Should Ukraine give up?

theprestige said:
I'm pretty sure NATO membership doesn't work that way. Poland annexing Ukraine would be a unilateral act of (nominal) aggression. NATO would nope out of any involvement in Poland's problems arising from such a unilateral act.
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What if Ukraine officially agrees to the annexation?
 
jimbob said:
That is true, I had seen that confirmed elsewhere* and Google Translate of Vixen's link.


*pretty sure I posted it in the other thread about a week ago
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And Russian Nationalist have been preaching this crap for years.
 
Hercules56 said:
Why not have Poland annex western Ukraine, so that much of Ukraine will be under official NATO protection? This of course would be temporary.
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Irony is a good hunk of Western Ukraine was part of Polean until 1945, when Stalin annexed it to Ukraine and "Ethnically cleansed" it of Poles.
 
jimbob said:
In which case, resistance is the only option for Ukraine.

A protracted occupation is bad for everyone, which is why NATO should act to protect the uninvaded parts of the country as soon as possible.

Putin has been at war with the West. Calling his bluff but with the NATO troops not attacking unless threatened would probably be the escalation to deescalate that he apparently seems to believe in.
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NATO won't do that, though.
 
As the war spreads to Western Ukraine, the chances of a accidentl clash between NATO and Russian forces are going to increas.
 
dudalb said:
NATO won't do that, though.
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True.

We're both old enough to remember the shameful way NATO failed to respond in Bosnia for years.

Partly due to fear of antagonising Russia.
 
At this point NATO should just help Russia kill everyone in the Ukraine just to get it over with quicker since that's the inevitable outcome anyway and Putin can do whatever he wants. No point in dragging it along, that's just cruel.
 
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JoeMorgue said:
At this point NATO should just help Russia kill everyone in the Ukraine just to get it over with quicker since that's the inevitable outcome anyway and Putin can do whatever he wants. No point in dragging it along, that's just cruel.
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Not funny.
 
JoeMorgue said:
At this point NATO should just help Russia kill everyone in the Ukraine just to get it over with quicker since that's the inevitable outcome anyway and Putin can do whatever he wants. No point in dragging it along, that's just cruel.
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Hercules56 said:
Not funny.
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It's not supposed to be funny. But it seems to be the attitude if NATO doesn't provide more support - and I would argue including the threat of troops.

But then if we don't, it's only a matter of time before Putin tries it on the other former Soviet states. Unless he gets stopped somehow, which almost certainly involves hos death, either from natural or unnatural causes.
 
jimbob said:
True.

We're both old enough to remember the shameful way NATO failed to respond in Bosnia for years.

Partly due to fear of antagonising Russia.
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The argument, besides some attempts at diplomacy over the years, has been ..
"We cannot engage because... Nukes! WWIII"!. :eek:

But when does that STOP being an argument? What would Russia need to do to provoke some real and direct response? And what would the strategy of that look like?

Seems to me, that Russia can just take what they want, in terms of territory, without getting anything more than sanctions.

I dont want a nuclear war, for sure. But isnt this all thought through for 50 years already? The eastern Ukraine fighting has been 8 years already.
Why do leaders act like they are caught with their pants down?
 
jimbob said:
True.

We're both old enough to remember the shameful way NATO failed to respond in Bosnia for years.

Partly due to fear of antagonising Russia.
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NATO had no treaty obligation to respond in Bosnia. You probably mean NATO*, the loose collection of western European nations with effective military-industrial complexes, the ability to intervene in violent conflicts in their region and beyond, broad commonality in doctrine and equipment standards, and in many cases shared pact for mutual defense, but not literally NATO as such.
 
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Hercules56 said:
Apparently Israel offered a deal from Putin, and Ukraine said no. Don't know the details yet.
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They seemed to be encouraging Ukraine to take the "offer" submitted by Russia. Total Ukrainian disarmament, no entry into NATO or the EU, Ukrainian recognition of the annexation of Crimea and the independence of Donbass.

