We already started during this year. No sane leader trusted in a coin flip to guarantee our security. A possible Trump presidency was planned for.

The optimistic alternative is EU countries scale up their military production and cover the gap. We were already seeing a ramp up, but it’ll have to accelerate.

Downside for the US is later down the line, exports will go down as the EU will have more domestic manufacturing.

This is more about ramping up domestic arms production to fill the gap that is going to come from US production no longer going to Ukraine.

I think Brexit has also been a significant factor in making UK way more xenophobic.

Personally, I don’t think it’s made the UK more xenophobic. A decent percentage of people supported Brexit due to xenophobia, and the success of the referendum made them more outspoken. Basically, Brexit is a symptom of xenophobia rather than the other way around.

It’s a confirmed fact they ordered troops in fallback lines to shoot any fleeing Russian troops trying to pull back on some of the fronts.

Those look like 3 random people to me. I’m not seeing the caricature. For them to not be caricatures, what would you expect them to look like?

They tried protesting at oil infrastructure, they stopped multiple oil terminals in the UK being used for weeks and caused shortages in various parts of the UK. Hundreds went to prison and everyone forgot about it after a week.

They throw soup at glass, 2 people go to a police station for a few days and people are still talking about it months later.

Unfortunately, they have to exist within the constraints of modern news media, outrage cycles and social media, and that influences their decisions.

Except when they did protests targeted at oil infrastructure, that was still apparently wrong and got far less coverage than much safer stunts like these.

Military stuff is out of the picture since they established their trade with CCP and NK for rockets

Not all rockets are made equally. The NK rockets, artillery barrels and artillery shells are much worse than they could manufacture with western components. A degradation in quality leading to less accuracy which lessens the battlefield impact is still a positive step.

It also means that China can take advantage of Russia to get much more than it could usually get for their gear. China is not helping Russia out of the goodness of it’s heart or some ideological reason. They’re taking advantage.

I wonder if sanctions targeting non-consumer products critical to producing them can lead to long pauses

Interesting question. I have no idea. I’m pretty confident all sanctions so far are for gas, oil, and military/dual-use technology.

Maybe. The point of the sanctions isn’t to cause unrest though, as I said, it’s to apply pressure to the state. If it happens to cause some unrest, that’s an unlikely side-benefit.

To piggyback on @Syntha@sh.itjust.works, the point of sanctions is to create an extreme economic cost to a state as a bargaining chip. Stop doing the thing we don’t like and you get your trade back. Unfortunately, states control the national currency (most of the time), which means anyone who uses that currency also gets hit. There is no way around that.

Politically speaking, a majority of Russians have been utterly disenfranchised from politics, repeating the refrain “I’m not political” like it’s a magic spell that will ward off the consequences of their government. Consequently I’m not that sad about them experiencing a bit of economic hardship. Maybe it’ll help them realize that politics isn’t just for politicians.

Commentators I’ve seen blame the lack of defence on incompetent commanders that aren’t reporting losses, lack of construction equipment for preparing fallback lines and lack of communication between units. There are apparently many cases of electronic warfare units jamming Ukrainian drones because they don’t know what the drone unit is doing. In short: doesn’t sound like a problem that can be solved by just adding more bodies.

Disclaimer: fog of war, I’m reporting on what people have said about what people have said, this may not be accurate (but what source is perfectly accurate in the middle of a war?).

I did the same. Anything can be a garden path sentence if your tired enough.

18, like the rest of Europe.

Like most things law-related, it’s more about enforcement than anything else. Things dramatically improved while our anti-corruption force was under the control of Laura Kovesi. She kicked some serious ass. Now things are treading water a bit, but Romania is not quite the kleptocratic corruptofest it was in the 90s. There’s always improvements to be made ofc.

Cheaper? Maybe. Easier? No, not really. Ion Popescu from Bumfuck, Nowhere doesn’t have the DNA breathing down his neck, watching for any signs of living outside his means and any unusual bank account activity.

EDIT: To be clear, I’m not saying corruption doesn’t happen. It does. I’m just saying it’s not automatically much worse than juries.

There’s also the fact that appealing a judgement goes to more judges, always different than ones who have seen the case. Basically:

1st judgement -> 1 judge

1st appeal -> 2 different judges (must be unanimous)

2nd appeal -> 3 different judges (must be unanimous)

This makes corruption less common, as getting 6 different judges to all risk their career for a bribe is unlikely.

I’m not going to claim this system is perfect. There are issues with the fact that there is no mechanism for preventing enforcement of an unjust law. If it’s on the books and it’s an open-shut case, the law will be applied no matter how unjust it is. The inverse is also true though: you can’t have unjust rulings that ignore laws the other direction, for example jury nullification of the murder of a black person (used to happen all the time in the US).

Like most things, it’s a tradeoff. Some things are better, some are worse.

Fun fact about our legal system: we don’t do jury trials. The evidence and arguments are heard by the judge, who decides both guilty/not guilty and the sentence.

I would think that Ukrainian military senior staff know a bit more of what they’re doing than us armchair generals. In terms of the full explanation, I’m sure we’ll get that much later down the line (likely after the war). In terms of the desperation, I guess a bit of that has to be involved. They wouldn’t need to do this if they were winning easily in the east, but that’s where basically all the Russian military is alongside extensive fortifications, minefields, pre-sited artillery, etc.

It’s likely also got a political angle to it too. Undermining the myth of the strong Czar protecting his people, and forcing tough decisions about how to use conscripts, some of which are from wealthy and influential cities (unlike the contract soldiers).

I’m no military guy, but as far as I understand it using troops trained in combined arms maneuver warfare to hold a trench line is a bit of a misuse of their skillset. Kinda like using an entire delivery van to transport your weekly shopping.

Why not use the troops in an environment they can truly excel and force a disproportionate response?

Also, it isn’t exactly true that these troops were pulled off the eastern front. More accurate to say they weren’t deployed there, so there’s an opportunity cost.