Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is the US weapons recipient who keeps on receiving. Ahead of his Wednesday address to Congress he said “We have artillery, yes. Thank you. We have it. Is it enough? Honestly, not really. We’re grateful for their (US) support, but it ($112 billion) is not enough. It is a hint – it is not enough.”
Wow. That’s some chutzpa. Not a hint Mr. President. More like a demand.
Zelensky spent most of his first 3 years in office fanning the flames of civil war in the Donbas and lobbying to join NATO. In doing so he broke his promise to make peace with the breakaway Russian speaking peoples in the Donbas provinces Donetsk and Lugansk. The ultranationalists with the real power in Ukraine quickly disabused him of that notion. Join with us in our destruction of those fake Ukrainians wanting to speak Russian, or you’ll join them in La La Land.
Zelensky got the message and dumped the Minsk II Accords which would have given the Donbas its autonomy within the framework of Ukrainian sovereignty. He not only joined their cause, he went begging to Uncle Sam for hundreds of millions in weaponry and US training to use those weapons on the hapless Donbas Ukrainians. The US was only too happy to oblige since it would assist its relentless effort to keep Russia out of the European political economy so the US could sell Europe super high price energy.
By caving to the Ukraine ultranationalists and Uncle Sam, Zelensky kept his puppet power. Alas, he overplayed his hand, and now finds his country being destroyed by provoking the illegal Russian invasion. During 10 months of war Zelensky not only demanded endless weapons, he demanded the US intervene directly, oblivious that may ignite nuclear war. He even planted a false flag, demanding NATO intervention when an errant Ukraine missile killed 2 in NATO member Poland. He damn well knew it wasn’t a Russian strike.
Time for puppet master America to sidle puppet Zelensky to the negotiating table to cut the best deal possible: independence and security for Ukraine, independence and freedom for the Donbas, and no NATO to allow NATO troops and nukes up to Russia’s border with Ukraine.
Walt Zlotow became involved in antiwar activities upon entering University of Chicago in 1963. He is current president of the West Suburban Peace Coalition based in the Chicago western suburbs. He blogs daily on antiwar and other issues at www.heartlandprogressive.blogspot.com.
Russia’s entire military budget last reported was $66 billion. How is $112 billion not enough? Where on earth did the money go?
To the pockets of a bunch of people.
The money goes to US arms factories, our weapons are more expensive than the Russian weapons, but they work better. The Russians ought to figure out that they aren’t facing just tiny Ukraine but a Ukraine backed by essentially infinite money and infinite weaponry. They can’t win, under those conditions it is immoral to continue.
“our weapons are more expensive than the Russian weapons, but they work better”
In some cases. Russian small arms, mortars, and artillery have — at least as of 30 years ago — generally seemed to be on par with, and in some cases superior to, their US counterparts. They’re not exceptionally complext, and they’re built to take a licking and keep on ticking.
On small arms in particular, the AK-47 tended to fire even after being dropped in the mud and stomped on, while the M-16 (especially the original and A1 models) would jam if a particle of dust came within ten feet of it. It did use ammo that was heavier to carry, and was less accurate past 200 meters, but it was a good rifle.
The Soviet-made artillery pieces, 82mm mortars, 12.5mm machine guns, etc. I came across in Iraqi positions seemed to have held up and remained functional even after more than a month of continuous bombardment.
The Soviet tanks turned out to be crap. Whether the Russians have gotten any better at building tanks that won’t explode if looked at the wrong way is an interesting question. Ditto the heavy and primitive, although fast, Soviet aircraft versus the post-Soviet Russian models.
Accurate description of the jamming “qualities” of the M16. Not fun in a firefight. In the muck and rain.
“Excuse me, this isn’t my favorite type of bullet. I’m not shooting it!” Ar-15/m16
vs.
“is tecknically boolet? I can shoot” AK-47.
I’m an AR guy myself, but I must admit the AK has its advantages.
I’ve only fired a non-military AR-15 once — a couple of weeks ago, in fact, and it was great fun. Question for you:
Do the non-military AR-15s need full metal jacketed ammo? One time in the Marine Corps, we were low on issue ammo and bought some civilian soft-tip stuff. Jammed like crazy. I don’t know if it was the soft bullet or the smaller powder load, but it was awful. When I fired the AR-15s recently, there was no problem with the .223 powder load versus the 5.56mm powder load, but all the rounds were jacketed.
If was pretty cool handling that platform for the first time in … 27 years, I guess. I had a secondary MOS of shooting coach in the Corps (trained at Quantico for that one). And the first time there was a problem, I found I could still disassemble the thing down to and including the bolt carrier group in ~30 seconds. Like riding a bicycle.
I haven’t tested my AR with many different types of ammo. I’ve used jacketed brass and jacketed steel, and never had much of a problem with either. I was more commenting on the stereotype from gun communities on the internet.
I’m relatively new to guns. I still only have 2. My AR and a .22
I’m an old hand with guns, but only have three (none of them ARs or anything like that — one of them is the bolt-action .22 rifle that members of my family traditionally received for their 12th birthdays). I’ve always liked shooting, but I consciously decided to stop being a “gun nut” when I got out of the Corps. It’s an expensive hobby when the taxpayer isn’t subsidizing it ;-)
But not enough to win. Just to keep dying. We don’t actually want to go to war with Russia, but we can keep getting Ukrainians killed as to weaken Russia. Now, who is the immoral one?
We aren’t forcing the Ukrainians to fight. Their choice, we aren’t giving them our best stuff, either to avoid antagonizing Russia, or more sinisterly to give the Russians some hope they can win so they pour another 300k mobniks into the meet grinder. War is immoral who started this one.
