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Biden was too much of a limpdick to do anything about it, but I do find it morbidly amusing that it took the US outright switching sides to get Europe to do something concrete.
When you’ve been relying on a free source of defense for decades, it’s attractive to divert investment into something more directly beneficial to the citizenry. Better late than never, at least.
This doesn’t sound like it’s really a new proposal:
Though variants of the proposal have been discussed without making progress since Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a fresh version of the plan has gained renewed impetus this week after Zelenskyy’s acrimonious meeting with US president Donald Trump on Friday.
So it’s already been discussed. I don’t know how much weight to ascribe to “renewed impetus”. It doesn’t sound like there’s yet a commitment.
That being said, it certainly beats there not being a “renewed impetus”. It could potentially develop into something real.
But at this stage, I don’t think that it’s yet over that hump.
That does certainly seem to lend credence to the position of "Europe was happy to let the US foot the bill’
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Do it!
narrator: yeah, they’re not gonna do it
Fuck yes.
The 3000 black fighter jets of
AllahZelenskyy.Hell, it would me an immediate gamechanger. Let’s go with it!
I am imagening it as something just like the requested no fly zone, from 1000 + days ago, to execute as per now or asap. Apart from all other contingencies. (*)
Europe is making a lot of noise, and promising a great deal, predicated only after a peace deal is reached and agreed to by Ukraine and Russia, which is no way is going to include concessions for European troops on the ground or a No Fly Zone in the airspace above whatever Trump isn’t ceeding to Russia immediately. As far as I can tell it’s all just talk, and completely unworkable, and won’t ever happen as long as Donald Trump is President of The United States. This is called betting on the come, or in car sales “the assumed close”.
The only thing that secures Ukraines ability to remain a soverign nation at all are European troops on the ground inside Ukraine fighting Russia until it gives up. That’s it. That’s the whole show. Everything other than that is only talk, as Ukraine slides ever further into dissasembly.
The UK also said that it’d send a “peacekeeping” force – I use the quotes here, because that’s the phrase they used, though it wouldn’t really fit the technical definition of a peacekeeping mission – but only if the US backstopped it…but the US has already said that it won’t backstop European forces in Ukraine, so it’s kind of not much of a commitment. I was watching a video on YouTube of someone hammering a British defense official…maybe John Healey? about that point. He kind of kept sidestepping the question.
And I’ve seen a lot of discussion in European news and discussion that seems to be less about Ukraine – a near-term concern – and more about how this impacts Europe on a much-longer-timeframe, like talking about reinvigorating defense industry, which doesn’t make me incredibly hopeful that the top priority here is Ukraine.
John Mearsheimer had some recent video that was completely dismissive of Europe, said that the UK and France are definitely not going to send any forces into Ukraine. He’s always been pretty negative on Ukraine, but it was another datapoint.
Michel Kofman said recently that Europe does have the ability to draw a line in Ukraine. I think that the real question is political will. This would require decisive movement in a limited time window.
