There’s no way you would see a general response across Ukraine from single use of a WMD. It would be a “tit for tat” limited response against a single target, probably something along the lines of destroying a Russian warship, perhaps with a tac nuke if that’s what Putin used, or with conventional weapons if he used chemical weapons or something. Full on NATO engagement in Ukraine is WW3 and I think will not happen short of the use of strategic nukes, or maybe repeated use of WMD despite limited NATO retaliation.
Fortunately at the moment I don’t think we’re likely to find out, since it’s unclear how the use of WMD would much assist Russian forces with the problems they’re experiencing. I mean they’re already able to shell cities to rubble, that isn’t the problem.
I’d still take any of those as I’m sure the response wouldn’t be significantly different. We basically just needed someone averse to escalating into WW3. Obviously we don’t have all the details but it seems like the high level strategy we’re using was the only reasonable response (send equipment and support, no troops).
It’s possible they would have done similar things, but Biden has legit handled this whole thing perfectly and it’s also quite possible that they wouldn’t have handled it as well.
It was very fortunate for President Kennedy to have the Bay of Pigs fiasco before the Cuban Missile Crisis. It basically undermined his faith in the credibility of the military, and made Kennedy make much more cautious decisions wrt Cuba when the generals wanted to gogogo
Seems awfully premature to say Biden is handling things perfectly. We have no idea what stage things are at and every possible ending is still on the table.
It is surprising to many that Ukraine still has the ability to hit ships and has aircraft flying. This is both a credit to Ukrainian command to use and protect these assets in a smart way but also Russia being a lot worse military than expected.
This is probably the most important background article I’ve read on the war, published Feb 2.
Didn’t realize Putin was best buds with the pro Russian opposition leader zalinsky had arrested and assets seized in 2021. Z has some fucking balls. He did what should have been done to Murdoc 20 years ago. Basically, ze was poking Putin with a stick, as he should have, and Putin doesn’t like being pushed back on.