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Comment by robkop | Hacker News Reader

This statement is so counter to what I'd normally expect a defence minister to say that I wonder if it's being setup as a cover for British troops to be in Ukraine without bringing forth all the issues around Brits and Russians killing each other.

I wouldn't be surprised if special operations groups were already in country but this would let them be a lot more liberal with showing themselves.

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This is certainly a reasonable hypothesis. Tell SAS guys they have a 3 month expenses paid holiday as civilians in Eastern Europe. Job done.

”don’t get yourselves into trouble. Wink wink”

PUTIN: These guys were on a holiday there

THE WORLD: gasps

UK: These guys were on a holiday there

THE WORLD: claps

I guess in a three months I would have more than enough of these gasps/claps jokes.

I wonder how large you could take this strategy before it turns into a NATO intervention. Could you have 3 full battalions of British troops all take time off and decide to go fight for Ukraine on their own?

Could you have a full armoured regiment take 1 month PTO and go fight for Ukraine and then suddenly have some British armour dropped off for the Ukrainian army to use?

Could you say a drone command group is taking a month off then lend and lease a fleet of drones to the Ukrainian air force?

This feels like a very Putinesque salami tactic, maybe we should be hitting back the say way he's hitting Ukraine.

I guess it depends on how much you can get away with.

For guys with guns, those are guys with guns. For drones, it is hard to prove it's not Ukrainians flying those TB2s or how many they have or anything.

Getting away with Patriot or few A-10's being on vacation might be hard.

There’s certainly a long history of Soviet Russian and Chinese personnel embedded with and “helping” US adversaries in Korea, Vietnam, etc. quite egregiously in fact. So there is definitely historical precedent.

This feels like the way the world ends.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/27/vladimir-putin...

Little green men.

It is a bit weird to state it so outright but there is a long history of governments giving more or less official support to volunteer soldiers.

During the Finish Winter War (1940) the Soviet Union attacked Finland, a neutral country, after a false flag operation which they used as an excuse to attack. My grandfather, together with 8000 other Swedes went to help the Finns with the explicit support by the Swedish government. [1]

He was part of the Swedish Voluntary Air Force F19 [2], as an airplane mechanic. I still have some of his winter war gear and the medal he got.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_intervention_in_the_Wi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Regiment_19,_Finnish_Ai...

My grandfather was a truck driver from northern Sweden. Just before the war he had just bought a new Volvo truck with about 70 hp (a monster in those days) and had loans to pay, but during the war suddenly there was no jobs. In the newspaper he read about a job in the port of Holmsund near Umeå and when he went it became clear that this was no ordinary job.

As you said Sweden allowed and encouraged Swedish volunteers to Finland, but the military also sent a lot of firearms, artillery and other equipment. But the railways in Sweden and Finland were of different widths meaning all cargo would have to be unloaded and re-loaded by hand at the border. They still tried but the system was quickly overrun.

The winter in 39/40 was one of the coldest ever here, meaning the Bothnian Bay was frozen solid. The solution was to drive civilian truck convoys loaded with armaments over the ice over "Kvarken", the strait from Holmsund to Vasa. There they unloaded the trucks and loaded Finnish pulp for paper production, which was the only thing they had a surplus of.

They had to drive at night and cover their headlamps so Soviet planes wouldn't spot them. They had to drive with their door open so they could get out and run if they were attacked or if the ice started caving, meaning many of them got frostbitten (especially those from southern Sweden )

My grandfather drove many times and "advanced" to plowtruck in the front part of the convoy, a safer position. One time there was a blizzard and the tracks got covered with snow in seconds. Since the drivers couldn't see more than a meter or two, the convoy quickly clogged up. Even if the ice was thick, it couldn't handle it. One driver died. He was the only casualty of the "Kvarken traffic" although 6 trucks went through the ice in total.

My grandfather proposed to my grandmother in the beginning of the war, but she already had a boyfriend. The morning after the blizzard my grandmother heard that the convoy hadn't yet arrived in Vasa. She was worried and devastated, and realized she loved him.

So, I guess the moral of the story is I exist because Sweden and Finland had incompatible train tracks..

It's also funny how truckloads of arms are sometimes dropped off in the night with no apparent owners. /shrug

Liz Truss is not exactly known for her intelligence.

But US and UK with their increased deployment on NATO borders might use it as a cover to put special forces in, but since the fighting is far from the NATO borders right now, I don't know how much it will help Ukraine.

Same. I was thinking about all those movies in the 80s and 90s that show US spec ops taking off their US patches before being dropped into some random South American country. Would NATO powers take that risk though? There's some game theory going now. If RUS found a NATO soldier in theater, would they attack outside UKR? I would think RUS definitely doesn't want to provoke a full on NATO response under any pretense.

Nukes are always the wildcard, but if Putin is willing to use them first at all, we already have much bigger problems.

I'd think it's fair to assume that there's Americans in Ukraine now, scavenging electronics and interesting materials from downed Russian airplanes, for rapid analysis elsewhere.

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