JonS

Yeah, counting is hard.
Actually, legitimately, hard.
That said, for the purposes of what we're talking about most of the time, the number of foreign mercs or contractors killed doesn't really matter. Whether it's 1,000 or 10,000 Nepalese killed in Ukraine, either number isn't going to lead to Putin's regime collapsing. And when Nepal gets tired of sending its young men to die there, theres still Nigeria, and Sudan, and Liberia, and Myanmar, and ...

This government has a track record of saying big numbers on lots of things and then not delivering.
If it happens great, but they are currently lame ducks waiting to be removed in less than a year.
However I think the new lot are likely to keep supporting Ukraine depending on the state of finances which isn't great...
Ohhh to be able to have back all the lost tax revenues from the recent massive increase of red tape between us and our closest and largest trading partners. 😢 

Noice
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/may/02/david-cameron-commits-3bn-a-year-in-aid-to-ukraine-for-as-long-as-necessary?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Is the graph heading missing some zeros? 200K a month seems pretty trivial really even as a spike.

Saw this on the Guardian when I woke up this morning ... I genuinely thought the reporting was about the US state, not the nation in the Caucasus. All the elements of the story - corruption, protests, right-wing wet-ons for Putin, fvckery with laws and legislation - fit either place, and for whatever reason the Caucasus didn't pop top of mind.

Saw this on the Guardian when I woke up this morning ... I genuinely thought the reporting was about the US state, not the nation in the Caucasus. All the elements of the story - corruption, protests, right-wing wet-ons for Putin, fvckery with laws and legislation - fit either place, and for whatever reason the Caucasus didn't pop top of mind.

Saw this on the Guardian when I woke up this morning ... I genuinely thought the reporting was about the US state, not the nation in the Caucasus. All the elements of the story - corruption, protests, right-wing wet-ons for Putin, fvckery with laws and legislation - fit either place, and for whatever reason the Caucasus didn't pop top of mind.

Saw this on the Guardian when I woke up this morning ... I genuinely thought the reporting was about the US state, not the nation in the Caucasus. All the elements of the story - corruption, protests, right-wing wet-ons for Putin, fvckery with laws and legislation - fit either place, and for whatever reason the Caucasus didn't pop top of mind.

Saw this on the Guardian when I woke up this morning ... I genuinely thought the reporting was about the US state, not the nation in the Caucasus. All the elements of the story - corruption, protests, right-wing wet-ons for Putin, fvckery with laws and legislation - fit either place, and for whatever reason the Caucasus didn't pop top of mind.

Saw this on the Guardian when I woke up this morning ... I genuinely thought the reporting was about the US state, not the nation in the Caucasus. All the elements of the story - corruption, protests, right-wing wet-ons for Putin, fvckery with laws and legislation - fit either place, and for whatever reason the Caucasus didn't pop top of mind.

Saw this on the Guardian when I woke up this morning ... I genuinely thought the reporting was about the US state, not the nation in the Caucasus. All the elements of the story - corruption, protests, right-wing wet-ons for Putin, fvckery with laws and legislation - fit either place, and for whatever reason the Caucasus didn't pop top of mind.

Saw this on the Guardian when I woke up this morning ... I genuinely thought the reporting was about the US state, not the nation in the Caucasus. All the elements of the story - corruption, protests, right-wing wet-ons for Putin, fvckery with laws and legislation - fit either place, and for whatever reason the Caucasus didn't pop top of mind.

Probably because the targets have dried up too.

Maybe we'll see some kamikaze peacocks before too long?
https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-zoo-sent-soldiers-peacocks-hoping-inspire-them-in-ukraine-2024-5
 
EDIT: realised that you need to sign up to read some articles on BI, text of the article below
 

Because it is an easy-to-understand metric that is good to measure and visualize.
Single value metrics for complex systems usually suck. Better metrics are hard to understand unless you know what's going on. Since the public does not, its km^2.

