How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Beleg85]

Out of curiosity about latest discussions regarding muscovy attitudes, a new Levada Institute * survey was conducted lately (here autotransl. for convinience)

https://www-levada-ru.translate.goog/2023/09/28/odobrenie-institutov-rejtingi-politikov-i-partij-sentyabr-2023-goda/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=pl&_x_tr_pto=wapp

-80% of Russians approve actions of Kremlin in general sense (not specified to Ukraine though)

-No dramatic changes as to "Is country going in right direction?"- ca. 60+% say yes, 20+% say no- here there is a very slight shift to "no", something like 5% along last half year.

-Putin remains most popular politician in the country (44% trust him- it is rather high for Russian politician).

 

Conclusions: no rapid shifts in public opinion in last months. Society remains apathetic and indifferent, propaganda machine is working effectivelly, NATO is blamed for everything (other survey even showed they even blame fall of Karabach on West). Note, that there is little interest in public matters even after dangerous mutiny by Prigozhin and despite massive casualties in war.

* About methodology- surveys were reportedly personal, but since Russians are extremely distrustful of pollsters- a heritage of Soviet era, where it was very difficult to obtain reliable answers since interviewed reacted to official "expectations"- it is likely survey is slightly moved toward accepting official Kremlin verison. Hard to tell how much, but probably no more than 10%.

[Teufel]

1 hour ago, Offshoot said:

A Ukrainian tanker who is having serious mechanical problems with his captured T72B3 phones and trolls Uralvagonzavod tech support

 

This is the one thing that makes for the best experience in war. Comedy! Black humor or not but to maintain the ability for this creativity is heart warming. We get a laugh out of it but it’s never missed on the guys around. Love his composure in the moment!

[Bearstronaut]

54 minutes ago, Teufel said:

Thank you for sharing! It’s actually a beautiful perspective of something that is anything but beautiful.

We been through this few times and please those of you seen it please share. Today’s understatement, war is nothing like in the movies in any perspective. Macho bravado Rambo’s are usually not around and if they happen to show they are the one’s to go first. Followed by those lacking any type of fear. Those that survive are those that maintain and control their fear, and the lucky ones.

That is no understatement nor joke, war is suffering bodily and mentally. Not just from pain but as per your reference - from lack of options. It’s seldom something you chose and those who did seek adventure usually found one last. War for the most part is about keeping your sanity, from sensory overlord and constant stress. Feelings of guilt, fear, rage and all other primal emotions under constant pressure and stress.

The thing that is the hardest thing of all is talking and keeping oneself from internalizing. One has to talk and keep others talking, the desire to be alone is very strong indicator that it’s going the wrong path. It’s normal to desire silence if one’s environment is that of chaos but it’s as dangerous if not worse than the chaos. Silence allows brooding, internalizing and building up stuff. One comrade always said he needs to “decompress” or “clean the chamber” to make space to contain more pressure.

In the end, like it or not, luck or chance is by far the biggest factor. There is one situation that portrays this better than anything. Group of guys had just arrived to join the action few days prior, socializing and standing around smoking in group of five. Enemy sniper opens fire and kills two of the five guys, one of them just joined and not fired single round. Not being singled out in that group of targets is chance and circumstance, devine intervention maybe for those that have faith. Coping with such randomness is the type of thing that makes talking difficult. It’s also the type of thing that turns your hair gray. Soldiers in action are thus probably the best subjects to study aging and the correlation between fear and illness.

We could go on all day about this but point is that fighting and surviving depends strongly on training, looking out for one and the other, and luck. Yes, luck! That is the brotherhood of war, it’s not about heroism or sacrifice.

Not sure if this at all adds or offers anything of value to the rest of you but I hope it does. Nothing to do with bravado, it helps to talk, it lends perspectives and helps to separate from civilian life. Be interesting to hear if there are other perspectives on this from those here that seen action, Vietnam or later, if any.

