Should we be worried about war

[Seasidesand76]

Seen a lot in the news about Ukraine using USA missiles against Russia. I've been thinking more along the lines that it won't start a WW3 and will resolve at some point without the UK getting directly involved in war. But there seems to be more and more tension and threats of an all out war recently.

Should we be worried about WW3? I haven't been prepping or anything but does make me wonder if I should start getting a few days worth of food in case. At the same time I don't want to go down the prepper hole and start getting over the top.

Very poor for the future....

But the trouble is, Putin is confident, he is taking territory, Ukraine is war wary, the West is fed up.

I said an age ago - the Ukraine invasion thread - and was told i was talking rubbish, that Russia can sustain war more or less indefinitely, in regard to Ukraine, the sanctions haven't worked, Russia economy is doing ok ish, it is still trading worldwide, China and our so called ally, India, is provided hard currency and dual use technology.
EU/UK sanctions are shit, Russians still driving around in brand new Jaguars, LR's, BMWs Merc etc etc

Putins terms for "peace" wont be acceptable to Ukraine, the war will continue and Russia will take all of Ukraine, probably via some sort of puppet Govt should Trump stop arming Ukraine.

Its bleak and its all on the West or rather Biden/US, for not supporting 100% Ukraine with what it needed at the beginning.

Here's what you said:

A senator has said that they want indirect control over the trillions worth of minerals in Ukraine, and that they did not want Russia or China to "get their hands on them" and said that this was why the US was pushing for war.

Graham obviously never said the US was "pushing for war", so you read into his comments that the US was pushing for war. How is supporting Ukraine with military, financial and humanitarian aid as they defend their nation from a genocidal invasion "pushing for war" on the part of the US?

Can you try to just answer that one simple question?

"can you try to answer that one simple question?" is very rude and goady.

To cut across the confusion, and to be clear and exact, this is a transcript of what he says (excuse the lack of grammar) with my bold:

"they are sitting on 10 to 12 trillion dollars of critical minerals in Ukraine they could be the richest country in all of Europe i dont want to give that money and those assets to Putin to share with China if we help Ukraine now they can become the best business partner we ever dreamed of that 10 to 12 trillion dollars of critical mineral assets could be used by Ukraine and the west not given to Putin and China this is a very big deal how Ukraine ends let's help them win a war we can't afford to lose let's find a solution to this war but they are sitting on a gold mine to give Putin 10 or 12 trillion dollars minerals that he will share with china is ridiculous"

Res ipsa loquitar applies here, this answers your simple question. However, humanitarian aid is always a good thing.

I asked directly because you completely ignored the point of my earlier post.

Graham's point was that it would hurt the world's economy if China and Russia had a near monopoly on the minerals in the long run. This is in no way "pushing for war". How could the US push for a war that was started by Russia? Do you think that self defense on the part of the Ukrainians or the act of providing assistance to them is somehow an act of aggression? Is the UK, Poland, or Germany pushing for war by doing so?

@Alexandra2001

I agree with everything that you wrote but the fact remains that the UK and European Governments were never willing to contribute towards the level of military aid that Ukraine needed and this is their democratic choice. Instead they relied on US taxpayers funding US military support.

The US equally now has the democratic right to stop military support to Ukraine.

As you say the future for Ukraine now looks bleak and a choice between accepting territorial concessions in return for peace (something Zelensky is unwilling to do) or fighting on with insufficient military support and potentially losing the entire country.

From a purely Western European perspective this half hearted support to Ukraine was pointless. If Ukraine was going to be thrown under a bus then it would have been better to have done it at the beginning or at least last year when they had the upper hand. To do it now means that over a $100 billion worth of military aid has literally gone up in smoke and at the same time Europe has had to pay the price of massively higher energy costs and higher food inflation for no benefit at all.

@1dayatatime A good summary of where we are now.

Europe needs to up its defence spending dramatically, 3.5 to 4% of GDP, still way below Cold war spending and there are up sides in this, employment tax take, reindustrialization, skills & of course exports...

Ah, here you all are!

@Alexandra2001

I completely agree that Europe needs to dramatically increase its defence spending to over 3% of GDP but the reality is that they won't. They've got used to taking a free ride on US military strength for too long.

For example in 2022 Finland with a direct border with Russia was only spending 1.7% (now increased to 2.3%). Germany from 1.3% to 1.7%. But it's all too little too late.

The future for Ukraine looks bleak but if there is a positive to salvage from this tragic outcome then maybe it's a long overdue wake up call for other European countries defence spending.

Folks who don't bother with news are blissfully ignorant

The Russians are taking territory extremely slowly and at enormous cost which isn't sustainable in the long run. Even a state with a population the size of Russia can't take 1,000-1,5000 battlefield casualties per day indefinitely. And in return for this staggering number of dead and wounded, they've made tiny territorial gains - though that would change if the Ukrainian defences collapse as has looked possible in places.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainians have been occupying a pocket of Russian territory for months and Russia is struggling so much for manpower that they've had to cut a deal with North Korea for reinforcements to deal with it.

The Russian govt's losses mean that they're now recruiting men in their 50s and 60s to go to the front line and be slaughtered.

Putin has always been frightened of the consequences of conscripting middle class young men from the big western cities, because his presidency won't survive if the middle classes in Moscow and St Petersburg turn against him. So, the government is having to spend eyewatering sums on contract soldier salaries.

