Russo-Ukrainian War 2014-23 and Invasion

[celedhring]

Both Nordstream 1 and 2 were apparently sabotaged yesterday. In multiple places.

Tomorrow they will both fall off a window.

If it's Russia (who else?), sabotaging the infrastructure needed to keep Europe grabbed by the balls doesn't come across as a genius plan. But what do I know?

[Legbiter]

Russians are blaming the Balts and Poland. Which means they did it themselves. As to why, dunno, drive a wedge between them and the Germans? Yeah I'm not seeing the master plan here.

[grumbler]

Videos of WWI levels massacres of fresh conscripts already floating around on Telegram. It's fucking nuts.

I haven't tried to look for them but I am having trouble believing these videos exist. As madly stupid as Russia is, I don't think they'd be sending fresh conscripts a week after they got fetched from their homes in mass assaults.

Thanks for inserting some common sense into this.  Even with zero training time in the mix, it isn't possible to get a unit of these newly mobilized troops transported to their depot, organized, equipped (however ill-equipped they may be, that takes time), transported to the combat zone, and inserted into the line in the six days since the decree was passed.  It's like in Top Gun where they graduate from Top Gun School and then "twenty-four hours later" are flying into combat in the Indian Ocean.  It's not possible because physics.

[alfred russel]

The United States and NATO don't need to use nuclear weapons in response to the Russian use of nuclear weapons.  What they can do is announce that the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine will be considered an attack on NATO (because of the dire effect such an attack would have on European countries) and that NATO will respond with an all-out conventional attack on Russia's ability to make war, wherever such capabilities are found.

The West will not launch a preemptive strategic nuclear strike on Russia, no matter how fevered the dreams of hillbilly contrarian mountain climbers get.  And it does not need to.  The Russian leadership knows full well that Russia is helpless in the face of purely conventional western arms, and they know full well that their own strategic arms are crippled by corruption.

I'm definitely not a hillbilly. That is just dumb.

So you are counting on Russian leadership to act rationally and in the best interests of Russia? If we launch a conventional attack on Russia, they are just going to go, "you got us!" and surrender? Or allow us to conventionally push them out of Ukraine after already going nuclear and lose?

[Tamas]

Russians are blaming the Balts and Poland. Which means they did it themselves. As to why, dunno, drive a wedge between them and the Germans? Yeah I'm not seeing the master plan here.

I am very puzzled. Russia could just turn the pipes off, so why do it? But otherwise this just makes likely the European public will panic and want an end to things, so it is NOT a help for the Ukrainians or anyone on their side.

[Legbiter]

None of the pipelines was operational so unlikely to cause any panic. It's just a weird spiteful act from Russia.

[Barrister]

Videos of WWI levels massacres of fresh conscripts already floating around on Telegram. It's fucking nuts.

I haven't tried to look for them but I am having trouble believing these videos exist. As madly stupid as Russia is, I don't think they'd be sending fresh conscripts a week after they got fetched from their homes in mass assaults.

Thanks for inserting some common sense into this.  Even with zero training time in the mix, it isn't possible to get a unit of these newly mobilized troops transported to their depot, organized, equipped (however ill-equipped they may be, that takes time), transported to the combat zone, and inserted into the line in the six days since the decree was passed.  It's like in Top Gun where they graduate from Top Gun School and then "twenty-four hours later" are flying into combat in the Indian Ocean.  It's not possible because physics.

I haven't seen any videos of fresh conscripts in combat.

But it does seem like the Russians are in fact conscripting people with zero military experience and are in the process of sending them to the front with zero military training.

[Tamas]

Videos of WWI levels massacres of fresh conscripts already floating around on Telegram. It's fucking nuts.

I haven't tried to look for them but I am having trouble believing these videos exist. As madly stupid as Russia is, I don't think they'd be sending fresh conscripts a week after they got fetched from their homes in mass assaults.

Thanks for inserting some common sense into this.  Even with zero training time in the mix, it isn't possible to get a unit of these newly mobilized troops transported to their depot, organized, equipped (however ill-equipped they may be, that takes time), transported to the combat zone, and inserted into the line in the six days since the decree was passed.  It's like in Top Gun where they graduate from Top Gun School and then "twenty-four hours later" are flying into combat in the Indian Ocean.  It's not possible because physics.

I haven't seen any videos of fresh conscripts in combat.

But it does seem like the Russians are in fact conscripting people with zero military experience and are in the process of sending them to the front with zero military training.

Tim quotes a guy who claimed that fresh conscripts were being machine gunned down as they assault Ukrainian trenches. That's what grumbler and I challenged, not the fact that there is mobilisation, or that those mobilised may eventually end up on the front (I am 100% certain they will).

