DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Russia's Invasion of Ukraine

Previous thread was at 11 pages. Thank you to everyone for posting videos and updates. It's great to be able to use threads on this site as an aggregator.

On the topic of sanctions: the invasion is well underway. Russia is reportedly pushing towards the capitol. Why are we "keeping rounds in the chamber" as far as sanctions? Aren't all sanctions reversible? If you're trying to get the opposition to take you seriously, why are you holding back while Russia is firing real bullets?

Sanctions can be reversed, but the damage caused isn't all that easy to turn around.

As was covered in the other pages, some of the European countries aren't on board since they get half or more of their energy from Russia. They don't want to throw their countries in to a depression like state.

If your gas pump and lights were going to be shut down, how eager would you be ?

and THIS is what Putin has been banking on. He doesn't require support of other nations as much as he does enough inaction or unwillingness to commit fully that the rest of Europe & the U.S. is prevented from any meaningful or potentially effective means of acting against him.

If anyone doesn't think he had conversations with many of those nations to feel things out prior to making this move, you'd be naive. This isn't a rash move he's making; it has been planned and timed with intent.


All of these Neville's are going to accomplish nothing but making this even bigger.
One thing is for DAMNED SURE.... we had best be ramping up our military production. Add 3rd shifts in the shipyards. Get the Joint Chiefs to set new standards that increase the size of our standing military to late 80's levels.
Scuttle any plans for decom'ing ships and start pulling some ships out of mothballs. Start uncrating the strategic reserves and blowing the dust off everything.

I think the thing with sanctions as a deterrent or as a negotiating 'strategy' - they are only effective as a threat. Once enacted - you have zip.

Depending on the nature of the sanction, you're mostly right, but some things force a continuous pressure on the people.

The thing is.... he doesn't care. He doesn't care what the impact is on his people. He doesn't care what his people are saying. He's going to squash any public protesting and arrest anyone and anything that speaks out against him. It is already happening.
Unless it gets to the point where the generals inside Red Square turn against him, what the people try to do won't mean much at all.... and I think that unless things get REALLY DIRE you won't get together a collection of enough of them opposing him to make a change.


Literally, the *only* real value of sanctions right now, as I see it, is that they hurt him economically while we put chess pieces on the board, which takes time.
The build-up for D-Day took like three years. Our build-up during Desert Shield took like three months. In this case, we have everything we need already at bases scattered across western Europe, but what we don't have and need the most is Germany... and until they stop taking Putin's side, we're stymied.

Or.....

I don't subscribe to The NY Times. I hope there is more to this. If not, good grief.

I'm beginning to feel like this is a Russian/Putin version of Shock and Awe. They have gone in and will seemingly swiftly take control. They will then establish a pro-Putin regime and then agree to leave. Seems no-one has the stones to engage militarily with Putin - so he gets what he wants. And we probably get to do this all over again in a few years.

We’ve been trying to ramp up production - at least on the stuff that I’m familiar with. Problems I’ve seen is on the contractor’s end (I’m sure they wouldn’t admit it). One moved production from its primary location to an area that would “save costs.” Lo and behold, they don’t know how to make the weapon system and now we’re several production lots back-logged in orders.

I think it’s going to take a combination of schedule and performance incentives plus a host of real, actual teeth if they keep screwing it up. Problem is, we’re so sole-source driven with our weapon systems that they often won’t agree unless the incentives amount to very little challenge to them, and our legislatures and O-6 level and above officers overseeing the acquisitions have left us with all gums and no teeth.

There’s a global strategy to inspire innovation and expand the industry to more modular designs made by more commercial and/or competitive entities, while maintaining more rights to share the data, but that’s a long term strategy, and one that our legacy producers either fight against, or they simply just acquire the new up-and-coming business.

It would take a huge reversal in paradigm across the board (blue and red) in our legislature to fix the problem.

I should start a different thread on it because I could really go down the rabbit hole on here.

well, let's not get carried away. There's no need to go nuclear... yet.

I think China has to be loving this.

