cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/59867996
German media outlets Süddeutsche Zeitung, WDR, and NDR also cite the report, noting that Russian President Vladimir Putin appears intent on testing NATO’s Article 5 guarantees. The alliance’s mutual defence clause obliges member states to come to one another’s aid if attacked. The assessment suggests Putin may seek to challenge how seriously that commitment would be honoured.
Take out putin now and set the stage for a world at “peace” with humanity’s eye back on a civilized future.
Problem is the people waiting to take over from Putin. They’re not at all nice.
Take them out first so it looks like Putin is doing it.
None of the candidates are nice and most are much, much worse. Don’t recall the name, but one of them basically is ready to drop the h bombs and push us all straight into WWIII because reasons.
If anyone takes out Putin, they’ll have to take out the entire military top and government of Russia with it or we’re all fucked
Eh, it’s the sword rattling. Common tactic to make himself look strong and to be feared. He could still be spineless or once not under watchful eye of Putin, a drastically different person.
Putin isn’t known for keeping people around if they’re a threat to him.
Putin has made his country after his own image; deceptive, criminal, deceitful, isolated, and violent… so you’re probably right there are no decent people to take up after he’s gone.
So I just looked into the numbers quickly and am probably off by a bit
NATO has 3.2m active military personnel and 2.2m in reserve
Russia has 1.5m active and 2m reserve
BUT, American forces make up 1.3m of NATOs active and 800k reserve
If I were to randomly combine the American army with Russia rather than NATO for no particular reason,
NATO would have 1.9m active 1.4m reserve and the Axis-sorry I mean Russia and America would have 2.8m active 2.8m reserve…
Maybe this is a suicidal plan, Putin is going to die and wants to take the world with him. From what we know about him, he is megalomaniacal and sadistic enough to want something like this.
He must also be counting on the United States being out of NATO by then, maybe Trump will even send some soldiers to help his Russian allies.
It has nothing to do with wanting to actually fight NATO. The idea is to manufacture a carefully crafted situation where Article 5 is triggered, but due to internal disagreement and individual risk, it is not fully honored.
Needless to say, any such move would be very risky.
And Trump’s United States will be one of those not to honour Article 5, if they are still part of NATO at that time.
The number of personnel won’t really matter here past a threshold. Looking at Ukraine Russian war it’s clear most of the fighting will be done with suicide drones, ones that can be produced en mass by any country more or less.
There’s no way the US military would side with Russia, even if ordered to.
Would you say they’re at the top of that slippery slope, or part way down it already?
Maybe today’s top brass wouldn’t, but there are probably enough JD Vance types among the MAGA lovin’ grunts to promote, to structure an army that’ll take Trump at his word. If he says ‘Europe were the enemy all along’, enough times, with enough conviction…
Wouldn’t have believed it myself until this year.
George W. Bush convinced Americans that France was an enemy for a while, and his supporters lapped it up. Today Trump has large chunks of his cult believing that Canada is an enemy. There’s apparently no limit to the absurdities and poison people will swallow if their beloved cult leader tells them to.
Big difference from renaming French fries to actual boots-on-the-ground fighting.
famous last words.
I hope you’re right.
I agree. People underestimate how our perspectives of war have shifted tremendously in the past century. The ideological shift towards xenophobia and nationalism in recent years is undeniable, but it lacks the context of the world prior to the world wars.
War was the default state. It was expected. Not just colonization, oppression, or revolution. No. Prior to the 20th century, humanity had experienced a nearly constant stream of full-scale, all-out, nation-making and nation-breaking wars.
In the modern day, American “wars” happen in deserts and distant places. There is a level of cognitive dissonance in the public and military consciousness, a separation of “us” vs. “them”, a facade of bringing “justice and peace”. There is, always, a one-sidedness to the engagement. Even when America “loses”, it has no fear of a counterattack, because in every case it is merely “protecting democracy”, as opposed to actually being at war.
The implicit biases against empathizing with other people - especially impoverished non-white refugees - have kept the nation from properly grappling with its history of tyranny. Many people have always believed in the greatness of the Land of the Free, simply because they could physically and emotionally distance themselves from the victims of “freedom”.
An American invasion of Europe would completely shatter the Union. Full stop. No amount of xenophobic lies can prepare the troops and civilians fast enough for such a dramatic cultural and ideological shift. The rhetoric will ramp up, the core supporters will rabble rouse, and the soundbites will be bloodthirsty, but the actual bloodthirst won’t be there among the rest of the population or the military.
War was easy to sell to Germany because it was billed as the only way out from the under the oppressive burdens of the last war. War was in the public mind. It was living memory of everyone else on the planet banding together to screw over Germany in particular.
War will not be so easy to sell here. Americans literally identify themselves as European Americans. They’re italian and irish and german. They want to visit, they want to find love, they want to dine in Paris and party in Dublin and see the Vatican. American soldiers are literally stationed all across the region partying with the locals.
We don’t remember war as a culture. We remember oppression, and “police actions”, and Vietnam. But we don’t remember world war, and we can’t imagine London or New York falling. That will all change if we attack our friends, and the cultural and ideological whiplash would tear the nation to pieces.
