With nuclear option unlikely, Putin struggles to defend his red lines

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/22/putin-russia-red-lines-nuclear-threat-retaliation/

27 Comments

  1. Putin is a coward. He knows if one flake of fallout lands on a NATO country we will instigate article 5 and glass Russia

  2. Time for brown lines.

    To honor the line of 💩, that he will leave behind on the final run to the bunker.

  3. Article 5 aside, any nuclear fallout in Ukraine will most likely hurt Russia as well. It’s not even remotely a good option for them.

  4. RobertEdwinHouse38 on

    They’ve seen the tests, they’ve seen the intercepts, they’ve watched their weaponized “satellites” fail.

    Both China and Russia have seen the US Missile Shield working along with its other intercept capabilities.

    This is why no nukes from Putin and no Taiwan invasion from China.

    So in response, they shit a BRICS. Then found out their collective bargaining can only dent the US hold on global trade by 18%. Leaving each of them with the same percentage reduction across their economies to inflict the damage.

    Anyone else unclear as to why both of them are pouring full assets into US Elections, infrastructure infiltration, and Donald Trump?

  5. While everyone else is saying fuck Putin I just want to give a shout out to Ukrainians. Fucking ironclad balls those people.

  6. Non-paywall link: https://archive.ph/z73ZQ

    > A Russian academic with close ties to senior Russian diplomats agreed, calling the nuclear option “the least possible” of scenarios, “because it really would lead to dissatisfaction among Russia’s partners in the Global South and also because clearly, from a military point of view, it is not very effective.”

    > “All this discussion of the nuclear threshold overexaggerates the threat of such a type of escalation and underestimates the possibility of alternative options,” the academic added. “Since the West has a global military infrastructure … a lot of vulnerable points can be found.”

    That last part is pretty interesting. Sabotage operations are already underway against Western nations, so that isn’t really a new option for Russia. I wonder if that’d push them towards proxy-related retaliation to try and enforce *any* of their red lines that eventually get crossed.

  7. Unlikely doesn’t mean impossible, and these are nukes we are talking about. I remember this country going to war (as well as near war) several times for far more remote and theoretical contingencies – Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya, etc.

  8. skepticalbureaucrat on

    I’m a PhD in math and don’t even pretend to understand the ramifications of nuclear fallout. That takes a LOT of knowledge and education with a degree of uncertainty.

    Nobody wins in a nuclear war.

  9. Leather-Map-8138 on

    In the settlement, we agree you can keep both Moscow and Saint Pete, and you agree that Rostov-on-Don and Sevastopol are now and forever part of Ukraine.

  10. Boatster_McBoat on

    What percentage of his missile siloes are empty / rusting 1960s tech because oligarchs took money and didn’t perform required services? Does Putin even know?

  11. Because Putin knows he can’t push the button. I’m sure he knows that there are serious reliability questions regarding the Russian nuclear arsenal. Second, any launch would have serious retaliation responses that I don’t believe he wants to face.

    It’s a catch-22 he’s given himself, he just didn’t calculate that people would fight back against his red line.

  12. When you’re the president of Russia and suddenly realizes nukes have expiration date and your entire army has been stripping nuke parts and siphoning gas from them instead of maintaining them for the last 50 years. 

  13. “Closing the British Embassy in Moscow” seems like a pretty feeble threat. A tit-for tat riposte would certainly do much more harm to Russia than the UK. Ridding the country of a nest of spies, for a start.