alt Hacker NewsI agree with what you have said here, but I don't know if the US is in a position to turn the war around in 2024 without a huge escalation. It remains to be seen if there is any possible way to do that without "boots on the ground" (formally starting WW III) or the use of nuclear weapons (again, formally starting WW III).
There were plenty of options to pressure Ukraine into preventing Russia from having a causus belli in early 2022 (too bad the Biden admin didn't do any of those), but those are gone now and Russia currently controls much of the territory they had as military objectives.
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> if there is any possible way to do that without "boots on the ground"
Of course there is but the Western allies are slow to arm Ukraine because they fear the Russian nuclear retaliation.
To recap, Ukraine received very few , around a hundred ATACMS missiles with severe restrictions on targets. They got less than two dozen F-16 jets. This is just nothing compared what the US might be able to send if they wanted to, they have over 300 Falcons at Davis-Monthan AFB (aka Boneyard) to begin with. There are near four thousand ATACMS missiles manufactured so far. And so on, with tanks etc.
If the "tap" were to open full stream instead of dripping, the war would be over very fast. The question is, which end would we get.
Doesn't need to be a huge escalation.
Just enough to send the tide of attrition turning slowly the other way for a while.
After which HN will instantly fill up with comments about "how badly Russia is losing", "it's clear Ukraine has already lost", and so forth.
There were plenty of options to pressure Ukraine into preventing Russia from having a causus belli in early 2022
Russia never had casus belli in this conflict, and no one did anything to present it with such.