Greenland. China, Russia, USA, and Denmark

[Rick]

22 hours ago, Soren Ras said:

Well, the whole Greenland kerfuffle is certainly entertaining. To what degree the whole thing is a negotiation ploy or an actual first step towards  replacing Denmark in Greenland, at the very least it manages to get everyone to look away from the confirmation of Trump's various position picks. 

The US certainly has a number of entirely legitimate security concerns that have not been adequately addressed by Denmark in recent years. Back in 2019, when the matter was raised during the first Trump term, after the initial exchange of nasty words, there was a meting during which our PM made a number of promises to Trump to increase the Greenland security posture. But as it turned out, for various reasons, not all of them derived from Trump no longer being President after the 2020 election, none of these promises were honored.

This puts the PM in a pretty poor light, since at the moment it is abundantly clear that Denmark at the moment cannot defend its own soil, let alone the rather larger territory occupied by Greenland. The recent defense increases will eventually (we hope) address these, but procurement and force building is a longterm thing and as such Denmark only has itself to blame for any security concerns raised vis a vis the defense of the Arctic.

The Greenlanders themselves are in a novel position. On the one hand, there is a significant part of their politicians (and to a lesser degree among their constituents) who would really, really like to be fully independent. And partially due to revelations of the formerly shameful and shabby treatment often accorded the locals by Danes in the past, the agreement in the Danish parliament is that the moment the Greenlanders wish to hold a referendum and vote for independence, it will be granted. The trouble for the independently minded is that currently the economy of Greenland is not only very dependent for a significant part of their economy on direct monetary transfers from Denmark, but worse than that, despite decades of trying, the Greenlanders have not yet managed to train and staff the professionals who are needed to actually run the society. Meaning that doctors, nurses, policemen, teachers, judges, lawyers, bureaucrats, IT specialists etc. (especially the higher levels) are overwhelmingly ethnic Danes to this day.

An independent Greenland would not only have to manage without appx 33% of their current budget, but also risks having to replace a large and key part of the professional classes (or find money to entice most of them to stay voluntarily). This is aside from defense related costs, but since Denmark has screwed that pooch so thoroughly, let's leave that.

Staying totally independent has so far been a pretty hard sell to the ordinary Greenlander, who might like the idea in theory, but are wary of what it would mean in practice.

Switching one overlord for another (and becoming a much, much smaller and less important entity relatively compared to that overlord) is probably also going to be a worry. I suppose if you simply promise to pay each Greenlander enough money personally, that will work on some, but my guess is that enough of them are also concerned about the preservation of their culture and language and some of their traditional way of life.

In any case, I guess my biggest question is what it is that the US wants out of Greenland that it does not already have today?

Exclusive military base access?   Already in place. About the only limitation currently is an old agreement that the US will not base nuclear weapons in Greenland. (or at least not do so openly, see no evil, hear no evil and all that).

Free access to enter contracts for mining and use of the minerals? Already there. Of course, you need to get accept from the local Greenlanders when you negotiate a new contract do so, but presumably outright annexation and abolition of any and all rights of the locals is not planned.

Maybe it is more a matter of preventing the Chinese from luring Greenlanders with their filthy lucre?  But that is already effectively in place, since in practice both Denmark and the US would get a say and neither party would be amenable to Chinese encroachment. The US might object from a national security POV and the Danes (and Greenlanders) might be more concerned about the environmental impact, though it is safe to say that if Washington lets Copenhagen know that they *really* don't like X, then Copenhagen tends to do quite a bit to make X go away. 

In any case, from a pure showmanship POV, Trump is playing a pretty strong hand. He is quite likely to get concessions if that is what he wants, such as additional assurances against Chinese activity, possibly even greater freedom in the use of or expansion of US base rights, and of course Denmark is currently scrambling to pick up and repair its pathetic military capabilities, which Trump has also demanded, though of course no small part of that is due to some dude sitting in Moscow.

Losing Greenland would be a blow to the national self image of Denmark to some degree, but well, we have been in that spot before.

Brilliant! I now know more in a few minutes than I have known since this topic made the news. Thank you!

[Roman Alymov]

Just now, Stuart Galbraith said:

Learning how to fight? Because judging by what happened in 2022, they surely didnt.

Surely they didn't since not only regular Russian Army was not fighting in Donbass during "Minsk agreements" years, but local pro-Russian were regularly punished for firing back when pro-Ukrainians were bombarding them. Because, as our officials claimed, "there is no alternative for Minsk agreements". 

[Stefan Kotsch]

6 hours ago, Roman Alymov said:

The war is on since 2014. Russian Civil war.

