[scorpion9]

Originally Posted by kellyhound ↗

President Trump is demanding Saudi Arabia and OPEC to drop the oil price in order to stop the war in Ukraine.

This demand - drying up russian revenues - is reminiscent with the 1980s, where Saudi Arabia significantly increased oil production, eventually driving down the oil price and contributing the Soviet Union to economically implode.

This is the second significant demand by Trump within a short amount of time which directly puts pressure on Putin.

“Yet now there are rumors Trump may even leverage $330bn in frozen Russian state assets, threatening to give them to Kyiv to buy US weapons – a move appealing to Trump’s transactional instincts.

Money is the only thing Trump cares about. Drill-baby-drill and fossil fuel mining/pumping has been his thing long before this war and i doubt that his orders regarding oil production have anything to do with russia. It benefits major corporations in the US who are all interested in lower oil price. Same goes for sanctions. The less energy/materials Europe can get from russia, the more US can sell to Europe at higher prices. This war is a profitable business for the US on almost every level and Trump, being extremely profit oriented, can easily flip against russia if Ukraine can make it profitable to do so. Russia will probably try to do the same - offer him some personal deals in russia, discounted oil post war maybe, god knows what else.

My advice to Ukraine would be to whisper in Trumps ears about the 330 billion dollars. Thats a sweet pile of money and Trump will take it if he thinks that he can. Same goes for weapons and aid. Just tell him that helping Ukraine profits US companies and gives jobs, and he can continue the aid. It just needs to profit him somehow more than whatever profits he gets from Russia via his shady deals. Im sure that the military industrial complex is already putting a lot of pressure on him to continue the aid.

[kellyhound]

Originally Posted by scorpion9 ↗

Money is the only thing Trump cares about. Drill-baby-drill and fossil fuel mining/pumping has been his thing long before this war and i doubt that his orders regarding oil production have anything to do with russia. It benefits major corporations in the US who are all interested in lower oil price. Same goes for sanctions.

The less energy/materials Europe can get from russia, the more US can sell to Europe at higher prices.

This war is a profitable business for the US on almost every level and Trump, being extremely profit oriented, can easily flip against russia if Ukraine can make it profitable to do so.

Russia will probably try to do the same - offer him some personal deals in russia, discounted oil post war maybe, god knows what else.

My advice to Ukraine would be to whisper in Trumps ears about the 330 billion dollars. Thats a sweet pile of money and Trump will take it if he thinks that he can. Same goes for weapons and aid.

Just tell him that helping Ukraine profits US companies and gives jobs, and he can continue the aid. It just needs to profit him somehow more than whatever profits he gets from Russia via his shady deals. Im sure that the military industrial complex is already putting a lot of pressure on him to continue the aid.

There's usally a second agenda in politics i agree. He explicit told them to lower oil prices as that could also end the war way quicker. Actually asking for that and wants to end the energy crisis by drill baby drill is a bit contradictive for American crude industry imo as when Opec does the world can buy cheap(er) oil from Opec instead of America so american profits go down.

5 years ago an argument between russia and Opec or Saudi arabia led to a flooding of extra oil, meaning lower prices for several months. Trump asked for cuts or else more and more American firms would go bankrupt as they were also hurt due to the pandemic. Trump threatened to pull his troops out of Saudi Arabia if production cuts weren't implemented.

Maybe he realizes it would take some time to drill baby drill and people that voted for him mostly did that because of inflation (and immigration) so when life gets cheaper in a real short period he can take credit for that.

Also he sees that russia is not doing well with their war industry and he doesn't want russia to crumble apart or some uprising taking place as that would benefit China way more as any other country.

[GoreGram]

Blue and yellow brigade lost the war in 2022 as soon as it started.

[Guns N' Coffee]

I see Putin and the Russian Army as the real losers here, who would have believed then that they would still not have defeated the Ukrainians three years later

[GoreGram]

True Russian-Personnel casualty number stands at a little over 92K troops.
Long live the truth

[GoreGram]

Originally Posted by Guns N' Coffee ↗

I see Putin and the Russian Army as the real losers here, who would have believed then that they would still not have defeated the Ukrainians three years later

Let me rephrase that:
Russia took territory from Azov and it is maintaining the territory for almost 3 years. And Russia is fighting the Ukraine + all Nato countries + the US.

