i was thinking about that. ukraine hasn’t revealed any saboteur tactics yet, although it’s justified since they caught many inside ukraine already. so far russia hasn’t unleashed the full range of shooting at their own civilians to claim war crimes.
the other possibility is that it’s self-sabotage, by soldiers who don’t want to deploy across the border.
In case anyone wants to watch a one hour lecture on Russian history and ideology from a Finn with an intelligence background. English subtitles. From 2018.
He approvingly cites Masha Gesson a few times.
This is pretty crazy.
https://twitter.com/hackingbutlegal/status/1500465032966062082?t=66Bu_6Dl4NGi6-0Q41C4zQ&s=19
The crazy part is this guy was head of a bunch of riot police. The Russians expected to roll into Kyiv immediately, and were more concerned with how to manage it.
https://twitter.com/pass_blue/status/1500607436792774658
Dammit - Biden caused this by talking about the invasion.
Btw the thing the Russians seem to be squawking the most about now is those MIGs in Poland. Their bots are all over any twitter thread where they come up, begging Poland not to escalate. So I guess we know what the Russians are most afraid of now.
Ukraine also has short range ballistic missiles and a few warplanes left.
It’s far more complex than you’re making it. You’re trying to keep the argument neatly confined to a box to suit your take, when the reality is that there are a lot of other options in between nothing and risking nuclear WW3, and many of them, including the ones we are taking, make it increasingly less likely that he can carry out a full scale war in Eastern Europe, and thus make a nuclear threat or an invasion threat against Estonia or any other NATO Country less likely.
Your set over set analogy is also pretty bad because if you’ve got middle set like 5,000bb deep on a dry flop and all the money goes in, you’re almost certainly drawing to one out.
If you think it’s a stone cold lock that he nukes NATO, then you think it’s a stone cold lock that we’re all going to die very soon. Let’s just be clear on what you are claiming is necessarily going to happen.
This. That is why I voted “no” to nato declaring war if a tactical nuke was used. All the discussion since then has been about strategic use. That’s a whole different asparagus. Ukraine has essentially no tactical targets, but if one popped up, and it was the recipient of a tactical nuke response, I don’t think that would be grounds for nato to declare war.
If they nuke Odessa? Yeah, of course it’s game on. That wasn’t the question in the poll.
Maybe it’s obvious but the choice is not between no risk of a nuclear exchange and the end of the world. This is a game we’ve been playing all along. The risk was never zero, we’d just got used to a certain level and now it’s ticked up to a point where we’ve noticed again.
Now the Russians have to do their accounting by themselves? That’ll show them!
But seriously what would hinder this Russian staff to continue whatever they are doing?
I’m a little worried that all these sanctions are going to backfire horribly.
This is insane gibberish. To clarify for the benefit of suzzer and whoever else cares: if I were President of the United States my plan would be to let Ukraine burn to the fucking ground rather than taking a serious risk of a nuclear exchange with Russia, and I think that’s the only sane position. If you like, take a flip through the rolodex of past wars and I will offer you a deal: a war of your choice never happens, but there is a 50% chance of a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States. Which wars are you taking the deal for? That is a short fucking list for me, maybe zero-length. It is certainly not going to include a regional conflict like this.
I know the comeback is going to be “oh so we just let Putin do what he wants until the end of time”. No, but where the red lines are needs to be clearly delineated ahead of time. I don’t have an opinion on whether the boundary should have been set as “Ukraine is a protected country” or “Ukraine is on its own”, because I just don’t know the area well enough, but I do think this footsie-playing hasn’t done them any favours.
This idea that Putin will inevitably just attack NATO anyway is insane. In World War II the Germans annexed France, a major European power, in six weeks flat without breaking a sweat. We are now a little more than two weeks into this war and Russia is struggling mightily to make any inroads into one of the poorest countries in Europe. If you think you’re looking at Wehrmacht Mark 2 here I really don’t know what to say. This idea of an inevitable showdown between Russia and NATO is also just lunacy. Thank God you guys didn’t live through the actual Cold War, with an actual superpower rolling tanks through the streets of Prague. There was no “inevitable conflict” with the Soviet Union, it eventually just collapsed under its own weight and unfortunately everyone involved screwed up the transition to capitalism, but the idea that Putin represents anything like as powerful an adversary as the Soviets in the 1960s is mental.
To me the big danger is not that Putin is going to invade Estonia next, but that he gets destroyed so thoroughly that he becomes a man with nothing left to lose. I very much do not want to see Putin in a position where he feels like all his options other than escalation are hopeless.
