Fwiw I actually agree with you. My point is that early in the war, it was commonly thought that just the western sanctions alone would totally cripple the Russian economy. Or that they'd soon run out of arms, or anything like that. None of that happened. It's not pro-Russian to establish that they were more resilient than what many people anticipated/hoped. This doesn't take anything away from Ukraine's resilience in the face of years of obscene unwarranted aggression which is easily 10x more impressive to me.
You can help instead of waiting for politicians to "do something about it". It's not that hard to find a reputable organization that helps Ukraine and send it some money.
> In 2024, charitable giving in the US was $592 billion. $392 billion of that was from individual donations.
That's a single-digit percentage of the US Federal budget.
Some of that goes to "family foundation" sinecures. Some of it goes to 10% church tithes. Quite a bit of it is spent on… raising funds. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/when-giving-to-charity-ask-wher... - "Of the more than $1.3 billion raised by charities in the [New York] in 2018, about $369 million — or 27% — went to pay professional fundraisers' fees")
> If 1% of our donations went to Ukraine, that's not a number to casually dismiss.
I think that's wildly optimistic, but that'd be somewhere between $3-5B. The US alone has earmarked something like $200B thus far. The EU has given a similar amount.
Every bit undoubtedly counts, but a single Patriot battery costs $1B.
I would be surprised if they could manage to keep refilling their squirt guns and deal with all the logistics required to keep an army available to use them
To be fair, it is quite difficult to support a regime where random people are grabbed off the streets and sent to their deaths. Where for expressing oppositional opinions your male relatives will have their door kicked down and will be sent to an assault on enemy position with a 90% mortality rate. And if they survive that - to another one just like it. To support a regime that has no long-term plan and goals for waging a senseless war and which openly promises to commit genocide and ethnic cleansing in the reclaimed territories.
So the support from Western countries is enormous, considering all these aspects.
I'm a big supporter of Ukraine, but let's be honest
People aren't being dragged off the streets in Russia. This was briefly true in mid-late 2022 when they flirted with a partial mobilization, but hasn't been true for a while.
This is (sadly) actually more true in Ukraine. But there's also some nuance there - they can stop and question but supposedly they technically can't use physical force anymore.
What Russia is doing is increasing the bonuses and salary for signing a contract. And they don't have manpower problems for the most part - Ukraine is the one having that problem.
Now the Russian military is doing alot of shady shit, like promising recruits they won't be sent to Ukraine or would serve only in rear areas (even the US military recruiters were frequently guilty of this tactic). Classifying certain infantry units as "disposable" (especially foreign recruits and those from less politically unimportant regions), basically to be used as bait in assaults. And I'm sure the pressure for the required conscripts every year to sign a regular contract so they can be deployed is quite great, but its nothing like what some would have us believe.
Western support to Ukraine has been a real joke - https://carnegieendowment.org/europe/strategic-europe/2025/0...