Thanks for the update. I also really wonder what some peacekeeping troops on the ground will really achieve. If they said they are going to create a no fly zone over large parts of Ukraine that would seem to be more effective
Yes, why would Putin agree to NATO peacekeeping troops when the whole war is supposed to be about keeping Ukraine out of NATO? This would make them de facto members! To paraphrase Stalin, how many divisions does Ireland, Austria, and Switzerland have?
Thanks. At least the ZSU troops started to leave. If Europe is serious about supporting Ukraine, it will need to reduce the thousands of regulations killing its economy. And as for Trump-Dumpf, it is quite obvious that he is saying what Biden wasn’t willing to say but was actually doing. So the ball is with Europe - will it act to defeat russia in Ukraine or face a wave of vendetta murders by FSB and terror acts of all kinds.
This -> excessive regulations in every aspect of life are root cause of the problem in Europe.
It's not so obvious when you are just living the "ordinary life" (maybe you are even better/safer because of them), but as soon as you try to start business, you are confronted with the problem immediately.
Also, as a consequence, available risk capital for innovative/non-obvious business ideas is piss-poor in Europe.
I spent quite some time in the last year developing&testing innovative long range UAVs, if I would be strictly following rules/regulations, I wouldn't be able to accomplish much and I still can't perform the most important tests without taking great risks.
In this aspect Europe must become more like America if it hopes to stay relevant and grow more powerful.
I wouldn’t agree that things are not obvious because everyone can see what has happened to the price of electricity (long before the war in Ukraine started) and everyone employed in an unloved industry such as mining, (fossil) power generation, steel and recently the auto manufacturing, etc will feel. The same guys pushing for more regulations are now pushing for help to Ukraine. It is quite obvious that we can’t have both and Europe should sacrifice something if it wants to win the war - better some of its regulatory fetishes rather than being torn politically and economically by “populist” parties
Sending peacekeepers is similar to sending French troops as proposed by Macron - not going to happen. Why don’t just send the arms and ammo and rely on ZSU, which still has much more troops than Europe will provide, to keep the “peace”
Actually they do. Trump has created a window of oportunity for scoring old debts. What if Serbia invadeze Kossovo or Turkey attacks Greece. Who will help them or support them?
Only the second case is realistic. And it has been always about NATO countries so not much of a new situation and that’s why Greece(it can’t rely on NATO against Turkey ) kept its military spending high during its financial crisis. As for the first, there are more young Albanians on the Balkans than Serbians and for all the sabre-rattling it’s dubious that Vucic can muster a strong and willing army and resupply it with arms from Russia. It will be suicidal for Serbia and Vucic - me thinks
Serbia has an army while Kosovo has something police/ paramilitare units. Trump may allow Russian arms deliveries as a favor to Putin. It will keep EU busy and reduce Ukraine importance.
Another thing with "peacekeepers": no matter how many (if any) might be sent by whom, I'm quite sure they will never waste the opportunity to send a purely decorative mission without any mandate to do anything useful except sit in their place (unless attacked directly, but who'd need that if they can just be passed by?).
While speaking of incompetence, I am wondering if there is any competence among journalists remains?
Like for example all those words thrown around like is it 75 billions of actual help delivered to UA, or 350 bln. as Trump believes. Any serious analysis? And surely Trump's team having a serious hand in producing that 2024 bill knows it well, that 2/3 of the bill were never intended for Ukraine, just going under the topic of.
Only to find that 2/3 are dedicated to US own expenses, like for example increasing presence of US troops in Europe, or expanding production capacity in US (which does not mean automatically that shells from that capacity goes to UA, because that goes with separate number). I mean for UA journalist/media it is a matter of survival to make this publicly available and clear as a day. Not just reports of whatever any telegram channel has posted. Facepalm really 🤦🫠
That needs to explained every day, on and on, until every Ukrainian knows it by heart and even better most of Europeans, and with not much hope some of Americans.
If the leaders of the EU countries had any b*lls and a shred of intelligence, they'd finally use those fu*king Russian $200+ billion they've frozen in 2022 to buy military equipment and munitions from their OWN defense industries in sufficient numbers to arm Ukraine and continue the war with Russia. Actually, they should have done so 3 years ago.
