interested in maximizing its budget and personnel - just like every other government organization. It's the age-old Bureau Paradox.
Biden is a coward. Just look at how he acted with Afghanistan. Biden will do as the liberal media commands. He didn't do jack shit for Ukraine until the media commanded him to. He was told 6+ months before the invasion that there was definitely going to be an invasion. He did very very little. He could have rushed billions of dollars in weapons to Ukraine in that time and helped them a lot. He didn't know why? Because the media didn't tell him to.
Even when the war 1st started, the only hawk was Boris Johnson, not Biden. Everyone else was like "okay let's pretend like we did something without really doing much". Remember at the start of the war Biden admin was telling Zelensky to get the fuck out. They were expecting collapse. So why did all that change?
Because the international liberal media made Ukraine dominate the news cycle 24/7 for weeks, with stories lionizing Zelensky, turning the war into a modern tale of good versus evil. THAT is the ONLY reason Biden (and countries like France and Germany, who also wanted to do jack shit) was forced into action: to. look. good. to. the. media.
Forget everything you think you know about modern politics and replace it with "modern globohomo leftists will slavishly obey whatever narrative dominates their modern globohomo leftist media" and then re-assess. I guarantee you their actions will make far more sense.
Spy balloon? Biden did jack shit, then his liberal media shamed him for it, then he shot it down, and overcompensated by ordering every child's party balloon intercepted by a F-22 for like 2 weeks afterward.
So my answer to you is this: whether Biden is willing to defend Taiwan comes down to 1 question and 1 question ONLY: will the liberal media pressure him or shame him into doing it? This is why I have always been clear that China's "blockade" scenario would very clearly fail. Nothing will drive more media sympathy for Taiwan than a protracted blockade attempting to literally starve the Taiwanese.
But let me tell you something else about the globohomo media. They are DOMINANT in Europe, and even in America, they are full of Europhiles. Russia is a threat to Europe specifically, so the globohomo media goes into defcon 1 whenever their precious EU gets threatened (the media care more about the EU than the US or anywhere else, because it represents their perfect leftist ideals, they secretly hate the united states in many ways). Is the same true of Taiwan? NO. As far as the globohomo media is concerned, Taiwan might as well have aliens living there. Taiwan is not part of their globohomo empire. It's an alien culture. They don't care about it. They also aren't really hostile to China because China is leftist in many ways and so is the globohomo media. Never forget that when Trump went against China, the globohomo media took CHINA's side.
So no. I do not think that if China launched an invasion of Taiwan tomorrow, that Biden would go to war with China. I guarantee you that he would not. He would posture, he would make empty threats to sound tough, and then he would do jack shit. Then it would be up to the media reaction & what he saw from polling data. If the media and voters rebelled against his response, THEN and only then, he would reverse himself and intervene. Since it is unlikely that war would be pushed hard, Biden still wouldn't go to war, he would instead do what he has done in Ukraine: promised a lot of aid and sanctions, everything short of war. Yet again, this is why a blockade won't work, because even if Biden was too cucked to go to war, he would still break a blockade since it would force the Chinese to fire 1st.
Don't be fucking stupid. What a retarded comment. Comments like these show you know nothing about American politics.
Nigga don't talk down to me about American politics. You know jack shit. "Incorrect". You literally know nothing about the dynamics of the Taiwan debate if you think "neocons" have anything to do with it. All the people ranting about Taiwan right now are people associated with the Trump admin who also rant about "neocons" like you, except they call it "the Blob" now. A term I know you don't even know because you don't follow this shit.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. China is not ready to attack Taiwan now. If they tried it, they would lose badly, but they are confident that over time, they will gain sufficient superiority to pull it off. Giving Taiwan a lot of powerful weapons now does NOT mean China would attack sooner, it would have the opposite effect: it would make Chinese war planners say "now our timetable needs to be pushed back to account for these new weapons".
Of course China wants to THREATEN to attack now to scare off weapon sales to keep its target weak and speed up its timetable. Only an idiot would actual be intimidated by its empty threats.
