Tag Archives: freedom

Prove It, Mr Biden

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President Joe Biden (D) said Monday (Tokyo time) that the US would intervene militarily if the People’s Republic of China attempted to invade and conquer the Republic of China (though Biden referred to the nation as “Taiwan”).

The president was asked if the US would get involved militarily in response to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan after declining to send American troops to Ukraine to fight Russia’s invasion.
“Yes. That’s the commitment we made,” he said.

Then prove it, Mr Biden. Get out of the way of arms sales to the RoC, stop slow-walking them. Do more, in fact—accelerate both the sales and their delivery.

As an aside, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin promptly came out and said Biden didn’t really mean what he said. Such public undercutting should get Austin summarily fired. But it won’t.

Ooh—Count ‘Em

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Germany has agreed to supply the Ukrainian army with self-propelled howitzers, the Panzerhaubitze 2000, which can fire a 155mm round 25-40 miles, depending on the round selected.

All seven of the howitzers.

And, in keeping with the German government’s practice of slow-walking all aid to Ukraine in the latter’s struggle to defend itself against the Russian barbarian invasion, Germany’s Defense Ministry

did not give a time frame for the delivery of the howitzers….

The weapons aren’t even operational; they’re being taken from a “pool” that has been set aside by the Defense Ministry for repairs. The weapons will be repaired over the next few weeks. Here’s an indication of the quality of German maintenance, too, via Deutsche Welle:

Germany has more than 100 of these howitzers, of which only 40 are currently ready for deployment[.]

A 40% combat ready rate is…suboptimal…except that Germany has been satisfied with that for some time.

For comparison purposes, a modern Russian Army self-propelled 152mm howitzer battery consists of 6 guns, and a modern US Army self-propelled 155mm howitzer battery also consists of 6 guns.

Seven howitzers. Chancellor Olaf Schulz shouldn’t strain his defense establishment so much just to make an insultingly puny contribution to Ukraine’s fight for its survival.

A Clear Difference

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Assume, for a moment, that the series of attacks inside Russian territory and unexplained explosions at Russian targets near the border with Ukraine have been carried out by Ukrainian forces and are not just examples of shoddy Russian maintenance or done by disgruntled Russian protestors.

Compare, then, that damage with the damage done by Russian attacks inside Ukraine. “Ukraine’s attacks” have been carefully limited to facilities supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s continued prosecution of its unprovoked attack.

  • a fuel depot in Russia’s Belgorod region directly opposite Kharkiv
  • an explosion sparked a blaze at an ammunition depot near the city of Belgorod
  • blasts have been reported inside the city
  • fires erupted at other oil depots, including one at a Russian military base
  • explosions have damaged rail lines in Kursk and Bryansk oblasts

Russian attacks, on the other hand, have been deliberately targeted at residential neighborhoods of Ukrainian cities, and have been aimed at deliberately razing whole cities to the ground (and of simply making the rubble bounce)—Kharkiv, Kherson, Izyum, Lyman, Bucha, Mariupol, to suggest a few—and nakedly, without regard for much of anything, attacking nuclear facilities at Zaporizhzhia or firing on “targets” very close to or having cruise missiles overfly the Yuzhnoukrainsk nuclear power plant near Kostyantynivka in southern Ukraine and the Khmelnytskyi Nuclear Power Plant near Netishyn in the northeast enroute to other targets, and blithely kicking up the potentially still lethal radioactive dirt around Chornobyl.

German Duplicity

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It continues. Recall then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s promise to boost German spending on NATO to 2% of GDP. She welched on that promise with her very next budget submittal to her Bundestag.

Now there’s current Chancellor Olaf Scholz. He opened Germany’s response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s naked invasion of Ukraine by blocking transfer of German-originated arms from all of the Baltic States to Ukraine and by not allowing British aerial transfer of weapons to overfly German territory.

Scholz later pretended to alter his position, promising to step up German defense spending and sending—count ’em—5,000 helmets to the Ukrainian army while promising more robust arms transfers.

Now he’s welched on that promise. And in a most despicable way. He opened his latest betrayal by promising Germany would reimburse Ukraine for any arms purchases it might make from German manufacturers.

However, Bild reported that Scholz’s office had crossed all heavy weapons off the list submitted by Ukraine. The combined value of the items on the inventory eventually approved by Scholz’s office was €307 million, less than a third of the €1 billion of equipment that the chancellor had previously promised. After the chancellery was finished “consolidating” the list, the document had shrunk from 48 pages to 24, the paper said.

Worse [emphasis added],

Ukrainian officials had sent a list of 15 types of urgently needed equipment to the German Ministry of Defense, which included tanks and artillery. Scholz’s government only agreed to three of these, including a radar system. Andrij Melnyk, Ukraine’s Ambassador to Germany, told the German public broadcaster ZDF that “the weapons we need aren’t on the list.”

Because…?

[M]embers of the [German] government argued that it would not be easy for Ukrainian forces to learn to use this western equipment.

Dumb Slavs just aren’t capable of understanding serious weaponry. Never mind that even the Americans think the Ukrainians are fully capable of learning—quickly—how to use American arms, and that training is going on pursuant to the US’ latest transfer of American howitzers.

This is not NATO ally anyone can rely on.

Trump is Wrong

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Former President Donald Trump (R) wants Ukraine and Russia to negotiate an agreement in their war before it is too late.

He warned that if the countries fail to soon reach a peace agreement, “there will be nothing left but death, destruction, and carnage.”

On this, Trump couldn’t be more wrong. There already is death, destruction, and carnage, all inflicted by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s barbarian army wherever it has occupied parts of Ukraine—it’s only necessary to see the butchery of civilians and civilian hospitals, residential neighborhoods, the bodies left lying in the streets of Russian occupied towns around Kyiv, like Bucha, and the occupied parts of Mariupol; and the ongoing carnage as the barbarian continues to target civilians, particularly including women and children, in cities like Kharkhiv, Chernihiv, Mariupol (still), and on and on in southern Ukraine and in the Donbas; and the barbarian’s explicit efforts to raze to the ground major Ukrainian cities like Mariupol and Chernihiv and Kharkhiv; and the barbarian’s agreeing to civilian evacuation corridors and train runs, only to then specifically attack those corridors and trains as soon as they are filled with evacuating civilians.

Trump went on:

The solution can never be as good as it would have been before the shooting started, but there is a solution, and it should be figured out now—not later—when everyone will be DEAD!

On this, Trump is correct, but not in the way he envisions. With only a little exaggeration about the “everyone,” many more Ukrainians will die if Putin succeeds in his effort to conquer Ukraine—see, for instance, his capture and exile into the Russian interior of some 40,000 civilians in what’s left of the barbarian-occupied parts of Mariupol.

There is, indeed, a solution, and it would be, in many ways, better than before the shooting started, even if in other ways, it would not be—cannot be—as good.

That solution is to apply the only negotiation possible between Ukraine and Russia: Putin’s agreement to remove his barbarian army from all of Ukraine, along with Putin’s payment of (not merely agreement to pay) reparations for the death and destruction he’s inflicted.

The former would be an improvement, since it would be a restoration of Ukrainian territory to Ukraine and an acknowledgment of Ukraine’s existence as a separate, independent nation and of its associated national sovereignty. The latter would be a necessary item but the deaths can never be restored, and the destruction will take years to rebuild—years that are lost to the status quo ante bellum Ukraine forever.