Russia Invades Ukraine. Again by captaincrunch

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Saturday, May 31, 2025 06:48
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Saturday, May 31, 2025 6:46 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

What Germany’s support for Ukraine’s missiles really means

By Demian Shevko | May 30, 2025, 07:20 AM

https://english.nv.ua/russian-war/russia-relocates-strategic-bombers-t
o-olenya-amid-fear-of-ukrainian-strikes-50518239.html

Q: Are you encouraged by Germany’s recent announcement that it will invest in Ukrainian long-range weapons production?

— Germany is applying the Danish model: "We give you the money, and you develop and produce the weapons yourselves."

To be honest, that’s better than endless talk about the Taurus missiles—how they’re "on the table," but not quite yet, the stars haven't aligned. Better just to hand over the funds.

In the long run, this is the more effective approach. The number of Taurus missiles available is limited, and transferring them remains questionable due to supply constraints.

I think we should lobby Germany for joint development of long-range weapons. It would be faster and cheaper for them to co-develop and procure from Ukraine than from other European firms.

Q: Is there precedent for such cooperation?

— Germany is a founding member of the ELSA program, which includes Italy, France, the UK, Poland, and the Netherlands. Its goal is to develop long-range missiles capable of reaching Moscow from within the EU—over 1,000 kilometers.

They signed that agreement last summer. Since then, nothing has changed. It remains just a memorandum.

Germany is also looking into buying Tomahawks and developing a 2,000-kilometer-range missile with the UK. France isn’t even invited to that. They haven’t managed to convince any EU country to buy their land-based naval missile variant.

So amid all this empty talk in Europe, we should push for joint development with Ukraine. It would be quicker, cheaper, and more effective.

Of course, that would run up against the lobbying power of giants like MBDA, the European missile consortium. But it’s still worth advocating.

Q: So what kind of weapon would Ukraine need to hit Olenya Airbase? Missiles? Drones? How heavy would the warhead have to be?

— Olenya is roughly 2,000 kilometers away—1900 km as the crow flies, but actual flight distance is longer.

Let’s say we use a cruise missile flying a zigzag route to avoid air defense. If you look at the map, launching from Kyiv would require bypassing Belarus and ideally Saint Petersburg too. You’d need to route through the White Sea area to reach the target.

That could mean a real flight distance of 2,500 to 3,000 km. A Tomahawk only flies 1,600 km.

So if I could hypothetically shop for missiles, I’d go for a ballistic missile with a cluster warhead weighing between 500 kg and a ton. That’s the only conventional weapon that could realistically do the job over that range.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, May 31, 2025 6:48 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Putin is blowing a golden opportunity to escape his Ukraine disaster

By David Ignatius | May 30, 2025

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/05/30/putin-trump-ukraine
-peace-deal-opportunity/

Russians have an expression that translates in colloquial English as “we blew it.” That’s an accurate summary of President Vladimir Putin’s failure so far to seize the diplomatic opportunity presented by the election of President Donald Trump.

Kremlin officials gloated when Trump took office in January. After Trump called Putin on Feb. 12, spokesman Dmitry Peskov purred that “the U.S. is taking a much more balanced position” on the Ukraine war. In early March, as Trump began squeezing Ukraine for concessions, Peskov said: “The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. … This largely coincides with our vision.”

Administration officials offered a deal that seemed to meet Putin’s minimum goals: If Russia agreed to a ceasefire, it could keep the territory it occupied in Crimea and four other regions. Moreover, Ukraine wouldn’t be allowed to join NATO after the war, and sanctions against Russia would be eased. Rather than a pariah, Putin would become an economic partner for the United States.

But an arrogant Putin rejected Trump’s deal. He refuses to accept a ceasefire until after negotiations about the war’s “root causes,” where Russian sources say he plans to demand limits on Ukraine’s military and political independence. Putin’s version of a peace deal would give him control over Ukraine that he hasn’t been able to win on the battlefield.

“Putin got greedy. He thought he could get more than what was on the table,” explained Eric Ciaramella, a former top Russia analyst for the CIA who’s now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Now, Putin might get nothing. Russia plans to submit its terms for settlement next month, but this diktat is likely to be rejected by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

If Trump walks away from a failed negotiation, as he has threatened to do, Putin will have a free hand. But what will that mean? The war will continue, probably more brutally than before. Ukraine’s cities will be pounded by missiles and drones, but Russia’s might be, too. And Putin will be further than ever from his goal of creating a friendly, pro-Russian Ukraine on his border.

“Putin has created his own nightmare,” Ciaramella argued. “Ukraine was weak militarily before the war, but now it’s getting stronger and stronger, and closer to Europe. Russia has produced exactly what it wanted to prevent.”

To appreciate the magnitude of Putin’s failure, it helps to go back to his statement when he launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, coyly labeling it a “special military operation.” He protested that “in the territories adjacent to us … an ‘anti-Russia’ hostile to us is being created … and is supplied with the most modern weapons.”

Putin vowed that Russia would regain control of a country that was “historically ours.” And he warned the West: “Whoever tries to interfere with us, and even more so to create threats for our country, for our people, should know that Russia’s response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences that you have never experienced in your history.”

Three years later, Putin has not even managed to gain control of the region of Donetsk, let alone the country. In the first year of the war, his army suffered more casualties than in all its wars since 1945 combined. And though Russia now has the upper hand, Ukraine has shown that, with European backing, it can keep fighting for at least several more years.

Some Russian analysts saw signs last fall that Putin had realized his goal of reversing Ukraine’s “anti-Russia” status was impossible. Konstantin Remchukov, a well-connected Russian journalist, argued in October that “Russia recognizes that a significant number of Ukrainians choose the current government in the country, consider themselves Ukrainians, and do not want to see any future together with Russia.”

But that optimistic analysis turned out to be wrong. Putin was set in his hard-line position, and he believed Trump’s election would allow him to neuter Ukraine, at last. That was Putin’s mistake. He overreached.

Russia’s predicament “is an irony of Putin’s own making,” Ciaramella explained in a December 2023 paper. “Despite claiming to have invaded Ukraine to increase Russia’s security, Putin’s blunder saddled his country with a far more dangerous challenge. So long as Russian forces occupy Ukrainian territory, Ukraine will constitute, in the words of Carnegie scholar Eugene Rumer, ‘the most threatening, hostile, irreconcilable enemy on Russia’s western frontier.’”

Tatiana Stanovaya, a Carnegie scholar with close ties to Putin’s inner circle, was skeptical that Trump would provide a safe hatch in November, after his election. She explained: “The problem is that no Western leader — including Trump — has a plan for ending the war that would be remotely acceptable to Putin.”

Stanovaya, probably the best Putin-watcher outside Russia, explained his current goal in a May 19 post on X: “What he truly wants is for Ukrainians to accept that they cannot win, that there is no point in continuing to fight against Russia, and that Moscow is prepared to persevere regardless of the cost because it views the conflict as existential.”

Putin’s mistake, now as in 2022, is that he underestimates Ukraine’s will to fight. When I visited Kyiv this month, I found a population hardened to war, even as ballistic missiles ravaged Ukraine’s cities. Putin had tried to destroy Ukraine’s energy grid. He failed. The idea that he can bomb his way to victory by breaking Ukraine’s morale is probably mistaken. Wars don’t work that way.

Russia and Ukraine are locked in a death spiral. Tragically, this war could go on for years, leaving both sides in bloody ruin — and raising the risk of a wider European war. The only way Trump can stop the carnage is to significantly raise the cost for Putin and alter the Russian president’s decision calculus. Otherwise, the missiles will keep flying.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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