[chrisco255]

I'm with you all the way up to the last paragraph.

There has been no explicit peace deal with Russia. There has been an ongoing negotiation and attempts at agreements but my no means was Trump suggesting to surrender all of Ukraine to Russia.

You do realize that EU support and weaponry is completely insufficient to fight Russia, right? Their military is far stronger than anything you've got. The only reason Ukraine has been doing as well as it has is because of American training, intel, weaponry, drones, etc. If America walked away, Ukraine would collapse quite quickly, regardless of empty pledges by the EU.

[WJW]

Interesting statement, and I think this shows how different the viewpoints are on both sides of the pond. First off obviously, the EU absolutely doesn't see its pledges as "empty". If anything, the amount of weapons being used in Ukraine are by now 80+% produced either in Ukraine itself or somewhere in Europe. Artillery shell production has increased fourfold over 2022 and will double again this year. US weapons deliveries are nice and everything is welcome, but it's mostly (Patriot) air defenses that Europe cannot yet produce at sufficient scale. There are huge training missions for Ukrainian soldiers in eg France and the UK where the US has basically zero input. American drones are crap compared to what the Ukrainians build themselves, to the point that the US is importing drone knowledge from there these days. All new fighter jets for Ukraine have been donated from EU countries, not a single one by the US. The Ukraine collapsing without the US is simply not true, and that is why so many of Trumps diplomatic advances have failed so far: he doesn't hold the leverage he thinks he does.

The relative strength of the combined armies in Europe is also something that we apparently think very different about. There are certainly strategic deficiencies: we'd prefer to have a more robust domestic nuclear umbrella for example, and the US has an advantage in things like intel satellites. In terms of regular weaponry though, we have more than enough "stuff" to win, especially with Russia severely depleted by several years of attritional warfare in Ukraine. The numbers gap is already big enough, but most of the Russian stuff is decades old by now while the European countries are mostly rocking up with extremely modern equipment.

[somenameforme]

European production is mostly a mixture of a myth to an outright lie. For instance as of late 2024 the commissioner of defense for the EU stated that only 20-25% of EU supplied weapons come from the EU. [1] And similarly EU claims of artillery production were dramatically exaggerated [2]. The EU 'military industrial complex' remains mostly going unsustainably deep into debt to buy US arms. Energy costs alone likely preclude any large scale manufacturing with any degree of efficiency.

[1] - https://kyivindependent.com/eu-to-produce-2-million-artiller...

[2] - https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-weapons-shells-european-unio...

[withinboredom]

> There has been no explicit peace deal with Russia. There has been an ongoing negotiation and attempts at agreements but my no means was Trump suggesting to surrender all of Ukraine to Russia.

I think you've been watching US propaganda? This "deal" explicitely happened, there was a lot of "wtf" moments at that. It was a thing that sparked protests.