>>512943924
>Nothing will come out the Alska summit, Trump is already getting flustered by the reaction of the neocons at home, he'll try to act tough with Putin and blow his chances of getting of Ukraine clean.
Nah.
My bet is that Trump will, on the surface, get everything and more than he asked for.
Land swap (Russia out of Sumy and Kharkov), general ceasefire and elections in Ukraine.
...but there will be nuance.
Land swap is conditioned on Ukraine implementing a 50km deep DMZ along the border with Russia, Russian pullout in the north won't happen before that.
Ukraine will give all of the four regions to Russia in exchange for the above (including parts of Kherson that are on the western side of the Dnepr).
Russian ceasefire will be limited to the troops pulling out of the four regions, and the general ceasefire will be implemented during the general elections of Ukraine.
Ukraine also won't become member of NATO and get no NATO funding or weapon deliveries, or the entire deal breaks apart.
Naturally, this is just a "deal" that will give the US and exit while the EU and Zelensky kill it.
>>512944045
>>512944169
I mean.. we see the corrupt nature of weapon purchases.
Nobody seemed to take a step back and ask what the functions of the air force should be.
You have interception, air policing, A2G (CAS and deep strikes), recon and A2A (air dominance/deterrence and simple "air mobile SAM type missions").
The F-35 could in theory do deep strikes and air dominance better than previous jets, but in reality the Russians can track and engage them from hundreds of km away. This means they are down to kinetic performance as means of self defence, kinetic performance that the F-35 simply doesn't have.
So now NATO are sitting with an air force that can't intercept anything, can't strike anything (without standoff munitions like the legacy jets could also use) and are too expensive to operate. Similar to the Eurofighter in that regard, but without the speed.
