txags92 said:
Rossticus said:
Russia is definitely all in on the "create the largest humanitarian crisis possible without nuking or gassing them and they'll give us what we want" strategy.
I'd rather see us take the gloves off and give the Ukrainians the weapons necessary to give them what they have coming to them. Screw all this short range crap. If Iran can sell Russia medium range ballistic missiles to attack Ukrainian civilians, what right does Russia have to object to us selling the same to the Ukrainians and letting them wipe out a few airbases in Russia where these bombers are taking off from.
Unless we're going to hand over B-1s, B-52s, or F-15Es, we don't really have anything beyond relatively short range weapons that the Ukrainians can use. The U.S. scrapped all of our Pershing IIs and ground launched Tomahawks to comply with the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty signed during the Reagan administration.
We withdrew from the treaty in 2018 due to non-compliance by Russia, but we have not fielded any land based weapons of that range since then.