I think that many of the older generation view Russia as inevitable.

They cheered Ukraine on at the beginning because they thought it would be short war anyway.
They cheered Ukraine on for the first week, because they thought Ukraine was going out in a blaze of glory.
They block transfer of aircraft because they think Ukraine will lose anyway and they think it might take too long to train up the Ukrainians, even on Soviet designs (because they've been upgraded with NATO-design avionics that Ukraine didn't have access to).
Now they propose surrender because they don't want to draw out the suffering that they feel will just lead to an inevitable win by Russia.

Russia is not inevitable. Russia may win this war - but that is far from certain. Very, very far from certain.

Ukraine is not collapsing and does not seem to be near collapse. Their military is bigger now than it was when the war started. This will go on as long as Putin is in power, and that could be for years - but Ukraine looks more and more able to keep up the fight for some time, years if need be. The NATO nations and other nations that work with them need to switch gears to accept that and start planning accordingly.
 
JoeMorgue said:
At this point NATO should just help Russia kill everyone in the Ukraine just to get it over with quicker since that's the inevitable outcome anyway and Putin can do whatever he wants. No point in dragging it along, that's just cruel.
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This is getting tiresome. There is a huge area of potential action between doing nothing and starting WWIII. The west is gearing up an economic war against Russia and providing the Ukraine with weapons that are destroying Russian tanks and planes. In the end even if the Russian somehow occupy Ukraine it will be a pyrrhic victory.
 
Garrison said:
This is getting tiresome. There is a huge area of potential action between doing nothing and starting WWIII. The west is gearing up an economic war against Russia and providing the Ukraine with weapons that are destroying Russian tanks and planes. In the end even if the Russian somehow occupy Ukraine it will be a pyrrhic victory.
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I would like to see Russia *not* somehow occupy Ukraine in the end. A pyrrhic victory for Russia would still probably mean ethnic cleansing and genocide for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians.

A pyrrhic victory for Russia is the second worst possible outcome in my view. Not the benchmark by which we should determine whether to intervene.
 
theprestige said:
I would like to see Russia *not* somehow occupy Ukraine in the end. A pyrrhic victory for Russia would still probably mean ethnic cleansing and genocide for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians.

A pyrrhic victory for Russia is the second worst possible outcome in my view. Not the benchmark by which we should determine whether to intervene.
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And no one is saying it would be a good outcome. And the west is intervening, it may not fulfil some people's John Wayne fantasies but in the real world of massive nuclear arsenals that's the way it is.
 
theprestige said:
NATO had no treaty obligation to respond in Bosnia. You probably mean NATO*, the loose collection of western European nations with effective military-industrial complexes, the ability to intervene in violent conflicts in their region and beyond, broad commonality in doctrine and equipment standards, and in many cases shared pact for mutual defense, but not literally NATO as such.
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The intervention in Bosnia was literally NATO.

I was there. We were under NATO command. IFOR, and later SFOR, were NATO forces. We wore NATO symbols on our uniforms. The medal I got has the NATO star on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_intervention_in_Bosnia_and_Herzegovina

ETA: An interesting thing is that Russia took part in that campaign. Their camp was just a short drive from ours. I have seen American and Russian troops conducting joint patrols. Times change.
 
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Ryokan said:
The intervention in Bosnia was literally NATO.

I was there. We were under NATO command. IFOR, and later SFOR, were NATO forces. We wore NATO symbols on our uniforms. The medal I got has the NATO star on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_intervention_in_Bosnia_and_Herzegovina
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I am not disputing that NATO chose to intervene as NATO. I'm saying they had no treaty obligation to do so, and could have achieved much the same result without doing it on NATO letterhead.

Same thing here. The problem isn't NATO refusing to intervene. It's the nations that happen to be NATO members refusing to intervene, which they could do with or without invoking NATO.
 
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