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Polish Foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorksi said a victory against Vladimir Putin’s forces would be swift due to the “overwhelming superiority” of its air forces, even without support from the United States.
“If Russia attacked us and we took our gloves off, I think we would defeat Russia quite quickly. We have overwhelming superiority over Russia in air power. General, correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s something like 2,500 aircraft,” he said during a discussion at the Yalta European Strategy meeting in Kyiv on Saturday.
“Even without the US it’s still overwhelming, and I haven’t checked recently how many F-35s and JASSMs and all the deep-strike capabilities we have.”
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He went further to say that Poland could knock out half of Russia’s refining capacity in a matter of weeks. The comments were in relation to a potential conflict between Russia and Nato and not about the prospect of a direct war between Russia and Poland.
“But if the Ukrainians have knocked out half of Russia’s refining capacity in six months, we could do it in six weeks and take out the other half,” he continued.
Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova accused Sikorski of “Russophobia of the brain” in discussing the conflict.
Speculation has abounded that Moscow is plotting to attack Nato, claims that the country has denied.
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Last month CIA director John Ratcliffe made a short trip to Moscow - the last time that a CIA chief visited the country personally was in the weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Several sources familiar with the discussions told CBS News that Ratcliffe had made the visit to warn Russia against an attack on Nato.
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No one can put the brakes on China without going into an immediate recession. The cost of ceasing trade with China will be catastrophic for both parties and trigger a war.
I am not sure whether there will be a recession, but China will suffer much more (and earlier) as soon as such a trade war begins. The Chinese economy is heavily dependent on exports.
I expect this to only work like that if done by enough countries in coordination, otherwise China will likely trade with others more, and suffer way less than the ones trying to pull them. But I hope we will not have to witness if that is so
We can’t slam on the breaks on China trade, but we can ease them on a bit. As you say, ceasing trade would be catastrophic, but slight adjustments could be effective. The key is not to slap on tariffs or regulations which only encourages a similar targeted response, but to build capacity and out perform them (even at an economic loss). Not easy in a capitalist economy, but governments can do this. It’s what China has done for cars and renewable tech. We need to fight back the same way.
Good one. The average salary difference between most European countries and China is so big that we’d need slavery and we’d still be doing it at an economic loss.
We’d need our own Shenzhen. Where do you propose we build a city of millions, ideally 10, 20 million people that’s entirely focused on tech and manufacturing?
We’d then also need to own the entire supply chain for batteries from mining to refinement to ready-made batteries. If we tried making lithium batteries for even twice as much cost as China incurs, it wouldn’t be enough.
20 years ago you could’ve done this. Now that ship has sailed. Europe will never catch up to China in manufacturing. We don’t have enough cheap humans. Ironically a place where automation could help us a ton… by putting people out of jobs.