The_Capt

Who inherited the mess of Bush…who inherited the mess of Clinton…etc. I will say that the US needs to get past whatever “this” is and find some sort of domestic compromise and unity built on mutual respect…soon. Were it anywhere except the US, we would have labeled it as a fragile state by now. And a fragile superpower…isn’t one.

There it is. I knew there was one out there but outside the western sphere. Although if you take into account burn rate over time (that war took 8 years) this one is higher intensity right now.

The other thing we need to be careful of is seeing this through our own lenses. I have no doubt the Ukrainian government published these dramatic numbers in order to reinforce their very real continued need for support; however, they may have misjudged the western reaction because we see this war through a very different lens. The West has been human security focused for about 30 years - and this does not matter which side of the political house you are within - it is the natural evolution of highly powerful (and entitled) societies, to value the security of the person as the highest priority. And even though human security is a key consideration within this war (e.g. war crimes, displacement, food security) it is not the key consideration. [Oh dear, I can hear the collective shudder in some circles.] Definitely for the Ukraine, and in a lot of way for the West this war is about collective existence and is therefore existential collective security focused in nature. We must avoid our own Western baggage with respect to casualties and war because the framework we use to make those assessments does not apply here. This is the Old Red God - many hoped had fallen asleep forever, which was naïve wishful thinking. He has woken up groggy and angry and decided on the old-school option to shake out the cobwebs. Ukrainians taking 500 causalities per day may seem shocking when looking through a human security lens, which we then project into "Ukraine is losing...human tragedy...they should negotiate! However, in the annals of warfare this is solid 5/10 of intensity (e.g Jul 1st 1916 - 57k UK casualties and on average 6k per day in WWI - http://www.100letprve.si/en/world_war_1/casualties/index.html). Existential wars are on an entirely different level and as such we should not focus on "500 casualties per day" but instead on what those 500 troops are buying for their side. Is Ukraine upside down in expenditure of people for what it is gaining losing...based on Russian speed of advance I have to go with a "no". Now, Russia is likely losing more than 500 per day on the basis that it is still the attacker - is it upside down on its cost-to-benefits? Much more likely. And why it is trying desperately to have a lot of other people doing the dying besides actual Russian's right now. Russian is losing at the same or worst rate and gaining literally feet of ground of seriously questionable operational value. Finally back to a central premise of mine - who is spending lives for options right now? Who's option spaces remain sustained or expanding while the other side is in a losing equation? The calculus of an existential war is absent of drama. I have seen a lot of western media playing up the human drama in this war and it is counter-productive. We can unpack the drama of this war for decades after it is over - this is about colder harder metrics where the value of a human life is only relative to what it is doing to your opponent. What is chilling about all this is that this is one thing the Russian's already know, and we are just finding out. Anyone think that Putin is having trouble sleeping at night right now? If he is, it is not over the "good boys lost at Severodonetsk". We need to accept and understand that we, the West, are invested in killing Russians right now...in fact we are part of the kill-chain to do so and we cannot rationalize our way out of it. We also need to become more cold blooded and objective focused and a less human security focused (obviously within reason) because the cost of this war is already high. If we want to ensure that the 500 teenagers who die/hurt today did so for a good reason then it is on us to finish this thing on our terms, definitively.