OMG ...

[Stuart Galbraith]

5 hours ago, Roman Alymov said:

Surely they didn't since not only regular Russian Army was not fighting in Donbass during "Minsk agreements" years, but local pro-Russian were regularly punished for firing back when pro-Ukrainians were bombarding them. Because, as our officials claimed, "there is no alternative for Minsk agreements". 

That's right, they wer3 all on holiday, vladmart, etc, etc.

[Roman Alymov]

1 hour ago, Stefan Kotsch said:

OMG ...

Some problems with Pioneers? You repeatedly return to that....

[Roman Alymov]

55 minutes ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

That's right, they wer3 all on holiday, vladmart, etc, etc.

Let me quote from my late friend Andrey "Murz" Morozov memoirs ( https://t.me/wehearfromyanina/169 )

"Of course, back in March there was a truce again, a real-super-real truce, and we couldn't return fire in any way. And, of course, this, as usual, did not concern the Ukrainian Armed Forces. I remember that the late battalion commander Alexei Gennadyevich "Dobry" Markov aka the LJ user trueredrat and I got pretty badly back then for publishing pictures in the style of "Birds don't sing here, trees don't grow" in the middle of a truce (https://kenigtiger.livejournal.com/2039205.html ).

The Ukrainian Armed Forces were not shy about hitting these positions with 120-mm mortars and artillery, plus every day around lunchtime, a tank was started somewhere in the Orekhovo area, which, of course, was prohibited by all Minsk agreements a hundred times, rolled out to a firing position and, hiding from the possible (but what if?)  ATGM on our side behind a peaceful rural house, slowly firing 7-8 shots at us. After the shelling, it was possible to walk through the trenches and find many beautiful fragments of tank shells (there is a photo of one such "catch" there). A couple of times a day, BMP-2s rolled out to comb, without sparing shells, the forest belt in which we were digging a trench. First along, then across. The end of these trips was then put by the destruction on July 4, 2020, by the hit of a 122-mm air conditioner of the ammunition supply point discovered by the KTSPN-provided drone, where they all loaded the belts of their 30-mm automatic guns and from where they carried mines to the mortar men. Here in this report https://kenigtiger.livejournal.com/2048058.html There is this episode. Both 30-mm shells and 120-mm mines burned down, leaving whitish traces on the grass from gunpowder fire. It was tearing up beautifully all evening, and somewhere I even had a video shot from our positions.   

But that was later, in the summer. Meanwhile, by May, our positions looked something like this.

See the photo.

"Our little Somme," as one Lugansk resident called it.

Now everything there is already so dug up and gouged that all these photos, of course, are not secret and they can be shown. In the third photo, where trueredrat then, in May 2020, circled more than 160 only the freshest, already on the green grass, craters. The same photo clearly shows a long trench dug into the "Pool" recaptured from the Ukrainian Armed Forces under these attacks. I was digging in the next trench, which is visible in the forest belt. It was being "scratched" by the BMP-2 every day.

The intensity and accuracy of the shelling were such that they eventually had to bring the dog to the rear from the positions - the dog was already frankly going crazy, howling plaintively, whining, digging the earthen floor of his kennel. We were left with two cats, one of whom, a one-eyed rascal, ran into the field after each bombardment, following the smell of explosives, to feast on stunned field mice. 

When the grass caught fire around the positions, we ran out in a crowd to extinguish it at gunpoint of the Ukrainian DShK, and we had to have time to stamp out the flames and dive back into the trench before the machine gunner "woke up" and started "scratching" at this place. When the mortar attack started or a tank rolled out, we hid for a while, and then returned to picks and shovels. Both the course of the message to the pool and the trench in the forest belt had to be completed as soon as possible. In the film by Maxim Fadeev and Sergey Belous "Ghosts. Soldiers of the forgotten war" there is a moment, a monologue of "Dobry" behind the scenes, which sounds while the deceased battalion commander is walking through long, long trenches. It was filmed there, in May, when they were already dug up.

Of course, I'm not an adrenaline junkie, and "risking my life" has never been fun for me, only a necessity. The "happiness" of these days was that I was among the bravest and most stubborn, most devoted to Russia people on Earth - among the simple Lugansk infantry. Which dug into the ground with picks and shovels under endless shelling, in order not to give the enemy a single meter of its native land. It was there that Sasha "The Negro", the main character of the film "Ghosts", fought, a desperately brave and very modest fighter, at that time the commander of our intelligence service. Among those who did not surrender Lugansk in 2014, who then took Debaltsevo"