And most definitely not this. NATO is not going to do anything that might occasion an ongoing shooting war between Russia and NATO. A military response, if one did happen, would be a single strike from a remote location, along the lines of Iran’s response to the Soleimani assassination, but more destructive.
You think a massive strike inside Russia is more likely than a no-fly zone over Ukraine? I don’t see how the former is less escalatory than the latter.
Didn’t Iran’s response to the Soleimani assassination kill US personnel? That would not be true for a tactical nuke inside Ukraine. Iran also isn’t a nuclear power so the US can strike them with impunity.
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I said inside Ukraine, not Russia. You realise that “a no-fly zone” is just a polite euphemism for engaging in combat with the Russian air force. That requires not only an ongoing shooting war with Russia, but giving commanders in the field freedom to strike Russian targets. It’s an inherently unpredictable situation and that’s what makes it more dangerous than a single strike.
I missed that when I only read your reply to me. At least theoretically can be achieved without a single shot fired if the Russians think it’s not in their best interest to actually fight NATO. A strike will definitely kill Russians.
It’s hard to picture NATO troops or planes or whatever entering Ukraine, engaging Russia for a short bit, then saying “see ya guys” to the Ukrainians.
It seems more likely to me that if NATO goes in they’re going in to wipe Russia off of Ukraine soil.
I mean if we’re relying on “hopefully the Russians don’t think it’s in their best interests to fight NATO” then what are we waiting for, just deploy NATO troops in Ukraine and blow them off the battlefield.
The calculation changes once Russia has proven it is willing to use tactical nukes and NATO might have more of an interest in declaring that a red line.
The worst thing about Russia using tactical nukes is that the nuclear taboo has been broken. China, North Korea, Iran (maybe someday), Pakistan, all will be watching.
Don’t forget the good nuclear powers
They don’t need to launch tactical nukes because they have all the best conventional weapons.
taking out the Sochi palace would be great. but it’s definitely going to be a military target, and if i had to guess it would be targeted at diminishing russian fleet or air force capability.
no fly zone is established gradually. it would first target all known SAM, while deploying more SAM to ukraine, and then ultimately flying patrols.
you are operating from the assumption that putin isn’t going to use a nuke, even though every week he paints himself deeper into a corner, and the nuke is precisely the last thing to try to make it out.
the us intel has been in front of every putin action for the past 6 months. they know if he’s ready to do it, and they will likely wait for that exact moment as the point of no return. “nato engaging russia first” is the last thing putin can conceivably make happen, there appears to be very few achievable military objectives.
i actually just had the thought that putin has one other thing to try, which is taking a hostage and walking out threatening to blow everyone up. i don’t quite believe 500k (150k children) were taken from mariupol to siberia, but i can easily see it being in the 10-50k range and they certainly look like hostages to me.
Here’s another:
There are 2-3 places that make the neon for semiconductors in Ukraine, and they are like 50% of the global supply. One is in a part of Mariupol that Russia controls, if I recall correctly the other two are in Odesa. If he can take all three, that’s a significant global economic hostage. He can also threaten a decent chunk of the global steel, wheat, and corn supplies through Donbas and the southern regions of Ukraine.
That’s quite a bit of negotiating leverage to try to get the West to make Ukraine settle for like giving him Crimea and some portion of the LPR and DPR.
Most of this makes no sense to me. “Paints himself into a corner” how? It’s not like he’s besieged or something, the Russians can go home and just claim victory on state TV. What does “make it out” mean and how would using nukes achieve that? Why would “NATO engaging Russia first” be a Russian goal?
Open conflict with NATO would be a total disaster for Putin because there are no good outcomes there for Russia. It’s either abject defeat or nuclear war. Putin is a gambler and would flirt with inviting conflict with NATO if there was something to be gained by using tac nukes, but it’s not clear to me what that something would be in the current state of the war.
yeah i don’t think putin is going to have a good time holding the world economy hostage for a period longer than a quarter, its GDP is 1.3% of the total. remember that trade wars are good and easy to win. but in all seriousness, those things that russia is going to withhold from the west are going to appear via some nice third world tax haven like an island off the coast of africa or north dakota as if by an invisible hand. us and canada will plant more summer wheat this year, simply due to higher prices, as will other countries. i wouldn’t bet on russian corn either.
TIL, majority of russian wheat is pretty poor quality, grades 3/4/5, and doesn’t get sold in the west much at all. a lot of it is destined for feed lots.
We’re not just talking about Russian wheat/corn/steel/neon, were talking about Ukrainian. Those sectors heavily if not entirely skew toward Donbas and the coastal region.
And for the rest of it, we’ve seen supply chains get fucked up by things a lot less dramatic than a blockade.
every week the war continues 1-2k russian soldiers die and far more are wounded. every week loses 100 tanks and 10 aircraft. every day they fire ~20 kalibr or iskanders with little military value in return. those are not just unsustainable expenditures. i won’t be counting dead generals, but the internal repressions are also costly. it’s around a cool billion $ of not immediately replaceable assets. even if they take territory, there are no spoils to be had that measure to that amount.
there are no off-ramps because putin never created any. even abandoning kyiv didn’t create a deescalation. what territory can he even hold next month? will he have to retreat in izyum or kherson to hold mariupol? they have achieved none of their objectives during or since the blitzkrieg. and i posited earlier they currently achieved the objective of holding the water canal to crimea, but that’s relatively minor compared to a city.
in short, russian army will take decades to rebuild. they have no forces to squash another potential uprisings in belarus or kazakhstan or within russia for that matter. russia was nowhere to be found when azerbadjan took nagornyj karabakh.
drawing nato into the conflict by engaging first is a wet dream for russian propaganda. it’s a thing they have been telling all along and it finally has a chance of becoming true. there’s no other single “truth” they ever said that is as big as that. but the biggest “win” it lets putin use nukes with impunity. abject defeat is an existential threat to putin, and it gets played on state tv as an existential threat to russia, making nukes justified.
ua economic value doesn’t skew towards donbass. i don’t know what you are reading that tells you this. ua gdp is even smaller than russia, and donbass is a fraction of that, not to mention dnr/lnr are net negatives in themselves.