Bankir and his men have been trying to fight off Russian attacks along the Ukrainian front lines for more than two years. But it’s only now that they are finally able to strike where it hurts: Inside Russia’s own territory.
The newly granted permission by the United States and other allies to use Western weapons to strike inside Russia has had a huge impact, Bankir said. “We have destroyed targets inside Russia, which allowed for several successful counteroffensives. The Russian military can no longer feel impunity and security,” the senior officer in Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) told CNN. For security reasons, he asked to be identified by his call sign only.
Everybody knew it would work. The critical part is actually “without Putin escalating with nukes.”
People keep saying this, but take the premise a little more seriously and it falls apart. Whom does Russia nuke, and in hopes of what outcome?
The only winning move is “nuke everyone all at once so far that nobody can retaliate, and then rule the world”. They simply don’t have that capability.
Ukraine?
Striking inside their territory won’t matter all that much if they can just nuke Kiyv.
And breaking the nuclear taboo is a catastrophe for everybody, regardless of who the target is.
It would not instantly win them the war - it more likely would provoke a direct response from Ukraine’s supporters. Further, Putin would have to go on TV explaining why it was necessary, given that state media has been shouting Russian military supremacy from the rooftops this entire time. I don’t see how he justifies it to his side, and critically, to the power brokers in Russia who support him. He would jeopardize his own situation with nukes, at least for now.
As all of the (nine?) nuclear powers know, normalizing the use of nukes on non nuclear powers will lead directly to massive proliferation, which is a nightmare scenario for Russia. Their entire geopolitical outlook depends on a world of purely bilateral agreements in which they are usually the stronger, so having to deal with more nuclear powers down the line would be seen as a major impediment.
I was absolutely certain Russia wouldn’t invade Ukraine, but here we are. I’m not ruling out anything just because it would be idiotic. Russia is past idiocy.
Actually their invasion made a lot of sense in light of the reaction of the West to their invasion and anexation of Crimea - they did the deed, then Europe and American bitched and moaned for a bit and after a few years things were back to normal and Russia was selling their natural gas and oil to them in greater quantities than ever before (remember how well things were with Nord Stream after Russia invaded and anexed Crimea that they were building a second one and how dependent Germany had made itself of Russia gas).
To me it seems that the whole plan was for a quick decapitation attack on Ukraine (using their armored convoy targetting Kijv from Belarus), then endure a year or two of bitching and moaning by the West, then back to normal just like last time.
The very different results were product of 4 big surprises:
Before those things were actually known, it absolutelly made sense for the Russian leadership to think that a military invasion of Ukraine to take it over had a high likelihood of success.
There’s probably also some twisted logic where you can think of Crimea differently - it has natural borders that Russia stopped at, they had a history of it using it for a major naval port, etc …… it’s easier to take the appeasement role when it looks like Russia had a stronger case and they will stop.
It’s a lot harder to make that leap when Russia flat out invades and the goal is subjugation of an entirely independent country. Even Putin must see the difference
Judging by what I’ve heard from the actual Russian authorities over the years, even before this invasion, for Russians Ukraine was seen as a natural part of Greater Russia (remember, Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union throughout its entire existence and even some leaders of the Soviet Union were Ukranian).
Even outside Russia you can see this natural acceptance of Ukraine as a place that Russia has a say over, in the arguments of traditional Communists, especially the older ones who learned their version of the ideology from Soviet Union propaganda.
Remember, Putin and those who surround them wouldn’t be reasoning from a Western European point of view, they would be reasoning from a Russian point of view and might very well expect that Western Europe would react to Russia’s invasion as being a natural clawing back of a region that broke away during a period of revolution (for which there is quite a lot of Historical precedent all over Europe).
I mean, if you look at the reaction of several European nations with regards to what Israel is doing in Gaza, a significant portion of the XIX century mindset (which includes Imperialism) is de facto alive and well amongst a significant portion of the European elites if often morphed in the whole “areas of influence” variance that justified US interventions, so it’s hardly surprising that a Russia whose leadership has that same mindset would expect that the reaction of European and in general Western political elites would be the usual perfomative theatre of “Freedom & Democracy” whilst not really doing anything when either is threatenned in “countries which are not like us” (and if you look at how German politicians reacted at the start of the Invasion, that seemed to be very much what they were going for).
PS: Mind you, I do think your point is absolutelly right when it comes to explaining the difference in reactions in the West. My point is that it seems natural that the Russian expectations about the reaction in the West, coloured as they were by their own mindset, underestimated the probability of the kind of reaction that did end up happenning, so the pros and cons considerations about “is it worth it?” before they actually went ahead and invaded, would have tilted more strongly than otherwise towards it being worth the risk.
Further, if Russia did succeed in their original target of a decapitation attack on Ukraine within 3 days, I very much suspect that the reaction on the West would be lots of bitching and moaning quickly followed within a couple of years by a “pragmatic” (read: driven by Economic interests) acceptance of the “facts on the ground” and return to normal.
This could he because they saw how WWII started and realized that the only smart move was stopping it before they built momentum. What surprises me is that Putin thought everyone would just let it happen in spite of the historical outcomes.
Yeah.