Considering that Putin got his ass absolutely beat by a small country using second hand and surplus military hardware he’d have to be an absolute moron to pick a fight with NATO. Literally the only card he has to play is nukes and that’s kind of an all or nothing sort of move. If nukes are off the table any concerted push by NATO is going to be mopping up in moscow within a few months.
That’s also assuming the US doesn’t get serious about it, but considering Putin’s puppet in the Whitehouse there’s a pretty good chance the US would quit NATO and so wouldn’t factor in. Even without the US though Russia has demonstrated the rest of NATO is far more than sufficient to handle Russia.
Poland + Ukraine is enough to practically destroy Russia.
Honestly I really hope putin just croaks over and dies at this point, the old fuck has practically killed endless amounts of his own people just for land. He can’t use the excuse of “Hur dur NATO is encroaching on my borders via Ukraine” because Finland is in NATO now thanks to his stupidity.
He’s gambling with WW3 with a high chance of losing it.
And he can’t keep America under his grasp forever, by the end of the decade trump could lose the election or get couped by anyone.
Then again he’s going on with cable cutting and other idiocies. I’m not sure some kind of stupid “test run” could be ordered by him, like attacking one of the Baltic countries or Finland.
If the war stops BTW then his days are probably numbered so maybe he’ll need some stupid war just to stay in power/alive.
Redo the calculations with the USA fighting on Russia’s side, and things start to look different.
Trump doesn’t have enough pull yet to make that happen, and it’s unlikely he will anytime soon. He could manage to get the US to sit out the fight, but actively committing US forces to help Russia isn’t going to happen.
What about Putin and Trump working together the rhetoric of nuclear deterrence?
IIRC, Russia+USA = 90% of all nuclear weapons in the world.
A big whammy hammer if they (hypothetically) fight together.
Possible but it would be an incredibly risky move on Trump’s part as nukes are a very touchy subject and frankly Trump doesn’t have either the brains nor the charisma to pull it off. He’s as likely to make things worse and unite the rest of the world against Russia (including China who won’t want to see nukes deployed in essentially their backyard) as he is to help in a meaningful fashion. Putin knows how limited a tool Trump is and wouldn’t want to risk that. Trump is essentially useless for international purposes and limited to only domestic affairs.
Despite his claims he is not and never has been a negotiator, he only ever “wins” when his opponents are at an overwhelming disadvantage. It’s why he prefers working with companies on the verge of bankruptcy because they’re desperate and easier to push around.
As for deploying nuclear weapons, not only would that unit the entire world against the US, it would ignite the biggest shit storm within the US in its entire history, assuming the military even went along with it in the first place. If anything was going to convince the US military to stage a coup against Trump, giving the order to nuke a recent ally in a war the US is only tangentially connected to would.
Trump seems to be consolidating to focus on Iran (and it’s allies) and China. He’s not going to fight Europe. If anything, he’ll try to get them to help by threatening NATO membership or something.
Taking how successful Russia was on the battlefield of Ukraine, I’m going to go ahead and say “try us”
I know that Europe is a bit behind on military spending but that is rapidly changing and in the meantime Russia lost nearly a million soldiers on the frontline. That alone is enough to cripple the nation for the next two decades.
It’s hard to see how Russia is going to do anything of that. The only “strength” it currently has is misinformation which works well for the US right now but that will have its limits soon enough
Nuclear exchange. Yeah it’s possible they nukes were maintained about as well as their tanks. It’s also possible that we’re entirely fucked.
And so are they, Europe has nukes too and don’t think that the US and China will just sot back and relax
If anyone sends nukes, wete ALL dead and those that survive will wish they were.
Elsewhere on Lemmy today;
Russia has depleted its tank stocks: the industry is not covering combat losses
Both of these cannot be true.
Hmm who do we know that will sell anything that isn’t tied down and currently controls the US government and is buddy buddy with Putin? No, not Satan, but you are close!
Nah dude killing people is God’s department Satan just smokes gay weed
Right? I don’t recall Satan killing anyone in the Bible, whereas God killed almost everyone.
TBF I explicitly said “Not Satan.”
With what? I read yesterday they were not able to keep up with the losses from just fighting the ukraine.
American tanks :(
I wish I wasn’t so sure you were right.
At least nato will know all the weaknesses.
for what?
King of the Ash Pile is a cool title
10yrs? That long? Is Putin really that healthy? He looks like he has Cushing’s.
End of the decade is 31-12-2029, which is about 4.7 years away, not 10.
10 years would be “within/in/over a decade”.
Germany has to pump out these messages because they live so far from the critical border. It’s easy to not understand the risk.
Honestly, I believe Europe needs to go on the offensive, we need a single unified offensive against Moscow with the intent of crippling the KGB and arresting Putin. They are both too dangerous to be left to their own devices.
The KGB hasn’t existed since 1991.
Officially.
Me too, I believe that. Anyone with half a brain believes that.
Bunch of rag outlets fearmongering. No way Russia will attack NATO which has nukes.
If Russia knows the USA won’t respond, and may even help, this may work differently. It would take a lot to get any NATO country to fire a nuke, especially if they didn’t have US support, and Russia knows this.