Please let's be real

[kellyhound]

The war of attrition between Russia and Ukraine is killing soldiers at a pace unseen in Europe since World War II.

Ukrainian artillery fire, explosive drones and mines are killing Russian troops, as they repeatedly charge across the no-man’s land. As Ukrainian positions are exposed, they are suffering heavy casualties inflicted from afar by Russian drones, shells and glide bombs.

Calculating the scale of the casualties, and therefore the war’s trajectory, is difficult: The information is a state secret in both countries. The Ukrainian government has been especially secretive, restricting access to demographic data that could be used to estimate its losses.

The most complete counts of Ukraine’s dead soldiers are made by groups abroad with biased or opaque motivations.

Working with incomplete information, experts estimate that Ukraine has suffered about half of Russia’s irreplaceable losses — deaths and injuries that take soldiers out of battle indefinitely — in the nearly three-year-old war.

Russia is still winning. Its much larger population and more effective recruitment have allowed it to replace losses more effectively, and to gradually push forward, said Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based military analyst.

“The fat man grows thinner. But the thin man dies,” Mr. Gady said.

The most complete publicly available tallies of Ukrainian deaths come from two opaque websites that track obituaries, posthumous medal awards, funeral announcements and other death-related information published online.

The websites — Lostarmour.info and UALosses.org — have produced similar results: They have each individually counted about 62,000 Ukrainian soldiers who have died since the invasion.

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Lostarmour and UALosses say they can only find some of the dead soldiers, because obituaries are published with a delay, and some deaths are never publicized at all. Lostarmour estimates that more than 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died by December, in total.

By comparison, Russian researchers and journalists have used similar methods to estimate that Russia had suffered more than 150,000 battlefield deaths through the end of November.

Lostarmour’s casualties project is run by about 10 anonymous volunteers, most of them Russian, who scour the internet and cross check information to verify its authenticity, the website’s spokesman said in an emailed response to questions. The group appears to sympathize with Russia and seeks to discredit Ukraine’s propaganda.

The person who claims to run UALosses told The New York Times in a message exchange on X that he is an IT specialist based in a Western country who started his project to address a public knowledge gap. He said he has no ties to Ukraine or Russia and works anonymously to avoid legal and personal risk. The Times was not able to confirm those personal details.

The Ukrainian government has accused UALosses of “disseminating false information,” and appears to periodically block the website. Lostarmour is blocked in Ukraine, like all other websites registered in Russia.

The websites’ secrecy or ideological bias do not necessarily invalidate their findings. The independent Russian media outlet Mediazona and the Ukrainian nonprofit Memory Book have separately verified some UALosses data by taking random tally samples and matching them with online obituaries.

A Times statistical analysis of Lostarmour’s public data has found that 97 percent of the group’s entries are accurate with 95 percent certainty, with a 5 percent margin of error.

In a rare move, a prominent Ukrainian public figure in December contradicted his country’s official casualty claims.

The independent war correspondent Yurii Butusov announced to his 1.2 million YouTube subscribers that sources inside Ukrainian Armed Forces’s headquarters told him that 105,000 soldiers have been “irreversibly lost,” including 70,000 killed and 35,000 missing. That’s far more than the 43,000 soldiers that President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed had been killed as of Dec. 8.

[Guns N' Coffee]

Originally Posted by GoreGram ↗

True Russian-Personnel casualty number stands at a little over 92K troops.
Long live the truth

Putin must have told you that

[Guns N' Coffee]

Originally Posted by GoreGram ↗

Let me rephrase that:
Russia took territory from Azov and it is maintaining the territory for almost 3 years. And Russia is fighting the Ukraine + all Nato countries + the US.

Please let's be real

[WonderMomma]

Originally Posted by GoreGram ↗

True Russian-Personnel casualty number stands at a little over 92K troops.
Long live the truth

Source?