That’s definitely what he intends to project. I’m not convinced his grip is that strong. Everyone was loyal to the Tsar until they weren’t.
Anyway, the U.S. and Europe need to be prepared for loose nukes. And also prepared for a sudden Russian collapse. China is assuredly prepared to exert economic hegemony in the Russian Far East, even if not direct political control.
Another scenario that could end with a partitioned Russia is if Russia does use their nukes, and most of them fizzle, and the rest of the world decide that they have nothing left to lose.
Agree with that fizzle scenario as one plausible outcome. An increasingly likely outcome as their stuff gets ever older and raggedier. Whether the fizzle is failure to command a launch, failure to launch, failure enroute, or failure to trigger. In the event it’ll be a combo of all the above.
Ref this:
Yep. Agree completely.
The “good” news is that reduces their utility as tools of coercion or tools of deterrence. They become politically less relevant, perhaps even irrelevant.
Now for the “bad” news.
That’s all true until somebody who has a few actually pulls the trigger and the world is rudely reminded of the lesson they forgot as the generation(s) with direct experience died off. They might have become politically irrelevant, but they aren’t irrelevant in the physical world; they blow shit up real good just as much as they ever did (malfunctions aside).
IMO the potential for bad decisions increases as long as nukes exist and are increasingly underappreciated as military weapons, not political game tokens.
Given the amount nukes Russia has in its inventory, wouldn’t even 10% of them working as intended be enough to utterly collapse civilization?
It’d be really bad, yes. But it wouldn’t collapse civilization to the point that the rest of the world couldn’t exact a very thorough revenge on Russia.
To be clear, I wasn’t trying to imply that that was a desirable turn of events, only a possible one. If Putin were sane (but still evil), then he would realize that most of his nukes are probably unreliable, and that any use of them would result in both Russia and him personally being even worse off than the rest of the world, and so he would be deterred from using them. Unfortunately, I believe that he’s both evil and insane.
Also not a gamble anybody would like to participate in, what’s the threshold that differentiates “really really really bad” from “civilization collapse”? 20% of the nukes working as intended? 30%?
Or those responsible refuse to launch them, as has happened IIRC twice in the past ?
This isn’t even a mod-nudge, so I’m not going to put it in staff color, but if we’re seriously going to talk about what % of nukes are needed for a world-ending event and possible retaliatory strikes in reprisal, we’re way past it being about the Ukraine, except as a precipitating factor. Probably better to spin off a thread so that those posters who want to talk ramifications of less apocalyptic ongoing scenarios can do so.
Not even a note, just a suggestion.
Russian Ammo depot goes boom!
2 min video
You aren’t going to shot down drones with shotguns anymore. Not when they fly 370mph.
I’m growing more and more concerned the US military won’t be ready for modern drone warfare. Technology and most importantly Military tactics are evolving quickly during Russian and Ukraine war.
The US could easily find itself needing Ukrainian drone experts to advise and train our military. Tactics are learned on the ground in a life and death situation. The commanders that don’t die rewrite the books.
I know the US was an early adopter of drone warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq. But, the targets then didn’t have the air defense capabilities the Russian and Ukrainian drone units are developing.
Remember during the early invasion there were news reports of basic weapons downing drones. I don’t see that happening as much now.
I’m actually less worried about the technical development of drones as weapons systems - American defense contractors will own that process and rapidly adapt when it perceives the need - and more concerned about the doctrinal aspects. Is the big bureaucratic Pentagon and Army War College, etc. prepared to entirely re-write the way it thinks about warfare? I’ve heard rumblings that the Army is planning to thicken the armor on top of our M-1 tanks, but this example reeks of a stopgap measure, and not the kind of wholesale reevaluation that’s almost certainly called for in light of the changes that are unfolding on the 21st century battlefield.
We really need more vocabulary here, because the word “drone” encompasses an extremely wide range of different devices, with different tactics and different countermeasures. On the one hand, you’ve got the things that cost maybe $100 and can be mega-mass-produced: These can’t do much individually, and must be deployed en masse to be effective, and any countermeasure against them must be even cheaper, or even an “unsuccessful” attack costs the defenders more than it costs you. This is the thing for which the appropriate countermeasure might be a shotgun. On the other end of the scale, you’ve got things that are basically modern fighter jets, that just happen to not have a human aboard them. These are cheaper than manned fighters, but still very expensive, and it can still be cost-effective to use a million-dollar missile to shoot them down.
Anything that can fly at 370 MPH is closer to the top end than to the bottom, and you don’t need to use shotguns to shoot them down.
It’s similar to the term “piloted aircraft”, which is also too general to be useful in most discussions.
The US coordinated and attacked from comfortable state-side drone bases in the Afghanistan and Iraq war. Sip a Coke and push a few buttons. 
Today, they got to get more dynamic. Get on the battlefield and shoot-and-scoot like artillery.
Ukraine has no choice. There is no safe place for a drone base. But, sitting in a chair in California, won’t work for the US drone command anymore.
Moderating:
At this point, if you want to keep discussing drone use by the US or any others countries not directly involved in Ukraine defending itself from Russia, please start a new thread.
Click Reply, in the upper left corner of the reply window is the reply type button, looks like a curving arrow point to the right.
Choose Reply as linked topic and it starts a new thread. As an example, you can choose GD, IMHO or The Pit for it.
That is actually the best method.
Sorry. I got too interested and carried away.
No more drone discussions.
So,so close but no cigar.
Alexeyev is number two in the main directorate of Russia’s GRU military intelligence.
Number 2 huh? 
Don’t ever take a job as the #2 of something people fervently want to stop. You get nearly all the visibility and nearly none of the protection.
It’s not a suicide gig, but it’s close.
He’s a war criminal.
True. I can’t remember all the times we(US) killed the #2 ISIS or Al-Qaeda leader in Afghanistan or Iraq.