So there is: what happened, what is happening and what will happen. Everyone is interested in the last one and never spend enough time on the first two. In reality good analysis should focus primarily on the first two and they are incredibly hard enough to get right. Resolution gets exponentially worse as you move left to right on this components - this is why right now we can only really make lo-resolution predictions. We can say "Normalization between Russia and the West will likely take a generation after this war" with a level of confidence but we cannot say exactly when the RA is going to collapse. The problem with a war, particularly one like this is that all analysts have are assumptions at the beginning of it. These assumptions become the foundational what happened that they build their entire framework upon. Then they tend to ignore counter-factuals as outliers and select information that supports their framework - I lost count how many times in Mar I heard "Ukrainians are putting up a spirited defence but this war is still going to end in Russian victory". That is human nature, but one has to be aware it is happening. The other problem I have seen in this war's analysis is a serious lack of expertise in those holding the microphones. I have seen the gambit of western GOs, some with pretty impressive resumes, on mainstream news and then the slick haired "combat bros" who served in the SEALs/Green Berets/Marine Recon/Rangers pushing their "analysis" via social media. The reality is that as legitimate as these people are, or are not, none of them have a clue about what they are talking about - none of us really do. Why? Because the people who actually would recognize this type of war, and they would even find some aspects very odd, are in their 80s-90s. Even those are mostly in-the-trenches-soldiers because all of the more senior leadership from WW2 and Korea died years ago. I don't care if you were a 4 star general at the tip of the spear in Iraq, or a Navy SEAL who shot OBL in the forehead - none of us have ever been in a war of this level of peer-intensity. The last European industrial war was really Yugoslavia and it never got to this level of intensity - in fact I am stretching to find an outlier war of this intensity and duration in a standup peer-on-peer fight since Korea. Finally, analysts are a social group whether they want to admit it or not. As such, a lot of normalization and peer-pressure occurs that naturally suppresses outliers. Steve would have been laughed out of the room of "serious military analysts" in early Feb, written off as some amateur enthusiast who clearly did not understand the deeper nuances of modern warfare. The mainstream analysts are trapped in the same box as those they analyze for and outliers get filtered out all the time. This creates a self-reinforcing loop of agreement as everyone references each other as the "collective expertise". This forms an incredibly powerful collective "norm" where advising power as on outlier is very risky because the first hand raised is going to say "well that is not what I heard from {insert pundit rock-star of the day}".

Yes, this definitely makes sense. I am not sure China is as deterred by threat of sanction, as the fact that a weakened and dependent Russia is likely in their own best interest (within reason). That, and China likely does not want to risk trouble backing a loser. This is also why I am not really worried about Taiwan (yet), China has a lot more to lose in all this and not much to really gain by large muscle movements right now. A slow steady pressure strategy, while addressing internal challenges, until they can achieve power parity makes much more sense from their point of view. They are far more likely to continue to pursue divisive/subversive strategies to weaken the West from within while combining it with incentive/positive inductive efforts. Of course we all thought Russia was all super clever and crafty before this insane clown show too.

Economics is not my area but I am not sure this is something we would undertake lightly: https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/china-mongolia-taiwan/peoples-republic-china In Canada they are our #3 trading partner: https://angusreid.org/canada-china-trade-economy-2022/ Those are really big numbers being tossed around. For comparison US - Russia trade is about 5% of what is does with China: https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/europe-middle-east/russia-and-eurasia/russia Russia trade with Canada barely breaks the 1B$ mark. https://lop.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/ResearchPublications/TradeAndInvestment/2017593E So What? Going to be exceedingly hard to get unity on China sanctions unless they do something egregious and selling limited weapons to Russia (which is perfectly legal by the way, particularly as China has not joined the sanctions block) is likely not going to do it.

200k is pretty restrained given history in the neighbourhood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Soviet_Union If Ukraine is smart, and I strongly suspect they will be - see membership in EU/NATO - collaboration and treason will be handled under a fair and transparent legal process (e.g. was collaboration forced?)…likely one much more rational than the actions of some others, or those they have supported.

Damn, should have went with camel...using goat too much. No wonder the poor thing looks so nervous.

Or have read enough to know when to apply and when to leave it in the past. Clausewitz - and here it is hard because there are really two Clausewitz in his work On War, young and old. The old C never finished his revisions because he died but you can see him starting question his own thoughts with age...as we all do. Clausewitz - war equals will, is frankly junior highschool of war theory, which gets slapped on every T-shirt and Reddit discussion. Duh, no kidding. Every war theorist in history before and after Uncle Carl had a bead on that one. Hell raise a couple kids and any human being can figure that one out. What is important is how that Will is generated, sustained and directed. And here Clausewitz does not quite get the entire picture. *Heresy!* Further without some of the ingredients that he missed, one cannot really apply his thinking nor his design philosophy to modern warfare. Clausewitz saw the Will of warfare as the engine of warfare and generated by the people (the passion)...he was absolutely correct there; however, he saw war through an early 19th century aristocrat lens. Around that hot passionate Will, of the uneducated masses one must have government and here he was really talking about a ruling elite whose job it was to guide and provide the "reason" to that Will...otherwise known as "policy" or literally the "how of power". The military was the means of warfare, the strength through which it was professionally applied. In Uncle C's world the people stayed back and were "passionate" in their fervor and support. Politicians set the policy of wars and then, like the public, stayed out of the execution. Military fought the war, in glorious isolation until they won or lost and then the government took over again. This whole "trinity" - and before any Clausewitzian priests out there jump in, I really do not care what the original translation from Old German may "have really meant", this is semantic apologist tactics - was an elegant system to which linear, but artistic military design could be applied...in fact we use a form of it to this day. Problem: the relationship between the military, government and people did not stay nicely separated. In his papers on Small Wars he wrestled with this (e.g. arming the populace for resistance) and never quite landed it. Further his underlying thesis of warfare being "rational" as passion was governed by "our betters" was rickety back in the day and in the face of modern democracy really starts to fray. The people are the government and the military and as such one cannot divorce human irrationality from warfare. This is really bad news as linear design also starts to fall apart because human systems are non-linear in nature (see: discussion on reaction to Severodonetsk). So even though we try to apply linear design working back from that T-shirt End you have posted up there, it never works out as easily as we would like. Taking into account things like culture and history (e.g. humans can remember the future) the limitations of Clausewitz start to appear. And none of this accounts for micro-social level warfare, famously coined as "war amongst the people" which is a whole other level of crazy. Now before the Prussian crowd start sharpening pitchforks and lighting torches, Clausewitz was a giant in the creation of modern military theory. But to my mind he was like Newton and his physics has limitations that need to be noted and moved beyond, not wholesale abandoned.

