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by roenxi 1250 days ago
The Ukraine war is messier, more urgent and has a lot more Russian corpses than the Cuban missile crisis. They are seeing US weapons everywhere, and there were some convincing stories that the Russian chain of command was being specifically targeted using NATO intelligence.

I'd work on the assumption that something like that will happen or has already happened and it isn't public knowledge yet. At this stage of the Cuban missile crisis people didn't realise how bad the situation was, so we probably don't have the full picture on the Ukraine war either.
1 comments
whythre 1249 days ago
That is the value in a proxy war- you don’t have the direct confrontation of US vs Russian fighters/ships, so the Ukrainian situation is ‘safer.’ All those dead Russian conscripts still isn’t as dire a situation as a US war vessel directly attacking a Russian sub.
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roenxi 1249 days ago
> That is the value in a proxy war...

The proxy war might be closer to Moscow than St Petersburg is. I don't think the Russians are fooled - the US just allocated more money than most countries GDP to this war, they may as well be directly at war. It isn't even a proxy war, the Russian army are suffering direct losses. Multiple Russian generals are dead [0]. Labelling it a proxy law is basically rules-lawyering in a way that is totally useless in the middle of an active war, the Russians are not going to react to this like it is some fight in the Afghan hinterlands or Somalia or something.

And this is in no way 'safer'. That is almost literally saying a Russian proxy war in Canada or Mexico would be less threatening to the US than a Russian missile base in Cuba. It is quite possible that when the dust settles we discover there was a 3:2 conversation where if it had been 2:3 humanity would be going extinct right now.

I'm not sure how people expect this war to end, but Ukraine being nuked is still an option if it goes badly enough for the Russian army. Unlikely, but war has a habit of becoming uncontrolled when the situation keeps escalating.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_generals_kille...

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