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”.
Oh fucking bring it you cold war-ass Goldeneye dingdong, we’re ready
We are not ready though. Mentally, sure, but in case of an all out war we would still run out of ammo, bombs and manpower in weeks. Only now do we see the first factories and production lines coming online based on the investments of the past years and even then not all the supply lines have been adjusted for it. Europe could probably be ready by the end of 2027 at the earliest, provided it removes its command and control dependency from the US.
Realistically, Europe won’t be ready until 2030. That’s not to say we wouldn’t be able to get ready sooner, we absolutely would, if we were to switch to a war economy. But nobody wants that, because it ruins your economy and is grossly expensive.
That doesn’t mean we would get crushed, that wouldn’t be the case, but we would be on the defensive for a while until the gears of war are properly greased.
All that could very well be true, but Russia has also blown through all their best men, ammo, and gear like 2 years ago at this point. They’ve been using shit from the cold war and north korea and even ww2 tanks in some cases. They’ve forced or bribed every russian man into service they can realistically afford and are using expensive and ill-trained foreign troops who are closer to slaves than soldiers. They’re being issued paintball gear instead of body armor in some cases for goodness sakes. They’ve had to re-insitute the Stalin-era orders that any man refusing to advance or fight will be shot. Russia, like the USSR before it, looks way scary on paper, but is so rotten, corrupt, and hollowed out in reality that it threatens to collapse dramatically at any moment honestly.
If Russia somehow has enough left in the tank to go toe-to-toe with every European military at the same time, then they should have easily beat Ukraine with such a force at any point in the last 3 years. The fact that they are unable to muster the resources to push over even little Ukraine bodes really really badly for them if more nations get directly involved.
The original headline was doctored to make it seem like Putin was threatening Europe with war, and has been changed since (not reflected in the post title as of this comment). Putin’s actual words are some paragraphs into the article:
“Russia does not intend to fight Europe, but if Europe starts, we are ready right now.”