When I was in Korea in 2019 my battalion's (an intelligence unit) retention NCO was a former infantry Staff Sergeant. In the US Army retention is an actual MOS that you can reclass to at a certain point in your career and is a pretty cushy gig as far as I know. Anyways, I was talking to him one day and I asked how he preferred doing retention in an intel unit over being an infantryman. He told me that he much preferred not going to the field all the time or the random busy work of a garrison maneuver unit but that he really missed shooting at people. I, who the closest I have been to combat was 3 weeks at a ROKA base on the DMZ, expressed surprise and a little concern at that statement. He said "dude, it's hard to explain but getting in a firefight and shooting at people is fun as s**t." Of course, counter-insurgency in Afghanistan is an entirely different beast than a full-on LSCO fight against Russia.

[Kinophile]

16 minutes ago, Bearstronaut said:

When I was in Korea in 2019 my battalion's (an intelligence unit) retention NCO was a former infantry Staff Sergeant. In the US Army retention is an actual MOS that you can reclass to at a certain point in your career and is a pretty cushy gig as far as I know. Anyways, I was talking to him one day and I asked how he preferred doing retention in an intel unit over being an infantryman. He told me that he much preferred not going to the field all the time or the random busy work of a garrison maneuver unit but that he really missed shooting at people. I, who the closest I have been to combat was 3 weeks at a ROKA base on the DMZ, expressed surprise and a little concern at that statement. He said "dude, it's hard to explain but getting in a firefight and shooting at people is fun as s**t." Of course, counter-insurgency in Afghanistan is an entirely different beast than a full-on LSCO fight against Russia.

Sounds straight up 19th century British Army,  just before the Big One,when an army's  experience was wide but also limited to limited wars. 

Still, there s better,  institutional forward thinking these days. 

Edited October 2, 2023 by Kinophile

[Carolus]

3 hours ago, Teufel said:

On topic, appears some good news are coming from Budanov and Co.

This is the way to win this.

The West will happily supply Russia with most of what Russia needs to continue this war, and there is no politician in sight who would change that.

But the West can help Ukraine build the capabilities to destroy the production facilities and products which Russia has manufactured with Western materials and machines at the same time.

This will make Russia buy even more material in the West, so it is even in the interest of Western politicians and corporations.

We just have to make sure to keep Russian saboteurs out of Western productions facilities and this can go on for a while.

Meanwhile, Ukrainians keep dying, but I am sure there are many politicians who can explain to us that while that is surely tragic, it is not actually our problem.

[Battlefront.com]

3 hours ago, Tux said:

There is clearly truth in what you write but there are also (at least) two major problems if such a position is prioritised:

1. There exist politicians who are uninterested in the truth or what will benefit their countryfolk (heresy, I know) and who won’t think twice about inflating almost totally unfounded fears and insecurities in their voter base.  Sometimes it is little more than these ‘problems’ which are held up as being more important than the nearby generation-defining war being fought.
2. The universe doesn’t care if your populist base is, for example, more worried about immigration than climate change.  The latter will still bite just as hard if you do nothing about it.

There is also the "false choice" issue at play as well as the fact that most people suck at working with money.

The US Republicans are pushing a new line which is summarized as the southern border is more important than the Ukrainian border.  Even if one presumes that throwing money at the southern border will fix the problems there (which itself is a bit of ideologically crafted fantasy), there is the presumption that it has to be a choice.  This is idiocy of the highest magnitude because you can make that argument about any spending choice.  "We can't have a secure southern border and also have a Social Security" or "we have to choose between having an Air Force and a strong southern border". 

The other problem (sucking at working with money) means that people don't understand basic concepts such as "penny wise, pound foolish" or "it takes money to make money".  They aren't sophisticated enough to understand how little impact billions of Dollars of spending has on their taxes (if they even pay Federal taxes, which most Americans don't).  They don't understand that cutting X can make Y cost way more.  Looking ahead at unintended consequences of poor decision making is flat out beyond most people's grasp.

A perfect example of this is the recent allocation $80 billion to the IRS (tax collecting authority) over a 10 year period.  The purpose is to modernize ancient computer systems and to go after rich people who don't pay their taxes.  It is estimated that better enforcement could result in recovering nearly $1 trillion in money already owed by the richest Americans.  Seems a pretty good investment, right?  Well, not if you spin it as government overreach that will come after Joe Dirt who didn't declare that $300 he made under the table instead of going after billionaires who are illegally using offshore accounts to mask their income.

