So basically North Korea writ large. A poor country, cut off from most of the world, client state of China, but armed with a whole lot of aging nuclear weapons, and probably leaders who are paranoid and reclusive. Does not fill me with warm happy thoughts.
And to think that, absent a successful happy-coup, we’ll be stuck with this and its potential terrors for the next few decades (eg the rest of my life).
Ask the USA military commanders of 1945 whether it was easier to defeat Japan by…
a) nuclear attack
b)conventional assault
The measure of history would concur with this assessment. As weak as the Russian Army may be on the offense, you can expect the Russians to fight to the last person in defending the otechestvo.
Stranger
Ask the 1945 military commanders in the USA if a nuclear attack on Japan would be a good idea, if Japan had 1000 nukes ready and able to be launched at continental USA.
This doesn’t sound delicate or tricky at all. Just keep arming Ukraine to the teeth, a task that the $800 billion military-industrial complex was born for. It’s a relatively tiny expenditure in light of the overall US budget. America wouldn’t even break a sweat.
The Ukrainians have demonstrated incredible resolve and morale. As long as America keeps funneling them weapons, money and supplies, they’ll forever keep Russia at bay. Putin is old, cancer-ridden and will die soon.
As long as no American forces intervene directly, there’s nothing Russia can or will do about it except seethe in rage. And in the long run, Russia will just be a big North Korea, but America has 70 years of experience dealing with North Korea, so no problem there.
And America should try to slowly make Belarus as Western and un-Russian as possible. Who knows, maybe 10 years from now, Belarus will be the next Ukraine. I’d love to see Russia’s entire western flank - Finland, the Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine, Turkey - all in NATO.
I’m not the OP, but my goal would be to drive Russia out of Ukraine and a restoration of the original borders. (plus one extra mile, because I’m mean and vindictive). And to prevent future shelling of the country.
I wouldn’t think invading Russia is any kind of realistic, or even useful, goal. But hey, who knows - maybe they’ll welcome us as liberators. 
Russia has been slowly moving a border for years.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/04/georgia-border-russia-vladimir-putin-213787/
TAMARASHENI, Georgia—The farmers awoke to find their wheat ripening inside another country.
South Ossetian troops and their Russian allies had worked through the night, sinking new border-marking poles across fields outside a hamlet called Tamarasheni in the golden hills of central Georgia…
“They took 10 hectares this time,” said farmer Levan Kipshidze, tallying the latest chunk of Georgia—about 25 acres—swallowed last August along a shifting line of demarcation between his country and the Moscow-backed breakaway region of South Ossetia. “This can happen anywhere. It can happen anytime. No one can do anything to stop it.”
Dato Vanishvili had a shock when he came out of his front door one morning.
Russian troops were laying coils of razor-wire fence right outside his house. They had cut Vanishvili off from the rest of his village, Khurvaleti – and, in effect, from his own country.
“I was in Georgia when I went to bed,” said the energetic 81-year-old farmer, speaking from behind the head-height fence. “When I woke I was in South Ossetia.”
I’d move those borders back as well.
Wow. And no one can stop them.
I never said anything about whether it is a good idea or not, just that a nuclear attack is an easier option than a conventional attack or invasion.
I’d add Georgia and Kazakhstan to the list, just for fun, and to see Putin’s head explode.
I’m actually not assuming anything and, if I was posting this again I would not include my intro statement which was only there to set the table. And the “hypothetical war” wasn’t really the main point of my post and it set off a bunch of responses . So I responded badly, got modded, and now I apologize.
I think that Western politicians are playing the long game with Putin; funding, supplying, and sharing intelligence with Ukraine, while scrupulously staying out of the actual fighting. The expectation is that eventually between the sanctions and the steadily replenished Ukrainian forces, the Russians just won’t be able to keep it up forever, and something will happen.
The biggest question is what that something will be. It could be as mundane as the Russians being driven out by the Ukrainians, or it could be as dramatic as nuclear weapon use. Nobody really knows, and that’s what makes people uneasy.
