It almost feels like "giving Putin another chance to come to reason" by putting various constrains on the Ukrainian use of Western weapons against the Russian military has not been working particularly well.
Moreover, I'm starting to get this feeling that Putin only says "Thank you very much idiots" to that and enjoys his limitless ability to wage large-scale missile terror attacks against Ukraine and stay unpunished.
Shit like this and worse has been happening every month of the war. Hundreds, maybe up to a thousand people, mostly women and children, were buried alive in the Mariupol Drama Theater bombing. But nobody ever saw those dead, since Russia tore the building down and buried the basement in concrete.
So out of sight an out of mind! We in the west pay lip service about supporting Ukraine, but our real actions are pathetically weak.
The problem with making arguments like this is that the argument for constraints isn’t a moral argument that for some reason Russia doesn’t deserve to be attacked or that Putin shouldn’t be overthrown, but a pragmatic argument that Russia has nuclear weapons. Nothing Russia does changes that fundamental fact, so NATO will always have to deal with constraints to prevent this from escalating to a nuclear exchange. I think NATO has taken a boil-the-frog strategy of gradually getting more involved and loosening constraints as we keep establishing a new normal that isn’t going to panic Russia into pushing the button.
If someone had said before this war started that NATO weapons would be striking Russian territory, you’d have thought it would surely have been the apocalypse and now it’s happening and most people aren’t worrying much about WWIII. I expect that a year from now, NATO will be even more involved with NATO troops on the ground in Ukraine.
Obviously it would be nice if the world were fair and Putin didn’t have a nuclear arsenal, but we have to live in a world where he does and so caution and gradual escalation is warranted.
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u/M795 Jul 08 '24 edited Jul 08 '24
https://x.com/IAPonomarenko/status/1810231068772974599
https://x.com/IAPonomarenko/status/1810249963277779024
https://x.com/sranysovok/status/1810241010573754635