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- Aug 14, 1999
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I don't think that the weapons given to the Ukrainians will turn the tide in any conventional sense (at least in the short-term). They're digging in for a long-term insurgency which seems to me to take the shelling and carpet bombing of Kiev into account. The assumption being that Russia may commit warcrimes but cannot possibly hold Ukraine and so will have to retreat at some stage while casualties stack up.
Its not just the weapons themselves, its the fact that it would bog down and frustrate the Russians into not making much progress. Putin doesn't have endless resources to continue fighting in Ukraine and there will be a tipping point where he either deescalates into negotiation or escalates by using WMDs. At that point, all of this trivial NATO tap dancing about no fly zones will fly out the window.