I think Putin and his generals are smart enough to realize that the Russian way of warfare has been pretty much universally spanked when Russian or Russian-trained forces have gone up against Western or Western-trained forces, and that doing anything to deliberately bring NATO into the war is probably insane on their part- if you think the Russians are sucking wind fighting the Ukrainians, imagine if they were up against modern NATO forces with M1A2 Abrams or Leopard 2A6 tanks and all the stuff that modern NATO forces bring to the fight- robust logistical capability, battlefield communication networks like Blue Force Tracker (which is old, in fact), and professional, well-trained soldiers, non-coms, and officers.
So the big question comes back to what will happen- will the Russians manage to grind their way into Ukraine inexorably but slowly, and conquer the Donbas, and call it victory? Or will the Ukrainians stop that and fight them to a standstill? Or will Putin do something crazy?
Personally I think we’ll see some sort of Trumpian double-talk claiming victory in some way, and the Russians will retain some territory but quit advancing. The next question is whether or not the Ukrainians will actually accept that, or if they’ll keep fighting.
Or Germany in WWI, or Japan in 1905. Russia has lost wars.
The OP says nothing about conquering Russia. It seems to only be implying defeating Russia in Ukraine. Given Russia’s struggling to beat Ukraine, I can’t see them stopping a NATO effort to push them out.
Correct and thank you.
My first paragraph didn’t help.
My point was that, assuming at some point that there’s some sort of resolution that involves Russian forces going home, what will things be like with nuclear Russia just sitting there as a potential, looming unpredictable threat?
Left alone and cutoff from the civilized world they will work on improving their cyberwarfare tactics. Which is why we need to bring them back into the fold of productive nations. We do not want amother, vastly larger and more dangerous North Korea.
Honestly, I think the financial war is working. There are reports this week that Putin is going in for cancer surgery. If true, why do we know this? It’s the sort of thing that should happen silently and be known by about three people. (Putin, security chief, and surgeon. Maybe a nurse.)
I think we know it because it is Putin’s graceful bow out. It may also be true, mind you. I’m not saying that he isn’t sick. It would explain why he decided to invade in the first place TBH. He wants something to be remembered for - reuniting the USSR. It’s the same motivation as Trump and his wall/Space Force. They want great works to have been done in their name and on their watch.
I don’t know enough about Navalny to predict what comes next. But I suspect it will be him, and that he will retreat and re-build.
As for the West, we can win simply by devoting ourselves to renewable fuels. Once we get serious about that, the Middle East and Russia will be forced to concentrate on growing food and re-building their economies. They will be unable to support large military efforts.
Well, except that Trump hasn’t gone away despite having lost both the election and his attempt to overturn it, and Putin isn’t going to disappear unless he is actually physically incapable of holding office. Putin (and his fundamentalist backers) will continue to keep an authoritarian stranglehold over the government if they have to prop him up in Weekend At Bernies fashion. And if Putin is at death’s door, they’ll try to push another demagogue in his place.
Alexei Navalny has about as much of a chance of taking over the presidency of the Russian Federation as I have of dating Hayley Atwell. He’s certainly popular with the younger crowd but is in a minority overall, notwithstanding that even the forces within the Russian government and security apparatus that might be in support of replacing Putin are going to be seriously opposed to a reformer like Navalny. That is assuming, of course, he is even allowed out of his current 9 year sentence for sedition and ‘embezzlement’ (the latter in quotes because the prosecution witness actually refused to testify and he was convicted essentially on the prosecutor’s say-so with no actual evidence or testimony).
It is entirely likely that Putin’s hypothetical successor might be even more dogmatic in pursuing the war, either due to extreme ‘Great Island’ ideology or in fear of appearing weak to the Russian population. Whatever happens, Russia essentially cannot rebuild; they done significant and probably long-term damage to their petrodollar (petroruble?) economy and lack the foundation to bootstrap themselves back up into an industrial superpower. Their only real major industry—aside from export of gas, petroleum, and grain—is arms manufacturing, and that reputation has been literally shot through. My bet would be on Russia becoming a client state to China, selling resources and granting mineral rights for pennies on the dollar in exchange for what goods China will sell them.