[OttoVonBismarck]

Long article on Politico EU about the state of European defense, particularly in response to Ukraine:

https://www.politico.eu/article/emmanuel-macron-olaf-scholz-defense-europe-strategic-autonomy-ukraine-war/

When will Europe learn to defend itself?
France and Germany keep saying Europe will have to stop relying on Washington, but then do exactly that.

PARIS/BERLIN — Thirty years after the horrors of the Balkan wars laid bare Western Europe's incapacity to deal with conflict on European soil, Russia's invasion of Ukraine is demonstrating how little has changed.

As Yugoslavia started to break apart in 1991, it fell to the Luxembourgish Foreign Minister Jacques Poos to make the ill-fatedly optimistic remark: "This is the hour of Europe, not that of the Americans."

Since then, there have been years of agonized soul-searching about why Europe failed to stand up as a military force. Stung to a new level of panic by former U.S. President Donald Trump's "America First" mantra, both French President Emmanuel Macron and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel issued dire warnings that the EU could no longer rely on the U.S.

Macron continually talks a huge game on Europe establishing its own security agenda but his pledges — along with those of many other senior European politicians — to pursue a policy of European "strategic autonomy" in which the EU will massively reduce its military dependency on the U.S. have so far been almost exclusively rhetorical.

Faced with Russian President Vladimir Putin's genocidal onslaught against the biggest country entirely within Europe, France and Germany spent seven months relying militarily on Washington, and to a lesser extent on Britain, to guarantee democracy and freedom in a close EU ally.

According to the Kiel Institute for World Economy, the U.S. has pledged €25 billion in military support to Ukraine and the U.K. pledged €4 billion. By contrast, Germany has promised €1.2 billion, behind Poland on € 1.8 billion, while France's military support for Kyiv barely registers, at €233 million, lagging Estonia in the league table. Britain has trained 5,000 Ukrainian troops, while France has trained 100.

These discrepancies are a question of political will, not cash. The EU has an annual gross domestic product of €14 trillion, and a combined defense budget of €230 billion. France, however, has stressed that it does not want to be a "co-belligerent" in the war or "humiliate" Russia, while German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stresses the dangers of being sucked into the conflict.

All eyes are now on whether a potential change of heart is imminent, and whether Europe's economic kingpin Germany and France, the EU's only nuclear-armed power, will agree to send Leopard 2 and Leclerc tanks. Ukraine itself is putting out a plea for more arms now that Putin has committed hundreds of thousands more troops to the fight.

Our fate in our own hands
The differences in spending between the U.S. and the Western Europeans raise excruciating questions for the EU leaders about what would have happened to Kyiv if the U.S. president had been less open to large-scale intervention than Joe Biden.

In a keynote speech this month, German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht acknowledged that the situation was untenable.

"Germany and the Europeans depend on a peace order that they cannot guarantee on their own," Lambrecht said, adding that this was particularly problematic as America is increasingly turning "its main attention" to the Pacific.

Washington "may no longer be able to guarantee the defense of Europe to the same extent as it did in the past," the minister said. "The conclusion is clear: We Europeans, and thus most prominently we Germans, must therefore do more to be able to credibly show so much military strength ourselves that other powers will not even think of attacking us."

Yet whether those words will be followed by action remains unclear. Her critics were quick to point out that former Chancellor Merkel already reached a similar conclusion in 2017 — telling a party rally in a Munich beer tent that "we Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands" — without much happening afterward.

It's a phenomenon that has plagued European defense for a long time: "Already back in the 1990s the tenor was: It cannot be that we're always dependent on the Americans," said Claudia Major from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

She referred to the 1998 Franco-British Saint Malo declaration, a response to the failures of the Balkan wars, which stressed that Europe "must have the capacity for autonomous action, backed up by credible military forces."

Instead, however, "little happened since" because the main European powers "didn't feel militarily threatened and simply relied on the U.S.," Major said.

Can't work together
Although it has been long been received wisdom that the EU won't succeed in credibly boosting its defense capabilities as long as it keeps 27 armies that often try to individually perform the same tasks and develop their own equipment, efforts to pool resources keep hitting fatal snags.

"We have to harmonize our actions, just as [Germany] emerges as a second military power," " said former French Europe Minister and MEP Nathalie Loiseau, referring to Berlin's massive €100 billion military modernization fund. "Our efforts are fragmented, there is so much wastage because we have so many different models of tanks, vessels and fighter jets."

Few things so neatly symbolize the woes of this poor cooperation and mistrust than the plight of the Franco-German-Spanish fighter jet project FCAS. It literally won't take off.

The FCAS, which stands for Future Combat Air System, has been mired in delays and difficulties for years and has suffered fresh setbacks even as European governments vow a renewed commitment to defense in the wake of the Ukraine war. The first models of the fighter jet are not expected before 2040 thanks to disagreements between the French and the Germans over the leadership of the joint project.

