I already pointed out how boots on the ground is not the only valid form of support and how the Ukrainians don't want it. You pose a false binary of all or nothing. There's no legal basis for NATO boots on the ground because Article 5 hasn't been triggered by a Russian attack on a member state.
Had your false binary been in effect in 1940-41, the US would not have kept Britain and the USSR afloat nor supported China with sanctions against Japan that triggered the attacks on Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong and the Dutch East Indies. So who knows more about the geopolitics of war, FDR and George Marshall or you?
The sanctions are working. Read the Russian central bank's report about how grim Russia's economic situation is:
It jives with the Yale report on the collapse of Russia's economy over time and how it will worsen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IPzww2IHzM
That the Russian govt has ceased publishing essential economic stats tells you the sanctions are working.
250k highly educated IT workers have left Russia since 24/2.
20% of high net worth Russians have left.
This major hemorrhage human and financial capital flight similar to 1917-21.
Disassembled Russian missiles reveal how they're using COTS (commercial off the shelf chips from the 1990s and 2000s, along with washing machine chips in tanks and IFVs.
The war costs Russia about $75bn/month and Russia had access to only about $360bn of its $640bn in foreign reserves after the US, the EU and other central banks holding Russian deposits froze them.
500000 Russian employees of departed western multinationals will stop receiving their salaries this month.
At $85/barrel oil sold at a $30 discount to India and China, Russia makes exactly $1/barrel over its production cost. Only 10% of Russia's natural gas pipeline capacity links to China, while India is already running out of oil storage capacity and reducing purchases of heavily discounted Russian oil. No pipeline links Russia to India.
EU countries have chartered 20 FSRUs to deliver LNG to the Netherlands and Germany this winter and Germany hit its 80% storage target two months early. If you don't know what an FSRU is, you have no business analyzing the energy business.
Restarted nuclear power (32 in France alone) and coal plants and decoupling natural gas from electricity prices will do the rest.
Once Putin shuts Nordstream, he's shot his load and is out of coercive options and Russia's loss of market share in Europe will become permanent.
"I'm not sure we can....without paying a very heavy price."--The Ukrainians are ready to pay the heaviest price because they understand it's a war of independence and survival vs the genocidal erasure political ventriloquist Putin has promised through his Ria Novosti and Duma puppets. For Ukraine surrender is as viable an option as for Israel in 1948 and 1967 and Finland in 1939-40.
So you know more about Ukraine's military prospects than my veteran friends who live in or have lived in Kyiv and are professional military historians, one of whom taught at West Point and another who worked for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense from 2014 (https://www.facebook.com/SamuelPNCook, https://www.facebook.com/glen.grant.908)
I've published several transcripts of their Borderlands podcasts from April and May that are expert and professional vivisections of Ukraine's military prospects. How are they wrong? You're opining on military matters you know nothing about while attempting no refutation of hard evidence presented by professionals who forecasted in April and May what is happening in Kherson now. How are you right and they wrong?
The Germans are ready to wear sweaters indoors to support Ukraine. The Baltics crowd fund drones and we don't hear a peep of complaint about the cost of supporting Ukraine. Poland has spent 1% of its GDP helping Ukrainian refugees and solidarity is absolutely solid. So from the safety of the US, you're telling the citizens of all these countries that the price is too high? I don't see the logic. Please explain it to me.
Like all fascists, Putin expected to break the unity of what he saw as a weak, divided and decadent democratic world (the EU, the US, Australia, NZ, Japan, Canada). In other words, based on Trump's 2016 election, January 6, tiki-torched Tucker's audience stats, Orban's recent victory and LePen getting 42% in France and Salvini's Kremlin t-shirt stunt, he forecast finding many more useful idiots than were actually there.
Instead he got Finland and Sweden into NATO, big increases in support for the EU in member state populations. Your views are swimming against a we must hang together to support Ukraine tsunami, like what happened in a divided US after Pearl Harbor. Have a good swim backwards against the tide.
