In Reply to: (link) Don the Con, whose side are you on? posted by SagoBob on February 21, 2025 at 17:51:47
Zelenskyy just had a speech where he said he was told under Biden that Ukraine was the 3rd priority after Asia and the Middle East.
Trump can hurt Ukraine by not sending missiles/supplies but he can't stop Ukraine.
Under Biden, Europe figured when things got bad, Biden would help albeit too little and too late. Under Trump, they aren't depending on him so they are sending more supplies and money.
Americans think we control the end of the war. We don't.
There are roughly 900K soldiers in Ukraine's army. Zelenskyy said that a peacekeeping force would need to be around 200+K to actually be a force that Russia's 1,500K army wouldn't run over. Russia has refused the idea of a peacekeeping force even if they were allowed to take all of the land they have insisted on which includes land they don't even control.
To get a sense of the scale of Europe's armies.
From unitedmedia, it would take 6 or 7 countries entire army to equal Russia.
Poland — 216,000
France — 204,000
Germany — 185,000
Italy — 171,000
United Kingdom — 138,000
Spain — 117,000
Greece — 110,000
Romania — 66,000
Netherlands — 41,000
Ukrainian Army — 880,000
Russian Army in Ukraine — 600,000
Total Russian Army — 1,500,000
A friend of mine who studies his professionally said that Ukraine's army is stronger than Western Europe's in total. My guess is that it was likely Putin's plan to take Ukraine quickly and then use their army to take the Baltics, Moldova, and Poland.