To get back to the real topic, my response would be to try to attack Russia both directly and indirectly, while trying to avoid a full scale nuclear war. To that end, I quite publicly state that, although the nuking of Kyiv provides the moral justification for full scale nuclear war, I am magnanimously refraining (at least for now…) from turning Russia into a giant hole in the ground.
Everything that follows is done at the same time as the most massive propaganda effort ever made to get information to the Russian people, with the primary message that this is all the fault of the Madman Putin, and that the fine people of Russia can end everything in a moment, by offering us Putin’s head on a platter.
Stage one, we launch our own “special military operation” to de-Russify Ukraine. We’ve held back on that so as to avoid a nuclear strike, but now, we have no reason to hold back. We make it clear that we intend to kill every single Russian still under arms in Ukraine. Any units that surrender immediately will be spared, but everyone else gets the Full NATO.
Concurrent with that, every NATO country I have influence over goes on full alert, and moves units into position to either repel new Russian attacks, or be staged for an invasion of Russia itself.
Stage 2, at the point we’ve reached the Ukraine/Russian border, we again very publicly halt our advance, and reiterate our intention to remove Putin from Office. To that end, we give an X hour deadline before we begin Stage 3.
Stage 3 is the most massive non-nuclear missile attack in history. We bomb every target of military importance that we can reach from outside Russia’s borders. Troop concentrations, vehicles, supplies, key transportation infrastructure, you name it. Every Russian submarine and ship we can find is sent to the bottom. When these forces have been sufficiently reduced, we start on everything else in Russia. We try to avoid actual civilian residences, but factories, government offices, all the rest of their transportation system gets a bombing.
Stage 4 will be a full scale invasion of Russia, with all that this entails, but I don’t imagine we’ll ever get to this stage. If we don’t have Putin’s head on a platter by mid-stage 3 at the latest, we’re probably going to get nuked.
We’ll probably still end up in a nuclear war, but this at least has a chance to avoid that. Really, the propaganda campaign is the most important part, because the one city Putin can’t nuke is Moscow.