Is Vladimir Putin happy to risk nuclear war to avoid admitting defeat?

amwassil said:
I have to disagree with most of your points.


Actually, representatives from Ukraine and Russia negotiated an agreement in March to end hostilities and grant autonomy to the ethnic Russian majorities in the east and south. But the US government torpedoed that agreement and even sent BoJo to Kiev in April to make sure Zelensky was perfectly clear there would be no agreement.


When you say 'Ukraine' I presume you mean the current regime in Kiev. It's at least legally doubtful that any regime in Kiev is the legitimate representative of 'Ukraine' since the ousting of Yanukovitch in 2014. The ethnic Russian regions of eastern and southern 'Ukraine' tried to break away from the Kiev regime after the coup that ousted Yanukovitch and the Kiev regime began a brutal pogrom of repression that lasted 7+ years.


A lot of nonsense in these couple of paragraphs. Putin did not corrupt the 'Ukrainian' government. It managed that all by itself. With some help from the Obama admin with VP Biden at point and first son board member of Burisma.


Then why not let 'what majority Ukrainians want' be determined by a nationwide referendum. Why does Zelensky and his band of corruptocrats make the call?

This is just not as simple and straight forward as you and many others seem to think and want it to be. Contrary to popular opinion, Putin did not start this war. It was started in 2014 by the illegitimate regime in Kiev that ousted Yanukovich in a US-backed coup de tat and then proceeded to punish the ethnic Russian population who elected him. Putin decided to try to end it - on his terms not the US/Nato or Zelensky's.

As David Stockman points out, and with which I totally agree, without the intransigence of the US this never had to get to the point of potential nuclear war or even the invasion in Feb.
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Ok dude, that's fine.
 

Murrmurr said:
Seriously, I wonder how we'd respond? And with everything that's going on with this situation, that's the thing that worries me most.
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I don't know how we would respond, because we are too polarized to be on the same page as a country. I would hope we would clobber Russia to a point where it's totally disarmed and about the same level of threat as the Kingdom of Tonga. I'm thinking Putin's nuclear capabilities are as substandard as the rest of his military. But there is no cure for any of our worries. We can only speculate, and wildly at that. Personally, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it, because that won't help and none of this is for any one of us little people to control.
 
I'm no international affairs scholar. I noticed the Russian people's response to Putin's call up of reserve troops. They are not exactly rallying around the flag. Actual protests!!! To me, that is a huge change from the old USSR. When Stalin was around, anyone, who questioned the state, wouldn't be alive in the morning. Russia is still dominated by Putin, yet they've come away from their brutal past.
 
fuzzybuddy said:
I'm no international affairs scholar. I noticed the Russian people's response to Putin's call up of reserve troops. They are not exactly rallying around the flag. Actual protests!!! To me, that is a huge change from the old USSR. When Stalin was around, anyone, who questioned the state, wouldn't be alive in the morning. Russia is still dominated by Putin, yet they've come away from their brutal past.
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And it's estimated that more than half the number of men being called-up, 300,000, have left the country. I also heard that the Russian military is taking a disproportionate number of minorities and men who live in small towns/villages near the border. Like, people in places like Moscow and St Petersburg aren't seeing their men being taken away.
 
Tish said:
I wouldn't put anything past him.
However, if the West is to respond, I would hope it would be a pre-emptive strike rather than wait for the big mushroom cloud.
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Unfortunately, when one of my favorite vloggers compared how long it would take a Russian nuclear missile to hit a significant US target to how long it would take a US interceptor to destroy it, it was no contest. The nuke won every time.

There's a good chance the online calculator/timer he used isn't accurate as to the location of all US interceptor launch points. Plus, some of them are mobile because they're on ships. And those are probably where they need to be in preparation; in case.
 
This is from 16 April so maybe/no longer applicable, but interesting none-the-less:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/od...interviews-opinion/?ysclid=l8rs4y4cs987697506

Unfortunately, most polling/reporting on 'man on the street' Russian support for the war or not is in Russian and not translated. So who knows? We can presume that western media reports don't reflect actual Russian support or lack of support. 'Thousands' trying to 'flee' Russia is very likely an exaggeration. Russians understand that the Russian ethnic regions of Ukraine have been subjected to nearly a decade of repression from the Kiev regime and agree that ending that repression is a worthwhile goal.

Instead of Google, I suggest using Yandex, which is a Russian search engine.
 
amwassil said:
This is from 16 April so maybe/no longer applicable, but interesting none-the-less:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/od...interviews-opinion/?ysclid=l8rs4y4cs987697506

Unfortunately, most polling/reporting on 'man on the street' Russian support for the war or not is in Russian and not translated. So who knows? We can presume that western media reports don't reflect actual Russian support or lack of support. 'Thousands' trying to 'flee' Russia is very likely an exaggeration. Russians understand that the Russian ethnic regions of Ukraine have been subjected to nearly a decade of repression from the Kiev regime and agree that ending that repression is a worthwhile goal.

Instead of Google, I suggest using Yandex, which is a Russian search engine.
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Try these "man in the street" guys:


Here's a young Russian guy who fled:


This guy is quite a bit more scholarly than the other two:



Just a few of hundreds of English-speaking Russian vloggers, journalists, and average people.
 
I feel bad for the Russian soldiers. I doubt if they woke up one morning with a great desire to travel to Ukraine so they could blow up buildings, kill people and get shot at. Now many are not coming home, and many who do go back home will have life-changing injuries. They are also victims of this war.
 
chic said:
I don't think he's a madman at all. This is all well calculated and coordinated.
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I wouldn't go so far as to say he's a madman. I usually reserve that for someone who has gone berserk. Putin may be berserk, but he seems more like an incompetent Hitler type, sitting in isolation among yes men, signing worthless declarations thinking that is progress, while not paying any attention to the disarray of his poorly equipped, untrained army abandoned by it's leaders, and left to the enemy. I thought Russia would do much better in the first couple of weeks of the war, and I expected Ukraine to fall in a few days, but I really underestimated how poorly equipped Russia is to engage in war. It's possible that Putin is going berserk, but I'm not sure when a psychologist would confer that diagnosis on him. He may just be a fool.
 
I agree with Col. Macgregor. Nuclear is not going to happen. It's going to end with Ukraine economically devastated and 10s of thousands if not hundreds of thousand of dead Ukrainian young men. US/Nato will just shrug and say: "we tried".
 
amwassil said:
I agree with Col. Macgregor. Nuclear is not going to happen. It's going to end with Ukraine economically devastated and 10s of thousands if not hundreds of thousand of dead Ukrainian young men. US/Nato will just shrug and say: "we tried".
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I agree also. No nuclear was will happen because of politics.
 
JustDave said:
I wouldn't go so far as to say he's a madman. I usually reserve that for someone who has gone berserk. Putin may be berserk, but he seems more like an incompetent Hitler type, sitting in isolation among yes men, signing worthless declarations thinking that is progress, while not paying any attention to the disarray of his poorly equipped, untrained army abandoned by it's leaders, and left to the enemy. I thought Russia would do much better in the first couple of weeks of the war, and I expected Ukraine to fall in a few days, but I really underestimated how poorly equipped Russia is to engage in war. It's possible that Putin is going berserk, but I'm not sure when a psychologist would confer that diagnosis on him. He may just be a fool.
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I agree. I don’t think many psychologists would go that far.
 


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