Well given the Ukrainian political levels mastery of the narrative, I think we can forgive them for a small communications mis-step. What is shocking is just how nervous the West is right now. Everyone remember these infographics from before the war? We went through this in the initial phases of the war, all waiting for the "inevitable defeat of Ukraine" and then it totally went the other way. Now it is almost like there is a push to re-affirm a pre-conceived reality of "Ukraine losing" at the slightest hint of a tactical set-back.

And that would entirely be on us in the West. If we do crack and fold, well we deserve what happens next and maybe we should not be holding the pen that writes the global order. We (the West) are the military industrial complex for the Ukraine - we committed to that pretty early on. Ukraine has demonstrated that they will fight, we need to demonstrate that we will back them until the job is done. I am not sure how potentially losing a tiny berg in the Donbas is somehow shaking everyone's resolve. I swear the online tone is as jumpy as the prettiest goat at an Afghan barn orgy right now. "Oh no, we have lost Severdonetsk! The war is lost!!" Why? Because the Russians actually managed to get a very costly tactical win? A win that is unlikely to go anywhere? The UA is collapsing!!!! Really? Where is that coming from? Based on Russian rates of advance, we in the west have clearly forgotten what an operational collapse actually looks like, which is really weird as we just saw the Russians do one in March. Ukraine is hurting right now but there is a whole lotta country besides the Donbas and for every day the Russians are burning resources, Ukraine has an opportunity to make more. We, in the West, are either in this to win it - which includes, at least: continuing to backstop UA force generation, building/funding a Ukraine internal military industrial complex for a long war and re-construction of the country after this is all over. Hell we did this in spades in Afghanistan...FFS! And the global stakes are orders of magnitude higher in this war than that "interesting adventure". Or we get ready to accept that we have pissed away billions, fracture and withdraw support, and live what happens next. There is no "easy out", or hedge fund strategy here...this is war. You do not take the Last Argument of Kings option lightly and to steal from Stephen King, we will have forgotten the faces of our fathers if we fail on this one.

We call this "auto-cannibalizations" and it is the last gasp of any professional military. If this is true and widespread, particularly if they start to pull people out of their training system, then Russia is really throwing it all in an a final gambit. This war is interesting as this entire last phase has been the Russians figuring out what losing looks like, while Ukraine tries to figure out what winning looks like.

Well based on Kofman's track record I am starting to lean towards Steve's thinking, Russian collapse sooner than later.

That is powerful stuff. This is where Clausewitz breaks down - when government and the military become extensions of the people, a war of the people cannot ignore the deeply cultural and personal factors that drive the conflict itself well beyond a simple "rational extension of policy". We in the West are trying to apply this lens of "rationality" in some circles; however, in doing so we create blind spots.