Putin is getting all the attention and they will likely be able to ramp up their prices to him in several key sectors because his dependence on them will grow from the sanctions. Cha-Ching for them in terms of how much they can sell, and shrewdly. I saw a phrase that I agree with: China doesn’t have friends. They have vassals. If Russia wants to be bellicose, China will help them out…at a high price.

On the other hand, they get to watch Putin be the Guinea pig. “Hey, look, this guy whose military is less stronger than ours is getting away with this aggression. The west has all their eyes on him, let’s ramp up our building of Pacific bases, and begin plans for Taiwan.”

Screw incentives.... if your company policies are getting in the way of this nation defending its interests, you need to be burned to the ground. This isn't play time. There is only ONE answer: Get the damn job done. Make it happen.

Anyone that can't or won't do that.... if their company is vital, War Powers Act. Take it over and throw those people out and put an E-9 in charge that knows how to get things done.
If the company isn't vital, carte blanche cancel all business with them and give everything to another company. There's no room for playing games.

Too late...

Ukrainian former world champions Wladimir Kitschko, Vitali Klitschko take up arms amid Russian invasion
Vitali -- the mayor of Kyiv, Ukraine -- said this week 'I don't have another choice' but to fight against Russian invaders

https://www.cbssports.com/boxing/ne...chko-take-up-arms-amid-russian-invasion/

And if you see Prp exit his car in the parking lot... walking in to check progress... HIDE UNDER YOUR DESK UNTIL "ALL CLEAR"!

I haven't seen any aggression out of China. Why all the talk of China, China, China? IMHO, China is taking the same hit many democracies are taking because of Putin's War. The economic impact will be felt around the world. China already has the world in a manufacturing/labor disadvantage. They have all but won the economic war with the US. Why would they use this to do something to get themselves sanctioned? US sanctions on goods from China would be crippling to both them and US. I think the Chinese are ruthless in seeking advantage, but they are far from stupid in how they go about it.

U.S. Officials Repeatedly Urged China to Help Avert War in Ukraine

Americans presented Chinese officials with intelligence on Russia’s troop buildup in hopes that President Xi Jinping would step in, but were repeatedly rebuffed.

By Edward Wong
Feb. 25, 2022Updated 10:06 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON — Over three months, senior Biden administration officials held half a dozen urgent meetings with top Chinese officials in which the Americans presented intelligence showing Russia’s troop buildup around Ukraine and beseeched the Chinese to tell Russia not to invade, according to U.S. officials.

Each time, the Chinese officials, including the foreign minister and the ambassador to the United States, rebuffed the Americans, saying they did not think an invasion was in the works. After one diplomatic exchange in December, U.S. officials got intelligence showing Beijing had shared the information with Moscow, telling the Russians that the United States was trying to sow discord — and that China would not try to impede Russian plans and actions, the officials said.

The previously unreported talks between American and Chinese officials show how the Biden administration tried to use intelligence findings and diplomacy to persuade a superpower it views as a growing adversary to stop the invasion of Ukraine, and how that nation, led by President Xi Jinping, persistently sided with Russia even as the evidence of Moscow’s plans for a military offensive grew over the winter.

This account is based on interviews with senior administration officials with knowledge of the conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the diplomacy. The Chinese Embassy did not return requests for comment.

China is Russia’s most powerful partner, and the two nations have been strengthening their bond for many years across diplomatic, economic and military realms. Mr. Xi and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, two autocrats with some shared ideas about global power, had met 37 times as national leaders before this year. If any world leader could make Mr. Putin think twice about invading Ukraine, it was Mr. Xi, went the thinking of some U.S. officials.

But the diplomatic efforts failed, and Mr. Putin began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Thursday morning after recognizing two Russia-backed insurgent enclaves in the country’s east as independent states.

In a call on Friday, Mr. Putin told Mr. Xi that the United States and NATO had ignored Russia’s “reasonable” security concerns and had reneged on their commitments, according to a readout of the call released by the Chinese state news media. Mr. Xi reiterated China’s public position that it was important to respect the “legitimate security concerns” as well as the “sovereignty and territorial integrity” of all countries. Mr. Putin told Mr. Xi that Russia was willing to negotiate with Ukraine, and Mr. Xi said China supported any such move.

