Absolutely kino.
And now, the thread tax:
https://archive.ph/qCzua
Article that goes into detail on European purchases from Russia. It isn't just oil and gas they're buying, but steel and other metals as well.
More of the US' greatest NATO allies continuing to fund the threat they demand the US spend hundreds of billions to fight while they couch their aid in loans.
The steel and iron is significantly less galling than the hydrocarbons. Its not only much smaller but the profit on it much smaller. Hydrocarbons are almost pure profit and pumps/refineries can't just be shutdown and restarted at will like you can with a mine or low-grade refinery. Grandma also doesn't freeze if the sheetmetal plant has to shutdown for a couple months
IDK. They can still hammer the "More Mobliks" button a lot longer than Ukraine.
Kinda. They are hammering the "bumpkin moblik" button pretty hard because if they start sending guys from Moscow it'll start to matter.
If they weren't having manpower issues, they wouldn't have needed to import 10,000 norks.
Ukraine is also in a defensive fight for its existence, and post-war would be bordered primarily by nations it wouldn't need to overly concerned with and has limited geopolitical engagements it is required to support. Russia needs remain strong enough after Ukraine to fend off China, the US, and other rivals
like the Finnish and the Baltic "let us show you much much we liked communism" alliance as well as support its new vassals in Africa.
That is, Ukraine can go to the point of collapse and if they get a NATO membership out of it, it won't matter because they'll be able to take as long as they want to recover.
Russia can't go all in or risk it might find itself in a defensive war for its continued existence, or at the very least discover those new foreign sources of wealth are gone again.
Still standing on my "4th year being decisive" theory of great power wars. If Russia doesn't wrap this up by the fall, they risk entering the 5th year of a Great Power War, and that is when things tend to fall apart.
I don't know that you can really call it a great power war. Dramatic events like Kursk asside, Russia largely gets to dictate the pace of the war. Its more than a low-intensity "Peacekeeping" action, but its not to peer levels.
I think a reasonable data point would be the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and US involvement in Vietnam.
The USSR was able to keep its deployment in Afghanistan going for a decade, even with Afghanistan getting outside aid.
Now true it was utterly ruinous for them and set the stage for the fall of the USSR and the dark times of the 90s, but they ran for much longer than 5 years.
The US committed vast resources to Vietnam and had a limited draft, and that went on well over a decade.
But admittedly neither of those map very well to current. In Afghanistan the opposition never really held territory and there was no armor-on-armor clashes. In Vietnam there was a significant trailing off as the conflict was progressively handed over the Vietnamese.
Since I've stepped on some rather long and sensitive toes.
Let me stomp down on them a bit more.
The US was late to the world wars because both had been going on before the US joined them.
For instance by the time Patton go to the Kassarine pass the battle for Stalingrad had already been going on for 4 months.
The prevailing narrative and the one Trump will give you is that those wars where crusades for democracy. But the US didn't join those wars out of ideological zeal. That makes it's self image in relation to those wars fake and thus gay.
Hence the US was late and gay to both world wars.
Sorry I missed where you posted how much of France & continental Europe in general was liberated before the US joined. Round numbers is fine, percentage or area, you don't have to be too precise. If you need to wait for the call to prayer to stop broadcasting before you can concentrate I understand.
