Putin will use nukes if he believes that it puts him ahead, and he won’t if it won’t. If he thinks that he can nuke Kyiv and not much happens worse than already, then why not do it?
If you’re playing chess, you don’t think, “Oh no, maybe I shouldn’t use my Queen because it will kill so many of the bad guy!” You keep your Queen back because the counter moves of your opponent won’t let you get the theoretical value out of the Queen that you would get if your opponent just let you do whatever you wanted to do. You use the Queen of it’s your best move and you don’t if it’s not. That’s the only consideration.
Putin probably isn’t sure what the counter is that his opponents are considering.
If there is one, keeping it secret might keep Putin guessing and assuming that they do have one (when they actually might not). But, if they do have one and it is a good counter then publicizing it is probably the best step since he’ll be able to do the calculations to determine that it’s not to his advantage to double down on war crimes.
At the moment, the only known risk he has is getting captured and put through a war crime tribunal. It would probably be good to have something more than that. It would also be good that it doesn’t come from NATO.
He’s probably around one of the more sober and practical guys around. Not in a good way, granted. He’s playing a game from an earlier era that is zero sum and where everyone ends up poorer, but he’s almost certainly playing it very strategically and coldly.
It would be fair to say that he’s gotten past his prime years and too deep into his own hubris, though.
I agree, the Ukrainians have acquitted themselves well in a defensive war against Russia but they have no capability to launch offensive operations against Russia proper or a Russian-held Crimea. Nor are they suicidal enough to try.
We’re not saying anything all that much different, then. While Putin may have thought (and may even still think) that he had a cunning self-serving strategy in invading Ukraine, it has not turned out that way. He has wreaked massive death and destruction to no apparent gain, including the loss (so far) of as many as 15,000 young Russian men, the loss of massive amounts of military equipment, has exposed the Russian military as inept and ineffective, and transformed Russia from a country that was viewed as regressive and militaristic but otherwise fairly ordinary, to a country that is reeling under unprecedented sanctions and one that will be an international pariah for many, many years. Those are not the outcomes of sane and sober calculation, and consequently are hard to justify as the actions of a sane individual.
This is particularly relevant in the context of what further escalation this madman is capable of, even if it’s a losing proposition for everyone concerned.
I disagree. No one, with the possible exception of the most gung ho of the Ukrainian military, expected the Ukraine invasion to go as badly as it did for the Russians. Putin’s plan wasn’t insane, it was just based on woefully inaccurate assumptions and terribly executed.
It’s not just that it went badly, it was insane from the standpoint of being a completely unprovoked all-out war, with predictable massive casualties on both sides. It was insane in the belief that there wouldn’t be almost universal international condemnation, or in the belief that such international reaction wouldn’t matter. It was insane in the apparently confident belief that it didn’t have the potential of provoking a much wider war, which has not yet happened but well may. I’m certainly not the only one who used to think of Putin as just a self-serving autocrat, and now see him as a 21st century Hitler.
How so? Russia is unable to support their existing force with food and materiel. Widespread attacks by low level combatants are reducing the ranks of the occupiers… How would intensive bombing of civilian cities have any military impact?
“Previous incursions” were not into countries politically allied with the West. And if by “Ukraine itself” you mean Crimea, that’s been disputed territory going back and forth for a long time.
Things might not have been so bad even if Putin had only tried to take over Donetsk and Luhansk, which after the initial invasion was generally believed to be as far as he would go. It’s outright ruthless thuggery but doesn’t quite meet the threshold of “completely insane”. But he’s attacking and destroying an entire country, apparently now with the sole intention of just reducing it to rubble if he can’t conquer it. That’s madness.
Not just Crimea, indeed there were the de-facto annexations of those Ukrainian territories you mentioned here.
The question of “how far will he go?” has been an open question since before 2014 and I recall divided opinion that included the possibility of the Baltic states and the wider Ukraine.
Taking Ukrainian territory is not an insane idea and has been his implicit aim for quite some time and for the best part of a decade it has looked like the West will do very little to stop it happening. So why not?
I don’t know about madness but it is certainly brutality arising from him now being painted into a corner. In any case it remains absolutely par for Putin’s course. There’s nothing here that should surprise anyone familiar with what he has done previously.
Nah. There is literally nothing insane about an unprovoked (or thinly provoked) war of conquest that inflicts massive damage. People have been doing it for literally millennia. You seem to be assuming that the veneer of modern civilization makes such a thing unthinkable and therefore insane. It’s not.
