King Arts
Well-known member
NATO managed just fine in the Cold War with a stronger russia and no Sweden. Away with your neo imperialism that doesn’t benefit Americans.
Finland's and Sweden's NATO accession following thread.
- Thread starter Tyzuris
- Start date
You do know up until the 80s NATO was not confident in a land war with Russia...
Airedale260
Well-known member
Or that Sweden actually covered for the U.S. a few times during the Cold War despite ostensibly being neutral…most famously protecting an SR-71 to keep the Soviets from shooting it down/forcing it down.
Not to mention the whining over “liberalism” in Sweden is way overblown, especially in light of the most recent elections & current government.
@Bacle as for Erdogan and the Koran thing…as I said previously, he’s using it as a convenient excuse. It should be noted everybody else in the Middle East (with the exception of Qatar) hates his ass, and he had to recently let up on something else so he could get some financial assistance from the UAE.
At this point, he’s starting to overplay his hand and everyone else is starting to get tired of it. Still, at least part of it is domestic politics, so I’d expect these antics to either continue until May or until his mismanagement starts becoming too much for him to avoid having to ask the West for a bailout (because while in theory he could ask Russia or China, that means he’d fully abandon NATO anyway and render the whole point moot. Not to mention piss off the voters, who generally have less than warm feelings about the Russians).
Hungary is apaprently backing Sweden's entry to NATO now.
apnews.com
Hungarian delegation backs Sweden's NATO application
A parliamentary delegation from Hungary says it supports Sweden’s NATO membership bid after meeting the speaker of the Swedish parliament to iron out what Hungary’s governing party has called “political disputes.”
apnews.com
Hungary is apaprently backing Sweden's entry to NATO now.
Hungarian delegation backs Sweden's NATO application
A parliamentary delegation from Hungary says it supports Sweden’s NATO membership bid after meeting the speaker of the Swedish parliament to iron out what Hungary’s governing party has called “political disputes.”
sweden must finally getting used to the backroom deals common in Nato, now they just need to work with Turkey and their in.
History Learner
Well-known member
Based Hungary continues to cuck NATO by delaying the vote.
A long-delayed vote in Hungary's parliament on ratifying the NATO accession bids of Sweden and Finland will likely be postponed again following a proposal from a senior government official.
In a letter published Tuesday by Hungarian news website hvg.hu, Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjen requested that a parliamentary session scheduled to begin on March 20 — during which lawmakers were expected to vote on the two Nordic countries joining the military alliance — be postponed to a week later.
Tyzuris
Primarch to your glory& the glory of him on Earth!
Today the President of Turkey Erdogan has confirmed that he will now accept Finland's (but not Sweden's yet) ratification to NATO and has signed the papers forward to the Turkish Parliament to be ratified before the Turkish Election on May 14th, 2023 (it's likely the Turkish ratification comes much sooner than that though because the Turkish parliament goes to an election recess approximately a month before the election date). Also Fidsz party of Hungary has confirmed that their parliament will ratify Finland's NATO ratification on March 27th, 2023.
Good day to be a Finn, and a historic day to be a Finn as well.
Good day to be a Finn, and a historic day to be a Finn as well.
Not really.
Between Finland and the core Russian lands there are good geographic blocking points and Finland has a tiny population (and eighth the size of Ukraine's).
Then you have the nuclear angle. Finland allowing an attack on Russian territory will get Russia nuking Helsinki and with it a third of Finland's entire population.
In a Russia-NATO war, Russia would always lose the conventional fight. Take nukes off the table and the US sails a carrier strike group down the pacific coast with orders to level every building within five hundred miles of the coast and there is literally nothing Russia could do to even slow that attack. Another carrier (probably two or three) sails into the Baltic Sea and secures St. Petersburg as a landing zone before the forces head south to take Moscow.
A purely conventional war between the US and Russia, today, without any active involvement from ANY other NATO member is a war that the US wins basically instantly.
US satellite coverage means that the US knows the exact location of every infrastructure target worth hitting, and US air (and cruise missile) power means that they are all hit basically day one. Large scale surprise is effectively impossible against the US any more, we track every substantive force in theater at all times from orbit. So your options are guerilla warfare or stand up fights.
Guerilla warfare can only slow an invading force when geographic factors allow tiny defending forces to block the much larger invading force. Russia is lacking in these geographic advantages vis a vi any theoretical US attack.