Anyway... I agree with the point that pitching messages of simple and selfish spending choices works because most people are too simple and selfish to understand what they're being led into.

Steve

[Sgt Joch]

On 9/30/2023 at 10:51 AM, Battlefront.com said:

A correct and academic view of the war clearly shows that the Nazi regime raised and recruited a large number of non-German units primarily for maintaining order within its borders of the Reich through terror, murder, rape, plunder, and the whole list of horrible things Humans do to one another.  Ukrainians were also recruited explicitly for roles in the Final Solution, in particular camp guards.  Eventually those units were incorporated into the Waffen SS and the interplay between guards, "police", and soldiers was blurred even more.  The same was true for the Germanic SS units, especially the Totenkopf Division.

So, bottom line, is that not all Ukrainians who were part of the Waffen SS committed the worst sort of war crimes, but the units themselves did.  Therefore, they should not be celebrated as freedom fighters, but instead correctly labeled instruments of terror.  Even the cooks and the clerks had their role to play in those crimes, just as the cooks and clerks in the Russian army today do.

Steve

quite a good summary.

I have for the past several months been ploughing through a fascinating 2,000 page book on Operation Barbarossa by two french authors. The book came out in 2019 and is based on the latest research from German and Russian archives. It of course gives a good summary of the pre-invasion political maneuvering and of the military ops in summer 41-winter 42, but what is fascinating is the extent of the atrocities committed by both sides which was in fact worse than what I had previously read.

Barbarossa, Jean Lopez, Lasha Otkhmezuri | Livre de Poche

Regular German army units were from the start regularly involved in civilian massacres, executing prisoners, wiping out villages, killing jews. SS units and of course, the einsatzgruppens were even worse. Russian army units were slightly better, but not by much.

Anti-semitism was of course a problem throughout Europe at that time, but was worse in Eastern Europe and especially in the Baltic states and Ukraine where the Germans had no problem recruiting locals to kill Jewish civilians.

 

[dan/california]

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/02/congress-shutdown-ukraine-aid-00119380

GOP senators weigh go-big-or-go-home strategy on Ukraine

The GOP confrontation last week over continued aid was a rude awakening for Mitch McConnell and other senators who back Ukraine funding.

[danfrodo]

6 minutes ago, dan/california said:

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/02/congress-shutdown-ukraine-aid-00119380

GOP senators weigh go-big-or-go-home strategy on Ukraine

The GOP confrontation last week over continued aid was a rude awakening for Mitch McConnell and other senators who back Ukraine funding.

damn you.  Damn you, Mitch McConnell.  You keep doing things for Ukraine that force me to say "thank you Senator McConnell" to a person I completely loath.  But I mean it.  THANK YOU SEN MCCONNELL.

[kimbosbread]

In the US our political choices are basically like a bundled cable deal (American cable channels would at least in the past come as big bundled set and you couldn’t just pick and choose individual channels).

So in my case, you might agree that supporting Ukraine is absolute highest priority but you might feel that the open-border policy of non-border states is problematic, and you might feel that the restorative-justice approach and just house all the homeless approach might not be the best things (especially in a major west coast city, where things are pretty dire honestly), and you might be pro-choice. And then you might be annoyed by inflation, where a number of people on one side of aisle basically said “inflation is good for everybody” and more or less laughed it off. And there’s obviously tons of other stuff.

On the middle half of the political spectrum, there are a lot of people who support Ukraine and are socially liberal but are extremely upset at the state of their cities and the economy, and who will definitely flirt with voting in the most conservative possible candidate as a show of their dissatisfaction.

[danfrodo]

6 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:

In the US our political choices are basically like a bundled cable deal (American cable channels would at least in the past come as big bundled set and you couldn’t just pick and choose individual channels).

