Summary
A European Parliament member claimed that the U.S. gave Europe three weeks to agree on Ukraine’s “surrender” terms or risk an American withdrawal from Europe.
Mika Aaltola made the claim on X, but provided no evidence. NBC News reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested a U.S. troop reduction in Europe.
Trump reportedly plans to cut 20,000 troops and demand greater NATO contributions. He has pushed for higher NATO defense spending.
Trump may meet with Putin soon, believing Russia holds the upper hand in negotiations.
Those are, in fact, good points, I just didn’t want to yap about them in the previous comment.
The battlefield has, indeed, got quite stale with rare opportunistic gains or those that were gained through massive bloodshed. Trench warfare is once again the reality of modern war. Still, even with all the aid Ukraine has received the tide isn’t going in their favor.
I stand ground on my conviction that there is no 4x force multiplier, solely by the fact that whatever Ukraine deploys could be also deployed by Russia. Most definitely a somewhat shittier version, but which gets the job done, maybe giving the Ukraine’s side at most 2X advantage, but most importantly, magnitudes cheaper.
Considering the point above, I wouldn’t be so sure about that given that we are… well, were for the past year in that position with the only difference of it being the US who’s providing most of the (military) aid rather than EU… and the front line is moving westwards nonetheless
Cars are def not a problem, the streets in Russia are absolutely flooded by Chinese imports. Tanks, artillery, and warships, from what I gather from some military analysts, and this will most likely sound controversial and so we’ll probably have to agree to disagree, is that those are basically entirely antiquated already by the advent of drone warfare. Armor shortages sounds surprising to me and I haven’t heard about that… I don’t see how it could problem for Russia, and yet it is… Corruption is the only possible answer I could see for that. But overall, even given that those are in fact necessary, as I’ve said, Russia still has a ton of economy not turned towards the war machine, and there’s a lot of factories to tap into to ramp the military production if necessary.
And please don’t take it as me praising Russia. Putin is definitely in wrong here and Zelensky has all the moral high ground there could possibly be. I just see that many news sources blow out any small Ukrainian achievements out of proportion into some kind of twisted Good vs Evil, David vs Goliath stories. And it makes my blood boil as it leaves an impression of “Why help Ukrainians even more when they’re doing quite well already”, while hundreds of innocent people are killed and displaced every day and it isn’t stopping, and won’t stop, unless a drastic measure is taken.
To go a bit deeper on the role of armor - on the background of drone warfare - I would explain like this: armor reduces casualties when moving people and supplies forward.
In these days, armor no longer controls the battlefield, it more likely delivers people and ammo.
If one moves soldiers and equipment forward with armor, it can move under machine gun fire, protect its occupants from one antitank mine, and somewhat protect them against one FPV hit.
If one moves them forward in a 4 wheel drive minivan or lorry, there will be ugly casualties when a mine is found, FPV arrives or a machine gunner opens fire. These vehicles also tend to get stuck easier. So, lack of armor tends to result in higher personnel losses and lower arrival rates of supplies.
From what I gather, the paradigm is also shifting on that front. MRAP’s and such are big, slow, noisy, easily detectable, and most often get immobilized regardless of armor, and all it takes to take one out is just a more powerful charge (in a mine or strapped to a drone). So both sides are increasingly leaning towards more lightweight vehicles, like enduro bikes, ebikes, and even EUC’s. Yes, if one blows up on a mine or by drone, there’s absolutely zero hope for them, but it limits the casualties to just that one poor sob (and possibly his passenger) rather than a whole dozen in mrap, but the big the pro is that they’re a lot harder to detect and chase with drones, while being economically unreasonable to be fought with conventional military weaponry, and have much less footprint allowing them to weave through narrower paths and right through the minefields. The big downside is that it’s not feasible to supply tanks and artillery this way, which is why I mentioned that some consider them obsolete already. On the other hand, drones, bullets and food are perfectly deliver-able by other drones. Not humans yet, though, so some will have to make the runs for rotations still, which us where most casualties happen and will continue happening unless something entirely new pops up all of the sudden