And also you're wrong about 1914 as that calculus had absolutely nothing to do with why WW1 started, and Hitler in 1941. Hitler was motivated by 2 things: (1) Germany was as strong as it was going to get so it might as well attack now, and (2) the USSR was uniquely weak and vulnerable as it just showed in the Winter War. So Germany was uniquely strong & USSR was uniquely weak, in his mind. However Hitler was wrong, and delaying 1 year to focus on destroying the UK in North Africa & the Middle East would have been a huge boon to his war effort. And Russia attacking Ukraine? HAhahahahahah. Ukraine wasn't getting jack shit for help in 2021. The only reason Putin attacked was that he saw Biden cuck out in Afghanistan and thought now was the time to strike. Period.
That's idiotic. China will THREATEN to attack over any little thing, but the threats are always empty. What kind of idiot would listen to those threats?
If the US announced a $10 billion arms package to Taiwan tomorrow, China would react the exact same way it reacted to the Pelosi visit: by throwing a little temper tantrum but then otherwise doing nothing.
LOL no he has not. Trump at least started the trade war. Biden has done literally nothing whatsoever against China. He's given China a total pass.
The liberal media commanded that he stay. Because if there's one thing they like more than Democrats, it's forever war. The only time they ever criticized Biden was when he ended a war, albeit disastrously.
Ending a war does not make you a 'coward'. It's not his life that's on the line either way.
The guy who got humiliated and completely discredited? Anyway, let's not pretend that European "countries" have any power beyond just obeying American commands. And if they even hesitate, their infrastructure gets blown up.
Your exact opinion.
The problem is that the same people who own the politicians, own the media. It makes sense that they do what the media "commands", but it's not because the media commanded it. Rather, the media is the propaganda arm of the corporatons, the banks, the wealthy - the same who own the politicians.
Come on, the media does not care about Taiwanese starving or dying. Or anyone. They care about the interests of their wealthy owners.
I don't see how. They could come all the way to Berlin, and they'd be no further than they were in 1989.
How can you claim that China is like Globohomo? They're actively opposing the Globohomo stuff, not promoting it.
I don't know if he would, but there's certainly the possibility. If not, why do people like Mearsheimer say that it is in the US' interests to defend Taiwan? He's a well-known restrainer, as you know.
lol, voters
"Voters" in the EU oppose mass migration. Guess what we got? Voters oppose trooning kids. Guess what we get? Voters don't mean anything. It's "our democracy" for the politicians because they decide what happens and screw the "voters".
That is actually pretty smart. Going to war with China seems to be pretty stupid.
Lobbyists, wealthy donors and corporations rule to roost. That's US politics, and politics in every "western" country.
Of course I know what the blob is. It was literally made up by a guy who then himself became part of the blob. Same guy who bragged about revoking Snowden's passport while he was in Russia to trap him there and say that he doesn't REALLY care about civil liberties, because Russia bad.
Trumpists oppose China and want to fight it economically. Neocons want another war there.
With all 'western' arms and ammunition depleted, this seems like a very good time to attack. If China doesn't, it's because it thinks that it will be in an even better position to attack 5 years from now.
Of course not. Because that would also give Taiwan more time to prepare and rearm. Unless China thinks that it would be in a better position to attack 5 years from now than now, it will attack now. That's why you don't do stuff like sending massive amounts of arms.
Nonsense. World War I was the result of German fear of Russia. Which makes sense, because Russia was a rising power, threatening Germany's predominant position in Europe. Better to have a war sooner rather than after more years of Russian development.
And Stalin was rearming like crazy, because he knew full well that Germany was going to attack. So why wait until 1942 when you are in a better position in 1941?
NATO has been training Ukrainians to, yes, terrorize the people of the Donbas for years now. They've been sending weapons. Trump sent weapons.
Why leave this open wound rather than closing it? At least now it will move towards a resolution.
This Western arrogance will eventually lead to a world war 3.
GOPe talking points.