So in my case, you might agree that supporting Ukraine is absolute highest priority but you might feel that the open-border policy of non-border states is problematic, and you might feel that the restorative-justice approach and just house all the homeless approach might not be the best things (especially in a major west coast city, where things are pretty dire honestly), and you might be pro-choice. And then you might be annoyed by inflation, where a number of people on one side of aisle basically said “inflation is good for everybody” and more or less laughed it off. And there’s obviously tons of other stuff.

On the middle half of the political spectrum, there are a lot of people who support Ukraine and are socially liberal but are extremely upset at the state of their cities and the economy, and who will definitely flirt with voting in the most conservative possible candidate as a show of their dissatisfaction.

This makes sense to me, Kinosbread, well said.  The only question I have is why the radical right is making UKR aid such a big deal.  I think it's because they are paid (campaign contributions) to do it by lobbies that are, somewhere well below the radar, funded by Putin.  I get why the radical left would be like this, they are nuts.  But they are also not in power, they have no one in power, they are where they belong -- on the fringe.  

We know that Putin has been poisoning democracies for many years, and this is just another instance I think.

[kimbosbread]

14 minutes ago, danfrodo said:

The only question I have is why the radical right is making UKR aid such a big deal.

I’m going to make an argument that the far left and (even nuttier, and more expansive) far right are the natural consequence of the economic malaise the US has seen for the middle class and lower in the last two decades, along with opoid crisis and the forever wars in the Middle East.

30 years ago a teacher could buy a house in a West Coast city. Now it requires a big tech salary to have any chance at even a ****ty house. The two income trap is real, along with massive real estate speculation and underbuilding and all sort of other problems that really hurt the middle class. And now in many cities we have functionally no law enforcement, and many other problems.

There’s a lot of anger, and for a while that was chanelled at people who rightfully shoulder some blame (Occupy Wall Street), but as a joke goes identity politics was introduced so the plebs would go back to fighting amongst themselves instead of joining together for a common cause.

This anger is now properly manifested (from the perspective of our betters) as hating whatever the opposite side likes. Ukraine, transgender, guns, racism, whatever. People on both sides latch onto a cause very hard, as a religious thing almost. We can complain the Biden is not doing enough now, but before the war Biden was trying very hard to warn people what was happening; planes of ammo + weapons were being shipped over etc. And the far right ignores that or twists it into some insanity.

At my previous job I worked directly with no less than three (3) trans furries, one of whom was a major antifa person, and it’s like you aren’t even from here while I grew up here, you know how not racist this city is? Not all. Why do you think there are nazis everywhere (for some definition of nazi)? This person had latched onto the idea that there are nazis in America, and this is the great cultural struggle of the left to defeat them. Very smart and nice otherwise though.

 

People forget how much support Bernie had from people on the right. 

[A Canadian Cat]

17 hours ago, The_Capt said:

If your expectation is for Russia to fold out a la Afghanistan, well that war took 10 years of bleeding.

10 years is the time scale for the '80s in Afghanistan. If you look at the casualty numbers we are likely already past it - by a lot.

Soviet Casualties for all of Afghanistan (The Soviet-Afghan War: Breaking the Hammer and Sickle)
14 453 dead
53 753 wounded
68 206 total

Russian Casualties in Ukraine since Feb 2022 (Troop Deaths and Injuries in Ukraine War Near 500,000, U.S. Officials Say)
120 000 dead
170 000 wounded
290 000 total

So, in less than two years Putin has managed to get 4 times the number of soldiers killed or wounded than during the whole Afghanistan debacle. It is a tribute the miss information and propaganda campaign that the wheels have not come his regime.

 

[dan/california]

6 hours ago, Butschi said:

Well, this kind of talk works because it is, in fact, largely true.

People have bills to pay, kids to take care of, all sorts of small or large personal tragedies, you name it. The fact that other people elsewhere have a far worse lot doesn't solve any of their problems and doesn't improve their perceived situation. Problems are always on a scale that is relative to one's own experience - for a child that loses its favorite toy this is the worst tragedy imaginable although it sounds trivial to us.

Not meant as an excuse for Fico but that is the space politicians have to navigate and IMHO failure to acknowledge this (that's not the same as act on it) paves the way for the populists of this world.