I would say that by the XXI century most of Europe (basically the EU and the nations mainly bordering EU nations) has transitioned to being used to Peace and using Trade power rather than Force for prosperity and to achieve its geopolitical aims, and the idea that Russia too had chosen to go with Peace & Prosperity through Trade was quite widespread.
Whatever XIX Imperialistic notions some Power Elites in Europe still have are only ever about “allied nations” (the US, Israel) with the victims being “people who are not like us” in far away lands, with the closest they get to practicing it being following the US into Afghanistan and Iraq.
So when Russia turned out to still behave as a XIX century warmongering imperialist nation, worse, against “fellow nations”, it was quite the wake up call.
I also suspect that the decades of warnings by Eastern European EU member countries about Russia over the last few decades didn’t entirelly fall in deaf ears and when some of those warning started looking like they were indeed right, this pushed the rest of the EU members and partner nations to listen to the rest of the warning coming from those nations, which accelerated the “We must stop Russia before it’s too late” reaction - I strongly suspects that an EU without Eastern European countries would have not at all reacted as forcefully and assertivelly.
Say instead that the best interest of the Russian state has been largely decoupled from the interests of its ruling few. Every country like that behaves in a way you could describe as objectively idiotic. 🇺🇸
I also thought they wouldn’t, but it was semaphored clearly well in advance and it absolutely makes sense given it’s West vs. rest of the world war with Russia, China, Iran and North Korea leading the pack. So far it’s a war of attrition the West is clearly losing. Let’s hope it won’t come to a nuclear escalation, where everybody is losing but Death.
This would instantly give Finland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia the excuse to allow nukes on their territory. Literally within 10 minute lauch+flight from Moscow and St. Petersburg
And that’s REALLY bad for Mr P
Even from a pure geostrategic point of view massive proliferation has the most negative impact for larger nations rather than smaller ones.
Whilst nukes don’t really help in a war of conquest (they basically destroy the very land and resources that the war was meant to conquer), they’re far more effective for a nation defending itself - which if getting to close to defeat is highly likey to nuke the attacking nation - in effect nullifying the greatest advantage of the larger nations which is that they have the manpower and wealth to field much larger and more advanced conventional armies.
So even the likes of China would turn against Russia if they used nukes, because China itself does want to expand its territory or at least to control more natural resources (just look at what’s going on in the South China Sea) and if nukes were used offensivelly in a war of aggression it would lead to all the little nations around China to get their own nukes (along with everybody else) by which point China wouldn’t be able to bully them anymore.
And this is of course whithout even considering just how much more likely massive proliferation makes that we destroy part or all of our planet due to some otherwise shitty shit escalation or some nutcase getting control of a country’s nuclear arsenal, something which is bad for everybody, not just the larger nations.
Somebody using nukes in a war of aggression would see every single nation on the planet turn against them, especially the larger ones.
Yep. And they can’t afford to lose China’s support at the moment, though their interests are only temporarily aligned.
I’m not saying they’ll do it, I’m saying it’s incorrect to state that there’s no valid strategic target when there absolutely is.
The target you mentioned does tick that box… But only if you carefully cut the corners off so that you’re only looking at what happens inside Ukraine within the space of a couple of months.
They’d get absolutely flattened by everyone else. It would be an insanely short sighted move.
Generally speaking, nuking a next-door-neighbor is really bad for your own country.
They could just take out logistics hubs like railway tunnels and the Odessa port, and destroy the rest of the power plants with few kT tactical nukes. Minimal direct casualties, but plenty dead in the aftermath.
Putin is waging a war of aggression, for conquest. Nuclear attacks would contaminate the land and reduce its overall value.
Putin is also not suicidal. And he has grandchildren.
He’s an absolute monster, but he’d have to be hiding in the bunker with Eva and the German shepherds before he pushed the button.
or they could go to Argentina and just hang out
At this point I don’t understand what he hopes to get out of it and how it could be profitable for him. Everything he might annex is a bombed out wreck and there are no longer the people that ran it. Even the existence of the harbor he wants to be a big naval base again: how could he expect that to ever be safe for the remainder of the fleet?
Even were he to win, he’s starting over with everything. Infrastructure, resources, people. When Ukraine wins, we will (hopefully) help them rebuild, but what is Russia going to do? Take out loans from Bank of China and dig themselves even deeper under a mountain of debt?
He wants the port in Crimea for trade. Russia is a mainly landlocked nation.
MAD wouldn’t be a thing in a first place if it weren’t for human spite, and the potential thereof. The ideal rational agents from game theory turn out to ignore it.
Baseless fearmongering.
Yeah, I’m kinda glad it’s not my job to figure out. There’s no manual, you just have to read the mood of the Russian establishment about what looks like expected consequences of their actions delivered in an orderly manner, and what looks like a NATO first strike.
It doesn’t even have to be a nuclear response. Russia still has plenty of conventional munitions to throw into this war and Ukraine still has plenty of infrastructure left to be demolished.
‘plenty of conventional munitions’
None that they’d be willing to part with, without creating some holes in their national defence structure.
Everything else has been sent to the front
I’ve been hearing this practically since the war started. “Russia out of ammo, Ukrainian victory is assured!” headlines have been coming out for years.