Stand up fights would just see the Russian units destroyed too a man. They are simply outclassed by the US forces in every metric and to a massive degree.
Russia's long term concern isn't an invasion by Finland, or even by the US. It is an attack by Turkey or Germany.
If Turkey comes north then it's natural path is to remain east of the mountains. It goes Bulgaria, eastern Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia. That entire invasion route supported relatively easily by sea via the Black Sea and giving Turkey lots of 'good', relatively lightly populated, land to grab off and substantial natural resource gains. Continue onto Volograd, follow the river down to the Caspian Sea, take Georgia, and Turkey has turned the entire Black Sea into its own internal lake while still having relatively defensible borders.
If everyone stood back and Russia didn't go nuclear, Turkey could probably pull that off today with relative ease. And every single day that passes, Turkey becomes more powerful relative to Russia (and all of those other nations in question).
Germany needs raw materials. If it moves west then it runs straight into France and gets wrecked (not that France solves the material needs). If it moves south then it runs into mountains and goes nowhere any time soon. If it moves north then it runs into water and goes nowhere anytime soon. Or it goes East, through some of the worlds easiest territory to invade via ground forces and culminating in Russia with all of its natural resources.
Give Europe an excuse, remove nukes from the equation, and you have Germany and Poland running straight to Moscow with basically nothing in their way.
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Russia's security concern isn't the US. That is a fight that has already been decided, Russia goes nuclear and Russia's best case outcome is a pyric victory for the US. In a conventional fight, the US crushes Russia in an afternoon even without any allies.
It's concern is Europe and Turkey in 2050.
Even if Russia only gets Ukraine east of the Dnipro river (well everything within artillery range of the east bank of the Dnipro in reality), it makes Russia's western border orders of magnitude more secure while also allowing it to use an order of magnitude fewer troops to gain that security. Push to the Dnister River and Russia is substantially more secure against Turkey; not its ideal borders but one that is far more defensible.
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Russia's war aims in Ukraine are 1) defensible geographic barriers that it can use to increase its security with a far smaller military, and 2) ethnic Russian children and women of breeding age that it can use to help with its demographic issues. Increased natural resources are considered an incidental extra. Wrecking every bit of infrastructure in Ukraine, killing basically its entire adult population, and wrecking Russia's relations with much of the rest of the world are all considered perfectly acceptable from Russia's point of view.
Finland and Sweden in NATO is, at worst, a marginal decrease in Russian security. From the Russian point of view they were always going to be US allies anyways.
The biggest mistake in that analysis is accepting the propaganda talking point that it is a defensive security concern for Russia at all. It's a "gorilla in the background" level sleigh of hand against your attention. The need to add the "no nukes" caveat is telling there. In a world where there is no 100% reliable way to stop nuclear weapons, delivered by missile, submarine or even covert ops, Russia is as safe as any nuclear power with a decently varied set of delivery methods. Very safe. Especially with the European countries being as risk and conquest averse as they are.
Russia is worried about Germany colonizing it for resources? Hell, if Germany was willing to do that, Russia doesn't need to worry about stopping it, only about being a tougher target than Africa. Which it already is... If EU countries had the resolve to go on for full conquest to get resources, Africa has a lot of poorly defended ones, often close to coasts, not protected with nukes, and armies even less competent than Russia's. There is only the cultural-political issue of dealing with local populations that may be miffed about the whole thing, but if they are willing to do it with Russian population in our little scenario, why not any other population?
The more likely explanation is that there is no real "security concern" regarding invasion by decadent westerners mysteriously getting more guts than they ever had, it's a very real "geopolitical ambition based internal security" concern. The most likely driver i think is Russia's oligarchy having a similar internal political problem as late medieval nobility. There is only so much land, resources and other oligarch fodder in Russia, it was given away generously and cheaply by the current team, and so there isn't much left that isn't already spoken for. So what does the leadership buy the loyalty of the neo-nobility with for the next decades with?
They can take away some of the already given away stuff to give to others, but that's an outright civil war risk, ruining trust in the system by its important participants.
The other option is conquest, aka "Russian World", aka rebuilding the Empire. Look at easy targets at the historical borders of the Empire (at first at least), tell the nobility that if they help with conquest and support the leadership, they will get a piece of some usual business... Not in Russia, because that's all spoken for already, but in the "new Russia" nothing is spoken for yet, it's all up for distribution as soon as it becomes ruled from Moscow, of course the nobility does not care if the previous owners get robbed of it by Moscow, they aren't part of the club, "robbing foreign owners is ok" is a rule they are willing to live with.