Democracies end because voters believe some loud mouth who proclaims that he can fix all their problems if they just give him all the power. Voters have been this stupid right back ancient Greece, on and off.The number of times it worked out well for the voters in question might be as high as two or three percent, but I doubt it. Competent autocracy almost always gives way to kleptocratic autocracy, that gives way to something worse. If you think Putin coming out ahead in Ukraine is going to make things better in anywhere in Europe in five or ten years, well I don't think you think that, but I don't think you have admitted yet that stopping it is going to be expensive. There is no cheap option here.

2 hours ago, Bearstronaut said:

When I was in Korea in 2019 my battalion's (an intelligence unit) retention NCO was a former infantry Staff Sergeant. In the US Army retention is an actual MOS that you can reclass to at a certain point in your career and is a pretty cushy gig as far as I know. Anyways, I was talking to him one day and I asked how he preferred doing retention in an intel unit over being an infantryman. He told me that he much preferred not going to the field all the time or the random busy work of a garrison maneuver unit but that he really missed shooting at people. I, who the closest I have been to combat was 3 weeks at a ROKA base on the DMZ, expressed surprise and a little concern at that statement. He said "dude, it's hard to explain but getting in a firefight and shooting at people is fun as s**t." Of course, counter-insurgency in Afghanistan is an entirely different beast than a full-on LSCO fight against Russia.

These are the guys you want to recruit, you need soldiers that want to fight. Churchill had a famous quote about being shot at and missed. 

2 hours ago, Kinophile said:

Sounds straight up 19th century British Army,  just before the Big One,when an army's  experience was wide but also limited to limited wars. 

Still, there s better,  institutional forward thinking these days. 

See above

1 hour ago, Sgt Joch said:

quite a good summary.

I have for the past several months been ploughing through a fascinating 2,000 page book on Operation Barbarossa by two french authors. The book came out in 2019 and is based on the latest research from German and Russian archives. It of course gives a good summary of the pre-invasion political maneuvering and of the military ops in summer 41-winter 42, but what is fascinating is the extent of the atrocities committed by both sides which was in fact worse than what I had previously read.

Barbarossa, Jean Lopez, Lasha Otkhmezuri | Livre de Poche

Regular German army units were from the start regularly involved in civilian massacres, executing prisoners, wiping out villages, killing jews. SS units and of course, the einsatzgruppens were even worse. Russian army units were slightly better, but not by much.

Anti-semitism was of course a problem throughout Europe at that time, but was worse in Eastern Europe and especially in the Baltic states and Ukraine where the Germans had no problem recruiting locals to kill Jewish civilians.

 

The more you read about central and eastern Europe/Russia the shocking it is that anything resembling civilization has survived.

38 minutes ago, danfrodo said:

damn you.  Damn you, Mitch McConnell.  You keep doing things for Ukraine that force me to say "thank you Senator McConnell" to a person I completely loath.  But I mean it.  THANK YOU SEN MCCONNELL.

Whether we are damning him or thanking him is still unpleasantly up in the air. Either Biden, McConnell and the pro Ukraine people in Congress have a brilliant plan, or they have just committed the worst unnecessary bleep up in human history. Because the cost benefit ratio of of keeping Ukraine going is one of the better bargains, EVER.

[dan/california]

4 minutes ago, IanL said:

10 years is the time scale for the '80s in Afghanistan. If you look at the casualty numbers we are likely already past it - by a lot.

Soviet Casualties for all of Afghanistan (The Soviet-Afghan War: Breaking the Hammer and Sickle)
14 453 dead
53 753 wounded
68 206 total

Russian Casualties in Ukraine since Feb 2022 (Troop Deaths and Injuries in Ukraine War Near 500,000, U.S. Officials Say)
120 000 dead
170 000 wounded
290 000 total

So, in less than two years Putin has managed to get 4 times the number of soldiers killed or wounded than during the whole Afghanistan debacle. It is a tribute the miss information and propaganda campaign that the wheels have not come his regime.

