Russia - threadbanned users in OP

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 28 | Institute for the Study of War (understandingwar.org)

You do realise the German government have started building an LNG terminal and pipeline which they plan to have finished in record time to reduce their dependancy on Russian gas, it will not happen overnight however they are working on it, they plan to invest €100 billion into their military to bring it up to (NATO) standard and at the same time are trying to keep their people in work and economy afloat... what is Ireland doing?

Have you ever lived on mainland Europe? Ever had the pleasure of working for a German or French production company? Do you realise how many French and German citizens rely on the gas dependant companies to earn their livings? Do you realise how many of those people rely on gas to heat their homes and water? Obviously not .... sure we could switch the internet off tomorrow and lets see how the Irish economy copes. How many of the tech companies would still be paying people within a month of the internet being switched off?

Where are the UK gas fields and why have they not been tapped by now? Why are the Dutch closing their North Sea gas fields? Because there is so much gas out there? Having worked in the industry in both Holland and Germany I can assure you, that the gas in the North Sea will take at least 12-24 months to tap into and will not be financially viable to tap, otherwise it would have happened. LNG is available from the US, however Europe has 2 terminals that are capable of taking it into the grid, no were near enough capacity to compensate the loss of Russian gas, hence why the German government are building a mobile terminal which they hope to have in operation next year.

As for fracking .... lets start in your back garden. You do realise why the EU is against it? You realise what is pumped into the ground to extract the gas and what effect it has on the lands surrounding. If Ireland were to engage in it .... fertiliser would be the countries smallest problem.

One way or another Germany was going to get what it wanted - either by coercion or direct conquest. The invasion of Poland was considered the point at which this was to be opposed, so war was declared. The Third Reich was the immediate threat to Europe and a European war became, with the addition of Italy and the Japanese Empire, a world war.

The strategic decisions taken by the belligerent countries were seldom perfect, some just plain failures - you mention one with regard to Poland.

One decision taken was that the Third Reich had to be brought down. I doubt if many would disagree with that.

What happened to the German population at the end of the war has not been ignored - it's simply little known.

You could as easily be critical of the Germans in the last eight months or so of the war. The system in Germany wouldn't, or couldn't, acknowledge that they were going to be defeated. This resulted in millions of casualties on all sides, mostly Germans.

missiles from Russia

Can someone exain why the West advertise the weapons they are sending to Ukraine. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to do that.

Not that it's new, the Americans armed the Taliban to the teeth in the 1980s and that came back to bite them.

I wonder where some of the western weapons being sent to Ukraine will end up in time.

I'm pro Ukrainian and anti Russia in this war, but I sometimes wonder if some western countries are killing the Ukrainians with their "kindness". They are emboldening them to the point where they won't negotiate with the Russians, but not so much that the Ukrainians can actually win...that means war without end IMO.

It seems to me that the West (and I really mean the US with a bit of help from the Brits) are determined to prolong the war so that the Russians are weakened to the point that it will take the best part of a decade for them to recover and therefore threaten anyone else. By which stage Putin should be a distant memory. Of course that's not to say his eventual successor won't be as nationalistic or worse than Putin himself. It's a clever enough approach. It may actually push Russia towards negotiations sooner as they will realise it is their only option to achieve any kind of win.

The reality is Ukraine isn't going to get all its territory back. Its impossible without NATO actually joining the war, in which case Ukrainian territory will be pretty irrelevant anyway as the whole of Europe would go up in a mushroom cloud.

Russia's only interested in the kind of negotiation that sees all of its demands met, and that's as much a negotiation as a mugging is. Ukraine tried to have peace talks with Russia early on in this and Russia were not interested in any kind of serious compromise.

It's not fair to criticise the West for prolonging the war when it's the Russians who started the war. They get out, and it ends tomorrow. It is the Russians who bear the responsibility for creating the conflict and maintaining it with their presence in Ukraine. No-one is forcing a single Ukrainian to pick up a weapon and defend their country against Russian aggression, but defend their country is what they want to do. In pursuit of that aim, they have asked Western countries for weapons and weapons have been provided. It's simple enough, really.

Of course it is the Russians that bear responsibility for the war. I'm not really criticising the West. Their tactic (or at least what I think is their tactic) makes some sense. What I'm saying is that a lot of Ukrainians will die in the interim and actually what I think will happen eventually is that the West will start to step back from its support of Ukraine (due to the cost of living crisis, the US wont be able to give them $40bn every 4 or 5 months) and Ukraine will have to do a deal with the devil anyway.

I watched a documentary a few months back and it was basically saying its like Rome and Carthage in regards the USA and China that there will be a good few conflicts between them both if it does kick off and they said even if China was to loose the 1st war between the 2 within 10 years they will be more advanced military wise as their equipment will be more then replaced by that time and will be tmore advanced then it is now but in regards to the USA they wouldn't be able to replace the same amount within the 10 years this was especially in regards both their navies. So it said China even if it lost within 10 years it would be stronger then it was before the war took place.

..

I think the hope in the West (and that includes the US) is that they can provide enough military aid to bring Putin to the bargaining table.

Even looking at the US, who are usually the most hawkish of the Western allies, I don't see anywhere near the level of support that would enable Ukraine to actually defeat Russia. It's not like they don't have the means to help either. They have vast stores of phased out military equipment that is still far better than Ukraine currently possess which will never see the light of day again. Most of the truly game-changing stuff isn't even on the table of being provided for Ukraine.

I am all for Ukraine and don't want to see Russia win anything, but some realism is needed. Ukraine's situation is still very bleak. They face a larger, richer and better armed opponent and are completely dependent on the kindness of outsiders to just slow Russia down.