U.S. approves shipments of F-16s to Ukraine in major gain for Kiev

Increased their military budget or increased their military budget to 2% of GDP?

If it's the latter, that's the bare minimum they are supposed to maintain to be in NATO. So they're not that scared.

 

We are running out of other things to give them is the long and short of it. That is also why they decided to give them cluster munitions. So far, this war has proven that both sides are good at defense but suck at offense.

 

DeSantis/Vivek won’t beat Joe. Rest I can live with as President and likely vote for.

 

Russia converted their manufacturing plants to build weapons. The US and NATO countries have not done this which is why Russia is able to supply weapons to the front and Ukraine is not able to get the weapons they need. Russia's military is also increasing as Ukraine's army is not able to keep up with their losses. The F16 is a very complicated maintenance intensive aircraft and needs a lot of support. Ukraine does not have that kind of support because they have relied on the aircraft manufacturer to provide a replacement aircraft when an active aircraft is grounded due to discrepancies that basic flight line maintenance personnel cannot repair. Where will this support come from?

 

They can if Independents don't vote for Joe and right now the polls show Joe is losing their support. Blacks may also not show up for the election due to the migrants forcing them to share their neighborhood or be forced our of their apartments to make room for immigrants. Lot's of unhappy Democrats due to Joe's border policies.

 

And yet, the front is stable.

You are currently witnessing the slow collapse of the Russian economy.

The Ruble is in freefall, Russian companies have lost 40% of their value on the MOAX since 2022 and the central bank has yet to raise interest rates to 12% to support the currency.

Inflation will soon run rampant.

It's bad, very bad.

 

Yet, the dollar is hanging on by a proverbial thread. BRICS, now 40+ nations are showing interest in, could be the catalyst that sends the dollar into a freefall. That would be extremely bad for the world economy, yet empower the Chinese and Russian economy.

 

Only because NATO is still able to supply weapons. They just don’t have the manufacturing to keep up with the demand. It’s been estimated it will take at least 2 years to get up to speed but without NATO countries contributing their share Ukraine will no longer be able to hold the line. Russia has known this fact which is why a long war benefits them. Putin is a dictator and doesn’t care about the people. He has the resources to continue his war.

 

You might know about the investor who bet against the housing market and won billions. The guy is now betting $1.5B against the stock market.

 

F16's can be based and maintained outside of the conflict area and Russia needs that bridge the Ukrainians are head for to hold Crimea.

 

Can you point to a source where that idea is being considered?

 

And the escalation of the war has started.

Ukrainian pilots begin training on F-16 fighter jets — just days after US aircraft approval

https://nypost.com/2023/08/20/ukrainian-pilots-begin-training-on-f-16-fighter-jets/

 

Which idea? The F-16 has a 2K mile range; Ukraine is less than 800 miles at its widest point.

There is a lot of acreage not in Russian control Source for Pix: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60506682

 

Just like Vietnam!! Ridiculous...

 

Biden paying back ukraine for his son. Shame .shame. shame.

 

Maybe Poland can help out. They have plenty of tanks and they're just around the corner.

 

So who will preform the maintenance on the F16 and all the rest of the support structure the F16 requires?

 

No offense, but Russia going after the grain silos is a direct attack on world grain supplies. indirectly ****ing over food costs for the entire world.

If we decided to directly protect grain ports by putting arms there, I'd say it's deserved.

 

I think you are misrepresenting the administration's words. They have made all their appraisals, for the current situation, as it existed, at that moment in time. I don't think Biden ever said that we would, "absolutely, under no conditions, ever supply Ukraine with F-16s." Rather, the language has always been more along the lines of, "we don't see that as productive, in the present environment," and then going on, to list the other equipment that they thought was more sensible to supply, at that given juncture. The only thing that Biden has spoken about, as decisively as you claim, is about U.S. boots on the ground (absent an attack on a NATO member, in which case we would be treaty-bound to assist them, with our own forces).

 

I have no idea since I am not a member of the Ukrainian military command .

Perhaps Vlad should go somewhere besides PF if he needs information.

 

It’s too bad the Ukrainians didn’t have those planes at the very beginning of the war. Putin’s tanks were lined up in a massive tragic jam outside of Kiev. They could have been bombed to kingdom come and perhaps shortened the war.

 

Rome was not built in a day-- besides, the EU was never meant to exist as just a single nation. I had written that it is an evolution of the European Common Market, but I see Wikipedia traces it back further than that:

<Snip>
The union was established along with its citizenship when the Maastricht Treaty came into force in 1993, and was subsequently incorporated as an international law juridical person upon entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009, [21] but its beginnings may be traced to its earliest predecessors incorporated primarily by a group of founding states known as the Inner Six (Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany) at the start of modern institutionalised European integration in 1948 and onwards...
<End Snip>

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union


My point being that such, largely economic agreements, could not have had the power to stop Putin from invading Ukraine; the only thing that would have stopped this, would have been Ukraine's inclusion in NATO-- which is why Putin did this before Ukraine was up for membership.

Additionally, though, the article goes on to note:

"After the creation by six states, 22 other states joined the union in 1973–2013. The United Kingdom became the only member state to leave the EU in 2020;[23] ten countries are aspiring or negotiating to join it."

This does not sound like an organization that is a "failure," as you depict it as being. The EU is merely a work in progress. Still, evidence of the success of European policies encouraging unity, is the lack of any major, multinational European war, for almost 80 years-- even with its Eastern half, for much of that time, fortified and facing the Western half, with the disposition of it being an enemy. That is an achievement which would not have seemed very realistic, in 1945. But that doesn't mean we should expect human nature to change, especially not so swiftly.

The big picture is that nations which were once prone to warfare, to resolve their disputes, and which once relied on military alliances, to oppose each other's threats, now settle those differences in a joint, elected body. As our own Congress demonstrates, this does not signal the end of all conflict, but does provide a peaceful, political mechanism, for working out those conflicts, without call for military involvement.

Russia, however-- and most importantly, Putin-- is still stuck back in that older mindset. We can only hope that it won't require their utter defeat, as it did for Germany, Italy, Japan, and others, for that country to turn a new leaf, as Ukraine appears resolved to do.

In conclusion, our European allies are now more numerous, and more united, but there are, of course, still nations with leaders willing to flout international rules & norms.

 

The only thing being discussed is pilot training. Experienced pilots can learn how to fly the F16 in no time but when it comes to the heavy maintenance that is needed to keep the F16 flying is not mentioned anywhere. The Soviet Union's aircraft maintenance relies on the factory to do most of the work so Ukrainian mechanics do not have the extensive training NATO countries have. Having spent 20 years in the military repairing aircraft this will be a serious glitch that won't be fixed for at least a year or longer. Ukrainian pilots will not be flying crippled planes back from eastern Ukraine to a NATO country.