And you are assuming that Putin expected massive casualties. I’m guessing he did not. I think he expected a quick ‘shock and awe’ victory. Worst case he secures the Donbas region, best case he removes the Ukrainian government and replaces them with a puppet regime. Problem is his worst case was actually not worse enough and he seems furious at his yes-men for hand-holding him down the garden path towards bloody stalemate (I personally have my doubts Ukraine can swing the OP’s non-negotiated #1 by itself, let alone #2-5 - here’s hoping I’m wrong).
Putin is guilty of hubris and overreach. But frothing mad dog? Don’t buy it. Nothing in his profile to date suggests him of being an unhinged nutcase. More a carefully plotting tyrant. He was calculating, but this time around he just ended up using a shitty data set and bad assumptions. Frankly as other accounts have pointed out Russian performance was just about as flawed during the Russo-Georgian War, but it was just papered over by the massive Russian military superiority. This time that wasn’t enough.
Agree. Somehow we’ve developed this weird 21st-century modern sanitized notion of human behavior, where we act shocked that a country (or despot) would invade another, unprovoked. As if we’ve somehow evolved or elevated into becoming a better sort of creature.
We’ve behaved this way for 95% of human history. Our intrinsic nature hasn’t changed. It’s just become more seldom.
Well, we’ll see where this ends up. I’m hoping for Putin’s self-destruction. With his nation a pariah to the entire civilized world, suffering under massive sanctions that cuts it off from most of the world, and the true facts eventually coming home to the Russian people, his ability to survive as leader seems to be in doubt. If he does survive, it will only because he has a stranglehold on the levers of power and on control of information – all of which have their limitations.
No, we’ve developed the concept of civilization, which has been reasonably well maintained in the advanced industrialized world since well before World War II, some aspects of which war were a shocking throwback to ancient brutality using modern technology. The exceptions have been primitive and/or rogue nations. I would not have suspected Russia of being such a rogue nation, to the point of now being feared as credibly willing to launch a global nuclear war just because there’s a madman at the helm. If Putin is as calculatingly rational as some claim, we shouldn’t have anything to fear, right?
Our intrinsic nature may not have changed, but our governing institutions and our standards of what it means to be a civilized society most certainly have. Much of it has been happening for hundreds of years, and other aspects were fast-tracked in the aftermath of World War II.
Well, that gets into the whole start of this mess. Depending on who’s narrative you believe, it was either:
A minority of terrorists backed by Russia committed continuing acts of guerrilla war trying to destabilize Ukraine’s sovereign integrity; or:
An ethnic Russian population found itself on the wrong side of an arbitrary border drawn by the Soviet Union decades ago, and which has been brutally oppressed by a discriminatory central government.
While Ukraine might not be faultless, I would suspect the former of the two is the more plausible interpretation in light of Putin’s actions. Russia was willing to suffer a nominally independent Ukraine as long as it was controlled by a puppet regime compliant to Moscow, like Belarus. When that ceased to be the case, Putin responded by seizing the Crimea then aiding the Dombas separatists.
What convinced Putin that now was the time to act I don’t know; but clearly he was hoping for either a quick overthrow of the Ukraine government or a truce on terms 100% favorable to Russia. Perhaps Putin really believed that Russia could once again be the military juggernaut that was expected to steamroll its way into central Europe during the Cold War. Now that that quick victory hasn’t happened, Russian forces are shelling the crap out of Ukraine partially because “shell it to rubble” is about the only thing Russia knows how to do with urban resistance, and partially perhaps in the belief that if they can simply make the civilian cost of resistance too high the Ukrainians might beg for terms (hence Russia’s repeated calls to end the humanitarian crisis by Ukrainian acquiescence).
All three cities are also military targets. Lviv is a major transportation hub for road, rail, and air. Odessa is Ukraine’s largest port. Kyiv, of course, is the center of everything. Irrespective of how many civilians are there, the three cities would be military targets.
No doubt that was a calculated benefit, but of course that warning has shown to be somewhat empty, seeing as the might of the Russian army seems to be nothing of the kind.
Does the Russian military seem more or less scary now than it did a month ago?
The whole world now knows the answer to that and Putin knows that we know it.
Seems like the only question he has left to pose is “how do I choose to lose”? I see no objectively “good” outcomes for him just varying levels of bad.
The tanks and conscripts might not be as scary (they’re still scary, what with being armed with live ammo) but the missiles are just a scary, if not more so, than they were a month ago.
Take a look at what was done to Grozny and Aleppo. Maybe if more people in the comfortable, “safe” West had paid attention to those atrocities they would have taken the threat of Russia invading Ukraine more seriously.