This perspicacious view has unfortunately been ignored for the last three decades as driven by an oil and gas industry that has lobbied against a sustainable energy infrastructure because it would dig into their bottom line. Energy independence should be considered an essential national security issue; although the US is nominally independent in petroleum and has large national gas reserves, the reality is that having our economy tied into foreign supplies of petrofuels is an enormous vulnerability, and even more so for our NATO allies who have been sucking at the teat of cheap Russian oil and gas for so long that this ‘sudden’ shock has put them in a tailspin.
Unfortunately, there are no ready stocks or sources of ‘alternative’ fuels that could readily replace gasoline and diesel for transportation at necessary scale, and while conversion of coal-fired plants to natural gas is already ongoing in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, being able to receive supplies of liquified natural gas (LNG) means siting and constructing port facilities suitable to handle this very hazardous substance which is the work of at least a couple of years, notwithstanding expanding the capacity to produce LNG at the source(s). In the ‘Nineties the US did have programs to develop methanol, DME, and other second generation renewable fuels that would be able to be inserted into the existing transportation fuel infrastructure and retrofitted into existing internal combustion engine designs with relatively little modification but those were shortstopped when the oil and gas industry opened up ‘new’ resources and started hydraulic fracturing en masse, making the costs of developing alternative fuels fiscally unpalatable. And as much as I know EV proponents think that we can just switch the entire transportation infrastructure to ‘electric’ (battery powered vehicles) the scale of expanding battery manufacture and required upgrades to the electrical power distribution infrastructure make that the work of a couple of decades, not just a few years.
Stranger
I disagree about the impossibility of a turnover in the Russian government. There are indications that the populace is more and more aware that they’ve been hoodwinked, and this war is becoming deeply unpopular. Furthermore, the kleptocracy had reached a point that even a healthy version of the current economy could no longer sustain the billionaires in their accustomed manner. (or even the millionaires, for that matter)
My original theory on the reason for this war was that Putin needed a shock to cover the coming partial collapse. Now he can try to blame it on the Western economic sanctions. But I don’t think that strategy will work.
Although I take your point about the difficulty of change in the Russian Government, I think they are ripe for a major turnover. If the kleptocrats are smart, they will step away and let the new guy take responsibility for cleaning up the mess (including the retreat from Ukraine).
They are at the point where even an American corporation would say “Maybe it’s time for a female CEO.”
It has been noted that Russia and Ukraine, between them, account for 30% of the world’s wheat supply. Russia cannot maintain it’s current economic levels even if they regain their petro customers, because too much is skimmed off the top by non-productive entities. We agree that they will have to find a new basis for their economy, and I think food production is the level to which they have to retreat. It will be a very long time (if ever) before they are a major player again. And we will find out just how much they have been helping to keep China at bay. That’s gonna hurt us.
There is no one quick easy massive scale answer to switching to renewables. Sadly, I still think when we really dedicate ourselves, it will happen faster than the Russian and Middle Eastern economies will adjust, and there will be a great deal of suffering there.
The switch has to happen in a hundred small ways. It’s about using the available production of solar panels wisely, instead of concentrating them on the partially shaded roofs of the rich. It’s about the Federal government heavily subsidizing home insulation and State and Local changing the building codes accordingly. The upcoming generation has already nearly severed themselves from the old car/ego connection, and is totally open to a serious public transportation boom.
There are thousands of rivers that could be contributing substantial chunks of power to the surrounding area. But because they aren’t usable at Hoover Dam levels, that capacity is ignored. Crisis will force these smaller solutions to be built into the grid. Maybe I should say medium-sized. Right now energy companies are only interested in massive projects. And there are quite a few of those which also need to be built. But the new infrastructure will require more management of a broader production base, and a lot less oil/gas/coal.