Some American officials say the ties between China and Russia appear stronger than at any time since the Cold War. The two now present themselves as an ideological front against the United States and its European and Asian allies, even as Mr. Putin carries out the invasion of Ukraine, whose sovereignty China has recognized for decades.

The growing alarm among American and European officials at the alignment between China and Russia has reached a new peak with the Ukraine crisis, exactly 50 years to the week after President Richard M. Nixon made a historic trip to China to restart diplomatic relations to make common cause in counterbalancing the Soviet Union. For 40 years after that, the relationship between the United States and China grew stronger, especially as lucrative trade ties developed, but then frayed due to mutual suspicions, intensifying strategic competition and antithetical ideas about power and governance.

In the recent private talks on Ukraine, American officials heard language from their Chinese counterparts that was consistent with harder lines the Chinese had been voicing in public, which showed that a more hostile attitude had become entrenched, according to the American accounts.

On Wednesday, after Mr. Putin ordered troops into eastern Ukraine but before its full invasion, Hua Chunying, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said at a news conference in Beijing that the United States was “the culprit of current tensions surrounding Ukraine.”

“On the Ukraine issue, lately the U.S. has been sending weapons to Ukraine, heightening tensions, creating panic and even hyping up the possibility of warfare,” she said. “If someone keeps pouring oil on the flame while accusing others of not doing their best to put out the fire, such kind of behavior is clearly irresponsible and immoral.”

She added: “When the U.S. drove five waves of NATO expansion eastward all the way to Russia’s doorstep and deployed advanced offensive strategic weapons in breach of its assurances to Russia, did it ever think about the consequences of pushing a big country to the wall?” She has refused to call Russia’s assault an “invasion” when pressed by foreign journalists.

Ms. Hua’s fiery anti-American remarks as Russia was moving to attack its neighbor stunned some current and former U.S. officials and China analysts in the United States. But the verbal grenades echo major points in the 5,000-word joint statement that China and Russia issued on Feb. 4 when Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin met at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing. In that document, the two countries declared their partnership had “no limits” and that they intended to stand together against American-led democratic nations. China also explicitly sided with Russia in the text to denounce enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Last Saturday, [censored] Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, criticized NATO in a video talk at the Munich Security Conference. European leaders in turn accused China of working with Russia to overturn what they and the Americans say is a “rules-based international order.” Mr. [censored] did say that Ukraine’s sovereignty should be “respected and safeguarded” — a reference to a foreign policy principle that Beijing often cites — but no Chinese officials have mentioned Ukraine in those terms since Russia’s full invasion began.

“They claim neutrality, they claim they stand on principle, but everything they say about the causes is anti-U.S., blaming NATO and adopting the Russian line,” said Evan Medeiros, a Georgetown University professor who was senior Asia director at the White House National Security Council in the Obama administration. “The question is: How sustainable is that as a posture? How much damage does it do to their ties with the U.S. and their ties with Europe?”

The Biden administration’s diplomatic outreach to China to try to avert war began after President Biden and Mr. Xi held a video summit on Nov. 15. In the talk, the two leaders acknowledged challenges in the relationship between their nations, which is at its lowest point in decades, but agreed to try to cooperate on issues of common interest, including health security, climate change and nuclear weapons proliferation, White House officials said at the time.

After the meeting, American officials decided that the Russian troop buildup around Ukraine presented the most immediate problem that China and the United States could try to defuse together. Some officials thought the outcome of the video summit indicated there was potential for an improvement in U.S.-China relations. Others were more skeptical, but thought it was important to leave no stone unturned in efforts to prevent Russia from attacking, one official said.

Days later, White House officials met with the ambassador, Qin Gang, at the Chinese Embassy. They told the ambassador what U.S. intelligence agencies had detected: a gradual encirclement of Ukraine by Russian forces, including armored units. William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, had flown to Moscow on Nov. 2 to confront the Russians with the same information, and on Nov. 17, American intelligence officials shared their findings with NATO.

