Why do you equate “not in an EU Battlegroup” to “not able to go to war immediately”? Every EU member retains independent control of their militaries. They do not need to use the EU Battlegroup command structure. In fact they never have, and yet they have still regularly deployed troops.

The EU Battlegroups are not the combined militaries of the member states. They are a specific group that works directly under the EU. The vast majority of the militaries of the EU member states are not in EU Battlegroups.

Did you not actually link of of your sources because you were concerned someone might actually read them?

• France and Germany weren’t even signatories to the treaties save for as members of the OSCE. Their only responsibilities in the treaty were to, as part of OSCE, monitor and verify the ceasefire.
• Nothing about either treaty says that Ukraine can’t re-arm during the ceasefire, and literally the only thing Merkel said is that Ukraine used the time to re-arm.
• Minsk I collapsed because nobody even implemented the ceasefire and then Russia launched a new offensive to take Donetsk airport. That is an explicit violation of the treaty, unlike Ukraine re-arming.
• Minsk II collapsed when Russia launched its 2022 invasion.

Ukraine preparing for a Russian invasion is not a ceasefire violation. The leader of a country that’s not even a party to the conflict saying that “it’s good that Ukraine prepared” is even more thoroughly not a violation. You know what is a violation? An invasion.

I assume it must have played a role. The Chinese border with Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar has some pretty damn big mountains too, which is one of the other classic “invading through this sucks” features

No individual European country is, but you and I both said “Europe”, not “a European country”. I’m saying that of the support Ukraine has received, most of it is from Europe. In terms of different categories of military equipment, though? Yeah, the US has often been outspent. In terms of value sent by individual countries, Poland has sent the most tanks and Germany has sent the most howitzers and anti-air systems. Sweden has nearly matched the US for IFVs. Even if you completely ignore the costs of supporting the Ukrainian government financially, giving homes to all of the Ukrainian refugees, and paying for humanitarian work in Ukraine — all of which are absolutely necessary for the war effort — the only way you can think that Europe isn’t doing anything is if you’ve just never looked.

Source: https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker

Europe is spending more than America to help Ukraine.

Vietnam has historically been pretty brutal for invaders too. Between the end of the third Chinese domination and the start of the French colonial period, they went almost a thousand years rarely ever losing a war. They even fended the Mongols off

There has been recognition of a particularly useful application of Möbius strips for a long time: belts in machinery wear out slower if they’re Möbius strips, because that way the contact with the shafts is split between both sides of the belt. The oldest example of this usage I know of is from a 13th century engineer in the region of modern-day Iraq and Syria

I have never felt more justified in being afraid of the ocean. I even used to be a keen kayaker

This is exactly it

My greatest ever achievement in the kitchen was that time I successfully cut a bagel into two interlocked rings like this

I’m not about to pick fights with good legislation over it not immediately solving the entire problem

They’re people explicitly looking to dodge taxes by converting their accumulated wealth into an untaxable asset. So you’re not seeing small farmers shielded from consolidation thanks to inheritance taxes. You’re seeing celebrities and mega-millionaires shielding cash assets behind an accounting trick.

This is exactly what the policy is aiming to address. Even if it doesn’t fix the consolidation of farmland by big companies, I don’t see how addressing this loophole is a bad thing, especially when you describe the drawback to it as having already happened anyway

Oooh that’s cool, thank you for sharing

And literally meaning “bear service”, I think? That’s hilarious. The most formidable beast of the wilds of Europe, simply a bumbling little guy always making things worse when they try to help

Europe is already doing more than America. But my proposal is that maybe we don’t extort the Ukrainians into oblivion

Half of the initial proposal is $250 billion, not $2.5 billion. $250 billion is the entire GDP of Ukraine. There is no world in which half a trillion is a sensible number here

This is, for a sense of scale, more than five times the total value of everything the US has sent to Ukraine since February 2022

Helen Keller

This is obviously beside the point and not helpful to you, but why is the Norwegian-language one called Norway and not Norge?