But wait, you don't know the best part! Some of them are wondering whether they shouldn't be using this money to negotiate with Russia, and end up giving it back in exchange for vague promises from Putin... If Russia invades the Baltic states and beyond to the west in the next 5 to 10 years, they'll still be wondering when things went so wrong.
I really can't stand being ruled by deep-seated morons who consistently make the most disastrous choices since I was born...
Yet the interest generated by those same frozen Russian assets has been routinely gifted to Ukraine for almost a year now. I guess if it's supposed to be forbidden to dip into frozen money, it's also forbidden to dip into the interest it generates.
Moreover, our politicians are devious enough to deviate from existing laws when it suits them personally, so if they really wanted to, they'd do it without hesitation. The problem is, they're incompetent cowards.
But in any case, necessity being the law, especially in wartime, and Putin not respecting any rule of international law since many decades now, I don't see why we should respect them, especially if they only benefit the other side.
Thank you so much, Tom. I fear things are much more dangerous than that. I am sure that the USA and ruzzia are preparing a sort of putsch or antimaidan or march on the capitol as trump organized for himself. They will create unrest among Ukrainians. They definitely try to get rid of ZelenskI. Zelenski etc. may be an idiotic "war general" but until now he is the legally ellected president according to the Ukrainian Constitution and not even the United Kingdom organiszed general elections during WW2 though not being occupied. This is what Kelloggs will tell Zelenski today. --- If something like this happens the ruzzians have reached their goal : trump and his team are implementing the ruzzian war plan : there is no Ukraine, no Ukrainians.
I could well be pesimist, but going through "news" about potential peacekeeping force deployment in UA, the first thing that comes to my mind is repetition of Srebrenica ethnic massacre -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srebrenica_massacre and how UN troops just watched due to incompetency in the west. So far, everything looks like west didn't learn a thing, or even worse, west got Dumpfer.
Classic Macron move. A few months ago, when it was all hypothetical and nobody wanted it, he proposed to do exactly that. Now that it is starting to be more concrete, he close that hypothesis. As usual he was only seeking attention.
Indeed, that’s about all we can expect from a politician who once compared himself to “Jupiter” (“un président jupitérian”) and told us, “Je ne suis pas un homme normal.” No wonder he and Trump got along relatively well.
Sorry for the incoming wall of doom. If there is any way to use spoilers in this website and someone could explain it to me I would happily obliged.
------
The Economist: Do you stand by what you said about possibly sending ground troops to Ukraine?
Emmanuel Macron: Absolutely. As I said, I’m not ruling anything out, because we are facing someone who is not ruling anything out. [...] I have a clear strategic objective: Russia cannot win in Ukraine. If Russia wins in Ukraine, there will be no security in Europe. Who can pretend that Russia will stop there? What security will there be for the other neighbouring countries, Moldova, Romania, Poland, Lithuania and the others? And behind that, what credibility for Europeans who would have spent billions, said that the survival of the continent was at stake and not have given themselves the means to stop Russia? So yes, we mustn’t rule anything out because our objective is that Russia must never be able to win in Ukraine.
The Economist: Do you think that other leaders will end up having to share your position on this if Russia is finally to be deterred?
Emmanuel Macron: You should never engage in political fiction. But I am convinced of one thing, and that is that this is the basic condition for European security and military credibility. So if Russia decided to go further, we will in any case all have to ask ourselves this question. That’s why I wanted this strategic wake-up call for my counterparts, but also for our nations. France is a country that has carried out military interventions, including in recent times. We deployed several thousand troops in the Sahel to fight terrorism, which could have posed a threat to us. We did so at the request of sovereign states. If the Russians were to break through the front lines, if there were a Ukrainian request—which is not the case today—we would legitimately have to ask ourselves this question. So I think to rule it out a priori is not to learn the lessons of the past two years. At the NATO summit in the summer of 2022, we all ruled out the delivery of tanks, deep-strike missiles, aircraft. We are now all in the process of doing this, so it would be wrong to rule out the rest. But above all, it would be wrong in terms of credibility and deterrence vis-à-vis the Russians to rule it out. I note, by the way, that the aggressiveness of the Russian response to what I said showed that this was having the desired effect, which was to say: Don’t think that we will stop here if you don’t stop.