I can make no sense out of the Russian plan here. I can make sense out of the Ukrainian one. If the Russians plan to "breakout at Popasna" then taking Severodonetsk is not a require pre-condition - so why do it? Taking the far bank positions offers no advantage to an encirclement battle coming from the West. Further if Russia could do that encirclement, then do it and cut off both Lysychanks and Severodonetsl from supplies and support...now! "But could this not be a Russian attritional strategy as well?" Maybe, but employing attrition as the attacker is kinda upside down, unless you have a massive resource overmatch and can afford the upside down loss equation - and Russia cannot at this point. Further the Russians are also losing another resource they cannot afford; time. No, Severodonetsk has the hallmarks of a political vanity piece, which is normally what happens when military logic stops applying. Ukraine employing an attrition strategy, particularly against Russian artillery and logistics, makes all sorts of sense. That, and they employed similar strategies in the opening phase of this war, Mariupol in particular. The UA is not "trapped" by any stretch. It has plenty of opportunity to withdraw...so they are staying for a good reason. As to "cutting off Ukrainian defenders" on the far bank of the Siversky Donets; the Ukrainians know that river a lot better than the Russians and they likely know where ford sites and ferry crossings can be establish. Further the Russians have not demonstrated the acme of ISR integration so I am betting the UA is hedging that they can keep defenders supplied for some time by means other than the bridges. This bring up an interesting point that should be underlined: we have asymmetric strategies at play here. The Russians are focused on terrain gains to demonstrate "victory", while Ukrainian defence has the overall strategic goal of "killing more Russians". We should keep this in mind - it won't explain every operation, but it appears as the overarching design for each side.

So that is a good question. My guess is: For Ukraine - to create opportunity to kill more Russians and expensive gear they cannot replace. The UA has not been perfect (no military under stress is) but they have been far too good that this is some sort of error. Unless there is some deep cultural symbolism I am missing here, this looks like a honeypot play. For Russia - To Quote Schwarzkopf "Bovine Scatology". Create drama to have drama. They can take this town and call it a great victory, much like Mariupol. And then Putin can try and stay in power for another month.

Maybe, to give benefit but I am not sure what he means by "pivot point" then. Severodonetsk is a frontal, straight and simple. Once you take it, you then have to take Lysychansk etc. Then once you do that you have push up the salient (again frontal). I do not see this as an operational manoeuvre pivot point - a jumping off point for more frontal, maybe. To take Siversk we are talking 25km of advancing over rolling ground, same ground that the Russians have stalled at Poposna and South-south-west of Izyum. I am not sure why everyone keeps looking for some sort of Russian rapid operational manoeuvre or the conditions for one. The Russians have been plodding and stalling over "undefendable western Dobas ground" for two months now. How they are supposed to break that pattern after heavy bleeding all over Severodonetsk is beyond me. Maybe they have a couple fresh Divisions with T-14s in the back pocket... To my mind, for the Russians the operational objective has to be Sloviansk - Kramatorsk. It looks like an MSR hub for both road and rail, Kramatorsk has a airfield. You take that and you have options to pivot off of. Problem was, and is, the Russians cannot seem to make offense work for them beyond this grinding attritional WWI-style humping and that is not going to get them the opportunities they are looking for. I guess they could grind down the salient and then "declare victory" which will mean nothing as the UA keeps infiltrating, nipping, hacking and snacking on them. The simple fact that the UA refuses to leave, and they damn well know where the Russian are, and are not, is a clear sign to my mind that this whole dance is still working for them. Otherwise they should have fallen back to the S-K line along the KT river, regroup...giggle watching the Russians try to advance in good order, and then counter.

Depends on the fidelity one needs. If you want to site an MG position, sure. If you want to see how the RA is setting itself up for a tactical nightmare....

Thanks, but I, for one, do not want the extra attention. Our little shop here is just fine. 1. Kinda asking myself that one too. If the RA can concentrate 900 guns anywhere and support them, why not do it at Poposna and try and cut the salient? This whole thing has a symbolic feel to it from the RA side. That or the RA has run out of gas for manoeuvre entirely, so bombing countryside out near Poposna with no ability to exploit is a waste of effort from a Russian perspective. 2. Heard rumours as well. Problem is that we are likely as far as current OSINT can take us, however, that does not mean things are going on. I noticed Oryx numbers have flattened, likely because there is not much coming out on social media from the area on either side. We get snippets but not like before. Could also be a result of UA conventional doing the heavy lifting on this one and they are far more tight with OPSEC. 3. No idea. Russian UAVs are likely commercial, based on the video of some captured. Which means they are not setup for an EW environment either. The western MILCOTs should be. 4. Again, unclear. My guess would be to draw in RA enablers in concentration in order to kill them, which makes future RA offensives even weaker. I am not sure what the UA trigger for offensive operations are, or where. Were it me I would be focusing on Kherson area and cutting that "strategic landbridge" but manoeuvre in this war has taken on new dimensions. It could be just as likely the aim here it to attrit the RA until it collapses, just like last time.

