wanderlust wrote:I feel that Ukraine has been used as a guinea pig for NATO to some extent. We gave them weapons - but not the really good ones. We gave them training but not troops. Seems to me that the West is playing a political game, not wanting to risk full on war but just testing how much of an actual threat the Russian army is in a non nuclear scenario. They are the canaries in the coal mine.
Hingary may block EU membership but NATO is a different thing and I can't see there being any rush to sign Ukraine up, however positions could shift very quickly depending on how the war pans out.
Sorry but again you aren't understanding much of what is really happening.
Let us do Hungary first. Hungry is a NATO country. Any new application to join NATO has to be approved by ALL current NATO members. Turkey refused to accept Sweden and Finland's application to join recently for example and although have since (due to deals with the US on military equipment that they had previously not been able to allowed to them - because the US backed the Kurds and Turkey view them as terrorists) signed an agreement to progress the application it still hasn't gone any further until their parliament votes their approval for Sweden and Finland to be accepted into NATO.
So if can understand that Hungary can block/make difficult Ukraine being accepted into the EU, then it is very much the same thing they can do in blocking/making difficult Ukraine's application to join NATO.
Now the military aid to Ukraine.
There are two real issues to this, practicality and political.
Let's deal with practicality first.
Rather oddly think of railways and that the standard width of track in some nations are different to standard width of track in others, meaning if you want to ride a train nonstop from one country to another, both of whom have different width of track you can't - it's physically impossible.
Similarly, Ukraine's military is based on the old Soviet military scheme which is completely different to the wests so any aid given to them is useless if their pilots haven't been trained to fly 'our' planes and their shells don't fit into the artillery that we use and can supply them with. So, when they were attacked the only aid we could supply that they could use immediately was 'old' stock that the former east European nations had in storage from their old soviet days.
As the war progressed that allowed for Ukrainian's to be taught how to use 'our' armament and weapons and gradually they were given the better stuff and the ordnance to go with them.
As for the political aspect, yes there has always been the view not to escalate things to far so as to raise the stakes in anyway. We are also dealing with major countries, Germany in particular, who have been tied in greatly to Russia in many ways not least through their energy needs with them.
In reality there was - and still is - a two speed support to Ukraine, the fast train if you will has come from Poland, the Baltic states, the UK and the US, the slow train from Germany, France and Italy, whilst Hungry and to a lesser extent Serbia and Austria haven't been helpful at all much.
Let us not forget that in the early days I think that almost all of us thought that Russia would win and that we still had to live with them after the war had finished - so people like Macron and Scholz had an eye to appeasing them to some extent (they still do to some extent even now).
Tied in with this is some respects is what equipment countries supplied to Ukraine, Germany and France have certainly held back on their good stuff - Ukraine desperately wants the German tanks that they constantly refuse to give them even now - and from the UK / US angle there is the view not to give them our very best 'secret' stuff if you like, for fear that it may be captured and China in particular gets to know our latest technology.
There are also the practical aspects of the wests military for instance it takes months to learn how to fly our aircraft and even when they do, the aircraft needs specialist maintenance and parts which creates an infrastructure that simply isn't in existence in Ukraine at the moment, so the planes would have to be flown out of NATO bases in European countries and that would be seen as NATO involvement.
There's a much deeper knowledge required to get some understanding of what is really going on and why.
Fwiw I strongly recommend watching the video lectures of Snyder that I referred to in an earlier post, they've certain enlightened me on how Russia /Putin view
THEIR world - which is a completely different way to how we view ours. Snyder's latest lecture I watched (No7) was given as recently as Tuesday of this week and he had visited and spoken to Zelensky in Ukraine just a few weeks earlier, so he clearly knows what he is talking about and is bang up to date in his analysis and explanations.
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