The Economist: Other European leaders seem to have lost their understanding of the importance of hard power in the world. Is that due to infantilisation? Because they outsourced their security to the Americans?
Emmanuel Macron: Listen, I think you always have to remember where you come from. I’m not lecturing anyone
------
More could be said about Macron's proposition, but my comment is already so long. Beside it is pointless. Macron did backtrack later. It is typical of him. First he says something controversial to seek attention. He enjoys himself as the Think Tanker in Chief. Then he realizes with a delay that he was merely generating bad attention and losing a few poll pourcentages so he partially backtracks his statement. But not too much because just like Trumps, his imbecility is only equalled by his fragile ego so he can't fully admit he was wrong. That is when his army of Macron explainer courtisans kick in to claim we are all imbeciles who misunderstood the "pensée complexe" of our glorious Jupiter Vulcain.
Vulcain cause a few years ago, he changed his mind on Roman divinity after his self-styling as Jupiter was so thoroughly mocked that it became ridicule. He then gave an interview and literally went "Actually I am Vulcain :) "
Sorry for the rant but I hate this imbecile so much. He is truly a French version of Trump : the living embodiment of all of prejudice flaws revealed to be a 100 times worse than imagined. And I am still bitter about his re-election.
The French troops were supposed to stay far from the frontline and intervenea only if UAF collapses. What was the intervention is not clear. If UAF was crushed while employing 200 000 soldiers on the frontline what is the French continent to do with 10-30 000 soldiers.
Thanks Tom for the update. Do you have any update on the Meteor AAM integration to the PSU F 16AMs? Such effort would be a real help to Ukraine instead of the western Europeans public statements on support to Ukraine.
The only way the Meteor is getting integrated into a F-16 is if some European or Gulf Arab government pays for it. The Meteor might also outrange the radar in the F-16AMs Ukraine received
Trump's latest machinations in Europe: welcome to another chapter in Grimm's Fairy Tales. Perhaps it is more appropo to say "(A) Grim Fairy Tale." It almost seems to me that I have been watching another episode of "Laugh-in," American TV comedy series of the late 1960s-early 1970s, but without the comedy.
"there is no need for so many troops actually"
The front line is ca. 1,000 km long so possibly you need more than one or two troops.
That's called "tripwire forces"
Yes. And it is also necessary to stop Trumps blame game. We must be able to say that we (Europe) were willing to contribute.
Thanks for the update. I also really wonder what some peacekeeping troops on the ground will really achieve. If they said they are going to create a no fly zone over large parts of Ukraine that would seem to be more effective
Rusia will not allow West European troops, Ukraine will not accept North Korean troops as peacekeepers.
Indian or Etiopian troops are also suspect.
So maybe some Nigerian troops which will do nothing because they have no capability ( în Europe) and no interest.
Yes, why would Putin agree to NATO peacekeeping troops when the whole war is supposed to be about keeping Ukraine out of NATO? This would make them de facto members! To paraphrase Stalin, how many divisions does Ireland, Austria, and Switzerland have?
Thanks. At least the ZSU troops started to leave. If Europe is serious about supporting Ukraine, it will need to reduce the thousands of regulations killing its economy. And as for Trump-Dumpf, it is quite obvious that he is saying what Biden wasn’t willing to say but was actually doing. So the ball is with Europe - will it act to defeat russia in Ukraine or face a wave of vendetta murders by FSB and terror acts of all kinds.
This -> excessive regulations in every aspect of life are root cause of the problem in Europe.
It's not so obvious when you are just living the "ordinary life" (maybe you are even better/safer because of them), but as soon as you try to start business, you are confronted with the problem immediately.
Also, as a consequence, available risk capital for innovative/non-obvious business ideas is piss-poor in Europe.
I spent quite some time in the last year developing&testing innovative long range UAVs, if I would be strictly following rules/regulations, I wouldn't be able to accomplish much and I still can't perform the most important tests without taking great risks.
In this aspect Europe must become more like America if it hopes to stay relevant and grow more powerful.