More generally, the Russian government is spending an unbelievable proportion of its budget on the war and trying not to let the population find out: ‘It could become a trigger’: Fearing public discontent, the Kremlin tells Russian state media not to report on its defense spending hike — Meduza

And now Putin has had his nuclear bluff called - two years later than it should have been - by the Biden administration and the UK. He's trying to scare people in the West because it's the last card he's got to play - at least for the next two months.

After that, of course, Trump will give him what he wants from the US, but a lot can happen in that time. And many European NATO states are unlikely to go along with Trump's Putin appeasement, so that's going to be a worry for him, too.

Interesting, I know friends in Sweden who work within the equiv of the NHS or in council/civil service type roles have been given 'roles' too. Started last year or so, with those in the more peripheral roles have more recently been briefed.

@WarProf

"And many European NATO states are unlikely to go along with Trump's Putin appeasement, so that's going to be a worry for him, too."

I agree that verbally many European NATO states will not go along with Trump plan to cut a peace deal favourable to Russia.

But they will not be willing to put their hands in their pockets (or more accurately European taxpayers pockets) to pick up the short fall from cuts in US military support.

So expect lots of supportive words and visits from the European NATO states but bugger all in terms of ammunition and weapons.

The net result won't change which will be Ukraine ceding territory in return for a peace deal.

I heard a horrible thing on Radio 4, that every week 2 thousand Soviet troops are dieing.

If you’re talking about Russian troops then according to most credible sources for some time now they have been losing ( as in killed/wounded/Missing) more than a 1000 per day most days and have been for some time now.

Yes it’s horrible, the solution is a fairly straight forward one and is in the hands of the Russian high command and Russian politicians.

Do you mean Russian troops? It's almost certainly more than that, if so - 1,500 killed or wounded every day, recently. Given that Russia has a terrible wounded to killed ratio (in other words, a much higher proportion of the casualties are soldiers dying than you'd get in a Western army), that's probably over 3,000 dead a week. At that rate, every 10 days as many Russian soldiers are dying as the US lost in the whole of the Iraq War. Many thousands more Russian troops have died in the war so far than the US lost in Vietnam. The scale of it is absolutely staggering.

@1dayatatime It's going to be interesting, if alarming, to watch. It seems to have finally dawned on a number of European NATO members (but not all) that they are going to have to radically rethink security now for several urgent reasons.

One is that the number and severity of sub-threshold attacks by Russia (sabotage of transport, communications, healthcare, etc) is only going to get worse. They need to work together to deal with this.

A second, of course, is that after kidding themselves that Trump 1 was a blip, they're now facing Trump 2 and the reality that the US is not going to be a credible security provider. With people like Trump. Musk, and Tulsi Gabbard in office, it won't even be safe to share intelligence with the US, let alone rely on them for defence. So states are going to have to start spending more on defence whether they like it or not, because Russia is now an immediate security threat to European NATO states. Of course, it would have been much quicker, safer, and cheaper to have taken the necessary steps to help Ukraine win in 2022, but Biden and Scholz, among others, weren't prepared to do it.

A third reason is that any peace deal that cedes allows Russia to keep control over occupied territory will only lead to a temporary halt in fighting, which will allow the Russian armed forces to be built back up, allow the Russians to fortify their occupation, as they did in Crimea after 2014, and put them in a stronger position to launch the next invasion a couple of years down the line. That, among other things, would generate a massive wave of refugees into NATO states - and no NATO state wants to deal with that.

So everything we're used to in terms of defence - reliance on the US, complacent Western European states, a sense that there's no really urgent state-based threat - is changing, and changing very fast.

I think the penny has dropped in Europe. Trump being elected has started to focus the minds in a way the last two years hadn't.

The planning has started, the rhetoric has changed, the European leaders now seem to be together and strongly backing Ukraine. I was concerned they would become Trumps lapdogs, but I'm beginning to think they are preparing to cut him loose (which they will have to if he tries to blackmail them with the threat of pulling out of NATO).

I would be surprised if countries don't have their budgets, and their plan b war footing budgets ready to go if needed.

This article (though rather sensationally titled) accords with everything you say here and it's well put: claireberlinski.substack.com/p/its-time-to-call-this-world-war-iii?utm_medium=ios

Thats a very grim assessment & goes far beyond anything so talked about here.

China taking Taiwan, France, Germany Japan under Russian or Chinese influence....

You'd be talking about Global collapse.

I think her point is wake up so that we can deter the worst case scenario. It's a call to recognise bad actors and to invest in defence and security. Another good (perhaps less hysterical) call for this is Keir Giles' work. His latest book is "Who will defend Europe?"

@MagicFox I haven't read Keir Giles's new book yet, but he knows what he's talking about and is always good at explaining things clearly, both of which are sadly rare in the public debate on Russia/Ukraine/European security.

Yes he's quite brilliantly clear-eyed isn't he? Just need the govt to listen to him!

Yes agree but so far, i don't really see much sign of European Governments being bothered enough to act and increase military spending.

As i said earlier, we need to take spending here to 3% plus even our 2.3% includes pensions, admin and police training in military tactics.

I think in real terms, UK spending is slightly less than it was in 2010/11,, we've slashed our infantry, ships and planes since then.

Too many people think appeasing Putin is the way to avoid further conflict.

I'm sorry , I initially typed " every day" then thought, that can't be right.

They are conscripts.