Whether the conquest is political, military or hybrid is not important, they are fine with either, as long as decisions as to who gets to make money on, say, forests of Finland and farming of southern Ukraine get made in Kremlin by their buddies.
The problem however happens when potential targets like Ukraine, Finland or Georgia get roped into western institutions that will get in the way of such conquests. The more such potential countries it happens to, the less of a potential expansion room Russia's leadership has for bribe material to their power base...
Once the options run out, it's either sea, space or civil war. And we all know they absolutely aren't anywhere near leading the technological race to new frontiers.
Leaving the civil war option...
However, as Finland and Sweden are already in EU, the difference for Russia is marginal indeed, though for different reasons. Which is also why we aren't seeing much of a reaction there nor attempts to bargain.
As for the demographic angle...
Russia is, at least on paper, considerably richer than Ukraine (not unrelated to its past lording over the place), it's just that this isn't reflected proportionally in living standards as a big chunk of it is oligarch playgrounds in resources and shit.
Considering the massive political and financial costs of the war, Russia could leech the same people from Ukraine (and many other Russian speaking countries in the region) cheaper by just paying them to come over. Yet it didn't...
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The future of strategic nuclear weapons is a lot more bleak than people tend to think.
Starlink is a proof of concept for Starwars. If Starship proves successful then the next two megaconstellations are going to be a US DoD communications and surveillance network that provides real time, global, 24/7, full spectrum coverage and then a laser based missile defense constellation that will be able to successfully engage anything that breaks atmosphere.
That second constellation shuts down all non US ICBM's and SLBM's.
The next generation of US air defense installations is likewise going to be laser based in all probability and will be fully networked with that global surveillance and communications network. Launch a cruise missile and it will be detected from orbit, tracked, and then the data fed to the air defense platforms to engage it.
If it flies, it dies is - quite literally - one to three decades away for the US military.
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If you want to deliver nukes then its either sneaking it in or going to very high tech delivery platforms. Russia can't field those kind of platforms, they can barely field what they have today (and what they field today is of somewhat dubious quality).
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No one else has the ability to compete with the US on the high end or at that kind of scale, but they can play lower down the tech ladder. Turkey could probably build an ABM system that offers decent capability vis a vi Russia in the next two decades. Europe could probably do the same.
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Technology also makes covert intelligence operations a great deal more difficult in many respects. During the Cold War, if you could get across the border you could basically disappear into a nation and forging an ID that would withstand normal to moderate scrutiny was relatively easy (at the nation-state level). Today? A fake ID that will withstand basically any real scrutiny is incredibly difficult to produce.
Moving money around at scale to support those operations? Very difficult.
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Russia and Ukraine are fighting a war as most of the world thinks wars are fought, and in fundamentally the same manner as virtually every country must fight there wars.
Even then, Ukraine is still in the fight only because it has the entire rest of the world providing logistical support and the US providing intelligence and targeting support.
Remove US support for the other side and even with how badly the Russians are fighting war, they could still take most of the worlds nations.
Then there is how the US fights a war. A US Carrier with a warload of fighters is, on its own, one of the most powerful Air Forces on the entire planet. If a US CSG decided to park itself in the Baltic Sea it could probably take the combined air forces of continental Europe and proceed to strike basically every critical infrastructure target in days.
Conquer Europe? No. Kick Europe back to pre-industrial levels and destroy it as a functional polity? Yes.
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The global geopolitical environment today is entirely an artifact of US policy choices. Russia is making fundamentally stupid moves under the geopolitical environment of today. But under the geopolitical environment of tomorrow? That is an entirely different conversation.
Starlink is a proof of concept for Starwars. If Starship proves successful then the next two megaconstellations are going to be a US DoD communications and surveillance network that provides real time, global, 24/7, full spectrum coverage and then a laser based missile defense constellation that will be able to successfully engage anything that breaks atmosphere.
That second constellation shuts down all non US ICBM's and SLBM's.
The next generation of US air defense installations is likewise going to be laser based in all probability and will be fully networked with that global surveillance and communications network. Launch a cruise missile and it will be detected from orbit, tracked, and then the data fed to the air defense platforms to engage it.