At the Chinese Embassy, Russia’s aggression was the first topic in a discussion that ran more than one and a half hours. In addition to laying out the intelligence, the White House officials told the ambassador that the United States would impose tough sanctions on Russian companies, officials and businesspeople in the event of an invasion, going far beyond those announced by the Obama administration after Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014.

The U.S. officials said the sanctions would also hurt China over time because of its commercial ties.

They also pointed out they knew how China had helped Russia evade some of the 2014 sanctions, and warned Beijing against any such future aid. And they argued that because China was widely seen as a partner of Russia, its global image could suffer if Mr. Putin invaded.

The message was clear: It would be in China’s interests to persuade Mr. Putin to stand down. But their entreaties went nowhere. Mr. Qin was skeptical and suspicious, an American official said.

American officials spoke with the ambassador about Russia at least three more times, both in the embassy and on the phone. Wendy R. Sherman, the deputy secretary of state, had a call with him. Mr. Qin continued to express skepticism and said Russia had legitimate security concerns in Europe.

The Americans also went higher on the diplomatic ladder: Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken spoke to Mr. [censored] about the problem in late January and again on Monday, the same day Mr. Putin ordered the new troops into Russia-backed enclaves of Ukraine.

“The secretary underscored the need to preserve Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” said a State Department summary of the call that used the phrase that Chinese diplomats like to employ in signaling to other nations not to get involved in matters involving Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong, all considered separatist problems by Beijing.

American officials met with Mr. Qin in Washington again on Wednesday and heard the same rebuttals. Hours later, Mr. Putin declared war on Ukraine on television, and his military began pummeling the country with ballistic missiles as tanks rolled across the border.

Edward Wong is a diplomatic and international correspondent who has reported for The Times for more than 20 years, 13 from Iraq and China. He received a Livingston Award and was on a team of Pulitzer Prize finalists for Iraq War coverage. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton.

lol, I was just raised in a different military. There are only those that get it done, and those that give excuses.
If you're told to move some big, massive winch that's welded in place to the deck, you don't go Cap't Obvious and whine that it's welded in place and weighs 7 tons. You grab a grinder and make it portable, then you find something that can move that weight.
You solve problems. If you need some parts to get a job done, but you don't have any and when calling around to other piers you can't find a ship willing to give up any of theirs... you go to the Exchange, buy a hat for that ship, and go aboard like you're part of their crew and go get one yourself.

I’m all for what you’re saying. I just don’t think our friends in the legislature are.

Wonder where they get their donations…

They just yesterday or the day before sent what I believe was 9? aircraft into Taiwan’s defense zone. It wasn’t a coincidence. I also don’t recall them using that much aircraft previously. There was also the leaked censorship talking about how they need to support Russia in Ukraine because of the similar comparison to Taiwan.

Yes, they are very calculated, pragmatic and intelligent, but also aggressive and growing more bold.

I don’t think they’re worried that they will be sanctioned. There’s multiple articles talking about how Russia could deepen its trading with China to offset sanctions.

Here’s one:

https://www.reuters.com/business/sa...-flow-shifting-towards-china-2022-02-23/

Taiwan is a bit different from the Ukraine situation. The US does a ton of business with Taiwan. Can't imagine the corporate masters settling for sanctions if Taiwan gets taken. And I'm not saying it's impossible, just less than likely. Nobody can really predict what greed or opportunity will cause to happen in our relationship with aggressive actors. I guess we will see.

Putin and XI are playing chess and Biden is stuck playing checkers. As I said earlier there are consequences to elections the Russian aggression is a consequence of 2020 here in the US. Once the strong man is bound then his home can be violated. The Leader of the free world is weak then the wolves come out. Plain and simple fact!!!

LOL. If you tink this would be any different with anyone else in the WH you are flat wrong. But sure - try to make out this is a Biden thing.

Actually, it's a completely reasonable takeaway, just as it could very well be entirely different if there was a different Chancellor in Germany right now. Don't kid yourself... Putin knows his adversaries.