French officials and defense experts are fuming about the recent German decision to replace the so-called "nuclear share" part of its airforce, which is supposed to be able to drop U.S. nuclear bombs in case of a war with Russia, with American F-35 fighter jets.

"There isn't a very clear line in Germany. Some things are reassuring, others are worrying. France can't really lean on Germany in matters of defense," said Pierre Haroche, a European defense expert at the IRSEM think tank backed by France's defense ministry.

"Germany's priority is not to build a European defense, it's to rebuild its army that was falling apart. It wants to regain its status as a good NATO pupil," he added.

German officials say that the F-35 decision does not change Berlin's commitment to the FCAS. Instead, they argue it had been made merely because new planes had to be bought immediately, while FCAS was still far from being operational. Furthermore, the officials in Berlin argue that Washington would not have agreed to have American nuclear bombs carried by a plane whose construction plans were not previously made available to U.S. intelligence.

For its part, Germany has accused France's defense industry of not playing ball when it comes to military cooperation.

"In everything we discuss, it must be clear at the end that we will be treated as equals. And that there cannot be French industrial companies that want to restrict access to certain knowledge. We should pay for it but don't get full access to all data? That can't be," Lambrecht told POLITICO.

Yet Lambrecht also acknowledged that, in order to boost joint European defense projects, Germany must abandon its policy of being able to block arms exports from allies if those arms were originally from Germany or jointly developed. NATO ally Estonia, for example, was barred from selling weapons to Ukraine shortly before the war.

"If I'm doing such a project together with my allies, who share the same values as I do, and if I'm the only country there that has a different position on an export, then you have to ask yourself whether that can actually be the obstacle," she said.

No solution from Brussels
Brussels is trying to bang heads together to get European countries to join up their defense projects, but progress is glacial.

The European Commission in May proposed a new plan to coordinate military spending among EU member countries. Whether countries buy American or buy European has become a key point of the discussion. Josep Borrell, the EU's top diplomat, stressed that Europe buys some 60 percent of its kit from outside the bloc and urged a shift to more domestic sources.

The proposal is now being studied by defense experts in the Council and there's hope that it can land on the desk of defense ministers in November, before going to the European Parliament. However, diplomats working on the dossier are not convinced that such a timeline is feasible because the discussion is still in the early stages. The sums involved are also small. The Commission is proposing €500 million over two years to support joint procurement of weapons, which diplomats say is too little to boost European capacities.

"For sure we, don't have a game changer yet," one of the diplomats said. Another more ambitious proposal is expected from the Commission but it's unclear when exactly it will land.

Key bones of contention include the rules for defense companies that receive subsidiaries from outside the bloc or have global ownership structures and the use of high-tech components coming from countries such as the U.S or the U.K. Diplomats say that France has a stricter view on these issues compared, for example, with Italy or Sweden.

However, the fundamental issue is that to buy European, member countries have first to be convinced that they are buying state-of-the-art products built with the best available technologies. "We cannot buy European for the sake of buying from European industries, that seems clear to me," said a senior diplomat.   

Credibility gap
At times, it has seemed like the severity of the Ukraine war could finally force a meeting of minds between France and Germany.

Last month, Scholz outlined his vision of "a stronger, more sovereign, geopolitical European Union." In Paris, Scholz's statement was read as a belated answer to Macron's 2017 call for "strategic autonomy." Macron had hoped to re-energize Europe's defense policy and spoke of the need to build "a common intervention force, a common defense budget and common doctrine to act."

But beyond the diplomatic niceties, neither Scholz nor Macron have been able to take the lead in the war. France and Germany have fallen in the wake of Poland and Nordic and Baltic nations in trying to steer the European agenda.

Several French officials have said that the publicly available numbers on military donations were unreflective as France has not disclosed all its donations. If so, it's a decision that has backfired according to Philippe Maze-Sencier, a public affairs expert at the Institut Montaigne and global chair of public affairs at Hill+Knowlton Strategies.

"We decided not to play the communications game, but it means France is in seventh position in international rankings, on a par with Norway. But we don't play in the same league as Norway. No wonder we are not legitimate when it comes to spearheading the Europe of defense," Maze-Sencier said.

Macron's past attempts at casting himself as a mediator in the conflict, promoting France as "a balancing power" on Ukraine, have also sparked suspicions over his long-term objectives. His decision to keep lines of communication open with the Kremlin and past calls "not to humiliate Russia" were derided in many parts of the EU, according to Maze-Sencier.

"[France] has lost credibility because of our position on Ukraine. Put crudely, our friends in Nordic countries, the Baltic states and in Eastern Europe feel let down and even compare it to [the lack of solidarity] in WWII," said Maze-Sencier.

"They say give us U.S. protection any day," he added.

