cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/59867996
German media outlets Süddeutsche Zeitung, WDR, and NDR also cite the report, noting that Russian President Vladimir Putin appears intent on testing NATO’s Article 5 guarantees. The alliance’s mutual defence clause obliges member states to come to one another’s aid if attacked. The assessment suggests Putin may seek to challenge how seriously that commitment would be honoured.
With what? I read yesterday they were not able to keep up with the losses from just fighting the ukraine.
American tanks :(
I wish I wasn’t so sure you were right.
At least nato will know all the weaknesses.
Honestly, I believe Europe needs to go on the offensive, we need a single unified offensive against Moscow with the intent of crippling the KGB and arresting Putin. They are both too dangerous to be left to their own devices.
The KGB hasn’t existed since 1991.
Officially.
Oh it does exist just not officially. Someone has to help everyone fall after windows
Sure, but why not use the names of the actual current Russian intelligence services? FSB, GRU, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_agencies_of_Russia
Elsewhere on Lemmy today;
Russia has depleted its tank stocks: the industry is not covering combat losses
Both of these cannot be true.
Soon to be seen on the battlefield: Reinforced, armored attack-Ladas, with turrets mounted on the roof.
Hmm who do we know that will sell anything that isn’t tied down and currently controls the US government and is buddy buddy with Putin? No, not Satan, but you are close!
Nah dude killing people is God’s department Satan just smokes gay weed
Right? I don’t recall Satan killing anyone in the Bible, whereas God killed almost everyone.
TBF I explicitly said “Not Satan.”
Well they can both be true, It just depends on Putin’s mental state.
There was a rumor going around that he is dying and he is basically just doing this to try and make a name for himself, he will rebuild the USSR and it will stand for a thousand years as him as its founding father, and all that rubbish. Of course it’s impossible for that to happen, but if he’s dying anyway why not try?
He has definitely made a name for himself. Can we just tell him it’s positive and let him die so that the rest of the world can move on?
Taking how successful Russia was on the battlefield of Ukraine, I’m going to go ahead and say “try us”
I know that Europe is a bit behind on military spending but that is rapidly changing and in the meantime Russia lost nearly a million soldiers on the frontline. That alone is enough to cripple the nation for the next two decades.
It’s hard to see how Russia is going to do anything of that. The only “strength” it currently has is misinformation which works well for the US right now but that will have its limits soon enough
Nuclear exchange. Yeah it’s possible they nukes were maintained about as well as their tanks. It’s also possible that we’re entirely fucked.
It’s not just whether or not the missiles were maintained, they probably weren’t, but due to the amount of corruption it’s also possible they are lacking critical components that Russia thinks they still have.
Every bad guy in every movie gets his nuclear material from some corrupt Russian military official. Maybe it’s true.
Yeah? And if you’re wrong we’re fucked. To be clear it’s not that you or I could do anything about it. We’re just either fucked or going to have the world’s biggest laugh at the Russians.
What’s the alternative alternative? Roll over and let Russia invade? Then we’re all fucked anyway. Might as well take the chance of standing up instead of dying lying down.
Yeah. I’m not disagreeing with that. I’m just mad.
Take out putin now and set the stage for a world at “peace” with humanity’s eye back on a civilized future.
Problem is the people waiting to take over from Putin. They’re not at all nice.
Take them out first so it looks like Putin is doing it.
None of the candidates are nice and most are much, much worse. Don’t recall the name, but one of them basically is ready to drop the h bombs and push us all straight into WWIII because reasons.
If anyone takes out Putin, they’ll have to take out the entire military top and government of Russia with it or we’re all fucked
Eh, it’s the sword rattling. Common tactic to make himself look strong and to be feared. He could still be spineless or once not under watchful eye of Putin, a drastically different person.
Putin isn’t known for keeping people around if they’re a threat to him.
Germany has to pump out these messages because they live so far from the critical border. It’s easy to not understand the risk.
Germany is still so uncertain of the risk that they still use Russian gas even 4 years after saying they were going to stop.
They burned through their Soviet stockpiles of artillery and tanks in 3 years fighting Ukraine, what makes anyone think they could fight NATO?
Depends which side the US is on
US has a sizeable advantage in terms of sheer firepower but lacks the collective will to side with Russia in a conflict with NATO. To be clear, the Trump administration might try to side with Russia and the initial consequences of that would be very serious. But, long term, I think that would bring a swift end to the US’ global dominance. Potentially even bringing us to the point of total collapse.
That’s just one American’s perspective though.
