Ukraine, Russia, and the West

No idea, if the mainland US was being attacked guessing would be be more than one.

We have a separate thread for anihilation?

Well thats where I need to be

My bad, forgot there were separate threads. Gonna bow out of this anyways.

7 plagues for 7 years, but most of them are self-imposed.

You’re jumbling two separate discussions. That is not what the article I linked said, and afaik not what anybody itt has ever said either.

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I have no idea what you’re trying to say then. You keep replying to me saying this is existing doctrine. What exactly is the doctrine?

I mean I’m the only one in this current argument saying there should be a red line on using any kind of (including tactical) nukes. So I’m very confused.

https://old.reddit.com/r/moderatepolitics/comments/t83fr2/the_fears_from_inside_of_russia/

So, where do we start? I’d say it all started somewhere around 2014. At least it became visible to the people. After Ukrainian revolution our state media immediately transformed to unstoppable propaganda bursting 24/7 that was putting threesimple things to peoples’ heads:
— New Ukrainian government is a Military Nazi Junta
— Most of Ukrainians don’t like them and are against the revolution
— Ukraine has no sovereignty and they just being directly ruled from outside by NATO and USA, which is our worst enemies somehow
They even tried to justify obvious offensive actions in Crimea saying that “If we don’t take Crimea, our fleet base there will be replaced by NATO base and it’s a huge threat to Russian sovereignty”.

Thanks to propaganda it was hugely appreciated in the Russian population. Mostly in older strata, who was used to seeing USA as an enemy from the cold war era. Then Donbass was going for 8 years now and all those years Russia was under the sanctions. Propaganda was telling people that they’re good for us and it will boost our economy and internal productions. To make things even better, they declared counter-sanctions, banning European food from Russian stores. It should be mentioned that it became a local meme: every counter-measure from our own government is worse than the sanctions it was meant to address. It goes by “bombing Voronezh”. Voronezh is a Russian city and the meaning behind “bombing it” is just general ability of Russian government of making the situation worse for us every time they want to somehow strike back “western aggression”.
Those 8 years the Ukraine was used as a main theme on Russian TV to distract people from our own problems. Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine —

Ukraine everywhere for 8 years now. The police just arrested the group of terrorists? Wow, they have Ukrainian flags under the table! This guy was neutralized trying to make a bomb in the center of Moscow? He has Ukrainian passport in his right pocket. And so on. Also they told that Ukraine was bombing Donets almost on a daily basis all those years. To this year our country came separated. Younger people were at most just annoyed by the word Ukraine and mostly understanding what it all was about, and older part of the population were generally sure that Ukrainians want to behead every Russian, Russian-speaking people were opressed all the time and Ukrainian government are just a band of Nazi Puppets of USA.

Good read. Really puts some detail around the current situation in Russia.

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The most likely short-term outcome is still the same as it was at the start of the invasion: Russia gains control of the majority of Ukrainian territory and establishes a puppet government. But they can’t sustain an occupation. Arms to Ukrainian insurgents will continue to flow in. Dead soldiers will go back to Russia. Ukrainians and Russians will suffer. Sanctions won’t move Putin but he’ll be weakened. He’ll spend the rest of his days trying to get his hand out of the cookie jar but he won’t be able to because he won’t let go of the cookie. This scenario corresponds to the consensus acceptable level of risk of wider war.

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https://twitter.com/notwoofers/status/1501302518336339981?s=21

https://twitter.com/anders_aslund/status/1501315627386118145?ref_src=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed|twterm^1501315627386118145|twgr^|twcon^s1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.redditmedia.com%2Fmediaembed%2Fliveupdate%2F18hnzysb1elcs%2FLiveUpdate_0dfe5c52-9f2b-11ec-a949-16b18a7a86e1%2F0

what are you doing in Bulgaria?

https://twitter.com/timkmak/status/1501205943199145996

The reason Poland balked doing it straight up is they would be without almost all their jets then, so this the workaround.

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https://twitter.com/FHeisbourg/status/1501322357075582977

Russian stock market is still closed. At this rate the entire Russian economy could become a smoldering wreck that China buys for spare parts.

This is a good piece.

The problem is, this is not a credible threat, because NATO has already demonstrated that it is not willing to go to the mat over what happens in Ukraine. The reaction to the annexation of Crimea demonstrated that. Russia have been treating Ukraine as a red-line issue for years and NATO haven’t. Trying to set red lines in Ukraine now, with threats of conventional war, will be met with counter-threats of nuclear war, and those threats will be credible because they are based around the underlying reality: that Ukraine is considered of vital strategic importance by Russia and not considered of vital importance by NATO. By contrast, threats of war if a NATO country is attacked are credible because they are based around the integrity of the alliance, which has been a clear red-line issue for the US for decades.

It’s very dangerous to make non-credible threats because if your bluff gets called, you are left with the options of either escalation to possible nuclear war, or backing down, in which case all your threats become less credible in the future. If Putin did call the bluff, would you be like “welp, here we go, better launch a full scale war against Russia”? Because I would be like uhhhh… I’m good, actually.

There’s a taboo against the use of tactical nukes because everyone recognises that it represents a dangerous escalation, but there’s not really any certainty around what happens if someone uses one.

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wegothim.jpg?

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After some basic reading it appears a light nuclear autumn could be a nice panacea for global warming, so perhaps Greta is behind this after all.

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https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1501276071362281480?s=20&t=pikrKi9Zyk8agc-uKX0EbA

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