I remember a lot of us were optimistic by initial responses to Ukraine that some of the European powers, specifically Germany, but to a lesser degree others, were finally "waking up." At the same time we all struck a skeptical tone, mainly because we know exactly how these countries (specifically Germany) are, and had plenty of reason for skepticism.

Time has now shown there was little real reason for optimism. If anything, the level of threat to the European order posed by Russia, and the level of minimal response to it militarily from France and Germany suggests to me nothing short of a direct military invasion of Germany and France outright will actually spur a serious defense reckoning in these countries.

This then raises a question--what do the countries that haven't decided to simply be fat and happy, i.e. Britain, the Baltics, Poland etc do going forward. The United States frankly, needs to shift to a Pacific focused strategy to deal with a rising China. This was perhaps foolishly assumed to mean we could largely draw down from Europe (which to some degree we have done in terms of long term deployments), I always thought it was unrealistic we could completely get out of Europe, but I think there is no way we can realistically continue to be the muscle for a group of very wealthy countries while we are engaged in great power conflict with a very large and powerful China in the Pacific.

If core Europe is not willing to stand up, America is not left with many good options. The reality is I don't want to lift a finger to defend countries like Germany that refuse to properly arm themselves and easily could do so, but the only way to send that message would likely be an American drawdown that very unfairly would primarily shift risk to the Baltic states. Even worse Germany is also completely unwilling to meaningfully contribute to collective defense. In a very real sense Turkey is a better military ally than Germany is, and they are continually playing footsie with the Russians.

It was one thing when we were essentially "bribing" West Germany not to drift into Communism during the Cold War, and when it was the literal front lines, but there is little benefit to America's military relationship with the Germans at this point.

Maybe we take heart from how incompetent Russia is and just pull back significantly from NATO in Europe and let them sort it out themselves and hope for the best, I do not know.

[Jacob]

Where does Eastern Europe, the Baltic States, and the Nordic countries fit into that Otto?

[OttoVonBismarck]

The reality is most of those States I feel fairly positively toward, and view them as doing more than their share. But they are all very small countries (if not geographically for the Nordics, in terms of population / economic power), without support from the dormant European Great Powers, I do not think that collection of countries is very safe from future Russian aggression. That puts the United States in the position of either having to leave these countries more to their own devices, in the hope that that could finally force France and Germany to care more about European collectively security, or we continue to create the umbrella which allows these large European economies to do nothing. The downside is the most direct risk falls on countries who don't really deserve it.

[Jacob]

Both Nordstream 1 and 2 were apparently sabotaged yesterday. In multiple places.

In Danish waters.

Danish media is saying:

- 3 separate leaks, not small.
- 3 seismological events consistent with explosion were recorded by no less than 30 separate monitoring stations in Sweden.
- Danish defence forces are maintaining an exclusion zone in the area.
- It's at this point too dangerous to send divers to inspect.
- Ships sailing through the leak area risk sinking due to the change in buoyancy.
- There's an unquantified risk of explosion as well.

[Barrister]

Nordstream leaks/explosions are an odd one.

Hard to quantify who would benefit.  Russians don't need to blow it up - they can just turn off the taps (which they have already done).  US doesn't like Europe getting gas from Russia, but better that in the short term than risking Europe running out of supplies and thus losing support for Ukraine.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Russians are blaming the Balts and Poland. Which means they did it themselves. As to why, dunno, drive a wedge between them and the Germans? Yeah I'm not seeing the master plan here.

I am very puzzled. Russia could just turn the pipes off, so why do it? But otherwise this just makes likely the European public will panic and want an end to things, so it is NOT a help for the Ukrainians or anyone on their side.

most europeans won't know anyway
most of those that do will be aware that there's barely any / no gas coming through
most of those will know that it's because Putin is a warmonger
the remainder are probably collabos who need their heads shaved.

[Zanza]

@Otto: On the short term issue of helping Ukraine, Germany does deliver weapons and other gear, but in smallish numbers. The argument that we just don't have more sounds plausible in the light of reports about lack of equipment in recent years. Confirms the statement that Germany didn't do enough in the last decades.

Especially why we do not deliver MBTs or IFVs to Ukraine is not transparent. Some personal decision by Scholz or a wider opposition within the Social Democrats maybe, but not public reluctance.

Mid term Germany will also increase its military spending in the next years. This is indeed  a significant change within the domestic politics scope which costed considerable political capital. Much bolder than Merkel was. But then nowhere near as pronounced as say Poland, which is massively investing. Whether that higher spending translates into more capabilities is questionable though. The culture of the armed forces and its civilian leadership is not helpful here. And of course, Germany will still largely be politically unwilling to exert what power it has anyway.

That said, American military in Germany is mainly here for American strategic interests, not to protect Germany - unlike during the Cold War. If that strategic interest changes, America should withdraw. No big deal, we will still like you.