But is there a downside for the guy running our country?
There was no downside for Gaddafi.
Until there was.
Bingo.
And also depends on which side China is on. Their war production dwarfs even the US, and I find it difficult to believe that it will all be spent fighting the US and Taiwan.
There is a very real possibility that these three countries gang up together and divide the world among themselves.
At this point it seems much more likely that the US sides with Russia than China. The EU is their largest trading partner, they’d never risk losing that market.
Why would Russia risk alienating China?
In realpolitik, China is the more desirable partner than the USA.
The problem is China is right there, and a lot of parts of Russia used to have Chinese names.
Mostly, Siberia is literally infinite resources, the kind of thing China desperately needs.
And China basically has a monopoly on Siberia with the current arrangements.
Russia has alienated China already by being an unstable and unpredictable mess of a country.
Why would either need to side with Russia? They only have 140m people, a untrustworthy and soon to be unstable government. If you’re aim is to carve up territory then you don’t give a potential long term adversary access to half a billion people.
Alliances aren’t forever. Hitler and Stalin made an agreement not to fight each other, which worked to the benefit of both for a while, and the Trump admin and Putin are more closely aligned ideologically than those two ever were. Alliances can be made for expedience and short-term gain, even with a potential long-term adversary.
You don’t ‘need’ Russia, but it’s mutually beneficial to have them on your side.
…
The only thing worse than having Russia as an enemy is having them as an ally.
They’re a catastrophe in nation form, the best thing we can do is push them as close to China as possible and watch them shoot themselves in the dick.
That’s why Trump is such a nightmare, he’s showing them our dicks.
Their unlimited supplies of Russian delusions of superiority.
Well China is ready to make bank
China doesn’t want to war between Europe and Russia.
It would force Europe to rapidly develop military capability and when Europ inevitably won that war, it would still have a vast military and might be feeling a bit touchy about dictatorships. China likes the world as it is right now, they have a lot of long-term plans and Russia suddenly ceasing to exist would mess all those plans up.
I don’t think Russia has money either from all the sanctions. This all strikes me as extremely unlikely. They can’t even get through Ukraine lol.
But maybe they’re just exaggerating to justify war spending just in case.
they have the US on their side now
Me too, I believe that. Anyone with half a brain believes that.
So I just looked into the numbers quickly and am probably off by a bit
NATO has 3.2m active military personnel and 2.2m in reserve
Russia has 1.5m active and 2m reserve
BUT, American forces make up 1.3m of NATOs active and 800k reserve
If I were to randomly combine the American army with Russia rather than NATO for no particular reason,
NATO would have 1.9m active 1.4m reserve and the Axis-sorry I mean Russia and America would have 2.8m active 2.8m reserve…
Maybe this is a suicidal plan, Putin is going to die and wants to take the world with him. From what we know about him, he is megalomaniacal and sadistic enough to want something like this.
He must also be counting on the United States being out of NATO by then, maybe Trump will even send some soldiers to help his Russian allies.
Just based on Trump’s previous administration I’m confident that if he actually tried to do that it would cause serious arguments between the military and the executive branch. The military already decided to pretty much ignore him when he was going on in his last term about nuclear weapons, fortunately it never came up.
It has nothing to do with wanting to actually fight NATO. The idea is to manufacture a carefully crafted situation where Article 5 is triggered, but due to internal disagreement and individual risk, it is not fully honored.
Needless to say, any such move would be very risky.
And Trump’s United States will be one of those not to honour Article 5, if they are still part of NATO at that time.
The number of personnel won’t really matter here past a threshold. Looking at Ukraine Russian war it’s clear most of the fighting will be done with suicide drones, ones that can be produced en mass by any country more or less.
There’s no way the US military would side with Russia, even if ordered to.
I agree. People underestimate how our perspectives of war have shifted tremendously in the past century. The ideological shift towards xenophobia and nationalism in recent years is undeniable, but it lacks the context of the world prior to the world wars.
War was the default state. It was expected. Not just colonization, oppression, or revolution. No. Prior to the 20th century, humanity had experienced a nearly constant stream of full-scale, all-out, nation-making and nation-breaking wars.
In the modern day, American “wars” happen in deserts and distant places. There is a level of cognitive dissonance in the public and military consciousness, a separation of “us” vs. “them”, a facade of bringing “justice and peace”. There is, always, a one-sidedness to the engagement. Even when America “loses”, it has no fear of a counterattack, because in every case it is merely “protecting democracy”, as opposed to actually being at war.