So this post and the one above it are what we like to call “losing the bubble”.  You have let your passion for Ukraine cloud objective strategic thinking to the point that you are proposing a denial of reality to insert one of your own that matches that passion.  In blunt terms, if you were on my staff I would be thinking you need a vacation and maybe a posting away for awhile.
1.  We cannot simply discount/avoid/wave away the risks of a full on Russian political and social collapse.  First off it is not “impossible” or even improbable given we have a rigid autocratic political mechanism that has been under significant strain for some time now.  Russia has collapsed in the past (twice in the past century and a bit) and can do so again.  
2.  The consequences of a Russian collapse cannot simply be waived away either.  At best we get a stable regime quickly grabbing power so that the centralized control apparatus stays in place.  That regime will need to 1) have clean enough hands to do an honest deal with, and 2) be supportive in stopping this war.  That is a tall order. Follow on scenarios of a Russian collapse and its impacts get worse from there and we have gone into them many times.  You are essentially so gripped with the Ukrainian cause that you have simply stated “ignore them” with neither proof or logic on why to do so beyond “well it hasn’t happened yet, so it will never happen”.
3.  By your metrics Ukrainian security is not guaranteed outside of a full Russian collapse and regime change.  Nothing would stop Russia from lobbing missiles even if it was forced back to 2014 lines.  So we are back to “we need a full Russian collapse to ‘win’ but ignore the consequences of that collapse because = ‘love Ukraine’.” That makes no sense nor does it address the scenarios where a collapsed Russia poses as greater risk to Ukraine than what they are dealing with now. 
4.  There are plenty examples of frozen conflict where an enduring peace and security were guaranteed: Korea, Cyprus and Former Yugoslavia, to name a few.  Like Israel right now, there is always risk of reemergence of warfare but we can manage that.  So immediately writing off any and all other peace scenarios is not only extremist narrative, it is dangerously reductive thinking.  This is not how high levels of diplomacy, defence and security or economics think about the world, it is how college students on a campus do.
5.  Your position and thesis essentially start with a conclusion and then build a logic model theory of success that only supports that conclusion.  Ukraine must have total victory, all other outcomes are defeats.  Further the West must support Ukraine in this venture to the point that it will risk the total political and social collapse of a nuclear power.  We are to sidestep all that risk for Ukraine.  What happens if we get to 2014 lines and Russia does not quit?  Do we need to go into Russia proper?  This nearly happened in Korea/China in 1950, this was how MacArther talked himself into nuclear weapons and a massive Chinese reaction.
6. We all support Ukraine and want a victory here.  But..and you really need to sit down and think about this…Ukraine is damned important, but it is not that important.  We are not going to start WW3 over Ukraine - even as we skirt around it.  We would be talking hundreds of millions of deaths, even if the thing stayed conventional.  We have 8 billion people on this planet and keeping them all alive takes a lot of energy and resources.  We built a highly complex and integrated system to keep the whole dance going.  One war breaks out between Ukraine and Russia and we already have people starving to death in Africa. Imagine a full on conflagration that drags in NATO. Iran and possibly China.  I am sorry but we could easily go with plan A, which was likely the plan on 24 Feb 22: continue to support Ukrainian resistance, fall back to NATO lines, drop a new Iron Curtain, and fund the hell out of NATO - in fact there are likely big winners in this scenario who know it.  We won the First Cold War, we can take our chances on a Second.
So, no, total 2014 lines are not the only victory in this war by a long shot.  In fact those territorial lines might not even mean victory if they were attainable.  We are very likely looking at a stop line, like in 2014, somewhere in the middle.  Then we will get some sort of shaky ceasefire that we will need to exploit, quickly.  We need to set the conditions to strategically deny Ukraine from Russia.  We know Russia can be deterred, this is why we do not have deep strikes into Poland happening.  We will need to move that deterrence line.  We will likely have to pound Russia until it drops its ridiculous negotiating position and we can land on something more reasonable.  Whether that will take a full on collapse is unknown, we can only hope if it does that we are looking at a soft collapse of political position and not social controls within Russia.
Finally, framing the war the way you have supports Russia.  You are making this war nearly unwinnable via these maximalist rhetoric.  As such, a reader of this thread could easily walk away agreeing with you but arriving at a very different conclusion - unwinnable war = GTFO, because we have already seen this movie twice in the last 20 years.  Which is exactly what Russia wants.
You have narrowed down the acceptable narrative only to those ardent extremist viewpoints that agree with you.  By leaving no middle ground you violate a core component of war: negotiation.  There is no negotiation in your position and that immediately sets off warning bells.  We hear this everyday now coming from all sorts of corners over so many issues.  I vehemently disagree with your analysis, narrative and conclusions based on this fact alone.

