That would be awesome. Right now he’s not willing to accept anything less than puppet govt. If he ends up accepting say Crimea and the Donbass and nothing else - that’s a clearly gigantic loss for him. Maybe he could spin that enough I dunno.
Are you thinking there’s a scenario where he gets the whole coastline but Ukraine otherwise stays intact? I don’t think Ukraine would ever go for that. But maybe they’d have no choice. So we wind up with a N Korea/S Korea situation of heavily fortified borders.
But an intact Ukraine can say they won’t join NATO all they want. It just means until the second they’re strong enough to pull it off. NATO will keep funneling arms in to Ukraine. Like it seems like any non-puppet scenario is basically unacceptable, and will be a gigantic, maybe career-ending, loss for Putin.
I think Russia is going to win. They’ll do whatever it takes to win. The US giving staggering amounts of arms and intelligence is making a dangerous situation for the rest of the world much worse, because these actions are so hostile to Russia. If the US did nothing to support Ukraine then the war would be far less dangerous. So my answer to the question of what should the US do in Ukraine is pretty much always the same: we should stay out of it. Do nothing. But that’s not what we’re doing and that’s escalating the danger.
The use of a tactical nuke would obviously demand some sort of response, but the idea that this response would be immediately launching a shooting war against Russia is implausible to me and therefore I suspect to Putin as well. As I posted in the other thread, making implausible threats just doesn’t work. If it did, Putin would threaten to use nukes unless the West stopped supplying arms to Ukraine.
What exactly the response would be would depend on the exact parameters of what this weapon was and how it was used etc. There are too many variables for me to spell out exactly what I think should happen. As things stand it’s not going to happen, because Putin also doesn’t want escalation, and he is perfectly capable of gradually destroying cities, if that’s what he intends to do, in a way that doesn’t step across any kind of long-established line. But it could happen if things get desperate for Russia. We need to thread a difficult needle here of harsh consequences for Russia for the violation of international norms, but not so harsh that all options except escalation become hopeless.
The use of strategic nukes, i.e. nuking a city, I think would demand a direct military response, even though the risk of nuclear war would then be very high.
Yeah, something like this where Russia gets the Black Sea coastline and the separatist areas in the east and as compensation the rest of Ukraine is ceded to Europe. I don’t think Putin would be thrilled with that solution, but he might see it as preferable to turning Kyiv into Grosny. And Ukraine would probably only accept it under great duress, so things are grim any way you slice it.
For the same reason that an attack against a NATO country would demand a response, that some lines cannot be crossed. If you’re never actually willing to react militarily then none of your threats have any credibility. Then Russia really would just annex the Baltics, because why not?
I get how it is sanctions are supposed to work, I understand why we can’t escalate to the point of military involvement too.
What I don’t know is if & how Putin could be rewarded (not just by removal of punishment / sanctions, but like positively reinforced) for deescalating without inadvertently encouraging future war adventures.
I don’t feel like we’re in any danger of anyone looking at this escapade and being like “well that was totally worth it, no serious consequences at all”. Russia’s economy is getting annihilated and they are taking significant military losses as well. So I’m not worried that Putin extricating himself from this without getting the Gaddafi treatment is going to incentivize other powers to act with impunity.
Use of a tactical nuke could probably be used to justify a no-fly zone. NATO and Russia wouldn’t be shooting at each other unless Russia decides to test it.
If Putin doesn’t want escalation, then does he only turn to nuclear weapons out of desperation if he has a monomaniacal obsession with uniting Greater Russia?
I don’t understand how a non-aligned country getting nuked crosses any red lines. Russia nuking a city in Ukraine and Russia leveling Grozny or Aleppo are in the same ballpark. Why respond to one but not the other? Russia nukes one of our allies they’re getting nuked back. But an unaligned country? Why basically guarantee global annihilation? What good comes of it? You think Russia would think that they could get away with nuking a NATO country? That’d be absurd.
Man it does seem like complete bullshit that Ukraine gave up nukes because Bill Clinton promised we would defend them and now we won’t defend them because nukes.
The use of strategic nuclear weapons has been long established as something that cannot be tolerated. And the whole of nuclear deterrence strategy is based around doing things that “no good comes of”. Like if Russia launched a massive nuclear first strike against the United States, should the US retaliate? What is the point right, like the US is getting wiped off the map no matter what, so why just increase the amount of destruction that is going to happen? If you’re never willing to wreak destruction on the other side because “no good can come of it”, then you have no credible deterrent. Human beings are evolutionarily programmed to seek revenge for this reason - it is necessary for their opponents to know that they are up against someone who will deliver consequences for transgressions even at cost to themselves.
This is key point as well. Putin essentially has a green light to level civilian areas as long as he doesn’t use nukes or chemical weapons. He’d be hurting his own goals to escalate like that.
I think the idea is it’s top men on each side. Maybe the same ones who let Russia and China know they weren’t going to let Trump launch nukes after Jan 6th.
