If Putin uses nuclear weapons you're gonna have an international retaliation that throws his ass out with the quickness.
I assume this is the red line. What kind of payload delivery would they use? Target Kyiv or Chernobyl? Do we have some sort of missle defense in Poland to intercept?
And you'd better hope those plans are already on the table to minimize casualties.
He has to know a first strike would be his last strike. He can't think he'd just target Ukraine, he'd have to target military installations all over Europe simultaneously, because he won't get a second strike. Samson Option.
That's not how nukes work.
If he goes nuclear, that’s it for earth.
So you're going with the doomsday scenario? Putin is losing so he blows up the earth?
Ukraine is being armed by NATO even though it's not a NATO nation. Intercepting one of those arms shipments would be an article 5 issue which means NATO, under their bullshit rules, have authority to team up and go after Russia. Putin is aware of this and being proactive. I don't like that he's doing it, but I understand why he is. NATO is putting itself into situations it knows will trigger full scale war.
If Putin uses nukes, we use nukes. If Putin uses nukes and we don't, he uses more nukes. If hypothetically he sets off a bunch of nukes and they land safely away from people, we have a nuclear winter and we all die anyways. There's no winning with nukes.
Planetary suicide seems a little extreme an option.
I think if NATO ends it's "open door" policy this ends today.
That's why when the USSR-collapsed promises were made that we wouldn't bring NATO (our anti-USSR military coalition) to their doorstep. Slowly, and against the advice of the eggheads, we did. The current head of the CIA warned against what America/ NATO were doing in 08, telling them this would be the outcome. They didn't listen, and here we are. NATO waving their dicks around and the people of the Ukraine suffering for it.
Did NATO Promise Not to Enlarge? Gorbachev Says "No"
Russian President Vladimir Putin has made it well known his antipathy towards NATO, claiming the Alliance took advantage of Russian weakness after the collapse of the Soviet Union in violation of promises allegedly made to Moscow by Western leaders. Steven Pifer argues that no such promises were...
Gorbachev continued that “The agreement on a final settlement with Germany said that no new military structures would be created in the eastern part of the country; no additional troops would be deployed; no weapons of mass destruction would be placed there. It has been obeyed all these years.” To be sure, the former Soviet president criticized NATO enlargement and called it a violation of the spirit of the assurances given Moscow in 1990, but he made clear there was no promise regarding broader enlargement.
Several years after German reunification, in 1997, NATO said that in the “current and foreseeable security environment” there would be no permanent stationing of substantial combat forces on the territory of new NATO members. Up until the Russian military occupation of Crimea in March, there was virtually no stationing of any NATO combat forces on the territory of new members. Since March, NATO has increased the presence of its military forces in the Baltic region and Central Europe.
Did you read the quote, or just the bolded part?Eh Bud,@BeardOfKnowledge said he's wrong eh.
I know you're all hopped up on the promise of war, but read what it says. "See? We didn't promise, we only made assurances. Totally different. Also, don't look up what assurances means."
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@WintermuteTurkey’s foreign ministry has signalled that it intends to block Russian warships from passing through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits that lead to the Black Sea, a shift in Turkey’s formerly neutral position where officials underlined alliances with both Russia and Ukraine.
Zelenskiy backing hits 90% among Ukrainians in poll since invasion – as it happened
Vladimir Putin said move came after aggressive statements by Nato countries; Ukrainian president says meeting comes with no preconditions
www.theguardian.com
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According to transcripts released years later by the United States and Russia, Baker broached the subject with the argument that it was better to have a unified Germany within NATO's political and military structure than outside of it.Eh Bud,
"At no point in the discussion did either Baker or Gorbachev bring up the question of the possible extension of NATO membership to other Warsaw Pact countries beyond Germany," according to Mark Kramer, director of the Cold War Studies Project at Harvard University's Davis Center, who reviewed the declassified transcripts and other materials.
"Indeed, it never would have occurred to them to raise an issue that was not on the agenda anywhere, not in Washington, not in Moscow, and not in any other Warsaw Pact or NATO capital," Kramer wrote in a April 2009 journal article.
Gorbachev met with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl the day after the meeting with Baker. According to Kramer's research, the subject of German unification was more prominent on the agenda than it had been with Baker. "Gorbachev did not seek any assurances about [NATO enlargement] and certainly did not receive any," Kramer wrote.
Ultimately, according to Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador who was serving at the State Department at the time, the United States, France, and Britain, along with Germany, agreed not to deploy non-German NATO forces in the former East Germany.
In 1999, years after German reunification and the withdrawal of all Soviet troops from Eastern Europe, NATO admitted three former Warsaw Pact countries: Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary.
Ten years later, in an interview with the German newspaper Bild, Gorbachev complained that the West had tricked Moscow. "Many people in the West were secretly rubbing their hands and felt something like a flush of victory -- including those who had promised us: 'We will not move 1 centimeter further east,'" he was quoted as saying.
Gorbachev later appeared to reverse himself, saying the subject of enlargement in fact never came up in 1989 or 1990. "The topic of 'NATO expansion' was never discussed; it was not raised in those years. I am saying this with a full sense of responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country brought up the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact had ceased to exist in 1991," he told the newspaper Kommersant in October 2014.
Did The West Promise Moscow That NATO Would Not Expand? Well, It's Complicated.
Mikhail Gorbachev himself said the question of NATO's expansion didn't come up in discussions when he was Soviet leader. That hasn't stopped the assertion that NATO and the United States misled Moscow from becoming a central grievance for Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin.
www.rferl.org
More than a quarter-century ago, in February 1990, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev discussed NATO’s future role in a unified Germany. Baker told Gorbachev that “there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east” and agreed with Gorbachev’s statement that “Any extension of the zone of NATO is unacceptable.” Conversation over, right? Wrong. Gorbachev himself has acknowledged that their meetings were an early discussion in what became negotiations over the terms of German unification, rather than a broader conversation about NATO’s future role in Europe. Understanding the twists and turns of these negotiations is crucial to understanding today’s contested narratives.
Promises Made, Promises Broken? What Yeltsin Was Told About NATO in 1993 and Why It Matters - War on the Rocks
Editor’s Note: This week, War on the Rocks is featuring some old favorites from the archives. This article was originally published in 2016. Surely
warontherocks.com