I wouldn’t agree that things are not obvious because everyone can see what has happened to the price of electricity (long before the war in Ukraine started) and everyone employed in an unloved industry such as mining, (fossil) power generation, steel and recently the auto manufacturing, etc will feel. The same guys pushing for more regulations are now pushing for help to Ukraine. It is quite obvious that we can’t have both and Europe should sacrifice something if it wants to win the war - better some of its regulatory fetishes rather than being torn politically and economically by “populist” parties
Sending peacekeepers is similar to sending French troops as proposed by Macron - not going to happen. Why don’t just send the arms and ammo and rely on ZSU, which still has much more troops than Europe will provide, to keep the “peace”
Also 10 000 will be a very good help, if it will be pilots+ staff+planes+ air defence for airports. It will minimize russia glide bombs.
NATO has weapons only for minimum requirements of their own forces. German units have now something like 50% of established equipment.
So West European biodiesel will be used as shields.
NATO and Germany won’t need them while the front is thousands of miles away
Actually they do. Trump has created a window of oportunity for scoring old debts. What if Serbia invadeze Kossovo or Turkey attacks Greece. Who will help them or support them?
Only the second case is realistic. And it has been always about NATO countries so not much of a new situation and that’s why Greece(it can’t rely on NATO against Turkey ) kept its military spending high during its financial crisis. As for the first, there are more young Albanians on the Balkans than Serbians and for all the sabre-rattling it’s dubious that Vucic can muster a strong and willing army and resupply it with arms from Russia. It will be suicidal for Serbia and Vucic - me thinks
Serbia has an army while Kosovo has something police/ paramilitare units. Trump may allow Russian arms deliveries as a favor to Putin. It will keep EU busy and reduce Ukraine importance.
The best use for the German military at this point would be to package all to the equipment and ammo up and ship it to Ukraine.
Deja vu Munich Conference in 1938. At least, Putler would like to be like that.
To me, it smells more of a Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
But my nose isn't the most reliable instrument...
Another thing with "peacekeepers": no matter how many (if any) might be sent by whom, I'm quite sure they will never waste the opportunity to send a purely decorative mission without any mandate to do anything useful except sit in their place (unless attacked directly, but who'd need that if they can just be passed by?).
While speaking of incompetence, I am wondering if there is any competence among journalists remains?
Like for example all those words thrown around like is it 75 billions of actual help delivered to UA, or 350 bln. as Trump believes. Any serious analysis? And surely Trump's team having a serious hand in producing that 2024 bill knows it well, that 2/3 of the bill were never intended for Ukraine, just going under the topic of.
I mean there is plenty of sources that are counting, like Kiel institute: https://www.ifw-kiel.de/fileadmin/Dateiverwaltung/Subject_Dossiers_Topics/Ukraine/Ukraine_Support_Tracker/3rd_Aniv_Report.pdf
Or like this CSIS report: https://www.csis.org/analysis/what-ukraine-aid-package-and-what-does-it-mean-future-war
Or reading the bill itself: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/8035/text
Only to find that 2/3 are dedicated to US own expenses, like for example increasing presence of US troops in Europe, or expanding production capacity in US (which does not mean automatically that shells from that capacity goes to UA, because that goes with separate number). I mean for UA journalist/media it is a matter of survival to make this publicly available and clear as a day. Not just reports of whatever any telegram channel has posted. Facepalm really 🤦🫠
That needs to explained every day, on and on, until every Ukrainian knows it by heart and even better most of Europeans, and with not much hope some of Americans.
Sadly Dumpf might as well be Pudding's agent, if he isn't in reality. He's not acting in anybody else's interests, in this debacle of "negotiations".
From the remaining sane people in the USA, we apologize to the world...
Any comment from @Kisco Kid yet? I'll be interested in her spin on these 'peace talks'.
If the leaders of the EU countries had any b*lls and a shred of intelligence, they'd finally use those fu*king Russian $200+ billion they've frozen in 2022 to buy military equipment and munitions from their OWN defense industries in sufficient numbers to arm Ukraine and continue the war with Russia. Actually, they should have done so 3 years ago.
