Summary

Germany warns that Russia is rearming faster than expected, replacing war losses and stockpiling tanks, missiles, and drones.

Putin has redirected Russia’s economy to fuel its military, aided by supplies from Iran and North Korea.

While there’s no clear evidence of plans to attack NATO, Russia is creating the conditions for it.

On the Ukraine front, Russian forces are advancing in south Donetsk, nearing strategic town Pokrovsk, a key supply hub and coal mining center.

Analysts suggest Putin aims to seize land before potential peace talks.

  • @[email protected]
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    23
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    5 hours ago

    Simultaneously so weak and incompetent that they can’t take a village of 80 year olds but so scary that they’ll go to war with like a fifth of the planet.

    How does the Umberto Eco thing go again?

  • @[email protected]
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    5 hours ago

    Russia has faced a tiny fraction of NATO’s combined military strength and has failed to produce any meaningful results. Attacking NATO would be suicidal

    • @[email protected]
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      637 minutes ago

      Yeahhhh, but what if someone in charge of the US sides with them instead of against them.

  • @[email protected]
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    9312 hours ago

    They’re betting on their fascist puppet in the US tearing apart NATO, so they don’t have to worry about such things when they start eyeing the Baltic states.

    • @[email protected]
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      2410 hours ago

      And what, lose another 3 years and a third of the country’s young to losing the fight for Estonia? Russia is absolutely incapable of successfully invading anything. They couldn’t even stay in Syria when a bunch of untrained militia said they might show up later. Russia is weak.

      • @[email protected]
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        259 hours ago

        As long as there is an war going on for the rest of Putin’s life, I don’t think he cares about the any of those problems.

        All he cares about is that if there isn’t a war going on, Russians will start to look at what their own government does.

  • Flying Squid
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    4911 hours ago

    I’m sorry, but even with the U.S. out of NATO, Russia would get their ass kicked. Putin must know that.

    • TimeSquirrel
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      3711 hours ago

      All depends on if NATO as a whole isn’t just a bluff. Are the UK, Germany and France, the three remaining major economies after the US leaves, actually going to go to war with Russia over Lithuania (no offense at all toward Lithuanians), for example? That’s what he’s testing, and that’s why he wants the US out.

      • Flying Squid
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        810 hours ago

        NATO is required to come to the defence of any member nation if it is attacked.

          • @[email protected]
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            9 hours ago

            Yes.

            I’m not sure if people know the history of trilateral defense agreements.

            Iirc it was the French and English who put their war on hold to fight the Spanish specifically because of a weird defense pact.

            • @RedditRefugee69
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              38 hours ago

              Do you mind if I borrow your crystal ball? You seem unusually certain of things most leading experts would call “very likely.”

              • @[email protected]
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                7 hours ago

                It would be weird if experts called it very unlikely, very likely is itself a claim of near certainty.

                • @RedditRefugee69
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                  36 hours ago

                  Good to see you back down from your assertion of certainty.

    • @[email protected]
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      1711 hours ago

      I think the plan is to be ready for WWIII, when China, Russia, Iran, and… haha…. North Korea, team up.

  • @[email protected]
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    2010 hours ago

    It takes Russia weeks/months to take a tiny village at the cost of thousands of soldiers. They can’t attack NATO.

    I mean they can… but it would go as expected.

    • Catma
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      159 hours ago

      Until the US starts giving them munitions because we have to fight the deep state/globalists that infect Europe.

  • FartsWithAnAccent
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    1210 hours ago

    Kinda seems like Russia is getting fucked up pretty badly already and they haven’t even taken one country. Seems doubtful they would have much luck against an alliance.

    • @[email protected]
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      128 hours ago

      If the US leaves that alliance and then starts surreptitiously sending drone parts to Russia, it’ll get dicey.

      If the AfD forms a coalition government with the normal conservatives and Germany decides to turn inwards and keep Deutsche money für die Deutscher, it’ll get dicey.

      If Macron finally completes his heel turn and appoints Marine le Pen to interior secretary…

      If Italy keeps going the way they’ve been going…

      If the Finnish right decides that joining NATO was a mistake that let too many minorities in…

      If the rest of Africa goes along with the Sahel nations and starts funneling their resources into the Russian war machine…

      If Modhi lets Russia open more factories in India…

      If China decides that they’re cool with sharing power on the global scale and fully buys in on the BRICS bloc…

      Russia looks weak right now because the invasion has been such and embarrassment, but that can change surprisingly quickly. The global shift towards authoritarianism is coming hand-in-hand with a shift away from US/Eurocentric hegemony.

        • @[email protected]
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          24 hours ago

          These arent nested. Any of these can happen independently and any one of them happening makes some others more likely to happen too.

          Each of them adds to shifting the balance of power and noone knows where the breaking point is.

          Of course there is also a few IFs going the other way around, or were we just know it will have an impact but not which way

          If the Russian people get fed up with the economy…

          If Putin dies…

          If Trump dies…

          If Xi dies…

          If there is an escalation in South East Asia…

          If there is a further escalation in West Asia…

          If there is a major climate event in Russia/Eastern Europe/Western Europe/North America…

      • FartsWithAnAccent
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        27 hours ago

        Still seems like they’d get their shit wrecked if they started a war with Europe, even with help.

        • @[email protected]
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          37 hours ago

          You vastly underestimate the size and power of the US military. This isn’t even a brag; it’s atrocious that our military is so large, but the US would have little trouble taking on Europe.

          • FartsWithAnAccent
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            57 hours ago

            That’s what they said about Afghanistan too though. Plus, the odds of the US getting directly involved in a war against Europe any time soon are still pretty damn low.

  • Rentlar
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    1110 hours ago

    An armchair analyst take here but I think they are gearing up to finally try to take Pokrovsk in the spring.

    Folks at lemmy.ml were shouting from the rafters most of last year: Invading Kursk was a mistake! Russia will drive them back, and Pokrovsk will fall any day now! But like Avdiivka, I expect it to be a siege and for it to take a while. If they can take it early enough this year, Russia will again be able to conquer massive swaths of farmland because that’s really the only thing the “throw bodies at the problem” strategy is very effective at. If Ukraine holds out until the late fall, Russia will again be stalled for months, so the pace of their entire army will be “1 regional hub per year”, which I’m not sure is sustainable for Russia’s economy and society.

    • @[email protected]
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      67 hours ago

      Honestly the pace of Russian advancement has been slowing down which is understandable because their losses are not sustainable. Their only hope for true victory is if Ukrainian losses are even less sustainable.

      This is possible, especially if Germany and the US, the 2 wealthiest partners, cut off or scale back aid. But at the moment Ukraine seems slightly ahead of the attrition game and the US just INCREASED sanctions.

      • @[email protected]
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        4 hours ago

        Perun (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EHUQmJCa3aY) just released a video yesterday that went over Ukraine’s war material situation.

        TLDW: Ukrainian military equipment is for the most part qualitative better than it was at the start of the war but not qualitative.

        Russia on the other hand is qualitatively worse, is running out of reserve war equipment (Soviet stockpiles), and is expected to deplete some of categories of equipment sometime in 2024 (tank stockpile source: Covert Cabal https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K8CcuVCDEUw).