The implicit biases against empathizing with other people - especially impoverished non-white refugees - have kept the nation from properly grappling with its history of tyranny. Many people have always believed in the greatness of the Land of the Free, simply because they could physically and emotionally distance themselves from the victims of “freedom”.
An American invasion of Europe would completely shatter the Union. Full stop. No amount of xenophobic lies can prepare the troops and civilians fast enough for such a dramatic cultural and ideological shift. The rhetoric will ramp up, the core supporters will rabble rouse, and the soundbites will be bloodthirsty, but the actual bloodthirst won’t be there among the rest of the population or the military.
War was easy to sell to Germany because it was billed as the only way out from the under the oppressive burdens of the last war. War was in the public mind. It was living memory of everyone else on the planet banding together to screw over Germany in particular.
War will not be so easy to sell here. Americans literally identify themselves as European Americans. They’re italian and irish and german. They want to visit, they want to find love, they want to dine in Paris and party in Dublin and see the Vatican. American soldiers are literally stationed all across the region partying with the locals.
We don’t remember war as a culture. We remember oppression, and “police actions”, and Vietnam. But we don’t remember world war, and we can’t imagine London or New York falling. That will all change if we attack our friends, and the cultural and ideological whiplash would tear the nation to pieces.
Would you say they’re at the top of that slippery slope, or part way down it already?
Maybe today’s top brass wouldn’t, but there are probably enough JD Vance types among the MAGA lovin’ grunts to promote, to structure an army that’ll take Trump at his word. If he says ‘Europe were the enemy all along’, enough times, with enough conviction…
Wouldn’t have believed it myself until this year.
George W. Bush convinced Americans that France was an enemy for a while, and his supporters lapped it up. Today Trump has large chunks of his cult believing that Canada is an enemy. There’s apparently no limit to the absurdities and poison people will swallow if their beloved cult leader tells them to.
Big difference from renaming French fries to actual boots-on-the-ground fighting.
famous last words.
I hope you’re right.
Considering that Putin got his ass absolutely beat by a small country using second hand and surplus military hardware he’d have to be an absolute moron to pick a fight with NATO. Literally the only card he has to play is nukes and that’s kind of an all or nothing sort of move. If nukes are off the table any concerted push by NATO is going to be mopping up in moscow within a few months.
That’s also assuming the US doesn’t get serious about it, but considering Putin’s puppet in the Whitehouse there’s a pretty good chance the US would quit NATO and so wouldn’t factor in. Even without the US though Russia has demonstrated the rest of NATO is far more than sufficient to handle Russia.
Poland + Ukraine is enough to practically destroy Russia.
Honestly I really hope putin just croaks over and dies at this point, the old fuck has practically killed endless amounts of his own people just for land. He can’t use the excuse of “Hur dur NATO is encroaching on my borders via Ukraine” because Finland is in NATO now thanks to his stupidity.
He’s gambling with WW3 with a high chance of losing it.
And he can’t keep America under his grasp forever, by the end of the decade trump could lose the election or get couped by anyone.
Then again he’s going on with cable cutting and other idiocies. I’m not sure some kind of stupid “test run” could be ordered by him, like attacking one of the Baltic countries or Finland.
If the war stops BTW then his days are probably numbered so maybe he’ll need some stupid war just to stay in power/alive.
Redo the calculations with the USA fighting on Russia’s side, and things start to look different.
Trump seems to be consolidating to focus on Iran (and it’s allies) and China. He’s not going to fight Europe. If anything, he’ll try to get them to help by threatening NATO membership or something.
Trump doesn’t have enough pull yet to make that happen, and it’s unlikely he will anytime soon. He could manage to get the US to sit out the fight, but actively committing US forces to help Russia isn’t going to happen.
What about Putin and Trump working together the rhetoric of nuclear deterrence?
IIRC, Russia+USA = 90% of all nuclear weapons in the world.
A big whammy hammer if they (hypothetically) fight together.
Possible but it would be an incredibly risky move on Trump’s part as nukes are a very touchy subject and frankly Trump doesn’t have either the brains nor the charisma to pull it off. He’s as likely to make things worse and unite the rest of the world against Russia (including China who won’t want to see nukes deployed in essentially their backyard) as he is to help in a meaningful fashion. Putin knows how limited a tool Trump is and wouldn’t want to risk that. Trump is essentially useless for international purposes and limited to only domestic affairs.
Despite his claims he is not and never has been a negotiator, he only ever “wins” when his opponents are at an overwhelming disadvantage. It’s why he prefers working with companies on the verge of bankruptcy because they’re desperate and easier to push around.
