valid point … it seems that at this stage there are no real “right” solutions … just less wrong ones… however, the broader the alliance - the better … ideally the whole world … because if the whole world is against you … maybe it “is you” and not “them”
my only comfort that my experience tells me is that “guys like Putin who bully the whole world” normally somehow end up face-down in the street. Happened to Saddam, Osama, Ghadaffi and others …
we are doomed to sit on the river-bank to wait and see our enemy’s body float by.
Even if we put aside the issue of nuclear weapons (let’s wave our magic wand and make them all disappear) there are still reasons for NATO not intervening.
Right now we have a war being fought in Ukraine. If NATO joins in and begins fighting in Ukraine, the new war won’t stay in Ukraine. If NATO starts fighting Russia, Russia will start fighting NATO. That means we would have a general European war. The scenes were now seeing from Ukraine would be repeated in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Turkey.
I know this is a really unpopular opinion, but I’m starting to feel like Ukraine would actually be better off under Russian control than where they’re going to be if this war continues. I do not see Putin backing off. And the worse it gets, the greater the outcry is going to be for NATO to intervene, which I do NOT want to happen because I truly believe it would lead to, at the very least, nuclear weapons being used and quite possibly a global nuclear conflict. I see a lot of people being really cavalier about the notion that NATO needs to get involved, and I feel as though these people aren’t thinking hard enough about the situation or weighing the pros and cons.
Does anyone really, really, REALLY believe that Ukraine can win a war of attrition against Russia? No matter how many Russian casualties they may be able to attain, Russia ultimately has more men and more bombs to throw at them.
You could substitute ‘Vietnam’ for ‘Ukraine’ and ‘America’ for ‘Russia’ and have the exact same sentence…
For Russia, or for Ukraine? That’s kinda the question on both sides now.
ETA: I should add I’m not trying to be cavalier about the amount of misery that will occur if this runs long. There’s been a lot, and will continue to be a lot, for both sides, and until one side decides there’s been enough and they can’t go on, it will continue.
But I don’t think the above follows. Russia might hit the Baltics as a diversionary tactic if under threat, but frankly they do not really have the capacity to wage an effective multi-front war right now. I mean the standing ground forces (~280,000 troops) + airborne infantry (~60,000) + naval infantry (~12,000) = a LARGE army. But rather less so when you have 150,000+ pinned down in Ukraine.
Sure they can call many hundreds of thousands of army reservists. But however effective those poor bastards might be in defense, they’re probably not going to be very capable of offensive operations against modern states.
The Ukrainians don’t have to win a ‘war of attrition’; they just have to resist to the point that Russia can no longer afford to keep occupying the country. The human toll of that would be almost unimaginable but I think it is unlikely to a point of certainty that the Ukrainian people will passively submit to a repeat of the 20th Century under Russian rule, nor that the Russian Army as currently constituted has the wherewithal to sustain an indefinite occupation.
As for Putin and the use of nuclear weapons, he is already making thinly veiled threats against for just imposing sanctions which is a Kim Jong-un level of crazy. Either he’s playing a bluff charge that nobody is going to back down from, or he is seriously contemplating a unilateral nuclear strike. For those of us who have long maintained that the public complacency regarding the massive nuclear arsenals maintained by the US and Russian Federation is in ignorance of the reality that a single unhinged leader or faceoff over a minor conflict could ratchet tensions to the point that use of nuclear weapons might be ordered regardless of how irrational and ill-advised it may be in sober reflection, this situation is terrifying; it is literally the worst case scenario that comes out of nowhere.
Of course, this situation didn’t come out of nowhere; it has been building for years, and many people—myself included—assumed that this was just a game of brinksmanship by a thuggish but shrewd leader who likes to fuck around with Western powers with full expectation of being able to get away with it as long as he didn’t threaten national security. Poisoning the occasional dissident and arranging for the odd journalist to ‘accidentally’ fall off a balcony was just a cost of doing business, and everybody was hungry enough for cheap natural gas and petroleum to overlook these transgressions, but it is hard to see how he though invading a sovereign nation in toto was going to pass without objection.
The problem with letting this go, or as you put it, “At what point is it going to stop being worth it?”, is that we know with near certainty that if Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop there. This is history on repeat, and normalizing this action would resonate around the globe, amplifying security threats far and wide, notwithstanding the explicit security commitments made to Ukraine and the near certainty of humanitarian disaster comparable to WWII.
10 days ago, I’d have believed the domino-effect story of Russia marching through Europe, picking off one country at a time, emboldened by success and reinforced by plunder. But that only works if Ukraine falls quickly, and Russia commandeers its economic output to replenish its own army.
It now appears that’s unrealistic. Recent events have revealed a startling level of neglect and corruption in the Russian Army. Their Ukraine invasion force appears only 3-4 weeks (conservatively) away from being an exhausted force. And that was 60% of their maneuver units. There seems to be no robust resources for Russia to resupply itself. Insufficient reserves of war material, perhaps not even enough trucks to carry it.
