for starters Russia penetrated our gov before ww2. that Clinton,Obama and Biden were bought and paid for is about right. actually they were on several non US payrolls. that is academic and is or should be well known. your Yanukovych take is about opposite of several other's take. that gets down to who one believes. that Putin is a corrupt,brutal dictator is also obvious. also,that he has strong domestic support. must be a Russian thing,so did Stalin and Lenin.
that Trump 1 had control of Putin may be true,but i don't think so. like i asked,what could he do beyond economic plays and bluffing? for that matter,what can he do now?
your claim that Russia is weak militarily is pretty lame. maybe you think Lithuania and Moldova can take it out? we may be overestimating them but that gets down to a casualty tolerance. could Putin go to the channel if he wanted to? prob but expensive. does he seek to regain loses that were in the USSR's control? maybe/maybe not and maybe you are a mind reader. there is good evidence that Russia's economy and industrial capacity is well advanced > '22. are they incompetent vis a vis US military? maybe. maybe we can turn them into ash. they only have to hit us with about 1% of their 1600 nucs to make that a bad trade. JFK figured that out and passed on the chance. our current war mongers don't seem concerned. maybe you aren't either.
this boils down to your being unwilling to lay out what you think we should have done since you say you disagree there. you also fail to commit to what should be done now. you also refuse to try and justify either of those. a lot of reasons stated elsewhere are: deflect Russia,save Europe,let Black Rock buy Ukraine,produce yet more corrupt billionaires,restock with new stuff,profit our MIC? the fact is the American people are not willing to go to war over any place in Europe. ie except the "i stand with Ukraine" crowd and our very own MIC. there wasn't anything in Europe in 1917 worth 1 American life or 1 American dollar and there hasn't been anything sense then. that we have places for our effort and $s here is obvious.
all bean breeze anyway as i don't think you are in charge and i know i'm not.
If Russia was militarily powerful, the simple introduction of Javelin Anti-Tank Guided Missiles should not have become a strategic asset for Ukraine in the 2022 invasion (which were sent my Trump from 2018-2019), but they turned out to be of significant strategic value.
Another way to know Russia is weak is by looking at the fact they haven’t taken significant ground, compared with The Great War and World War II. The lines have barely moved and we have watched a stalemate over the past 3 years. It’s one of the most militarily-wasteful campaigns in all of warfare, with nothing to show for it from the aggressor but dead bodies and T54s being pulled from ancient storage to replace T72s that were turned into smoldering scrap metal in the first year of the war.
Russia would have been more powerful or perceived as such had Putin achieved his strategic goal of conquering and taking Kiev. Then he could have staged on the borders to the West, annexed Moldova, while causing anxiety within Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Finland.
Remember Biden was going to extract Zelensky to open up Kiev for Putin, leaving it leaderless. That was Biden’s job, which Zelensky did not play along with. With the weapons Trump sent back during Poroshenko’s term, Ukraine was able to deny Putin’s overall strategic objective, causing much consternation and loss of Russian war material and manpower, while embarrassing Russia in the process.
Russia’s economy and industrial capacity is nowhere near advanced. They are not a value-added style of economy and industrial base, but one of low-skilled labor and exporting of raw materials. That’s the primary basis of Russian revenue.
Now Trump has to clean up Putin’s mess, while making it look like Putin is still strong because the alternates under Putin are far worse. For years we have watched Russian state media openly talk about nuking London, Washington D.C., etc. Because Putin wiped-out the older Oligarchs and intelligentsia who might threaten his reign, there isn’t anyone well-educated or tempered to rule Russia with a stable geopolitical posture.
I would have never thought of the Trump proposal to invest in mineral extraction in Ukraine. I come from the defense sector, so everything looks like a nail when you’re a hammer. Since we have no real trade with Russia, there aren’t many levers to pull. So far, Trump is far more adept at managing this than any other US politician I could imagine.
But there are 4 rounds missing.....
