MJ20/20 said:
There's definitely a lot of proganda on both sides, but that's the world we live in. Everything is proganda these days.
What I have a hard time with is if Russia is this paper tiger with inept leadership, dilapidated equipment, cold war technology, neglected and defunct nuclear arsenal, etc... why haven't they been shoved out of Ukraine? Why haven't the pro Ukraine powers grabbed this three legged, blind, and deaf red bear by the balls and thrown it over the fence?
Russian's actions are the equivalent of me walking uninvited into one of your houses grabbing a beer making a sandwich and sitting in your chair. When you and your buddies come in the room I say get the **** out I'm trying to watch TV and you all ***** and moan but go in the other room anyway.
It's why I don't really believe what we are being told. The story doesn't add up. The actions are not matching the words.
Numbers and nukes.
Russia does have inept leadership. That is evidenced by their bungled initial invasion and getting bogged down and losing A LOT of equipment, including a bunch of EW and radar gear that was basically abandoned intact early on. They've also experienced multiple explosions and the near complete loss of weapons dumps due to poor storage and handling.
Much of their equipment is dilapidated and does suck. Their tanks are ****ing terrible, which has been evident since Desert Storm. However, not all of their equipment sucks. They're actually very good at EW and air defense against manned aircraft. They have adapted to tactics to hit strategic targets behind their lines.
Yes, they're kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to equipment, but they're also likely producing just enough to get by. They can't move forward, but they aren't getting pushed out either.
What the Russians have going for them is numbers. They have a lot of bodies, and the tried and true strategy of the red army for many decades has been to simply overwhelm their opponent. They can do that to Ukraine because they're just so much bigger. After we outproduced the Germans into submission during WWII and watched the Russians push them back with shear numbers, we realized we couldn't defeat the red army the same way because Russia was proportionally the same size to us as we were to Germany. During the Cold War, we strove to fill that gap with enhanced capabilities, maximizing our potential kill ratio in any hypothetical conflict. Ukraine does not have that luxury because we're not giving them the best of what we have. They're basically getting what we went into Desert Storm and the Iraq War with, and it's on par with what Russia is fielding. So Ukraine can hold their own, but they can't exactly push Russia out, either.
The Russian nuclear arsenal is a black box. People assume there's been no maintenance or upkeep because that's the state of many of Russia's arsenals and the history of Russian military corruption, but nukes are a strategic asset and probably watched a lot more closely. They might be complete ****, but they also might not. No one really wants to try to answer that question, least of all the Europeans. That's why no one is pushing too hard. Personally, I think Russia probably takes decent care of its nuclear weapons stockpile, but they wouldn't use them because of MAD.
The analogy would be more accurate if you had a gun, but we pulled ours and blocked the TV. Russia isn't being pushed back, but they're also still burning a lot of money, resources, and manpower to stay where they are. They don't have what they want yet, so it's still kind of a standoff.