If it flies, it dies is - quite literally - one to three decades away for the US military.
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If you want to deliver nukes then its either sneaking it in or going to very high tech delivery platforms. Russia can't field those kind of platforms, they can barely field what they have today (and what they field today is of somewhat dubious quality).
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No one else has the ability to compete with the US on the high end or at that kind of scale, but they can play lower down the tech ladder. Turkey could probably build an ABM system that offers decent capability vis a vi Russia in the next two decades. Europe could probably do the same.
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Technology also makes covert intelligence operations a great deal more difficult in many respects. During the Cold War, if you could get across the border you could basically disappear into a nation and forging an ID that would withstand normal to moderate scrutiny was relatively easy (at the nation-state level). Today? A fake ID that will withstand basically any real scrutiny is incredibly difficult to produce.
Moving money around at scale to support those operations? Very difficult.
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Russia and Ukraine are fighting a war as most of the world thinks wars are fought, and in fundamentally the same manner as virtually every country must fight there wars.
Even then, Ukraine is still in the fight only because it has the entire rest of the world providing logistical support and the US providing intelligence and targeting support.
Remove US support for the other side and even with how badly the Russians are fighting war, they could still take most of the worlds nations.
Then there is how the US fights a war. A US Carrier with a warload of fighters is, on its own, one of the most powerful Air Forces on the entire planet. If a US CSG decided to park itself in the Baltic Sea it could probably take the combined air forces of continental Europe and proceed to strike basically every critical infrastructure target in days.
Conquer Europe? No. Kick Europe back to pre-industrial levels and destroy it as a functional polity? Yes.
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The global geopolitical environment today is entirely an artifact of US policy choices. Russia is making fundamentally stupid moves under the geopolitical environment of today. But under the geopolitical environment of tomorrow? That is an entirely different conversation.
The creeping changes in how exactly will nuclear warfare work in the future are well known and not just us. Russia and China are already taking preparations in countering that new setup, with nuclear torpedos and hypersonics.
Assuming USA will more than theoretically have the financial and political capital for meeting the threshold of "sufficient lasers", unlike its policy with the prohibitively expensive kinetic interceptors (with which it is also possible, but only theoretically so far), it means shifting nuclear warfare doctrine back to something similar to the time from before ICBM arsenal saturation, as in somewhere around early 60's.
But that doesn't completely neutralize the threat of nukes, which, as current situation shows, works well enough for deterring US intervention even with vastly less capable delivery methods countries like NK and Pakistan have.
Secondly, if you can do it against cruise missiles, you can do it against aircraft, non-tiny drones and possibly even artillery shells, imagine those implications.
If it's good enough against even hypersonic cruise missiles, then it truly is "it flies, it dies", and even artillery warfare will change massively.
Thirdly, you said it would be Germany/Poland/Turkey invading them hypothetically, not USA, anyway.
Russia and China already experiment with those. If Russia cannot afford it, China will either float them up as a vassal or destroy them itself to take the Far East because they will be polishing both the sword and the shield to such levels merely to compete with USA.
Could... Before Russia's shit fit they had little interest in properly financing even the basics, Turkey lacks the money and the tech - we can start talking of 2 decades when Japan has theirs in testing already and they do need one more than EU and Turkey taken together.
Back to reality, Turkey is haggling with NATO tech powers about being allowed to buy 4th gen fighters because no one trusts them with 5th gen ones and if they could make their own...
Western countries would need China level internal regulation to take proper advantage of it, especially to counter professional wartime covert ops.
We're talking smuggling a nuke. The "hottest" piece of the setup cannot be bought anyway.
Air forces, perhaps. Navies could do it pretty quickly though, Baltic is not a good place for a CSG to be, it's bringing a sniper rifle to a CQB fight, Pacific and Atlantic are the proper CSG arenas.
It is... But where does Ukraine and EU fit in this future? If Russia stays behind technologically enough to worry about its nuclear deterrent no longer deterring, it's screwed completely, there is no geographic advantage that will save it from resource hungry and mysteriously warlike Europe that has both functional deterrent neutralizers and at the same time more advanced, hard to neutralize nuclear weapons, because such a setup begs for use of tactical nuclear weapons that the Russian side cannot effectively escalate against.
