Financially, Europe can can hold up America's end for another six years, just by seizing the Russian cash in Belgium:
https://www.ft.com/content/6c9d0cee-43cf-47ee-8bb6-8e6a16fbd968
That is significantly more than the total $69.2bn in military assistance Washington has given since 2014
https://www.ft.com/content/dc981cd9-857d-4af0-a9f1-a01ce6242471
"The US has contributed approximately $60bn so far, with an additional $31.5bn in financial assistance," the Ukrainian president said. "That's $67bn in weaponry and $31.5bn in direct budgetary support."
https://www.ft.com/content/9529da2e-963e-4b46-956f-3d78548fa3be?shareType=enterprise
The CBR data means $350bn worth of reserves have been immobilised in sanctioning jurisdictions. What has been made public about Euroclear is consistent with this total and the CBR's reported allocation between instruments.
Three public sources -- the growth in Euroclear's balance sheet, its currency breakdowns of Russia-related assets, and Belgium's announcement that a total of €191bn-worth of CBR reserves is immobilised in the securities depository
I'm not getting/seeking out much in the way of nitty-gritty Ukraine news these days, so take all of this with a grain of salt.
In the short term, how long does Ukraine keep fighting?
As far as I can tell, indefinitely. Russian goals are still maximalist.
How well can Europe prop them up?
I guess we're in the process of finding out? It depends on what the critical needs are. If Ukraine is facing manpower exhaustion after three years of war, there's not much Europe can do. Starlink replacement, probably pretty well. Seems like artillery shells are something Europe can deliver a lot of. Not so sure about artillery pieces. Planes and spare parts, maybe even better than the US was doing. Patriot missiles, not so much, but other forms of missile defense, apparently. Drones? No idea, there's domestic production. Details matter, but Europe is rich and maybe willing enough.
Is there a ceasefire?
No. It seems like the tempo has slowed, but who knows what the summer will bring.
Is there any scenario in which negotiating with Russia makes sense for Ukraine or do they just fight until the last man falls?
If negotiating buys them time, then by all means. Russia's economy is not in great shape, it's been sustaining plenty of losses too, it's not an existential war for the country. And who knows, the horse may learn to sing.
Eastern Ukraine may turn out to be the Alsace-Lorraine of the region, with a ceasefire just a pause in the fighting. Then the game is who can rebuild and re-arm the fastest and most effectively.
In the medium-term, if Ukraine loses the war, what does that look like?
In a sense, Russia has lost by not taking Kyiv in the first push. Anything that leaves Ukraine independent is a win of some sort. There are a lot of situations in between Russian annexation of all of Ukraine and a return to the 1991 borders (that Russia guaranteed). Truce at the current line of control is not great for Ukraine, and especially not great for Ukrainians who used to live along the eastern part of its Black Sea coast. Will they then proceed with European integration? Will Russia low-key keep attacking? Will there be progress in anti-corruption, or will there be backsliding? Putin's promises are not worth the sand they are written in, so the real questions will be internal to Ukraine. Will they stand for Europe? How strong will the forces of backsliding be, as in Georgia, for example?
(Ugh, this is when I think my news bubble keeping the bad stuff from me is good for my mental health).
Three cheers for good bubbles!
And I guess in the long term, if there's some negotiated piece that leaves Ukraine with some sovereignty, how long until Russia launches a third war of conquest, and what can Europe do to forestall that?
Five years? Depends on what they think they need to rebuild. Europe can give a bunch of the frozen Russian assets for Ukrainian reconstruction, can deepen integration, and can keep sending armaments. An independent Central European nuclear deterrent is not out of the question either.
One bright spot is that Germany is throwing out its fiscal hawkery for military spending. I assume military aid to Ukraine will benefit, although I don't quite remember if that was stated.
I occasionally wonder whether there is any floor to Russian capacity to absorb misery. Or if the 'stans will choose to secede while Russian is busy in Ukraine.
1: How is Europe doing on being able to supply the Ukrainians with weapons they can use?
2-4 posted while I was typing and away from my desk.
I recall reading somewhere that Ukraine has been producing artillery pieces though I guess not SP; also FPV drones at scale. Air defense is the thing that's going to be hard to replace.
Farley, or as I like to think of him "former Russia Today employee Robert Farley", has some remarkable blind spots on display in that article.
1) He seems to believe that Putin is being sincere about "denazification" - that Putin really does believe that Ukraine is being run by Nazis.
2) He seems to believe that Putin would be satisfied that Ukraine had been adequately "denazified" by the results of a Ukrainian election which would, first of all, be unconstitutional, and, second, lead to the election of someone probably at least as hawkish as Zelensky - who was, if you remember, the "compromise and peace with Russia" candidate in 2019. They are not going to elect another Yanukovich. That ship has sailed, been hit by a Neptune UAV, and sunk.
3) He's pretty sure that the Ukrainian army is on the verge of collapse. He doesn't even seem to consider the possibility of the same thing happening to the Russian army, which has been taking losses that are practically every month higher than the month before and certainly than a year before, for minimal and decreasing gain.
4) He's really convinced that Russia will stick to the terms of a peace deal that he thinks should involve the partial disarmament of Ukraine, rather than just going to war again in a few years when Russia's stronger and Ukraine's weaker. God knows why he thinks this.