I also like how he made is scroll through that entire copypasta to get to his little nugget of insight.

He could have saved us all some time and simply wrote "Biden bad. "

I think there should be WAY MORE talk about rolling back current administration policies against gas, drilling on federal lands, to have greater domestic oil production. Production needs ramped up immediately. The US went from being a net exporter of oil back to buying more from OPEC, Russia, etc
I hold Biden directly responsible for this and he could help the situation by realizing he made a mistake and reverse what he did for the good of the country.

I wasn't alive for this but I heard during the Reagan administration the influx of other countries flooding the market with oil choked off Russia's biggest money maker which was oil (still is). If more countries ramped up oil production I believe maybe we could repeat history.

Why would anyone need to trade with Russia at that point? Would they even have anything that people actually need or want?

jc

aye i just have to be honest here. with the videos/photos that i'm seeing....man both the russian and ukrainian militaries are using some old ass busted equipment. i'm looking at some of these vehicles going "wait militaries still use those?"

yall can say what you want about military spending, but never in my deployments were we working with anything that close to garbage. i feel like this is what bosnia-kosovo looked like, just 2022 with wifi.

i dunno. i guess i expected better. especially from big bad Russia. i get that ukraine is broke and all...but damn.

Helsinki. Stop crying that Biden is weak. Nobody is as weak as your guy was against Putin. Your argument is actually tantamount to giving aid to the enemy. All this right-wing BS about Biden, is making us look much weaker than we are. You are helping Putin by spreading propaganda and faux outrage. Super patriotic on your part. This BS disgusts me.

You got a right to think whatever you want to think. I'm glad you get to put it into the digital sphere, so generations can read what was said by people like you in these times. This is pure lunacy, and now it's your legacy. Elections do have consequences, and the right lost.

i have to emphasize this. im so dead ass serious when i say a Ram TRX with armored plating would be better than some of the military trucks they're currently using. i swear to god we are watching JV squads fight each other right now and i'm kinda sad.

I don't know about Trump, but I am fairly certain that a number of the Democrats that lost in the primaries would have handled this type of thing differently. Certainly Gabbard and Sanders would take a different approach to foreign relations and likely so would Yang, Booker, and Beto.

How can we just conveniently overlook that Biden was chiefly responsible for the situation in Ukraine that led up to this? He headed up the coup of the democratically elected government and installation of the puppet regime that was never accepted by the ethnic Russians living in the Donbas. He negotiated the aid and arms deals that helped arm militias that have stirred up additional tensions in the Donbas for the past 8 years, and he is the one that has a family that is benefiting from the coup in the Ukraine.

I find it hard to believe that his election to President has helped calm tensions in the region given the history.

Pretend this is written in crayola and try to grasp it… Biden DID NOT CAUSE PUTIN TO ATTACK. Putin is doing Putin, and nobody saw this coming a few months ago. All this anti Biden BS is hurting our stance right now, maybe it can wait until midterms and we could try to be patriotic for 5 minutes now.

I think Biden and his sanctions are weak af, but I'm not going to bash the man dealing with this situation while IT'S ONGOING.

China still has a problem with Taiwan declaring its independence. However, I think that there is a bigger issue with Taiwan. Taiwan and South Korea currently make over over 70% of the worlds supply of advanced semiconductor chips. China buys over 50% of Taiwan's chips and need more. The Trump administration blacklisted some Chinese companies, including China's top chipmaker. We wanted to cut off US technology from being used for the Chinese military. Biden administration has continued the blacklist of China companies. From the couple articles I saw, it looks like China still is the worlds leader in consumer printed circuit boards

Two weeks ago, the White House blacklisted seven Chinese companies to keep the largest chipmaker in the world, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), from selling advanced microchips to China. Those chips would have been used to make advanced weapons as well, officials said when announcing the sanctions. Beijing continues to lag in domestic manufacturing of computer chips and relies on imports to support its growing economy.

China might feel at this point it is just easier to go take Taiwan so they could control the worlds chip supply.

