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We’ve given them 1980’s weapon systems and they held their own against Russia. Modern stuff would do it. American has won its wars with air supremacy so modern fighter planes with the proper weapon systems would do that. It’s much tougher to take out all the Russian artillery with artillery.
and with what pilots would the planes fly? A massive airforce requires even more massive logistics to keep it running, Ukraine has had difficulties even keeping their tiny airforce from being targeted and is forced to regularly fly them from place to place so they don't get taken out by Russian missile strikes. There is no way we can just park a few 100 f16s somewhere in Ukraine and maintain them without them being targeted even if there was such a location where they could be kept and maintained which there isn't...
This is the problem with all the wishful thinking of the pro Ukraine side. There is no depth to it. It's just endless handwaving away all the issues. How do you completely and unanimously win against Russia? Oh just give them airplanes. Wow. Insightful. Meanwhile 200-400k Ukrainians are dead up to 50k just from this doomed summer offensive and all those fancy western Leopards and Challengers are useless because war has evolved and between drones and remote mining they are sitting ducks. Ukrainians are crawling through tree lines at night to lead assaults on trenches after softening them up with artillery. That's so far the only strategy that gets them any progress. So forgive me if I doubt that America winning against 3rd worlders via airplanes isn't a guaranteed win.
We have more air defense systems too.
400k won’t die if they are properly armed.
400k dead though is a reasonable price to pay to get to exists as a people. We fought our revolutionary war. Every people who have ever existed fought for their lands.
Belarus isn’t do that great.
Russia has plenty of AD systems but Ukraine can still hit them. Problem right now is that drones are too cheap relative to the cost of any of the intercept systems. Can easily just over saturate and overwhelm them.
See this right here makes no sense to me. Are you claiming that all of Ukraine will be killed if Russia wins? Some kind of Nazi concentration camps but on an even grander scale? That seems incredibly unlikely, probably not even possible given logistics of attempting to round up all of the Ukrainians to exterminate them, unless Russia goes total mobilization or something.
If you're claiming some kind of more hazy spiritual collective sense, then I think you really misunderstand how divided things are in Ukraine.
This sums up a lot of Western thinking in a nutshell. I'm not at all advocating for abandoning Ukraine or partitioning the country, but the situation, culture, and history of those two countries is complex.
Making statements that Ukraine would cease to exist as a people if back under Moscovian suzerainty just evinces a lack of understanding of that history and the people themselves.
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