[dgellow]

Nuclear weapons are really a horrible curse, in every single ways possible. You can see the bully coming after your neighbors and you know, they know, everybody knows you won’t do anything to defend yourself to avoid a nuclear conflict. If we wouldn’t have nukes we would join our neighbors and fight but the real risk of a complete nuclear annihilation freezes all our moves.

Ukrainians and Georgians are indeed fighting our war, defending the European cause, while we are bystanders. The entire situation makes me feel sick.

[lvl100]

I agree 100%.

Ukraine deserves all the money that will go toward building back their economy when they finally win this war.

[musha68k]

I’m still wondering at which point diplomacy started to fail so spectacularly?

[jounker]

When Ukrainians overthrew Putin’s puppet Yanukovych back in 2014?

My personal opinion is that Putin was never negotiating in good faith. He was negotiating as a stalling tactic while prepared and/or waited for the most opportune time to invade.

[dgellow]

Yes, I agree, it has never been in good faith. Putin is a fascist, in the true sense of the world. His ideology is based on a "natural order" in which the strong dominate the weak and a past dream of lost glory. When he's using the "blood and soil" argument or he's talking about fighting against degeneracy it's not by mistake. If you look a bit at the ideology popular among high-ranked Russian, their behavior for the past 15-20 years make more sense.

For example, you can check:

- the book "Foundations of Geopolitics ": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

- its author and "philosopher" Aleksandr Dugin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Dugin

Putin has a long-term vision and strategy to build a fascist empire, he has been working on this for decades.

[lvl100]

I think it’s 2011 when NATO flipped on Libya. That’s the exact moment Putin stopped being friendly to the West.

[musha68k]

So basically he is afraid. Dangerous.

[baybal2]

Russia first strike on NATO will cause at most 40m dead in the most improbable scenario of NATO just standing doing nothing.

If NATO will disable the Russian nuclear C&C, they will no longer be able to launch a coordinated attack, and it will be for individual officers in bunkers to decide of fighting an unwinnable war.

[oaiey]

"first strike"? The moment America or Russian launches a single nuke on the other the other goes full on last strike by glassing half of earth, the rest of us dying in nuclear winter.

It is called mutual ASSURED destruction (MAD) for a reason.