Arguing about other nations is fun an all, but get a room.
Back to the theoretical about giving Ukraine nuclear weapons, I still think that feeding Russian paranoia, justified or not, will provoke a more aggressive response. Russia is huge, and those who should be most at risk could likely isolate / protect themselves from any direct risk of a nuclear strike. Thus it would be military / population targets at risk if anything.
And any weapon of substantial range / size would also be an a major escalation rather than a gift of tactical weapons.
But lastly, while I don’t give a single flying F*** for veracity in Putin’s premise to start this (completely unjustified war for those following at home), giving nukes to the Ukraine would retroactively support his whole NATO aggression on the borders theory (although not the Nazi one). Keeping Putin as an international martyr is only partially successful, and does far to little to directly aid Ukraine, but is not valueless.
I figured that you’d changed the direction the sentence was going. I do that a lot, start off saying “A is better than B” then rewrite it to say “B is worse than A”. But in the edit process I swap the order but not the comparator word. So the final posted result is “B is better than A”.
Gaah! I hate it when I do that.
NATO giving nukes to Ukraine then having Ukraine use them, especially if that killed Putin directly or precipitated regime change would indeed make Putin a martyr in the eyes of the hard-core Russophile chauvinists.
Most nations have been invaded at some point in their history but Russia (including the Tsardom of Russia, Grand Duchy of Moscow, Muscovite Russia, et cetera) have been invaded and often devastated by groups vowing to completely destroy it, and in the most recent incidence by a nation that condemned all Slavs as subhumans who should be destroyed. Perhaps you feel that the Russians shouldn’t be more paranoid about being invaded that anyone else but as a cultural matter that is a very real and persistent fear that Russian leaders since the Tsars have fostered and exploited to motivate public opinion.
I’d say the better part of central europe has been way more often and heavily invaded than russia … starting some 2.500 years ago and ending just 70 years ago…(vikings, romans, vandals, saxons, turks, arabs and lately McDonalds and Starbucks)
so that’s not really a Unique Selling Proposition for russia and thus not really explaining much
Just to be clear, this would be the invader with which Russia made a pact that they would both let each other invade a lot of other countries first? World War II is hardly a good example of “Russia thinks everyone else is out to invade them”.
Granted, it could be “Betray everyone before they betray you first” sort of screwed up paranoia. I think it’s fair to say that the overall Russian mentality is pretty fatalistic rather than clinically paranoid.
Worse, for the purposes of the thread, is that they do seem (and are by NO means alone in this) that problems should be fixed from the top down, preferably by someone strong! And if the results turn out badly, back to fatalism.
And by this roundabout path, we are back to the OP - where contrary to Western horror at nuclear weapon use, they may well look at it as just another one of those things. Bad, to be sure, a last resort, perhaps, but not unthinkable.
And that difference to me at least, informs my earlier statements, that at least an initial use of nuclear weapons by Russia is likely to be met with a non-nuclear response from the rest of the World. Which Putin is likely to use to his advantage in securing terms. Or so he may think.
Yes (although the divvying up the Baltics and Central Europe into ‘spheres of influence’ was part of the Secret Protocol and was not widely known until the Nuremberg trials), and before you point out the philosophical inconsistency of making an agreement to invade other nations and then being surprised when Germany attacked the Soviet Union directly, Russia is currently advancing the rationale that it needs to invade Ukraine to “de-Nazify” it by removing the (Jewish) Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his party from power, which is as tortured as logic can get without being sprinkled with salt and served up with mustard. A culturally entrenched fear does not need to be rational, and in fact, it works better if it isn’t.
Whether Russians have a logical reason to believe that they are more subject to invasion and persecution is irrelevant; the reality is that if you ask a group of typical Russian citizens regarding a justification for invading Ukraine, they’ll cite the fear of an invasion by NATO, ‘Nazis’, Muslims, et cetera as sufficient rationale for preemptive attack. And while the Russia propaganda machine has certainly fanned those paranoid flames in the last couple of decades, it is playing on long held cultural insecurities and fears of being dominated by alliances of European powers. Russia has long been viewed as a not-quite-European country and far less accomplished in the colonial era when the modern European states came to ascendency, and that scar tissue exists today in Russian culture which feels that it never gets deserved respect despite the intellectual and technical attainments of Russian artists and scientists, and certainly isn’t treated as an economic or social equal in a confab of Western powers.
