Ukraine ping
[With all the daily stories that you post about how well ukraine is doing and how they are winning over russia....
there doesn’t appear to be any need for the U.S. to help ukraine anymore, so the U.S. should be rebuilding all the stocks biden sent to ukraine, but never replenished.]
Ukraine is doing pretty well, given the very limited help it’s getting, a tiny fraction of what was given to either Russia or Britain against Germany or China against Japan. As a country invaded by a much larger one, Ukraine does need foreign supplies, since its economy can’t match Russia’s.
In WW2, Russia was invaded by Germany, a country with 1/3 its population and 1/40 its size. Yet it relied on massive US aid, including as much as half of many raw materials, more than half of a number, 100K trucks, 400K jeeps, 14K planes, 13K tanks, huge numbers of railroad cars. Khrushchev and Stalin admitted it would have lost without US aid.
When Finland fought Russia during the Winter War while Russia was allied with Nazi Germany to divide up Poland and hand over the Baltics to Russia, the Finns relied on foreign supplies to keep fighting, but was denied this aid by Germany, leading to its partial defeat and the loss of 10% of its land.
But in the Continuation War, which Finland launched to retake its lost territory, it received full German support, including a detachment of German troops. In that campaign, it not only recovered lost territory, it advanced onto Russian land, and held it until it signed a separate peace in 1944 giving that land back and another piece as a concession. German supplies to the Finns had slowed to almost nothing, and it could not keep fighting Russia without that imported equipment, so it made the best deal it could, under these straitened circumstances. As with Russia’s reliance on Lend Lease supplies from the US and massive rerouted Lend Lease from the UK, foreign aid meant the difference not just between victory and defeat, but the very ability to continue the war.
But in light of July Fourth celebrations, a more timely comparison might be to the rebel cause being aided by French and Spanish cash and arms. France and Spain gave 3% and 1.5% of their GDP to the Patriots for 7 years running. They fought the British Empire in Europe and throughout the Atlantic, which diverted Crown resources, both material and men, that could not be used against the Patriot cause. At the time of Yorktown, financed for the Patriots by Spain, the French Navy was blockading supplies to Cornwallis and a French ground force was on hand, just in case British reinforcements arrived by land.
The bottom line is that all small powers require foreign help to sustain a war against bigger powers. Ukraine’s need isn’t indicative of incompetence, corruption, congenital bad luck, or whatever. China and Russia, were both substantially larger than Japan and Germany in land and resources, but needed foreign supplies delivered as gifts to remain in the war. Both the Chinese and the Russians were incompetent relative to their adversaries, but better supplies courtesy of Uncle Sam helped turn certain defeat into certain victory.
The impressive aspect of Ukraine’s war effort is the way it has held the line against Russia with a fraction of the material supplied to Russia in WW2, and without direct allied military action against Russia to divert its resources. Without US and British action in WW2 against Germany and Japan to divert and exhaust the latter’s resources, Russia and China would have been defeated.