 

And this is on a smaller population base. The problem is that we are past the low cost decision point for ending the war one way or another. A competent autocracy would have cut bait at about two months in, and briefly propagandized whatever deal they got as a huge victory, and then memory holed the whole mess. China did that very successfully in Vietnam in 1979-80, outside of this forum less than one percent of the world is even aware that conflict happened.

Putin wasn't that smart, and nobody else was brave enough to shoot him before he managed to transition from an autocratic regime where the governments overwhelming goal was to maintain a state of apathy in the population, too a totalitarian one that is all in on winning this war. So we are sadly past rational cost benefit negotiations. One way or another the Russian regime is going to have to break, the economy, the army, or both. As we are seeing right now though screwing up the internal politics of much of the West is really the only thing Putin has managed to do right, so this is going to be an unpleasantly near run thing.

[Jiggathebauce]

6 hours ago, Teufel said:

Hold on one second my slavic hombre! I don’t think I misunderstood but for clarity, did you just differentiate between communists and criminals?

Poor Vaclav Havel just turned in his grave! Well aware that wasn’t your point as you reference one individual’s past. But let me repeat - not all criminals are communists, but all communists are criminals. Without exception!

Guess I'm a criminal then. My belief that people who work and create wealth deserve the fruits of their labor, and democratic say over what is done with surplus is truly the worst crime of all. Second in heinousness to the reasonable conclusion that the current system, like all preceding systems, is inherently doomed and will give way to new forms of organization and modes of production to resolve its contradictions. 

I'm in the trotskyist corner that actively supports Ukraine's self determination, and we regularly oppose  stalinists who make no distinction between Putin 's war on "global homo" and the "woke west" and an imagined utopia under Stalin and his bureaucracy, and defend them both.  Horrible men making hard times for the good, as I said before.

[danfrodo]

Some good perspective on the hard, grinding war of tree lines & trenches.  Plus at the bottom the post by Sen JD Vance that set me off yesterday -- bizzarro world fantasy that the pro-UKR folks are all just bleeding UKR for some kind of revenge.  It's so utterly insane it's like it was generated by some really bad chatbot.

But the tactical part was quite good

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/1/2196681/-Ukraine-Update-A-kew-weapon-is-making-its-way-to-Ukraine-and-it-s-better-than-ATACMS

 

[dan/california]

https://www.reuters.com/world/yellen-says-legal-obstacles-remain-seizure-russian-assets-aid-ukraine-2023-02-27/

The other option is to ram through giving Ukraine Russia's money. There are complications, they do not remotely compare to losing this war.

[kimbosbread]

13 minutes ago, dan/california said:

There are complications, they do not remotely compare to losing this war.

Now, now, don’t be so defeatist. If Ukraine ends up in a frozen conflict due to lack of support from the US, that will accelerate the timeline for getting nuclear weapons for all our lovely friends in East Asia. I argue that this makes it less likely for China to invade Taiwan due to having their giant single point of failure dam (unless they drain it before the conflict to avoid it being such a liability).

[dan/california]

11 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:

Now, now, don’t be so defeatist. If Ukraine ends up in a frozen conflict due to lack of support from the US, that will accelerate the timeline for getting nuclear weapons for all our lovely friends in East Asia. I argue that this makes it less likely for China to invade Taiwan due to having their giant single point of failure dam (unless they drain it before the conflict to avoid it being such a liability).

Taiwan should also be working a non-nuclear missile that could crack that dam, it might be the best guarantee they could get.

[Kinophile]

https://english-alarabiya-net.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/english.alarabiya.net/amp/News/world/2023/10/02/Turkey-considering-supplying-Bayraktar-Akinci-drones-to-Ukraine-Turkish-defense-firm?amp_gsa=1&amp_js_v=a9&usqp=mq331AQGsAEggAID#amp_tf=From %1%24s&aoh=16962701863082&csi=0&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fenglish.alarabiya.net%2FNews%2Fworld%2F2023%2F10%2F02%2FTurkey-considering-supplying-Bayraktar-Akinci-drones-to-Ukraine-Turkish-defense-firm

 

Akinci is the next step up From TB2. 40k' ceiling,  possibly higher (TB2 is max 30k I believe,  with limited endurance at that upper limit). Still just turbo prop so limited maneuverability but excellent range.  It's not an air-to-drone, it's observation and strike. 