The biggest loss from withdrawal of US support is long-range anti-air defence. This is something Europe and Ukraine can't yet match at scale. And the US not only won't give Ukraine Patriots, it won't even sell them.
But, on the other hand, how well has a strategy of "bomb them into surrender" done, historically?
4 is a fantasy. Russians are a majority in almost all the ethnic republics, and there are no significant secessionists anyway.
Posted before I read 7. Ukraine produces a vast quantity of drones, and it does indeed produce a lot of both towed artillery and wheeled SP guns (such as the 155mm Bohdana) - they're confident that they will match Russian output of tube artillery pieces this year.
Agree with 9 - plus there's the viability. Russia is incredibly centralised. The wealth is focussed in Moscow and Leningrad oblasts, like the population. What's the path to viability for an independent, say, Bashkortostan, impoverished, with no sea coast, and entirely surrounded by a murderously vengeful Russia? Even the Chechens couldn't pull it off and they had considerably better starting conditions.
The noise from the last 24 hours may go somewhere, but (1) literally every Russian offer since 2014 has been in bad faith, so I assume this one is too, and (2) the Ukrainians aren't going to surrender just because Trump yells at them. I think the war will continue indefinitely.
Putin thinks a longer war favors him, because he thinks war is all about spiritual factors like manliness and resolution and stuff, and that effete buttfucking westerners have less of that than Russians, so they'll lose (Putin also thinks Ukrainians don't exist, so he doesn't weigh them and their artillery pieces either).
I think Putin is wrong, because war is also about material factors like money and factories, and the west has a lot more of those things than Russia.
Ukraine has tough choices but the resolution is probably stronger on their side. The choice is risk your lives fighting Russia or be absorbed and risk your lives fighting for Russia against whoever Russia targets next.
2: In a sense, Russia has lost by not taking Kyiv in the first push
Whether that is true or not aside, I do find it interesting that that part of the war seems to have been pretty effectively memory-holed in the general discourse and media. I guess I'm not sure how it would come up, but the fact that Russia tried a blitz aimed at the capital that nearly succeeded would somehow come up a bit more. Especially when pushing back against TRumpco's gaslighting on thew origins of the war--it all just gets framed as distant costly quibbling over borderlands. Ukraine beat back an attack by a militarily superior power at the doorsteps of their capital and premier city. Quite a story!
as I like to think of him "former Russia Today employee Robert Farley"
Wait, what? I haven't followed him closely but I must have missed this part of his career. It would explain the weird pro-Russian spin of the linked post, though.
I think a peace that gives Ukraine anything less than security guarantees equivalent to NATO membership, effectively immediately, wouldn't be worth it. Such a peace would just be a rearmament pause before the next Russian attack. In that pause, Ukraine would be working at a far greater resource disadvantage than it was pre-2022; there is Europe, but there are no good reasons to think Europe would take Ukrainian defence any more seriously in peacetime than in wartime; indeed, with the Russians not tied down in Ukraine, they would be more inclined to keep their spending and production domestic.
15: If Biden played a crucial role and it was good, it got memory holed.
Robert Farley (of LGM and the University of Kentucky's Patterson School; there's also a journalist of the same name whom I don't know anything about) has never to my knowledge worked for Russia Today; Googling, he seems to have appeared as a talking head on a RT show at least once (in 2011, to talk about US/Pakistani relations), but that's not the same.
I don't think think he would endorse either Ajay's 1 or 2; I won't speak for him, but he's been quite negative about Ukraine's ability to sustain the fight against Russia while being undercut by America, but also describes this as the "firmly within the confines of the worst case scenario". Not a Russia stan.
I find "stan" confusing in this context.
"Oh look at me, I'm Moby. I'm going to make Heebie feel dumb by writing 'thanks for making that explicit'. Wheeeeee!"
19: he appeared fairly regularly on Russia Today in the 2000s and was paid for it. I'm not terribly interested in whether this makes him an "employee" sensu stricto. He defended this on his blog at the time IIRC by arguing that he was just giving honest commentary, and other people were doing the propaganda-for-dictatorship bit.
I was pretty unimpressed by this argument at the time.
The big issue is this: to get both sides to accept a deal, both sides have to agree that the deal is better than the no-deal alternative. But the US deal, as presented, involves no US arms for Ukraine, no NATO membership for Ukraine, no security guarantees for Ukraine, and no recovery of currently occupied territory. And Trump is threatening that if Ukraine doesn't take it, they will get no US arms, no NATO membership, and no security guarantees. Where's the incentive?
25 That's Trump 2.0 all over; no carrots only sticks, even for his supporters.
To be fair to RF I think he's trying to take the Russian terms seriously as a basis of argument; if someone says their terms are x, y, and z, if you're going to negotiate with them you will need to address x, y, and z in your proposal or come up with some scheme to get them to drop whichever of those you don't want to address.
OTOH I am not sure how serious they actually are - they were originally made public when the Russians thought they were going to win in a weekend, years ago, and it's not as if they bind VVP in any way.
27.1: I don't think that follows - if someone says their terms are X, Y and Z and you know perfectly well that they don't really care about X, then you can actually ignore it in the negotiations, because they will be perfectly satisfied by just achieving Y and Z.
But you may need to pretend to address X, since they are pretending to care about it.