Summary

A senior White House team, led by Steve Witkoff and Mike Waltz, is traveling to Saudi Arabia to set up Ukraine peace talks, excluding both Ukraine and Europe from negotiations.

This move raises concerns about sidelining key stakeholders while favoring direct U.S.-Russia discussions. European leaders, including Macron and Starmer, are meeting in Paris to respond.

Trump’s team has hinted at lifting Russian sanctions, a stance welcomed by the Kremlin.

NATO allies are wary of U.S. inquiries on security guarantees for Ukraine, fearing strategic leaks.

  • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Funny, I recently spoke with a guy from Finland, who basically claimed they could take Russia on their own.
    That’s probably overstating it a bit, but in the 40’s Germany took a pretty huge chunk of the Soviet Union alone.
    Only with help from USA was the Soviet Union able to resist the Germans.

    Russia is thoroughly corrupt and incompetent, and even the Soviet era of willingness to die for nothing, will not help them if Europe joins in helping Ukraine in a full scale military effort.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_military_and_paramilitary_personnel

    France alone has 270000 troops! Just including Germany makes it almost ½ a million! Adding Italy, Spain, Poland and Greece we are easily at a full million!

    This is even without counting about 20 smaller countries, and UK which is not in the EU, but would absolutely help too I’m sure.

    • truthfultemporarily@feddit.org
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      5 days ago

      The Finns could probably take Russia on their own. They have been continuously preparing since the winter war. Everything is build around it, everyone has trained for it, they even test moving their entire economy to war economy on a regular basis.

    • badwetter@kbin.melroy.org
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      5 days ago

      Son/kid That’s not all combat troops. I’m referring to boots on the ground, combat troops. How many rear soldiers do you think it takes to support 100 k soldiers? I bet you have no Fricken clue … Look deeper.

      • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        OK first you are moving the goal post, you merely wrote troops originally, now you change it to combat troops.
        But yes I know the ratio is usually 1:4, meaning about 250K European COMBAT troops.

        This is still way more than the 100K you claimed above.

        All in all you are literally full of shit.

        • badwetter@kbin.melroy.org
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          5 days ago

          I’m not moving the goalposts. I forget that I’m talking to civilians. It takes more soldiers in the rear to support soldiers in the front. So the % of combat troops is the tip of the spear. The total number of troops means little, it’s the number of troops that are the tip of the spear. The EU has little in combat capacity, and most of the equipment has been destroyed in Ukraine. So what are they going to fight with?

      • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        Oh boy, so Ukraine is most corrupt? And only a 4th the population and military of Russia, Still Ukraine has very successfully fought against Russia. So Russia in 3 years has only been able to achieve a fraction of what they claimed could be done in 3 weeks, or maybe even 3 days!
        And you claim Europe combined wouldn’t do any better?!
        You are a very special kind of delusional.