And in the not so unlikely scenario Europe lacks (likely) will or (less likely) means to push it that far, China will have both the will and means (or for total nightmare scenario, China and EU do the XXI century Ribbentrop-Molotov against Russia to split the resources), so yet again, they are screwed.
If Russia doesn't stay so behind, it's all moot, Russia would be safe on account of deterrence alone, which i think is the most likely scenario, while Russia made the move on completely different, mostly internal politics driven motivation.
To add to the irony, if anything Russia's aggressive "security concern" pursuit may turn out to be the only thing that will finally get Europe to do the military spending increases USA was always yelling at Europe to do, and the only chance Europe may have at reaching the technological advantage over Russia that would justify these concerns about nuclear deterrence in the first place...
Long story short, Russia, even if it succeeds, will gain no real external security with this move at best while ruining its soft power for decades by joining the rogue state club, and at worst it made its own nightmare scenario real by going to extreme lengths to mitigate it while it was purely theoretical.
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NK and Pakistan don't directly deter the US. NK deters the US by threatening South Korea, and the big threat isn't with nuclear weapons but with artillery launched chemical weapons. Its nuclear arsenal is mostly about threatening Japan and to a lesser extent Russia and China.
Pakistan is nuclear because of India. Its ability to deter the US is basically non existent, the US just doesn't really care all that much.
Yes. The US is steadily redefining how it fights war and the constraints it operates within. And doing so in a manner that no one else even begins to approach.
Yes. The point I am making is that Russia already concedes that it can't win any kind of serious military conflict with the US short of going fully nuclear (and even full scale nuclear use is iffy today). Hurt the US, absolutely. Deter the US, yup. But the Russian nuclear arsenal today is not a nation ending threat to the US.
Looking forward what Russia sees is a US that doesn't give a solitary damn about most of what is going on in the world and a likely global US nuclear umbrella where the US is just going to shoot down any strategic nuclear weapons that anyone launches without US permission. The Russian nuclear arsenal thus becomes a non-factor in many respects.
If the US has pulled back, it doesn't really have all that many strategic concerns in Europe. Russia will never be able to threaten France, or Denmark or Sweden or Turkey. So long as the US keeps Denmark and Sweden happy, it can lock down the Baltic Sea at need.
The Bab al-Mandeb Strait and the Strait of Gibraltar mean locking down the Med.
Russia tries to conquer Europe and the US likely does what it is doing in Ukraine now, provide a lot of relatively cheap equipment along with intel support and then let Europeans die to exhaust Russia. The relative economic and population costs to both sides screw Russia.
Absent the nuclear issue, fundamental US strategic interests aren't threatened by Russia expanding to the borders that it truly wants. The strategic problem facing the US with Ukraine is that Russia is likely to continue until it gets those borders unless the cost in Ukraine becomes too high for that continuation to be viable and that continuation would mean Russia conquering NATO nations. If the US just shrugs its shoulders and refuses to honor its NATO commitments then the US is dealt massive diplomatic damage as no one has any real trust in any US security guarantee going forward.
If the US pulls back and pulls out of NATO at some future point in time before Russia attacks a NATO member that diplomatic damage is substantially lessened.
You also have to recall that in the US those who grew up with the Russian's/Soviets as the Big Bad as part of their fundamental experience are steadily becoming less and less of the US population. Ask someone born in 1995 if the US should risk nuclear war to stop the Russians from invading Warsaw and you get a substantially different answer from someone born in 1975 (as a general rule). Give it another 20 years and everyone fifty and under will have lived their entire lives after the fall of the USSR and with Russia largely seen as a joke/no threat to the US.
Biden is the last Cold War politico that the White House will have.
So what is the European and Russian and Turkish geopolitical calculus in a world where the US basically doesn't care what they do to one another? That is the world that Russia is planning for and operating in expectation of.
China is fucked, hard. Its demographic problems are worse than Russia's, its political problems are worse than Russia's, its economic problems are worse than Russia's, and its neighbors are far more dangerous than Russia's. It isn't in any position to support Russia today, much less in the decades to come..
You are taking the fundamental situation as it is today and playing it forward 20 years. What you need to account for is how that fundamental situation is changing. Turkey is very well positioned to become one of the worlds great powers in the next two to five decades. Europe, on the other hand, is well positioned to collapse back into being Europe.
Not really.
You need the intelligence infrastructure in place first before you actually get to the smuggling itself.