I thought I’d lay all this out explicitly because I am kind of sick of this shit. Since 2014, the same year Russia invaded Crimea, there has been a war going on in Yemen in which hundreds of thousands of people have died and millions more have been under starvation conditions. This forum has been so unconcerned with this war that I don’t think anyone, including me, bothered to check whether Biden has lived up to his promise to stop providing logistical support to the invaders (no, he hasn’t). What is it that makes this war so much more alarming? It’s hard to escape the conclusion that it’s that the people suffering are white, European and on your TV screen. The idea that we should risk nuclear war over a regional conflict like this is quite literally insane. Congratulations to half the forum for apparently now being well to the right of Henry Kissinger.
Since suzzer has been posting Tom Nichols recently, here he is making the same argument less bluntly.
But public figures and ordinary voters who are advocating for intervention also do so from the comfort of offices and homes where they can sound resolute by employing clinical euphemisms such as no-fly zone when what they mean is “war.” For now, fidelity to history requires us to remember that this isn’t the first time we’ve had little choice but to stand by and watch a dictator murder innocents.
In some cases we were unwilling to bear the costs of intervention. In others, we were deterred by the immense risks of a nuclear confrontation. During the Cold War, we did not face down the Soviets in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968. We did not send troops to drive them from Afghanistan after their 1979 invasion. (In Afghanistan, we provided material assistance to raise the cost of occupation, and we succeeded in helping the local population inflict serious wounds on the Soviet war machine, but hundreds of thousands of Afghans were dead and millions had fled as refugees by the time the Soviets threw in the towel.)
In the 1990s, we allowed war crimes and ethnic cleansing to reach horrific levels in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. More recently, America chose to stand aside as the Syrian regime used chemical weapons against civilians in a war that has taken well over half a million lives (a disaster that I have argued, repeatedly, justifies global military intervention). We pointedly avoided too much criticism of the Russian war in Chechnya and now do the same with regard to Chinese crimes against the Uyghurs.
I am recounting this litany of shame not as a device for consigning the Ukrainians to oblivion, but to remind us all that this is not the first humanitarian outrage we’ve seen. The day may come, and sooner than we expect, when we have to fight in Europe, with all the risks that entails. If we are to plunge into a global war between the Russians and the West, however, it needs to be based on a better calculus than pure rage. (It also will require a vote of assent from all 30 NATO nations, something that is not currently even a remote possibility.)
I really don’t see a better option than for America and the rest of NATO to keep doing what it’s doing.
I guess an argument can be made that attacking Putin in Ukraine would preemptively stop him from attacking a NATO country. But if the guy can’t make progress in Ukraine, it’d basically be suicide to attack anyone in NATO. It also probably rejuvenates Russia’s war effort and boosts morale if NATO attacks by playing into the NATO is evil narrative. Attacking Ukraine is probably a lot more demoralizing than attacking NATO
My biggest fear is that Putin needs to shut down Western supplies coming into Ukraine and that means fighting near NATO borders with crossing those borders in the heat of the battle a very possible outcome. That is what makes me follow this war and not the one in Jemen as nothing is going to escalate the war in Jemen into NATO firing at Russians.
Well… right but isn’t that an argument for being dovish? Like the argument here is “tens or even hundreds of thousands of people dying isn’t actually as serious a situation to me as something that might escalate into a full on NATO-Russian war”, which I agree with and really think people generally agree with in practice even if they don’t like it being stated as brutally as that. I think it’s worth reiterating the number of times there have been brushes with catastrophe simply because of elevated nuclear alertness. Nuclear war brinksmanship is very dangerous even if you are guaranteed that your adversary will eventually back down, if no accidents occur.
I mean the United States just let probably hundreds of thousands of people die for the sake of still being able to go to Applebee’s and Walmart. So while saying I would trade a couple hundred thousand people’s lives for avoiding nuclear war sounds harsh, it actually works out very cheap if you look at the prevailing exchange rate.
That sounds like the amoral realpolitik of Henry Kissinger.
I see…
Letting Ukraine burn down to the ground because suddenly we are at 50% chance of nuclear war with Russia.
These unfalsifiable positions keep piling up. Now we are at 50% chance of Nuclear War with Russia .
This is the best chance we have in 30 years to help take down Putin’s Russia and all we have to do is send in javelins and ammo by the plane loads.
Putin will turn himself into a North Korea hermit kingdom before he nukes the world because he got beat in Ukraine. Despite reports, Russia is handling this with a lot of restraint relatively.
Is it really possible Putin nukes anywhere in Ukraine without a fallout cloud getting into a NATO country? I would assume if Polish or Romanian citizens are impacted by radioactive fallout article 5 is triggered regardless of where the nuke blew up. Would Putin use the nuke when the wind is blowing back into Russia?