But wait, you don't know the best part! Some of them are wondering whether they shouldn't be using this money to negotiate with Russia, and end up giving it back in exchange for vague promises from Putin... If Russia invades the Baltic states and beyond to the west in the next 5 to 10 years, they'll still be wondering when things went so wrong.
I really can't stand being ruled by deep-seated morons who consistently make the most disastrous choices since I was born...
Yet the interest generated by those same frozen Russian assets has been routinely gifted to Ukraine for almost a year now. I guess if it's supposed to be forbidden to dip into frozen money, it's also forbidden to dip into the interest it generates.
Moreover, our politicians are devious enough to deviate from existing laws when it suits them personally, so if they really wanted to, they'd do it without hesitation. The problem is, they're incompetent cowards.
But in any case, necessity being the law, especially in wartime, and Putin not respecting any rule of international law since many decades now, I don't see why we should respect them, especially if they only benefit the other side.
Putin is a wanted war criminal
Confiscating criminals assets is a regular occurence
How do you understand "Confiscating criminals assets is a regular occurrence" as confiscating sovereign state assets?
No
You wrote, "There is no law that says that if you are a bad guy, your money may be just taken."
Putin is such a bad guy and I corrected your false statement.
If you want to pretend you were writing about something else...
Then you might also benefit from reading this;
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule150
Thank you so much, Tom. I fear things are much more dangerous than that. I am sure that the USA and ruzzia are preparing a sort of putsch or antimaidan or march on the capitol as trump organized for himself. They will create unrest among Ukrainians. They definitely try to get rid of ZelenskI. Zelenski etc. may be an idiotic "war general" but until now he is the legally ellected president according to the Ukrainian Constitution and not even the United Kingdom organiszed general elections during WW2 though not being occupied. This is what Kelloggs will tell Zelenski today. --- If something like this happens the ruzzians have reached their goal : trump and his team are implementing the ruzzian war plan : there is no Ukraine, no Ukrainians.
I could well be pesimist, but going through "news" about potential peacekeeping force deployment in UA, the first thing that comes to my mind is repetition of Srebrenica ethnic massacre -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srebrenica_massacre and how UN troops just watched due to incompetency in the west. So far, everything looks like west didn't learn a thing, or even worse, west got Dumpfer.
Well, Macron announced yesterday there will be no French forces sent to the frontline to fight.
"la France ne s’apprête pas à envoyer des troupes au sol, belligérantes dans un conflit, sur le front"
https://www.lefigaro.fr/international/guerre-en-ukraine-emmanuel-macron-assure-que-la-france-ne-s-apprete-pas-a-envoyer-des-troupes-au-sol-belligerantes-20250218
Classic Macron move. A few months ago, when it was all hypothetical and nobody wanted it, he proposed to do exactly that. Now that it is starting to be more concrete, he close that hypothesis. As usual he was only seeking attention.
Indeed, that’s about all we can expect from a politician who once compared himself to “Jupiter” (“un président jupitérian”) and told us, “Je ne suis pas un homme normal.” No wonder he and Trump got along relatively well.
Macron has proposed last year to send troops în Western Ukraine and guard the borders with Poland, Hungary and maybe Belarus.
The Ukrainian border troops were supposed to be shoveled into Donbas and voila 30-40 000 fanatic troops for ZSU.
Nope. Initially he talked about the possibility to send troops to join the frontlines.
The only limitations he initially stated were the following :
- Should the Russians break the Ukrainians defensive lines
- Should the Ukrainians authorities meaning Zelensky openly call to arms Western states.
- No "offensive operations"
https://www.publicsenat.fr/actualites/politique/emmanuel-macron-persiste-sur-lenvoi-de-troupes-en-ukraine-je-nexclus-rien-parce-que-nous-avons-face-a-nous-quelquun-qui-nexclut-rien
https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/05/02/emmanuel-macron-in-his-own-words-french
Sorry for the incoming wall of doom. If there is any way to use spoilers in this website and someone could explain it to me I would happily obliged.
------
The Economist: Do you stand by what you said about possibly sending ground troops to Ukraine?