Probably because the targets have dried up too.

Sounds good, but private Mykola with PKM on second crewman seat is cheaper that R&D and producing of such system ))) 

It just me or isn't it extremely disrespectful to Ukrainians that everything goes directly to the press from the Pentagon

To restate the points I made earlier in this thread:
Bolton and others have said directly that Trump had planned to pull out of NATO in a second term and there is no evidence that he now intends the contrary. Trump has also quite publicly rejected the Pentagon’s top generals who restrained him from this direction in the first term and there is no constituency in Trump world that has a stake in European stability. Quite the opposite, in fact, as they can anticipate making enormous amounts of money off of the Russian oligarchy should the US swing into acquiescence to a Russian dominated Eastern Europe. Don’t kid yourself. If he wins, NATO is very likely to die.
It is also a canard that Putin was holding back on Ukraine before Trump left office. The reality is that Putin’s regime was involved in a full court press to pressure Ukraine into subservience with the willing assistance of political appointees in the White House. Russia hasn’t gone to war because Putin didn’t think he needed to and clearly the Russian government expected Trump to win a second term. War was decided when it became clear that Biden had won and the immediate focus of American power was going to be on containing Moscow. Putin’s clique imagined that the US was still too shaken politically from the previous four years and too involved in Afghanistan to reorient rapidly while the Ukrainian military wouldn’t be able to put up significant resistance. Virtually wrong on all counts. 

Agreed Canada and most other NATO members could and should do more. But these guys below should show that Canada indeed was and is part of NATO.
 
Fallen Canadian Armed Forces Members - Canada in Afghanistan - Canadian Armed Forces - History - Remembrance - Veterans Affairs Canada

Is there any /military/ point in sinking more ships?
It looks good, and plays great, but this war isn't going to be won on the Black Sea, and the Russian fleet has already been neutralised. Maintain the threat for sure, but there doesn't seem much point expending any further resources there.

The 'desire' (or belief) in the more clownish part of the electorate may have been true, but the "lack of commitment" in Europe was not.
 

Fundamentally this is a thread about the Russo-Ukraine war that is (unsurprisingly) pro-Ukrainian. So the U.S. political party that refused to bring aid to a vote is going to catch the most flak here. And like yea AOC might be destructive to some process but she isn't destructive to getting Ukraine the materials the country needs to fight the Russian invasion. The House vote tally was overwhelming for aid so why wasn't there a vote on the aid 6 months ago?

Like I don't want to talk about gun rights, or schools, or abortion, or any number of other U.S. hot button topics. But I've been sitting here for ~6 months watching as one particular party refused to allow Ukraine what it needs. And frankly I'm not an unbiased observer about this and its one of the reasons I stepped away from the thread for a while. Its hard to come in here to hear and see bad news about the war and then be non-partisan about the partisan politics that are getting Ukrainians killed. Like if you trawl this thread you will see video evidence on nearly every page of real soldiers and civilians who died needlessly for some partisan BS.

 
 

The dose makes the poison.
Looking from the outside, there is absolutely zero equivalence between the two parties. None at all.
There are ... odd individuals in both, but at the party level only one is utterly dysfunctional.
Theres also this inconvenient reality:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_federal_politicians_convicted_of_crimes