So, you think Ukrainians are willing to fight knowing that they won’t ever have the adequate weaponry needed to actually win? Are they stupid or uninformed? And your good with that as long as more Russians are put through the meat grinder? Damn.
They have better stuff than the Russians. Beggars can’t be choosers. Plus I bet they are enjoying a lot of intelligence assistance from us, a dividend from hundreds of billions of investment over the years.
That’s totally false, and I can’t tell whether you’re misinformed or lying. Russia and Ukraine reached a peace deal in March or April (brokered by Turkey), then the U.S. sent its lapdog (at the time) Boris Johnson to Ukraine to tell Zelensky not to enter the agreement.
The clear fact is that the U.S. has been provoking Russia in numerous ways ever since the Soviet Union disbanded. The U.S. may not want direct war with Russia, but it certainly wants this proxy war, and it’s willing to risk direct war in order to try to hang on to its global hegemony.
No ideed, we aren’t forcing them to fight. But we are enabling the people who are forcing them to fight. This is the ukrainian and russian governments against the ukrainian and russian people.
Why did Ukraine make it illegal for men to leave the country? was it because they had droves of men willing to fight for them, or a startling mass of men trying to escape?
Really? Russia has liberated a huge portion of eastern Ukraine, almost all of it. That’s one of their goals here, so they’ve already won that.
There are a couple of questions. Are they going to keep it? and how much did it cost them, looks like 70% of the combat capability of their army, so an expensive acquisition. Throw in all the military age males dead or who have fled the country and it would seem the fuse on Russias demographic timebomb has started burning significantly faster. This won’t be seen as a Russian victory historically speaking
You’ve got it backward. It’s Ukraine that can’t win, and in fact would have lost badly months ago if 1) the U.S. hadn’t supplied it with a massive amount of weapons, which started well before Russia invaded; and 2) Russia had gone U.S.A.-style shock & awe instead of the more moral and ethical path it chose, which was to try to prevent as many civilian deaths and as much infrastructure destruction as possible. The latter has clearly changed as the hard-liners in Russia got fed up with the slow progress, but it doesn’t seem like you have any idea of what’s been going on here. If you really want to get an idea of how this war is going and why, read/watch/listen to Scott Ritter and/or former colonel Douglas Macgregor.
And this is why we have to have wars, so that in the end everybody can come to agreement over who won and who lost. I should point out the US can barely lose at this point, Ukraine and Russia have both lost already but one of them is going to lose worse.
Wrong again. The U.S. is already losing badly. Because of the very successful Russian reactions to U.S. sanctions against it, the petrodollar is falling apart and will almost certainly be abolished eventually. This will cause major economic upheaval and problems in the U.S. Moreover, the sanctions have greatly exacerbated inflation here, and have totally boomeranged against the U.S., while only slightly inconveniencing Russia.
Well I see it quite differently guess it will have to run some more until we all agree
While the sentiment is often overblown and not ALWAYS completely accurate, Jeannette Rankin was MOSTLY correct when she asserted “you can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.”
Yes, the US is going to come out of this war having taken various types of damage, possibly up to and including the collapse of the petrodollar even if it doesn’t escalate to e.g. nuclear exchanges.
But the US “losing” isn’t the same as Russia “winning.” Even if the Russian regime manages to accomplish some of its objectives in Ukraine, it will have done so at great cost to itself as well.
One problem here is the “sunk cost” fallacy, or “throwing good money after bad.”
Putin has already made Ukraine a de facto permanent NATO member state, lengthened his regime’s borders with NATO by inspiring Finland and Sweden to join it, and outed his country as a third-rate conventional military power instead of the juggernaut everyone thought it was. The longer he keeps doubling down, the worse off Russia will be. Maybe he can make it even harder on Russia’s opponents, but even if so that’s not a “win,” it’s just loss mitigation.
Who is it, exactly, who thought the Russian military was a juggernaut? I doubt that anyone following the adventures of either Russia or the US in Afghanistan would characterize either army as a juggernaut, considering they both had their asses handed to them by the locals.
And then there was Vietnam, again with the locals…
But at least we’ll always have Grenada ;-)
It’s far easier to defend one’s territory than to attack and take territory. But that said, the U.S. and Russia are capable of causing massive harm, death, and destruction.
As to this specific issue, the advisors in the White House told Biden that they expected the Russian army to be in Kiev within 2 weeks of the invasion. But they didn’t account for the fact that Russia was trying to minimize civilian deaths and infrastructure damage to the extent possible; the evil Americans just assumed that Russia would be as immoral as they are and just use some shock & awe strategy that kills and destroys everything, like the U.S. does.
I didn’t say anything about winning the war except to say that Ukraine can’t win. I also oppose the Russian invasion, and my initial reaction to it was that Putin had gone insane. I’m totally anti-war, and even more so when it comes to industrial war instead of fighting by volunteers with preindustrial weapons on a battlefield. (However, from Russia’s point of view the invasion is a defensive reaction, and the U.S. is totally at fault for this war because of its endless provocations of Russia.)
Well, what do you expect when you send that kind of money to the most corrupt country on the continent? Only 30% of the weapons have made it to the Ukrainian military, the rest are probably being sold on the black market. Oh, and as to the military/industrial complex, one of the most evil entities on Earth.
Everyone has a ‘begging bowl’…
December 23, 2022 AMERICAN WEAPONS MANUFACTURERS PROFIT FROM MAKING UKRAINIAN CONFLICT PERPETUAL
Uriel Araujo, researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts. On December 8, The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington hosted a reception in honor of the 31st anniversary of their Armed Forces. Interestingly, the invitation itself displayed the logos of major military contractors Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and Pratt & Whitney as the event’s sponsors – right below the official Ukrainian emblems and the Ambassador’s name.
http://infobrics.org/post/37389/
https://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/A-Military-industrial-US.jpg