Emmanuel Macron: Absolutely. As I said, I’m not ruling anything out, because we are facing someone who is not ruling anything out. [...] I have a clear strategic objective: Russia cannot win in Ukraine. If Russia wins in Ukraine, there will be no security in Europe. Who can pretend that Russia will stop there? What security will there be for the other neighbouring countries, Moldova, Romania, Poland, Lithuania and the others? And behind that, what credibility for Europeans who would have spent billions, said that the survival of the continent was at stake and not have given themselves the means to stop Russia? So yes, we mustn’t rule anything out because our objective is that Russia must never be able to win in Ukraine.
The Economist: Do you think that other leaders will end up having to share your position on this if Russia is finally to be deterred?
Emmanuel Macron: You should never engage in political fiction. But I am convinced of one thing, and that is that this is the basic condition for European security and military credibility. So if Russia decided to go further, we will in any case all have to ask ourselves this question. That’s why I wanted this strategic wake-up call for my counterparts, but also for our nations. France is a country that has carried out military interventions, including in recent times. We deployed several thousand troops in the Sahel to fight terrorism, which could have posed a threat to us. We did so at the request of sovereign states. If the Russians were to break through the front lines, if there were a Ukrainian request—which is not the case today—we would legitimately have to ask ourselves this question. So I think to rule it out a priori is not to learn the lessons of the past two years. At the NATO summit in the summer of 2022, we all ruled out the delivery of tanks, deep-strike missiles, aircraft. We are now all in the process of doing this, so it would be wrong to rule out the rest. But above all, it would be wrong in terms of credibility and deterrence vis-à-vis the Russians to rule it out. I note, by the way, that the aggressiveness of the Russian response to what I said showed that this was having the desired effect, which was to say: Don’t think that we will stop here if you don’t stop.
The Economist: Other European leaders seem to have lost their understanding of the importance of hard power in the world. Is that due to infantilisation? Because they outsourced their security to the Americans?
Emmanuel Macron: Listen, I think you always have to remember where you come from. I’m not lecturing anyone
------
More could be said about Macron's proposition, but my comment is already so long. Beside it is pointless. Macron did backtrack later. It is typical of him. First he says something controversial to seek attention. He enjoys himself as the Think Tanker in Chief. Then he realizes with a delay that he was merely generating bad attention and losing a few poll pourcentages so he partially backtracks his statement. But not too much because just like Trumps, his imbecility is only equalled by his fragile ego so he can't fully admit he was wrong. That is when his army of Macron explainer courtisans kick in to claim we are all imbeciles who misunderstood the "pensée complexe" of our glorious Jupiter Vulcain.
Vulcain cause a few years ago, he changed his mind on Roman divinity after his self-styling as Jupiter was so thoroughly mocked that it became ridicule. He then gave an interview and literally went "Actually I am Vulcain :) "
Sorry for the rant but I hate this imbecile so much. He is truly a French version of Trump : the living embodiment of all of prejudice flaws revealed to be a 100 times worse than imagined. And I am still bitter about his re-election.
The French troops were supposed to stay far from the frontline and intervenea only if UAF collapses. What was the intervention is not clear. If UAF was crushed while employing 200 000 soldiers on the frontline what is the French continent to do with 10-30 000 soldiers.
Thanks Tom for the update. Do you have any update on the Meteor AAM integration to the PSU F 16AMs? Such effort would be a real help to Ukraine instead of the western Europeans public statements on support to Ukraine.
The only way the Meteor is getting integrated into a F-16 is if some European or Gulf Arab government pays for it. The Meteor might also outrange the radar in the F-16AMs Ukraine received
Trump's latest machinations in Europe: welcome to another chapter in Grimm's Fairy Tales. Perhaps it is more appropo to say "(A) Grim Fairy Tale." It almost seems to me that I have been watching another episode of "Laugh-in," American TV comedy series of the late 1960s-early 1970s, but without the comedy.
"Turned out that the US President Dumpf, apparently in attempt to distract from his screwing up of the USA"
I'm afraid it's where you are getting this wrong.
To mess the US internally and externaly was the sole goal of the trump project of kgb/fsb.
One can only guess the exact reasons, but anyone paying attention sees that trump & Co is doing what they're told by moskow.
Just another example of doing opposite of what they are stating: make america great -> make america weak.
As someone has already put it, in moskow it's Christmas, Easter and New Year in one.