Agree that exact scenario probably wasn’t much pre-planned.
But it’s more or less indistinguishable from " “Russia invades a smaller neighbor. The West & US in particular help smaller neighbor by fighting alongside them. The combined force pushes the Russians to stalemate or back to near the original borders which humiliates them mightily. Now what?"
It amounts to two routes to the same destination: Russia gives up all their temporary gains, is humiliated & pariahed, or they go for double or nothing.
When you say “political capital” I suspect you really mean “secret police power”.
That’s the real problem with these totalitarian regimes. The rest of the leadership cadre could be 100% against the Boss on this topic, but if the Boss might have anyone disappeared most unpleasantly for any reason or no reason, nobody has the 'nads to go first.
If the Boss arranges for some bigwig to disappear the day before he plans to implement his private decision to launch nukes and lets it be known to the inner circle that they’d had a difference of opinion on the course of the war, well, tomorrow’s launch order may get all the way to the field before anyone dares to ask why or whether this is a good idea.
Fuck off? Eat shit? No damn way? It’s nice that you know enough Russian to drop phrases into a post and how to use the Cyrillic font, but it breaks the flow of reading your posts.
Modnote: This is an English speaking board. Don’t drop foreign phrases into your posts without a translation unless extremely common like “Tempus Fugit” or the like. Pretty much anything in Cyrillic does not qualify as common.
@Folacin, please flag such posts you see in the future.
I still think Putin will try to sidestep those fundamental scenarios - although IMHO they’re largely accurate. I mentioned this upthread, but I would bet that he’ll tell one or more of his generals on the front lines, that he has firmly compromised (or have family that they’re very attached too) that if they are pushed back past X point, to use a nuke in retaliation, of course, with nothing on paper as it were.
Said general will then be disowned after the use and “kill themselves out of remorse” while Putin claims to the world that while excessive, it was still justified, and that everyone should come to the table before the stakes are raised further. Which he will try to then to hold onto, say, the breakaway territories and Crimea, while letting some of the other freshly claimed territory go. Just enough to claim a win at home, while also demanding sanctions be lifted for his efforts to create peace.
Am I certain this will happen? Hell no, but it might be seen as a way to claw a win he can’t get through non-WMD means as long as much of the rest of the world continues to support Ukraine, while avoiding the worst of the pariah state options otherwise heading his way.
Except that part of the leadership cadre is the secret police themselves. Compare to the later days of the Roman Empire, where the Emperors served at the pleasure of the Praetorian Guard.
If the people who are physically right next to Putin, because their job is to personally guard his life, people who are sufficiently well-armed to be able to do that job, decide that, no thanks, they’d really rather not be vaporized in a retaliatory nuclear strike, and Putin gives orders that make said vaporization seem likely, what happens then?
Huh?? I’ve read for years that one of the major issues with a big modern war would be the rate at which supplies & equipment are used up. Military analysts have been telling us for years that there will never again be a WW2-style build-up to build tanks, planes, etc. because the war won’t last long enough to spin up the production lines.
Well, I think that was most likely because they thought that any extended, existential war would probably go nuclear before we expended our conventional arms, in most situations.
This situation is historically unique: a nuclear power who is on the verge of running out of conventional arms. Where the cupboards of non-nuclear long-ranged weapons are looking bare but there are still whole locked cabinets of doomsday weapons in the next room over.
Hitler had enough of a personality cult that he could probably have had a handpicked cadre of followers fanatical enough to set off a doomsday bomb. Stalin (see my thread about him) perhaps less so. Putin I doubt it.
I’d say, “running out of modern conventional arms”, there.
If this does go on for years, Russia could probably organize factories to produce new weapons, but they might be more akin to 1950s era technology than 2020s, or even 1990s. We’ve been building things that go “Boom” for a long time, it’s all the computers and sensors and what not that make modern weapons so expensive and hard to build (and effective, of course).
Hordes of Russians attacking in obsolete tanks might be pathetic to look at, but they can still kill a lot of people if we don’t kill them first. So long as a nuclear-armed Russia is effectively immune to invasion, we could be looking at just such a scenario. Every week, a small force of NATO-equipped Ukrainians lines up to blow away this week’s 50,000 Russians in WWII era tanks.
My perspective was more focused on what military doctrine calls “theater-level warfighting”. Cruise missiles, air power, medium ranged ballistic missiles. What you use to attack your opponent’s ability or will to conduct warfare, and not the actual frontline combatants (“tactical warfighting”).
These weapons have to be sophisticated to be effective, You can’t threaten Ukrainian power generation capability (for example) with any number of foot soldiers with brand new AKs unless you can fight your way to the power plant. Your ability to build short-range artillery and personal arms is useless to conduct the deep portion of total war.
So Russia will have tactical frontline weapons… and nukes. and nothing in between.
You don’t need to manually invade Russia so long as you can precision target the ammo and fuel depots the Russians need to move forces up to the front, conventionally armed drones taking over the role of the tactical and theater nukes NATO planned to use against the Warsaw Pact.
Well, regardless if we’re killing them here or killing them there, the point is, they can still make it so we have to kill them. So long as Russia has factories and nukes, they can keep this up for as long as their mental states allow. We’ll have no choice, because otherwise they’ll kill people with their obsolete stuff.
That this is the military equivalent of a drunk guy who’s already had his ass kicked trying to get in one last sucker punch doesn’t really matter. So long as the drunk guy won’t stay down, someone has to keep knocking him on his ass.
I agree in general with this, but disagree in specifics. YES, if they thought it likely that a retaliatory nuclear strike was in any way likely, they would probably interfere. I doubt Putin has enough fedaykin to protect him against such a threat in a MAD scenario. But for a single tactical nuke? I don’t think even the strongest Hawks in the west are sincerely considering an immediate nuclear strike in retaliation unless (and probably even!) it lands on NATO territory. And Putin and his security forces are probably equally certain at this stage.
But this is not an existential war. (for Russia)
Most war-games and World War Three-style scenarios are based on an imagined re-play of WW II, which was an existential war, and could only end when one side ceases to exist, while both sides feared that it could be them.
But this war is one-sided…nobody is threatening Russia’s existence. (obviously Russia is threatening Ukraine’s existence.) So Russia could decide to end the war. They would be defeated, but still existing as the same country. If Russia uses nukes, it will cease to exist as the same country.
But until they come to that conclusion, it will take another two years of ground fighting with conventional weapons.
I wasn’t saying it was an existential war for Russia. I was saying that an existential war was the kind of war where the US would be expecting to expend all of its conventional weapons in a rapid fashion, and that it would most likely go nuclear before there would be a need to ramp up our production lines or develop new weapons. Sorry if that was unclear.
And yeah, since this isn’t an existential war for the nuclear power involved, it is unlikely to go nuclear, but NATO and Russia (moreso the latter, it seems) are tearing through our stockpiles rather rapidly.
Except that even if a war could continue forever on a purely material basis that doesn’t mean that it could continue forever on a political basis. If the Ukrainians can bodily push Russian ground forces out its territory and hold indefinitely against any counter-attack, from the Russian standpoint what would the expenditure of lives, treasure and reputation be for? WW1 was a bloody, expensive and nearly futile stalemate, but it continued because as long as Germany held French territory (in addition to the previous loss of Alsace-Loraine in the Franco-Prussian War), the war was an existential one for France. The present war is an existential one for Ukraine. For Russia, not (although it might be for Putin and the current regime in the Kremlin).