So been pondering this one as well: - UA does not need to destroy every RA arty piece in order to create operational effect/outcomes. They need to degrade the RA artillery system to a point that it is no longer effective at accurately massing fires. - There a a number of routes to this objective that range from killing/attriting trained crews and FOs. To hitting RA logistics to the point it cannot get ammo or fuel to all those guns. To finally hitting those guns and their prime movers themselves. - It depends what everyone's guns are shooting at and how well. I will take 128 UA guns if they are mostly M777s linked into western ISR and are hitting the RA artillery systems with high accuracy and effect. Versus 900 RA guns all focused on smashing UA infantry to take ground they do not need. UA does need any and all deep strike capability we can give them. What we have not seen are NLOS ATGMs/self-loitering - of course the problem with some of these will be EW but western systems are supposed to be set up for that. Or next gen more autonomous unmanned systems that don't need a ground link.

Oh wait, there is more....seriously the Russian's are hitting a low point on the operational art of warfare. So I did the MSFS flights [aside: we have been chewing on this for some time now but a micro-view of warfare, and what modern gaming software can provide should not be under-estimated] and for all us CM'ers out there, here is what your battlefield looks like once you take Severodonetsk: And the view from the UA side: And it gets better. I flew the length of that river and it is like this for 40km total, from Pryvillya down to Nyzhnie but wait, that is not the best part: In order to avoid that insane frontal, across a river, dominated by a bluff/ridgeline and the follow on built up areas on that ridge - you need to go North or South. North is the site of that screaming-baby-rabbits-dumpster-fire of a bridge crossing we saw earlier and south is Popasana...which you already freakin own!! Seriously, if this was WW3 fan fiction I would toss it on the "dumb premise pile" and be done with it but here we are. They gotta change the Russian national anthem after this war:

So for the record, calling Jomini a "little conservative" is akin to calling Billy Graham "a little religious" - the man tried to create a deterministic theory of warfare based on geometry, and Clausewitz called him on it...and frankly I think Uncle Carl was extremely conservative by modern standards. That said, I am not sure what the story is around Severodonetsk to be honest. I completely disagree with J of the West assessment that Severodonetsk is a "strategic decisive point for the RAF" and by taking it they gain "a pivot for operations" and a "pivot for manoeuvre". If we look at wiki for the latest situation: And then a G-Earth shot (I will try and do an MFSF flight later): None of what J of W is stating as "importance" makes sense. If this was a break out battle over the river and to take Lysynchansk, maybe. But his argument that the "undefendable terrain of the western Donetsk Oblast" on the other side of this river, also make no sense as we know the RA advances out of Popasna have stalled. As have the attempts coming down from the North out of Izyum...this is all the same type of rolling terrain spotty with water features. The idea that if the RAF somehow takes the far bank town of Severodonetsk it is set up for a rolling breakout manoeuvre battle is sensationalism at best, and applying metrics from the Gulf War to this one at worst. If the RA takes Severodonetsk, they still have a major water obstacle dominated by a very long ridge line to try and assault, then more urban area, and then rolling terrain which the UA has stopped them on along other axis. So seriously, WTF "Jomini of the West"? This battle is likely more along the lines of Verdun albeit what I suspect are for different reasons (I am not sure of the historical angle but Haiduk did mention this was a big fight in WW2). This is a "I want that" and "you can't have it...jerk" type fight. The UA is there because it is a spot they can make the RA's life miserable an pull in forces. The RA wants it...well why does the RA want anything? Likely because Putin has been briefed and figures it is also "really important" for reasons. This battle is interesting in 1) it is definitely attritional, and 2) it looks like it may be the one spot where the Russians have managed to create information parity (but I have a major caveat to this). The noise about guns and UA casualties is just that "noise". The UA is not stupid, that is one thing they have proven in this war. They would not be holding onto a far bank defence - one they really do not need - unless there was some serious advantage attached to it. My bet is that it comes down to two things: the concentration of arty and EW. Lets leverage Jomini for a second and lay it out (in some ways he was not wrong): I am going to be extremely generous here and say the RA has its guns positioned within 30km of Severodonetsk based on ranges (D-20s do about 18 and the Pions can reach out at about 37, so for arguments sake). That is a slice of a pizza that is 188 km around. The Russians can realistically put their guns in about 1/3 of that circle - so about a 63 km arc, which translates into about 942 sq kms. At "900 guns" that is a density of a gun per sq km. That is a pretty high density of gun positions - not WWI - but likely the highest of this war. Further you have all the logistics to support all them guns. Finally, the RA has concentrated a lot of EW to try and make this op box go dark for the UA: https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-kyiv-technology-90d760f01105b9aaf1886427dbfba917 All these emitters are pumping out an ungodly amount of EM and easily visible. So what? Well there is a lot of talk of Ukrainian losses in this fight, and I believe them. But war is negotiation and sacrifice. Those lives are not being spent for the far bank town the UA really does not need. They are likely being spent to pull in the concentration of arty and EM...so the UA can hit them - attrition, like tracers, cuts both ways. What is missing from all this is the RA losses on key arty, EM and logistics because they are concentrating them around and on top of this operationally near-worthless town, that when successfully taken will bring all the joy of a colicky baby because you still have to take that brutal set of ridges...on the other side of a freakin river. We have no idea how bad the Russians are taking it right now, because "dark box"...but you know who does...the UA. The one thing all that EW cannot turn off are the space-based ISR assets that the West (primarily the US) are beaming directly to the UA. All those RA assets are very visible to multi-spectral space-based ISR and I have every faith are being hit regularly in this fight; it is the only thing that makes any sense - the UA are trading infantry for RA arty, EW and logistics right now. If they wanted to trade infantry-for-infantry they would be doing it from all those ridges, which is the the obvious fallback position. The Russians on the other hand are trading their own critical resources so that Putin can declare a "great victory" of very little military value - just like they have done throughout this war.

