Says biggest draft dodger.

I just dodged your personal attack try to to dodge 10%

He's not gonna pick a serious fight with NATO because he knows he can't win that - but he might retaliate against Ukraine itself. Say a hydrobaric bomb on Kyiv or Kharkiv. Or intentionally causing a nuclear "accident" at the Zaporizhzhia NPP, which would contaminate large swaths of Ukraine. As the ultima ratio, he could drop a nuke on Kyiv.

Russia's escalation potential is far from exhausted, it's mostly held back by the desire of his Chinese overlords to prevent this conflict from fully spiraling out of control, and by Russia's desire to not alienate the big unaffiliated third world countries (in the original meaning of the term): India, Brazil, South Africa etc.

So in short, nuclear. We all know that is extremely unlikely.

Every conventional means is already being applied by the Russian military. It might be a bitter pill to swallow, but they were simply nowhere near as capable as they thought they were.

His escalatory potential is entirely exhausted, aside from full mobilization. Which would be akin to admitting the previous 2.5 years have been a complete failure.

Laughably Putin has projected that Russia is and has always been at war with NATO and protecting Russians from the western imperialists.
Now he is sabre rattling about starting a war with NATO.

He's fucking bricking it

https://eadaily.com/en/news/2024/09/13/my-stud-das-ist-fantastisch-50-of-prostitutes-in-brothels-in-germany-are-ukrainian

And that's the original behind a paywall:
https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/plus253481548/Prostitution-in-Berlin-In-den-Bordellen-sind-es-mittlerweile-etwa-50-Prozent-Ukrainerinnen.html

This post was edited by babun1024 on Sep 13 2024 06:31pm

The reality that you fail to grasp is that Ukraine is being supported by all of NATO plus another 20 odd NATO allies that have by now sent everything they had short of nukes.

Might be a bitter pill for you to swallow but Putin hasn't even fully mobilized yet, is outproducing entire NATO and now has closer ties with China, Iran and NK.

Project Ukraine has already proven to be the West's worst foreign policy disaster and got Ukraine completely wrecked.

Talking about bricking it, lol

The fact remains that Russia is winning the conventional war and has no reason to escalate against NATO or go nuclear as long as they are winning without it. You don't flip the board when you're ahead.
NATO escalating attacks on Russia thus either have to fall into one of two categories: Too insignificant to threaten Russia or stop their invasion, or existential threats that couldn't go unanswered.
Even Putin as the head of a pseudoautocracy wouldn't be able to hold back the furor if NATO missiles started killing civilians in the motherland. Either he retaliates or the duma would find someone who will.

So what is it? Do we provoke nuclear war, or fail? Its not Russia's turn to play paper tiger by failing to retaliate. If all we do is these minor aggressions that don't stop Ukraine, their war machine will clank on unhindered. If we draw blood against Russia, they'll have no choice but to fire back at us, and then it wouldn't be enough to just hit Ukraine or proxies, not if hundreds of Russians are dead from NATO bombardment. The ball is in our court to escalate us into mutual destruction or lose a conventional war

I can completely agree that Russias militarily capacity was greatly over-hyped before the war but we all know that drone warfare almost single-handedly saved ukraine from being completely overrun.

Tbe problem that i have with this scenario, is that now Russia is all caught up and making daily improvements to their military that they wouldnt have known to do otherwise. Imo, the west had a 5ish year buffer window between russia catching up to western tech and them not knowing the future of warfare(drones/ew).

This lead is gone now. Russia is being turned into a wartime state while europe is being destroyed by doctors/engineers and effeminate men. I cant see a scenario where this war has been good for western interests (besides Raytheon profits)

The war has been a complete boon for western military experts. Russia are gaining similar information while losing material, men and overheating their economy.
It will be remembered as the greatest military failure of modern times, its gone beyond the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and done so in less than 3 years.

Putin spent a decade preparing for an invasion and Gerasimov/Shoigu pocketed most likely a third of the investment. Mind blowing incompetence.
If anything the gap which you described as 5 years, but would be more like at least a decade, has only grown. Russian anti air in particular has performed abysmally.
The hundreds of thousands of troops that invaded Ukraine 2.5 years ago are most likely all dead or wounded in some capacity. Even a portion of NATO's combined strength would slice through Russia's recruit and mercenary based army.

If you can't see how awful the invasion has been for Russia then you are either blind or lying through your teeth.
The West in general remains the same. Stagnated but vastly higher standard of living than a majority of the orient.

This post was edited by Prox1m1ty on Sep 14 2024 10:59am

If a country spends hundreds of billions a year in whichever industry, weapons, chips, auto making, metal working, refining, whatever it may be, that industry's capacity grows and they eventually reach some production advantage relative to global peers. The Russians because of this war are spending more in military industrial than ever before. Some of it we can say it's not long term accretive, i.e. producing bullets, small arms, trucks, paying salaries etc there's really no great advantage in that, while other stuff i.e. creating factories for drones, cruise missiles, R&D in a variety of military related fields is exploding.

I said this a few times. This was is going to end at some point, could be a year from now could be 5, it certainly wont last a decade. When it does, Russia is going to have so much spare military capacity and output that we quite literally would have created what we feared most. A highly military industrialized nation that has a fuck ton of protentional output, with a ton of spare capacity, and I'm sure they will look to export a lot of weapons. Of course these weapons won't be going to friendly's but will literally be shared with the likes of Iran, China, NK, various African friendly's and so on. Don't be surprised 10 years from now when random habibis in Yemen or Ethiopia are using high grade drones to wreak havoc on western interests and at that point most will have probably forgot the original point of escalation.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Sep 14 2024 11:16am