Absent nuclear weapons, Russia is no longer a credible invasion threat to anyone for the next 5 years. In fact, if not for nukes, NATO likely be prepping a counterattack for regime change. Had you told me this 10 days ago I’d have laughed in your face, but the facts on the ground have changed dramatically.
it is the emotional hemisphere of your brain fighting your rational hemisphere, right? …
luckily (to a certain degree) those who call the shots get the information presented differently …
as a matter of fact that IS probably the reason for the whole “dry” language in military (neutralizes instead of kill, high-value-target instead of kindergarden , surpressive fire…) - to keep relevant people’s brains firing on the rational hemisphere
sorry to say, but from a reasoning’s POV your argument doesn’t make much sense …
If I’d use the same historic argument as you I’d have to say "Ukraine cannot accept help from the germans because … "(Nazi-Germany)
case in point … times have changed … and what was true 80 or 90 years ago might no longer be true today … and there are a lot of good reasons putin should not reign in Ukr., a forced famine in the 1930ies is not high on your list
excellent synthesis ! - I feel completely the same (and have stated this in var. threads)
If we search for a silver lining in this whole war, it is this … 10 days ago everybody was was scared of the russian army , now everybody can look beyond the potemkin village’s fassade
Their “threat” to scandinavia a few days ago, rings hollow
Probably not full invasions. But if NATO and Russia were at war, we could expect Russia to launch drone attacks and airstrikes against military bases and supply and communication centers in NATO countries along their border. That’s a legitimate military operation; if Romania, for example, has declared war on you and a Romanian airbase is being used to attack your soldiers, you would bomb the airbase.
But that leads to escalation. If Russians are bombing military bases in NATO countries, NATO is going to want to stop this by bombing their military bases. And if we have NATO (and America) dropping bombs on targets in Russia, we are getting real close to the edge of nuclear war.
We could theoretically have an informal agreement with Russia that both sides agree to limit the war to just Ukraine. But agreements like that are shaky. If the balance starts tipping against either side, there will be pressure to strike the enemy elsewhere.
Putin just specifically warned against a no-fly zone. Unfortunately I think he’s going to intentionally step up the brutality. First, since his ground forces aren’t performing well, it’s easier just to shell everything; and second, he wants to portray to the West an image of him as unhinged so they don’t interfere for fear of nukes. I don’t think the public is remotely prepared for what we’re gonna witness in the coming months/years.
All of this talk about “bluffing” is driving me crazy, because that phrase implies that Putin DOESN’T actually have a strong hand. It’s common knowledge that Russia has more nuclear weapons than any other country on earth. We can SEE Putin’s hand. It’s not bluffing if you can see the other guy’s cards.
I’ll add that the command-and-control network associated with the use of nuclear weapons has to be primed to be ready to do its job - with humans in the loop, and human conscience in play, and the incredible gravity of human action when called upon to pass such a firebreak, it’s not necessarily easy to impel people to take such an action.
But Russia is primed to use nuclear weapons in a first-use scenario to provide for the security of the state - see the “escalate to de-escalate” strategy from Wikipedia.
This also says Russia may threaten nuclear first-use as a way to keep a conflict from escalating. Unfortunately, this leaves Russia’s antagonists with little way to distinguish between a bluff and a concrete threat. This is where the worst can happen.
No one is doubting that he has nukes. The question is whether he would use them if we implemented a no-fly zone. I don’t think it’s enough of an existential threat to him that he would risk us nuking him out of existence in retaliation. Most people don’t grab knives or bottles in bar fights because it escalates asymmetrically. It’s not a gamble you want to be wrong on, but the alternative poses a lot of problems as well.
Russia used to own Alaska, so once he’s done with Ukraine, Putin decides to say “You know, USA as reparations for these sanctions, you should give me Alaska back. Better do what I say or nukey nukey.” Would you give him Alaska?
Because Russia has held up to its agreements thus far?
Between your stream-of-consciousness ellipsis-joined quasi-thoughts and apparent lack of knowledge of the Ukrainian perspective of Russian/Soviet rule I can’t discern what your actual argument is but regardless the Ukrainians are not going to submit to docile overrule by Russia because that has never gone well for them, notwithstanding whether NATO backs them or not.
It is not so much the quantity of weapons than the scope of mutual destruction that is possible, and even with the reduced US arsenal (and that of France and the UK were this to become a general war) there are still more than enough nuclear weapons and capable delivery systems to render all involved nations back to pre-industrial levels. The real danger is that Russia has invested heavily into tactical nuclear weapons and Putin might inadvisably decide to use them if the war in Ukraine goes really bad or if NATO decides to intervene on the ground, and despite the ostensible distinction between ‘tactical’ and ‘strategic’ nuclear weapons, in wargaming scenarios of a hypothetical general European land war the use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield almost inevitably progresses to a general exchange of strategic weapons because once one party has the ability to obliterate an entire brigade with one shot there is no longer any sense in fighting a conventional war.
Whether this is a ‘bluff’ or an actual threat, backing Putin into a corner might have him feel forced to use nuclear weapons regardless of his intent. As many analysts have opined, it is important to give Putin a way to back out gracefully and at least ostensibly saving some face even though he deserves to have his head on a pike.