Which, again, doesn’t mean that there was anything politically or strategically wrong about the expansion of NATO regardless of what John Mearsheimer says, and the current situation actually speaks to the foresight in doing such that Putin’s designs for a new Russian empire are pretty much limited to the Crimea and whatever parts of the Donbas that the Russian Army can even hold at this point. Consideration for the use of nuclear weapons to retain these slight baubles is almost certainly in the calculus for the current (and likely any near future) Russian leadership, and would not be regarded adversely by the bulk of the Russian public given a justification of protecting the rodina.
Russia has literally spent decades training their population on seeking shelter in case of an attack (nuclear or otherwise). Russians were going underground, as opposed to Americans going under desks (no longer done in the US). It’s drummed into Russian culture that an eventual event will necessitate it’s citizens to seek shelter underground.
From 2020: https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2020/12/01/putins_new_assured_survival_nuclear_bunker_651424.htm
The procedure for organizing civil defense is enshrined in the federal laws
Russia is well aware that this is not something the west has trained for. Basements are rare in the US, as are large underground facilities. The vast majority of Americans live at blast level and have no options to retreat underground. Especially those that live near military bases or even remote ICBM silos. People that live in larger cities might have the option to shelter in an underground subway, but who’s teaching them? Will they be tuned in to international events in time enough to use it?
I’m not trying to start a conspiracy here, but imo Putin could make a Nuke decision based on our lack of population readiness vs his.
If they’re to go nuclear, it’s when the overall Russia / Ukraine / NATO situation reaches a crisis. Or when Putin fears he’s about to be deposed from within by the high leadership or by the public at large.
What we have now is the beginnings of a frozen stalemate that may smolder for decades, or maybe, just maybe, the beginnings of a rout of the Russian forces. Which rout will not begin in earnest until after the early spring thaw/mud fighting season has warmed to mostly solid ground during late spring.
If it does become a rout, or major social unrest breaks out in Russia, that’s the time for the West to get nervous. Not before.
Many people associate nuclear war with Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Always a possibility, but other scenarios exist.
If Russia were to launch a limited successful strike on US or allied territory will the US response be to destroy the planet? I doubt it.
A good paper on the subject:
Limited Nuclear War: The 21st Century Challenge for the United States A key concern for U.S. policymakers is that an adversary may conclude that winning a limited war with the United States and its allies is possible. Fighting in its own backyard over interests it considers vital, the adversary may bet that its stake in the conflict outweighs U.S. re-solve to defend its allies. Thus it may be willing to risk limited nuclear war on the belief that important objectives can be achieved without significant risk of large-scale escalation.
It would probably be an all out attack on Russian nuclear forces by conventional means. The question would be can it be done without them launching more? I’m sure some will make it.
Bumping the thread for the latest in Russian nuclear threats.
This one is a bit more specific sadly, and IMHO follows the now normalized trend. Each time Russia fails or appears to be failing in traditional military efforts in their war, they make it a point of how many nukes they have and how close they are. Specifically -
MOSCOW (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin announced plans on Saturday to station tactical nuclear weapons in neighboring Belarus, a warning to the West as it steps up military support for Ukraine.
Putin said the move was triggered by Britain’s decision this past week to provide Ukraine with armor-piercing rounds containing depleted uranium.
The fig leaf for this move being extremely tattered and tiny, but that is not a surprise.
I would dismiss this as part of the above pattern, except that I keep having terrible reminders of smugly assuming that prior to the actual offensive, that Russia was just building forces on the border to look threatening and make demands… and it strikes me if Putin keeps threatening while losing, and the west keeps up support, he’d LOVE it if one of his allies “accidently” let off a nuclear weapon after which he could go “So sad, sorry, see what happens when you push us? Accidents will happen!”
A Belarussian unauthorized nuclear release will be a bit harder to explain away than was e.g the Donbas separatist shootdown using a Russia-suppplied SA-6 of
But they’ll try. Just as they did with the whole “little green men” BS.
It also helps Putin ensures Lukashenko knows how close he needs to stay to Putin to avoid falling out a window. It’s major stakes-raising in the battle for Belarussian allegiance. Lukashenko himself is a one-way bet; Putin owns his 'nads and they both know it.
But you have to assume a decent fraction of the Belarussian public was watching the last decade’s events in Ukraine and wishing they could get some of that sweet, sweet democracy and economic growth stuff for themselves.
I don’t know; it seems to me that Belarus’s leash isn’t quite as short as Putin likes to pretend that it is. A sane leader, in Putin’s shoes, would not want to put some of his nukes in control of a different country. Of course, a sane leader wouldn’t be in Putin’s shoes to begin with…
