alt Hacker NewsPeople are not perfect. I went to Ukraine just days before the invasion. Travel and Hotels in Kiev had become extremely cheap. You asked the Ukrainians about the possible invasion. "Not going to happen" everybody said."Russia talks always aggressively, but never does anything".
They did not properly prepare and as a result lost 20% of its territory in days.
Days after that I was back is Austria and could not stop thinking about some of the people I spoke with being dead.
Since that I have also been in Dubai and Saudi Arabia as an entrepreneur and engineer. "What are you going to do when drones are used against your infrastructure?" If you followed the Russian war and first Iranian strike it was obvious that drones were going to be used against them. "not going to happen" again.
The have lost tens of billions for lacking proper preparation. They could have been protected spending just hundreds of millions of dollars over years.
It is about humans, not AI.
Replies
I'd say that Ukraine were very prepared for the invasion, though? They managed to survive for the first 2 weeks, leading to a long-term war. The Donbas war had already been going on for 8 years, and I don't think Ukrainians were under some illusion that those weren't Russians.
On the flip side, all around the world you have "leaders" talking about imaginary conflicts with foreign countries that we must spend billions (they have a friend who really should get the contract) to prepare for and if the other side (tm) gets in your whole family will be killed instantly.
In hindsight, it's easy to be smart. You picked two examples where somebody said "never gonna happen" and then it happened. How about the countless examples where somebody said the same and then the thing actually didn't happen?
Take millions playing the lottery. To each of them, I can confidently say "you won't win, not gonna happen". For almost all of them I'll be right. There will be one who wins, were I was wrong, and they will say "see, told you so". That doesn't mean my prediction was wrong. It means you are having a reporting bias.
> They did not properly prepare and as a result lost 20% of its territory in days.
They did though. While nobody actually believed Putin would be dumb enough, the Ukrainian army was still, just in case, extremely busy on preparing defences, organising stockpiles, preparing defensive tactics.
> Since that I have also been in Dubai and Saudi Arabia as an entrepreneur and engineer.
Why would we listen to anything related to right or wrong from you then if you don't care?
> They did not properly prepare and as a result lost 20% of its territory in days.
Ukraine has been preparing since 2014. Without preparation there would be a Russian talking head right now in Kyiv.