Nope, the US could sink every navy on the entire planet basically on whim. A CSG is more naval combat power than most navies in the world combined. US military advantage is so over the top absurd that it is hard to conceptualize.
The EU is unlikely to survive the near future, much less for decades longer. European demographics are shit. European natural resources are limited. Pan European nationalism doesn't exist. The European economy is entirely export driven and the consumption bases that it exports to aren't going to be buying in the near future.
Russia had two fundamental options.
1) Do nothing, maintain borders that are conventionally indefensible given the Russian demographic and industrial situation. Rely entirely on nuclear arsenal and the good will of its neighbors to secure its borders while Russia suffers through its demographic issues.
2) Use military force to expand Russia's borders to a state where they become conventionally defensible with the population and technology that Russia can expect to have in the coming decades. Utilize the nuclear threat to shape the military calculations of its neighbors. Isolate itself from the rest of the world and try to rebuild and rebalance the Russian population.
With option 2 there become three possible outcomes:
a) Russia is militarily defeated and becomes an international pariah state reliant on its nuclear arsenal to protect its pre war borders. Russia hopes that it doesn't face external attack, goes full isolationist and tries to deal with its internal problems. Do things like pay India with gold to hire an entire generation of teachers to rebuild the Russian education system. Fundamentally, Russia isn't really that much worse off than it was before in many respects and it still fucks Europe hard because of the lack of raw materials exports from Russia to Europe.
b) Russia succeeds in getting the borders that it desires and as a consequence its enemies unify against it. Unless the Russian nuclear arsenal is negated in the immediate term, the threat of it is probably enough to keep the EU from trying to reclaim the territory in question and by the time that changes it will be a settled issue. Europe will spend tons of money on its military while still facing the economic and demographic issues that it already has. That military force is either not used at all (fine with Russia, its just wasted European economic output then), is used against Turkey and/or Africa (fine with Russia), or is used against other Europeans (fine with Russia). If turned on Russia then Russia has nukes and has much more defensible conventional borders to blunt the attack, along with substantially more land to trade before core Russian territories are threatened.
c) Russia succeeds in getting the borders that it desires and as a consequence Europe breaks apart into independent, competing, nations. Russia is returned to its historical position vis a vi Europe and gets to leverage its natural resources to manipulate the European nations to Russia's advantage.
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Fundamentally, what does Russia lose from its military actions? Or from Finland joining NATO?
Access to the US dominated financial system is the single biggest loss. But Russia doesn't need imports so that is a relatively limited import.
Russian men of military age is the next biggest loss. But Russia's demographic situation was such that its already going to basically have to turn its breeding age female population into brood mares and it will probably take advantage of IFV to do some hardcore eugenics programs to weed out as many of the health problems as possible so that generation of males dying is less demographically significant than it might otherwise be (and as a rule they were low skill and poorly educated as well). Russia is also moving the Ukrainian women and children out of its seized territories and back into Russia; to the point that it has already seized more than twice as many people as it has committed as troops.
Territory loss? Nukes basically preclude that.
Governmental control over Russia? This war, win or lose, has increased that.
Diplomatic damage? The nations that were generally willing to deal with Russia are still doing so.
The US-Pakistan situation was much hotter in 2001...
And if NK wasn't trying to deter USA, just SK, it wouldn't be bothering with building ICBMs, it's not like Japan or SK will move over to another continent.
Hard to say, it could be, USA would have to multiply its missile interceptor numbers for it to not be a nation ender unless the pessimistic assessments of Russian nuclear readiness are right.
And then they still have tactical ones and non-ICBM strategic ones in form of hypersonics. Both can be used in counter-value strikes like strategic weapons, provided they have the range. Which in case of Europe, they have.
USA will not voluntarily throw away the massive value of NATO before the confrontation with China, it would be way too stupid to do.
Besides that, Cold War may be in the past, but the "rogue state" political pains are in the news regularly, and Russia is trying to join that camp rather than help manage it more than ever. Russia is unwilling, even if able at great pain, to separate itself from the other political hotspots of Iran and China.
And then there is also the irony that if a world where USA doesn't care what Russia does in Europe is soon to come and Russia believes this will happen, this world would be a far better time to invade Ukraine than today.
Risking nuclear war for X is going to become a rote question for US public due to the tensions with China around East Asia, and any preparation half-decent for China will work far better for Russia, dramatically undermining the oomph of the "risk" part.