As for deploying nuclear weapons, not only would that unit the entire world against the US, it would ignite the biggest shit storm within the US in its entire history, assuming the military even went along with it in the first place. If anything was going to convince the US military to stage a coup against Trump, giving the order to nuke a recent ally in a war the US is only tangentially connected to would.
10yrs? That long? Is Putin really that healthy? He looks like he has Cushing’s.
End of the decade is 31-12-2029, which is about 4.7 years away, not 10.
10 years would be “within/in/over a decade”.
for what?
King of the Ash Pile is a cool title
My opinion is if they have any proof of this just declare article 5 now and attack them before they are prepared.
Waiting for Putin strikes me as stupid just get organised and crush them as brutally as possible.
Article 5 states that an armed attack against one member will be treated as an attack against all members.
There has been no armed attack against a member state.
Correct, they would have to use the infrastructure attacks
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Baltic_Sea_submarine_cable_disruptions
They can’t use article 5 preemptively
They could just go to war with Russia. War is not an article 5 exclusive.
Yes but that wasn’t what the person had said
They can’t use article 5 preemptively
USA did after 9/11.
The use of “after” in your statement should be a clue that you’re wrong
What was preemptive about 9/11? The US was attacked, therefore they invoked Article 5.
A planned attack is still an attack. Waiting is stupid we should hit them with everything now if there’s proof.
If I see a local nutter known for stabbing people staring at me with a knife and bragging about he’s going to stab me later I’m stabbing him first to protect myself. Same thing imo.
You’re missing the point. It’s not a strategical decision that’s being made here.
NATO is a defense treaty, not a warfare alliance. It has specific language describing it as such.
Interestingly enough, you are paroting Kremlin talking points by treating it as anything other than a defensive agreement.
Well if I was the country that knew it was being attacked I’d not be waiting for the Russians to build up their equipment. This could be Ww3 if you wait until they’re ready or their buddies to arrive.
Might be time to end Nato and make a new alliance that is willing to do what is necessary.
You are advocating for a group of countries party to a defensive pact, going on the offensive, to perform a preemptive strike on a nuclear armed country. And arguing that the alternative could be ww3.
That is the same as saying starting ww3 is the only way to avoid ww3.
Might be time to end Nato
Increasingly less interestingly enough, also a Kremlin talking point.
Putin thinks we are weak we need to give him a bloody nose, Russias the one that’s weak and they’ve been proving it for 3 years.
I understand it’s a defensive pact but it still make no sense to wait in my opinion and why give the Americans a chance to switch sides then it is really ww3.
Starting wars, especially world wars, is bad. I don’t know what else to tell you.
Other than individual countries can take action if they decide to.
Perhaps you could drum up popular support amongst your citizenry and convince them to start a war.
Certainly been done before, you’d be in good company.
Well if I was the country that knew it was being attacked I’d not be waiting for the Russians to build up their equipment.
Given that most of the countries in Europe have been relying heavily on their now-compromised former ally America for security, the smarter move would be to also spend the intervening years building up equipment.
A planned attack is still an attack.
It absolutely isn’t.
Yeah, Europe ain’t ready either.
Bunch of rag outlets fearmongering. No way Russia will attack NATO which has nukes.
If Russia knows the USA won’t respond, and may even help, this may work differently. It would take a lot to get any NATO country to fire a nuke, especially if they didn’t have US support, and Russia knows this.
Lol, imagine thinking the USA and Russia would be on opposite sides when we have multiple Russian assets in the White House. And in Congress. And probably in the supreme court.
France has nukes too.
One day Russia is flat broke and losing the war.
The next they are preparing to invade Europe with their epic weapons stockpile
Honest question. If Russia nuked Krakow, would America retaliate with nukes? Would France? England?
I don’t think so. It’s not even clear nato would declare conventional war.
Mutually assured destruction only works for countries with nukes. Am alliance is no real deterance.
What did Kraków do to you :( Leave my city alone.
You are being downvoted but you are asking a very legitimate question.
If Russia nuked a NATO country, what would really happen ?
Would the US respond ? It’s extremely uncertain, especially with the recent election of space Karen and cheetos.
Would France or the UK respond ? It’s a big question and a big discussion is happening currently in Europe.
France nuclear doctrine states that their nuclear arsenal will be used of France’s “vital interests” are at stake. Is Europe part of France’s vital interest ?
France will because it’s article 42 of the EU.
