Russia and the US did not make progress toward a peace deal for Ukraine during their talks, a senior aide to Vladimir Putin has said, hours after the Russian president issued threats that Russia was ready for war with Europe.
In remarks to Russian media, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said that after a five-hour meeting with Trump envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, the two sides were “neither further nor closer to resolving the crisis in Ukraine. There is a lot of work to be done.”
The downbeat assessment of Tuesday night’s diplomacy follows combative opening statements from Putin as Witkoff and Kushnerarrived for talks at the Kremlin, in which he accused European powers of sabotaging peace in Ukraine and that “European demands” on ending the war were “not acceptable to Russia”.
To everyone saying Russia can’t go to war with Europe because of their failures in Ukraine: this is just not true, and a dangerous assumption.
Their economy has been on a war footing for some time now, and they don’t sacrifice preparedness for war with NATO to support the war in Ukraine. That’s why they’ve thrown all their old inventory at Ukraine. Use it up to soak up ammunition, shift the economy to build new equipment.
Does everyone really think all this hesitation from Europe is because they think Russia has been neutered?
All indicators suggests their logistics and resource management is under serious strain. They do not have the industrial output to take Ukraine in 4 years, let alone all of a United Europe and it’s allies.
What are these ‘indicators’?
First of all, Russia has lost a bunch of their newer tech. Second, they aren’t building any new equipment of higher tech than what they have lost to Ukraine because Russia is a fucking shit hole that has been exposed as lying about their technical and production capabilities.
Russia has been expanding T-90M production for example with much of the T-90Ms staying within Russia as per NATO themselves:
“In 2021, before the invasion, Russia made about 40 of its main battle tanks, the T-90M, according to Western intelligence estimates. Now it is producing nearly 300 a year. A senior Finnish military official said almost none are being sent to the front line in Ukraine, but are staying on Russian soil for later use.”
Source: https://archive.ph/20250516130430/https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russia-military-nato-europe-finland-ff53b912
So, what are you talking about?
Yup and I noticed they’ve been saving their good jets for a rainy day too. Lost a few of the 1980s ones but none of the latest generation.
What indicatiors are those? All the third party analyses that I can find show that Russia is still the second most militarily powerful nation in the world, with a huge reserve of tanks, planes, missiles and manpower to fight with, with production only speeding up.
It’s not all peachy for Russia by any means, but to assume they are weak because of their failures in Ukraine is disingenuous. If they wanted to sacrifice their readiness against NATO, they could absolutely take Ukraine. But no one is going to make their homeland vulnerable for land expansion, it doesn’t make sense.
They aren’t ready against any major power, Europe, US or China.
I thought all the hesitation was because of the nukes.
I’m pretty sure it’s the nukes.
No one is using nuclear weapons.
But let’s say I’m wrong. We should still not fear them. The reason being that accepting nuclear blackmail destines the human race to even more misery and pain than it experiences now.
Rip the bandaid off. Call the nuclear bluff. Then once it proves toothless and we don’t have fascists at the helm, work on nuclear disarmament so we don’t have any accidents.
Narrator - “It was the nukes”