 

Plus,  Australia keeps the flame alive:

https://mil.in.ua/en/news/australia-prepares-the-first-batch-of-slinger-counter-uav-systems-for-ukraine/

Hopefully cheer everyone up a bit after the Slovakia news

Edited October 2, 2023 by Kinophile

[Butschi]

7 hours ago, Tux said:

There is clearly truth in what you write but there are also (at least) two major problems if such a position is prioritised:

1. There exist politicians who are uninterested in the truth or what will benefit their countryfolk (heresy, I know) and who won’t think twice about inflating almost totally unfounded fears and insecurities in their voter base.  Sometimes it is little more than these ‘problems’ which are held up as being more important than the nearby generation-defining war being fought.
2. The universe doesn’t care if your populist base is, for example, more worried about immigration than climate change.  The latter will still bite just as hard if you do nothing about it.

I did not say that something should be prioritized - I explicitly said: "failure to acknowledge this (that's not the same as act on it)". I do think support for Ukraine should be continued.

But whether you like it or not, I am almost certain that for most people outside Ukraine there are more important things than Ukraine. And not because they have a bad character or are weak of mind or whatever but just because they are humans. We care for our own problems and for the people we love.

The fears and insecurities you speak of exist, unfounded or not. So if you disregard that people first and foremost think about how to manage their own lives and that other topics, such climate change are at least as generation-defining for them, then you are going to lose the people for your course. Then people will go and find someone who listens to them, which are then precisely the kind politicians your are warning me of. Politicians don't have to give in to those fears and insecurities or act on them. But they have to acknowledge and address them. That is important if you want to have sustained support for Ukraine. Otherwise the Ficos and Orbans and Trumps of this world will act on, amplify and exploit those fears.

 

[Butschi]

2 hours ago, dan/california said:

If you think Putin coming out ahead in Ukraine is going to make things better in anywhere in Europe in five or ten years, well I don't think you think that, but I don't think you have admitted yet that stopping it is going to be expensive. There is no cheap option here.

I seriously fail to see how you extracted that from my post.

[dan/california]

1 minute ago, Butschi said:

I seriously fail to see how you extracted that from my post.

Sorry if I misunderstood something. The thing about the Russian problem is that the way to keep it a smaller problem than the usual stuff of peoples lives is to break the Russian Army in Ukraine right now. Being so worried about other things that we DON'T do that will eventually result in the Russian Army being the ONLY problem for a great many more people than just Ukrainians. A lot of very crooked politicians on both sides of the Atlantic a lying to a lot of stupid and/or miseducated voters about this fundamental truth. If we let them get away with it things are going to end badly, or worse than that. What am I missing?

[Tux]

26 minutes ago, Butschi said:

I did not say that something should be prioritized - I explicitly said: "failure to acknowledge this (that's not the same as act on it)". I do think support for Ukraine should be continued.

But whether you like it or not, I am almost certain that for most people outside Ukraine there are more important things than Ukraine. And not because they have a bad character or are weak of mind or whatever but just because they are humans. We care for our own problems and for the people we love.

The fears and insecurities you speak of exist, unfounded or not. So if you disregard that people first and foremost think about how to manage their own lives and that other topics, such climate change are at least as generation-defining for them, then you are going to lose the people for your course. Then people will go and find someone who listens to them, which are then precisely the kind politicians your are warning me of. Politicians don't have to give in to those fears and insecurities or act on them. But they have to acknowledge and address them. That is important if you want to have sustained support for Ukraine. Otherwise the Ficos and Orbans and Trumps of this world will act on, amplify and exploit those fears.

 

Yes, I understand and I meant more to add to what you said than to imply that your point was lacking. I did note that you specifically spoke of acknowledging people’s insecurities and I agree that’s the key, whether they actually exist or not.

We all just have to hope the sensible politicians in as many countries as possible can keep a firm hand on the tiller and avoid giving populists a meaningful gap to fill.