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Russia-Ukraine SITREP for 18 JAN 2024 23:59* PST - O for Orwellian

🕑 Added 2024-01-19 11:03:14 +0000 UTC

Comments

Ethan Stein

Your thoughts have occurred to me as well. I do wonder if Germany believes that given their history with Russia and being the largest economy that Russia would find German actions more inflammatory than French or British. Or perhaps a completion of FGB providing arms would be a final straw. I don't know. I kind of understand their fears and think really it is a country we are not naming is the biggest problem with the effort against Russian aggression.

Berlin, Germany: After the vote yesterday, it seems the chances of Germany delivering the Taurus are diminishingly low. Scholz’ logic seems to be that the risks of escalation outweigh the benefits the weapon system could have on the battlefield. An expectation could have been that if a third country supplies ballistic missiles to Russia then the west would respond by supplying Ukraine with longer range systems, but North Korea has evidently done that, so that was not enough to tip Scholz’ scales. Other western nations are supplying longer range weapons so the safety in numbers principle also doesn’t tip the scales. If the Malcontent assessment is correct and the Russian military will really run out of steam in 18-24 months, and western intelligence services have a similar assessment, then perhaps western leaders would like to let that happen and hope that the Russian regime then implodes. At that point, Ukraine could get its territory back without much resistance. Perhaps that is line with the frog-in-boiling-water analogy. If we throw a bunch of super powerful weapons systems at Russia, she will react wildly, but if the heat slowly increases, she will boil without reaction.