Quote:
Originally Posted by davem4616
China is out for China...period, The will do whatever is in their interest
None of us thought that Russia's military was the joke that it is...they are inept, which makes the nuke threat real
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Bingo. The bumbling bear has nuclear teeth.
This is vintage Russian, by the way, repeated throughout history. They've never been all that efficient militarily. It goes back to Peter the Great and probably even earlier, but examples from the lifetimes of some of us, there are some good examples. Russia, in the Winter War (1939) invaded Finland with every hope that they'd subdue that relative tiny country in a matter of weeks. Didn't happen. The Finns under Mannerheim kicked some major-league Russian butt. A saying among the Finns exemplified that: "Their army is so big, and our country so small--where will we find room to bury them all?" It was only through sheer numbers and a total disregard for the lives of their own soldiers, that in the end Russia (The Soviet Union, then), won. But even their victory did little to save their reputation.
Same thing in WW II. The German armies in operation Barbarossa rolled through the Soviets with little resistance, killing and capturing hundreds of thousands (in the end, millions). It didn't help much that Stalin had purged his military of most of the officers worth their salt. In the end, the Germans were stopped, but only because of the Russians' three best generals (General Mud, General Frost, and General Distance) intervened in the nick of time, and the bloody process was reversed, with the Russians slowly pushing the Germans back into the heart of Germany. But even here their disregard for life--even the lives of their own--was apparent. The Russians lost over 80,000 dead in ONE battle: the Battle for Berlin; a battle whose outcome was inevitable in any case. That number of dead lost by the Soviets in one battle, incidentally, is nearly TWICE the number of dead that America lost in the entire Vietnam war.
The very ineptitude the Russian military has demonstrated so far, in my opinion, not only makes Russian use of nukes likely, but inevitable. And the aid being poured into Ukraine only adds more fuel to that particular (near future) conflagration. They will use whatever it takes, without regard for lives lost, even if those lives are their own.
Putin cannot afford to lose this war.