President Joe Biden touted on Thursday several new major U.S. commitments for Ukraine that were announced this week, including a 10-year bilateral security agreement, sanctions to disrupt Russia’s war machine, and a sign-off from the G7 on a $50 billion loan backed by frozen Russian assets.
Biden, in during a press conference in Italy with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the collective efforts by the G7 show that Russian President Vladimir Putin “cannot wait us out, he cannot divide us, and we’ll be with Ukraine until they prevail this war.”
On the bilateral agreement, Biden said the goal is to “strengthen Ukraine’s credible defense and deterrence capabilities for the long term.”
He reiterated his position that American troops will not fight in Ukraine, but the United States would provide them with weapons.
Zelenskyy called it a “historic day” after signing the “strongest agreement between Ukraine and the U.S. since our independence.”
The us troops who do ask to go to Ukraine should be supported by the us government
Ukraine needs two things, and as many of these two things as possible: artillery shells, and drones. That’s what this entire war has hinged upon, that’s what’s causing the vast majority of equipment and personnel losses, and that’s what Ukraine is lacking.
The US and EU somehow cannot scale artillery shell production as fast as Russia despite Russia being sanctioned to hell and back, meanwhile, they’re antagonizing the world’s leading supplier of drones with trade war bullshit instead of buying up Chinese drones to give to Ukraine. Chinese companies don’t give a fuck who uses their products.
The US and EU need to dump money into their MIC, and they need to do it yesterday. They’re not, because they’re convinced that a NATO war with Russia would not go the same way, but them believing that is them not recognizing that Ukraine is exactly how modern warfare will go.
You can’t move troops in secret. You can’t mass large formations for attack. You can’t gain air superiority with perfect SEAD. The future of warfare is knowing that everything you do can be watched by a drone operator tens of kilometers away. It’s knowing that air defence systems are absurdly mobile, absurdly distributed, and that random units can launch SAMs at you to deny you CAS capability. Meanwhile, you don’t need A-10 style CAS capability because glide bombs and advanced targeting mean you can drop your bombs from tens of kilometers away as well, where there was never any risk of you being targeted.
Drones, smart munitions, and advanced communications have made Cold War doctrine obsolete. Russia took a ton of losses learning that at the start of the war. Armoured columns get blown up by cheap drones you buy off of Alibaba. CAS helicopters and aircraft get blown out of the sky by cheap MANPADS that every unit has. Masses of troops get a grenade dropped on them from nowhere. The entire principle behind Cold War doctrine was that you needed something expensive to take out something expensive. You need your trillion dollar stealth fighter. You need hundreds of tanks. You need massive combined arms pushes organized through a 300-step carefully choreographed plan. That’s simply no longer true. Back in previous conflicts, drones were something expensive, not something every script-kiddie with access to their parents credit card can buy and every 14 year old with an Internet link can build with parts off of Digikey.
Sending troops is a PR stunt. It won’t help the fact that Ukraine is running out of artillery shells (again) and the trade war (with Ukraine getting caught in the crossfire) has made access to Chinese drones with Chinese semiconductors increasingly challenging.
Putting it more simply: one guy with a drone can knock out a tank. One guy with a drone and an artillery team can suppress an entire sector. Seems to me like the solution should be to give Ukraine more drones and more artillery.
I can definitely understand the reasoning behind sending troops vs just supplies, and it’s kind of shit either way; but I’m with you, supporting them directly is ultimately the path to losing the least amount of human life.
Russia is running on fumes, but so is Ukraine. Even the threat of our involvement could end the war - continuing the attack on Ukraine would be suicide at that point.
No they shouldn’t be. I’m an avid Ukraine supporter, just check my previous comments, but this HAS to be Ukraine doing this. Especially regarding US troops. Not only would it signal a more militaristic approach, it’s also come off as more US imperialism/colonialism. I don’t want Ukraine being a puppet of the US. I want them to be free and to choose their own destiny. I’m happy to provide them weapons, and intel, and if other smaller nations wish to help and align that’s fine, but a US soldier supported by the US government makes us look as if they’re yet another country that’s a US proxy.
Well the US certainly isn’t supporting Ukraine enough as the frontlines have been almost entirely frozen.
Ukrainians are dying the longer this war is dragged out and Putin continues to fund the felon’s cronies while issuing baseless threats about nukes.
I don’t disagree about support having been delayed having negative effects on Ukraine’s ability to hold its line and potentially progress. Ukrainians are also dying for this. That’s unfortunate, and at the break of this war I was fine with the US being involved to squash it immediately. However it’s now too late in it for us to be seen as protecting, and now it would be viewed as another move by America to enforce its imperialist views on the world. We’ve done enough of that for the last 80+ years. We have to stop, but our friends and allies in the EU can step up and help. Ukraine, and the rest of the democratic world, shouldn’t be so reliant on the US and its support. For obvious reasons.
I mean I get what you’re saying but the way Zelensky has been talking about Gaza he already sounds like a perfect US puppet.
You may have been convinced that Iran and their proxies are the good guys but Ukrainians not agreeing with you is not a sign of them being a puppet when they’re hearing Shahed drones buzzing overhead.
This is about the cognitive dissonance of Zelensky being invaded by an imperialist foreign power that is committing genocide against the Ukrainians while at the same time standing with Israel who is committing genocide against the Palestinians. And this person here starts talking about Iran and drones. Are you okay?