You are only telling half the story to match your narrative. The UNSC passed 3 resolutions to get Serbia to stop killing people (a fourth after the bombings) and then passed 1244 which authorized a direct ground intervention by NATO (KFOR). Further, NATO nations tried to get a resolution but were blocked by China and Russia as you note above...why? Because Serbians were ethnic cleansing again which everyone still remembered from 1995. This followed the precedent set in 1995 of NATO airstrikes to protect UNPROFOR, which led to UNSCR 1031 and the NATO ground intervention of IFOR. Making a link back to US politics and "expansion" in Kosovo makes zero sense - just as it does for Libya frankly. For Libya, UNSCR 1973 was put forward by France, Lebanon and the UK...what in the hell does this have to do with "Congressional approval"? 1973 was a classic Chapter VII, and again, Russia and China were on the SC and let it go. Kosovo and Libya were interventions to try and stop repeat humanitarian offenders and dictators from doing worse - not some Rub Goldberg attempt by NATO to rule the world as a puppet of the US. France intervening without the US - you have heard about Mali (Op Serval)? In fact there were more: https://www.okayafrica.com/french-military-in-africa/ I can say NATO is a defensive alliance - the history of the Alliance has been defensive from the beginning. NATO has done interventions on behalf of the UN and failing that, with the support from the international community. To make all this some self-centered US political issue is frankly insulting to all the nations and its military members who participated on those missions. Finally, we know NATO is not a US puppet because it stayed out of Iraq in '03 (which did not have UN cover) and only went into Afghanistan when it did. This is not the behaviour of a "puppet alliance doing the bidding of a US president who can't rule the planet based on domestic political landscape". Russia is paranoid...because they are Russia, and no one likes/trust them because of history. And Putin just took out a big red marker and underlined that dislike/trust for the next 50 years by unilaterally invading a neighbor. And attempts to play "pick-and-chose" history to create a justification for Russian behaviour is just wrong.

So Kosovo and Libya have been brought up a couple times now as examples of “NATO aggression” and some weird theories on the US somehow “using NATO” to do its bidding. This is not how things worked, nor how things work. Both Kosovo and Libya were conducted under UNSC resolutions as Chapter VII missions, not by an edict from the White House. In fact every NATO intervention over the last 30 years has had the backing of the UN Security Council, of which both Russia and China are permanent members. (the only exception may be immediately after 9/11 when the US invoked article 5). In fact NATO as an alliance is not supporting the Ukraine (technically) it’s member states are bilaterally. NATO is a massive military alliance, trying to make it to do anything is very hard and the idea that the US can “order NATO” is laughable. NATO having a history of unilaterally invading nations and so Russia is somehow justifiably pushing back is nonsense. As to NATO expansion, it has been 1) bureaucratic and 2) driven by Russian aggressiveness to its neighbours. Narratives to the contrary are misinformed at best.

Oh this is gonna be good. Let's get Mongolia involved....