And I didn't know if I would be alive or not, but I remember talking to my dad in the 80's about all the manufacturing closing down and moving offshore and when I was working for a company in the 90's that was a division of GM that I basically got to see them piece by piece remove almost every piece of equipment and pallet them for another cheaper plant out of this country that at some point we are not going to be able to manufacture the items to save our own ass

I try to avoid social media at all costs these days, but if they're still using things like late 80's Soviet BMP's and flying mostly MiG29's, then we *could* maybe steamroll them with one carrier. That's the same gear Iraq was rolling with in the 90's.


I still think that flattening his fleet in the Black Sea is a good opening move. Launch those fancy new F-35s with cruise missiles, set them free about 10 feet above the waves, and watch them clear a path to flattening their airfields and taking the port. Our tech advantage could have air superiority over the theater within five to seven days, I bet.

Hell, send an SDV with two teams and a bunch of limpet mines.... super quiet and fun to watch, lol!

That's an interesting perspective with some things I've not read about. Controlling that chip supply right now would be huge for China. I could see them pulling a stunt for that, but only if they think the world will let them do it and get away with it. Just like Russia, nobody wants war with them, but sanctions and restrictions could cost them dearly. Extremely volatile situation with chips, because every country wants them.

And in reply to my earlier post, if anybody has any sway with Intel and them going to build the semiconductor plants outside of Columbus.
They only want to build 2 out of the 8 possible plants now; I think that if I was in state/federal government, I might want to nudge them along to start the engineering of all 8 plants now

You think Putin would ever use his nukes? I didn't use to think he would, but if his goal is to retake the USSR territories, he has to be willing to use them now, IMO.

One of the few things Trump had right, was that we don't manufacture enough to meet our national security needs. We must rebuild our manufacturing capabilities, to at minimum insure we can be self sufficient in time of war.

Sanctions immediately become a thing of the past once you control assets the rest of the world needs. If China got Taiwan, how long do you think it would be before they tell the world they are cut off form what Taiwan produces unless sanctions are dropped?

I think maybe 48 hours, tops.
Economic coercion works both ways when both sides have something the other needs.... and China would have more leverage than we would because they'd have what they came for. Additionally, like Putin, they don't give a damn about their people and the impact of sanctions.


Folks need to realize that sanctions rarely accomplish anything except making innocent people more miserable than they were. It's a politician trying to do a general's job. The politician isn't going to affect the army's supply lines, they only going to hamper the civilians' supplies, and if the leader of that nation doesn't care AND has the clout/power/following/fanaticism/fear/muscle to back up not caring, sanctions become nothing but empty rhetoric. Look how long Saddam lived with his nation under crazy sanctions. His people were crazy poor and miserable, but he was still living quite well and comfortably. HE was unaffected.

Sancctions are what a government does when it's afraid to actually do anything of substance but needs to APPEAR to be doing SOMETHING/ANYTHING.

I don’t disagree with you. I definitely think this plays into their planning process though.

I agree. There’s a big difference between calling to do more and just outright looking for an opportunity to blame, and we all know who started that dynamic. You and I were both let down of the stance that was offered yesterday at the podium, because we want a stronger response. I’m sure many will deny that they are looking for such an opportunity, but I think they are being dishonest with themselves.

I’m all for pressuring Biden to do more, but the whole “I hOlD BiDeN ReSPonsIBle for UkRAInE!” is disingenuously displaced rage, at best. Focus on condemning the perpetrator, and advocate for what needs to be done to reach the correct solution.

FWIW, I’d like to pull on tasty’s point about oil. I do think we need to start exploring all ramp-up production options. I do agree with the longer term goal of moving away from it, but the recent situation I think takes precedence. JMO.

Off topic, but one of our restoration hangars on base a couple years back was restoring an Iraqi Mig-25 right next to the road that led off base. Got to see it every day. I guess it was buried in a sand bunker to hide it and then forgotten about. Pretty cool to see.

There’s also a Nazi trabsport plane in one of the hangars. It’s a bit jarring when you come to work and then see a plane with a swastika on the tail.