They need to start announcing that over public address systems: “Dear Russian soldiers: We have vodka served by young Ukrainian girls, and pierogis served by Ukrainian babushkas, if you just lay down arms! We promise the babushkas won’t tell you to fuck off and die if you just come have some pierogis!”
If true, this will probably push China and anyone else downwind off the fence.
It’s accurate – shelling of nuclear plant and resultant fire confirmed by CNN and CBC, currently the main headline.
I had just written a lengthy post about the possibility of Russia using a nuclear “warning shot” on some uninhabited place to scare Ukraine and the rest of the world into backing down, but now I see the recent news and I think they actually did almost the same thing, but stopped short of actually using a nuclear weapon. It might be equally effective. The headline reading “NUCLEAR” might be enough of a psychological blow to achieve this objective. Either that or it causes NATO to intervene, which could itself cause a nuclear war.
I really do think Putin would go there, and it scares the bejeezus out of me.
Dammit. Doesn’t somebody have to step in if they “accidentally” set off a nuclear catastrophe?! We can’t just let that go, can we?
Putin will of course claim that it was a “rogue act” that was never authorized. Our response, via the UN and NATO, should be to give the Russians 24 hours to exit Ukraine before direct NATO intervention.
Are you serious?! The response should be to negotiate some kind of ceasefire whereby there can be humanitarian aid rendered to the nuclear plant and its surrounding area. What you’re suggesting is just going to get the entire world killed.
The convoy is armed with weapons of equal or superior power. You cannot just stroll up to them and start shooting. They can shoot you, too.
This isn’t some unexpected thing; this is what you’d expect an attacking army to do. The Russians are going to form resupply centers just outside artillery range of Kyiv, set their arty up, and deploy ground troops to various axes of attack.
The Russians were never going to just drive all the way from Belarus to Kyiv in one shot, you can’t do that. You don’t just scoot beyond your lines of supply and enter a city in march formation.
They’d launch nukes in the first hour.
That’s a real risk for sure. But they didn’t during the (arguably) even greater tensions of the Cuban missile crisis in the depths of the Cold War, when Kennedy directly confronted Soviet ships in a naval blockade, and at one point the US Navy dropped depth charges on a Soviet nuclear submarine.
But @Lamoral is probably right that the more sensible approach is to appeal to the Russians to allow multilateral assistance to contain the damage to the nuclear plant. How Putin reacts to that will be an indicator of whether or not he’s completely lost his mind. If he has, what do you suggest we do?
I heard on the NYT’s The Daily podcast that a leading theory among defense analysts is that the Russian air forces are leery of friendly fire from inexperienced Russian ground forces.
I suspect the attack on the nuclear power plant is probably just part of an attempt to take down the power grid. They aren’t necessarily shelling the reactors.
Well, they set one of the reactors on fire.
Or it’s a big FU before deciding to call it on the battle for the big cities, before retreating into the Southeast that they’ve gotten in the bag.
Well, the problem with that plan is Zaporizhzhia is near Enerhodar, in the southeast of the country.
ETA: and they still haven’t taken Mariupol.
To be honest, as this conflict continues I’m feeling less and less like there’s any chance of Ukraine “winning” it, if winning means that the Russians fuck off back to Russia and leave all of Ukraine’s territory alone.
I feel like we’ve all gotten this very carefully curated narrative of the conflict, with the plucky underdogs, the legendary pilots, the sunflowers, the handsome-everyman president, it’s all being presented as a romantic struggle that the whole world should be rooting for. But how much more punishment can Ukraine really take? Really? The attack on this nuclear reactor is only a tiny, tiny taste of what Russia is capable of doing.
One source said it wouldn’t be that hard for the Russians to simply coordinate by time slots. From 8 AM to 8 PM, they could say, “we’re flying, don’t fire on us.” Then from 8 PM to 8 AM, they could tell the Russian SAMs, “Feel free to fire on anything in the sky, we’re grounded.” rinse and repeat.
western wind blowing any eventual fallout back to russia
maybe that is a domestic tipping point for Mr. P. - one can hope!
I don’t think I’ve seen a single outlet say Ukraine has anything but a miniscule chance of winning a conventional war. We should root for Ukraine and the sunflowers and Zelensky are inspiring. What does that have to do with them defeating Russia?
The most optimistic hope (not prediction) I’ve seen is that Ukraine can be enough of a meat grinder and the sanctions can fuck over enough oligarchs, that there’s a coup in Russia.
GOOD NEWS - The fire at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station broke out IN A TRAINING BUILDING outside the plant’s perimeter, the state emergency service said in a statement
unconfirmed fresh off twitter
Poisoning a chunk of land that a lot of innocent Russians live on doesn’t strike me as especially good news