It is very able to, not doing so only due to unwilingness to escalate a sanction war with the West, and it has an industrial capacity Russia can only have wet dreams of.
I don't see it with Turkey. Their economy isn't really doing better than Europe's, especially after the giant earthquake. Their political stability is under a big question mark. Its demographics are also getting Europe problems, just lagging decades behind. Europe? Well, it's in many ways the Japan of the West, for good and for bad.
Yes really. It's taking major EU countries months of increased due to Ukraine vigilance to catch agents in own military related institutions.
Not much for a one-off that's meant to be done within less than 48h.
If used optimally... CSG is the king of blue water. Tell it to go to green water, and the admiral in charge will start voicing objections.
EU is using economic inter-reliance in place of nationalism, for better and for worse.
But unless it really doubles down on doing stupid shit for no benefit like green virtue signalling that can hold.
Demographics? Resources? Japan has these problems but even worse. Meanwhile, EU has over 3x the internal market of Japan.
Russia was doing ok on neighbors before it started doing funny business with borders, and the other 2 are money solvable problems... and good luck solving them without the money lost on the war and sanctions.
How will Russia get that technology while spending all the money on expanding borders and integrating war torn territories while being sanctioned to hell? Terrain is only a force multiplier, if the force is shit to begin with, multiplied shit can't save them from an opponent that can shield itself from their nuclear sword. If Russia can't contest the nuclear defense and delivery field in the peaceful scenario where it has more money, it sure can't do it in this scenario.
a) Russia is unwilling and unable to go full isolationist. Too much reliance on imports and exports. Trying means being a failed state and split/civil war. Lack of trade with Europe hurts them more than it hurts Europe, which is how the current sanction setup got where it is.
b) Same as A, except with bonus internal problems and even more motivation for Europe to fix its military spending, getting it closer to the "security concern" that prompted the whole run for defensive border in the first place, and which won't do much to alleviate it - if Europe has good enough nuclear neutralization while Russia doesn't, well, the defensive advantage of few rivers and some plains won't be enough to fight an opponent that can nuke them at will while they can't nuke back, *especially* with the differences in conventional technology and the conventional doctrine of Russia. If Russia can't win conventional wars with masses of mediocre troops and artillery, it can't win them, period.
c) This and more is what the yes-men of Russian leadership thought...
You forgot the mass of valuable middle class Russians that ran away due to the war and its fallout. That's irreplacable, definitely not with the mostly low class and retiree "gains" in Ukrainian territories.
Ironically, it improves internal political stability, but at the cost of future attempts to stay in technological and economic races - Russia becomes more of a resource based third world economy.
Russia has no magic bullet to fix typical developed economy fertility problems, and with the budget drained by current situation, it certainly won't invent one.
IVF? The women are a secondary problem, the cost of raising the kids is the big problem, fix that, and for a chunk of money involved that fix you will also get the women to volunteer. Leave it to Russian orphanages? They are going to get drunks and criminals, not officers and scientists, and Russia has more than enough of those already.
As for territory loss - if nukes preclude that, then the more defensible borders are irrelevant as a goal to do it in the first place. If they don't, better borders are absolutely insufficient, especially if this event prompts Europe to not laze away militarily.
Long story short, the long term fallout of this is Russia taking a step towards being a bigger North Korea with oil. It will take some more steps to get there, but we shall see if these are taken.
Nations dealing with Russia? EU ones are out for foreseeable future, that's one thing, while Japan/Taiwan disengage to the degree that Russia values most, aka electronics. All Russia has left is frenemies and opportunists, while the sweet&safe deals with Europe are over, probably for good unless a major regime change happens.
Bassoe
Well-known member
The problem is the chances of Russia taking this seriously and concluding that if they wait, they'll lose their deterrence and threatening to launch now while doing so still works unless said missile shield progress is halted.
That or deliberately inducing kessler syndrome.
Well, this is a new era, with a Rivet Joint able to fly directly along the Finnish/Russian border for the first time.
Edit: Also looks like the Nordics have agreed to for what is effectively a joint air force between Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland.
Tyzuris
Primarch to your glory& the glory of him on Earth!
Also today the Turkish parliamentary foreign affairs commission green-lighted our NATO ratification to be sent for a final vote in Turkish parliament. And Hungary released their parliamentary schedule of next week, and on Monday March 27th 2023 their parliament will have our ratification in their agenda.