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Notes -
But what happens when all the infrastructure for that gets hypersonic missile striked on the first day of the war?
Yeah, I think this is something that gets neglected frequently in the /r/CredibleDefense-style discourse of how an EU entry into the war would play out. There is a meaningful sense in which the current arrangement, in which the EU functions as a safe logistical and industrial base for Ukraine that could enter the war but hasn't, is stronger in the long run than one in which it participates in earnest - for starters, the Ukrainian power grid largely is still somewhat operational only because attacking Ukrainian nuclear power plants is an EU red line (the non-nuclear ones are already largely out of operation, and the grid itself has a lot more redundancy); and there's the Polish and Romanian staging areas right across the border, and recon flights peeking across the border from EU airspace.
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